Right Person, Wrong Internet Connection

Situations do come up when the person you want or need to work with just doesn’t have the Internet connectivity to support the tools you use or to easily download the files they need. There are different options available, the simplest of which can be adding a stipend to pay for an improved Internet connection of some sort.

There are, however, some places where a great Internet connection just isn’t available. For the right person, it’s worth choosing tools that don’t require high-speed Internet access. This kind of situation can be less than ideal, especially if you need to keep files synchronized, making it necessary to weigh the difficulties against the value of working with a particular individual.

Preparing for Emergencies

At any given time, you can read about floods, fires and a wide variety of other natural disasters in the news headlines. With team members spread throughout the world, there’s a greater chance that services such as Internet access will be disrupted by such events.

It’s good to have an emergency plan in place for these situations so you aren’t left scrambling if a team member’s Internet connection goes out. That can include making sure that you’ve got alternate lines of communication set up — you may be surprised by how many teams communicate purely online, not even making a note of members’ cell phones in case of an emergency. It can also be worthwhile to look into setting up alternate methods of internet access ahead of time, like a wireless modem.

Hiring With Internet Access in Mind

It’s interesting to watch the job ads listing positions for telecommuting. It’s become fairly common for such jobs to require having a high-speed Internet connection as part of the job. Virtual assistants based in places like the Philippines or India will often make a point of noting the speed of their Internet connection. It’s become a valuable asset in such careers not only because it makes a person more productive but because many employers now expect an Internet connection beyond dial-up.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Jonas Boni

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All too often, I see people working on the same document and shipping it around via email, and before long, you have multiple conflicting versions made in parallel by several people. Yes, it may seem like creating a document and sending it to a few team members over email is the easiest solution, but it can quickly become a nightmare of merged edits and too many versions, all going in different directions.

Here are a few document collaboration tips and best practices  to reduce the pain and make you more efficient.

Pick a Tool

1. Figure out if you already have an appropriate tool you can use. Your IT department or another team member might already have a document collaboration tool, so start by trying what you have to see if it meets your needs.
2. Wikis are a great solution if you have a large team and want to develop content that anyone can edit, or if you want to share the content with a large audience. They are also a good solution if you will have a large number of pages with related content and many links between documents. You can install a wiki internally behind your company firewall if you need additional security or you can open it up to the world, depending on your needs.
3. Google Docs works really well for sharing a few documents with a small team, and it is one of the best ways to collaborate on spreadsheets, presentations and other documents where the end product is a standalone document in a specific format.

For all of my current projects, I use wikis and Google Docs; it’s likely that one of these solutions will also work for you. If not, there are plenty of other choices depending on your specific needs, ranging from simple text editor applications with local network sharing to high-end collaboration suites for large enterprise businesses and everything in between.

Have the Right Mindset

You need to go into the document collaboration process knowing that other people will change “your” work. As a result, you want to think about the document as a team effort and not something that you own. The vast majority of the time, the additions from team members will make the output better, so be careful to look at changes for improvements and not get defensive about other people changing or rewording your earlier draft. Occasionally, someone (maybe even you) will make a change that takes the document in the wrong direction. Often these undesirable changes are based on some misunderstanding of the purpose or the audience for the final product. Hopefully, you’ve picked a tool — like a wiki or Google Docs — where you can view and restore previous versions. It’s a good idea to get in touch with the person whose changes are reverted or add a comment on a discussion page to explain why, and to investigate whether some of it can be reincorporated.

Release Early and Often

Too many people want to get their document as close to perfect as possible before they share it with anyone else, but that really isn’t the best way to collaborate. Would you try to cook a perfect dinner for someone without finding out when they were arriving or asking if they have any dietary restrictions? Probably not. You would at least have a conversation with them to better understand their needs. The first version of your document can be that initial conversation where you find out if your plans are on the right track. You can start with a disclaimer at the top of the document stating exactly where you are in the process to help people understand that it’s just a list of ideas or an outline for what will eventually be the finished document. This gives people time to tell you whether you are going in the right direction or are way off in left field before you have invested too much time in it. You can even assign sections to different people to work on or get suggestions that you might not have come up with on your own. By putting the content out there early and making frequent changes, you can get team members involved and collaborating early.

Format Later

Don’t get too caught up in formatting and making the document beautiful early in the process. Especially when you are collaborating with other people, worry about getting the content right first, and then figure out how you can best display it with the right headings, formatting and image later. This also gives you the flexibility to transfer the final version of the content into another tool with more robust formatting features to create nicely-designed PDF files or other formatted documents.

What are your favorite collaboration tips for working on documents with other people?

Photo by Flickr user Sean MacEntee used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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1. Find Twitter for Mac in the Finder. You can do this by either looking for it yourself (it will most likely reside in [Your name]/Applications) or by right- or Control-clicking on Twitter in your Dock and choosing Options > Show in Finder.



2. Once you’ve located the app, quit it if it’s running, then right-click on the icon and choose Show Package Contents. This lets you look inside the app bundle to find the files it needs to run, so be careful about what you do as you explore. Next, navigate into the Contents folder, and then find the Resources folder inside that. You’ll see three .icns files — the 3D one from the latest update and two others.



3. If you try to change the files while they’re still in the application bundle, it won’t work, so drag the three files out onto your Desktop. Rename the 3D icon to Icon1.icns and then rename the icon you want to use as Icon.icns. Note that the file name is case-sensitive. Now drag the renamed icons back into the Resources folder. You’ll have to click “Authenticate” and type your password in order to overwrite the existing files.



4. The last thing to do is drag Twitter out of the Dock and relaunch the application. Your new/old icon should now show up, and all is right with the world again.

This method works with any application, not just Twitter. Just make sure that the icon you drag in has exactly the same name as the app’s existing icon, and you should be good to go.

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Before you can begin any kind of marketing or promotion, it’s important to have a firm grasp of the purpose, mission, and values you want for your business, but for the sake of this post, we’ll assume you’ve gotten that far. You know your unique selling proposition, your target market, and what your business represents. Now you just need to find a way to create a more focused and consistent plan for increasing awareness and, ultimately, finding more customers and clients.

Finding Your Marketing Strategy and Tactics

One of the hardest things about marketing is selecting the overall strategy and individual tactics for promotion. There are hundreds of ideas; narrowing them down can be a challenge, especially if you’re new to marketing.

One of the best ways to get your initial direction for marketing online is by looking to other successful companies or entrepreneurs and learning from their experience. For example, if you want to build a blog, find a few bloggers that you admire and follow, and then dig back to the very beginning of their blogging days. This will take a bit of time, since most successful blogs take a while to establish. If they’ve published two or more posts per week, it might take a while to get back to their very first post, but keep digging!

Once you reach the beginning, get ready to take notes. You’re going to begin going through all their posts looking for clues as to what has made them such a success, and here are a few things to look for as you go.

• How often do they publish to their blog? Weekly? Twice-weekly? Several times daily?
• Are their posts long or short?
• At what point did they starting getting consistent comments, and when did their comments start to steadily increase? Was there something that they changed or were doing during those times (and the months before) to generate those comments?
• How is their site laid out, and do you notice anything about their site that might be particularly helpful for capturing visitor attention and converting them to subscribers or customers?
• How has their writing evolved over time?
• What kinds of posts do they regularly publish? Interviews? Advice? How-to articles?
• Many bloggers tend to create “How I Created a Successful Blog” posts, once they reach a certain level of success. Keep an eye out, and if you find this sort of post, pay close attention to the blogger’s advice, and then think of ways you might be able to apply that advice to your own marketing efforts.

Be aware that there is no single answer to some of the questions listed above. If you can find a successful blogger who advocates short daily posts, I guarantee that you can find another who prefers long articles posted weekly. The key is to find an approach that you think will work best for your situation, personality and style.

Also, a note of caution, you’re not looking to copy any other blogger (in fact, that would be a good way to fail). You want to be original and unique with your business, so the point of this exercise is not to copy anyone else, but rather to emulate the marketing strategies that they’ve used to build their blogs. Think of these bloggers as mentors and role models, not people to clone.

Brainstorming Your Options

As mentioned, the options for marketing and promoting a business are virtually endless, but here are a few that I like best:

• Blogging, guest blogging and article marketing
• Podcasting and video casting
• Interviews and appearances for relevant websites and media opportunities
• Online networking

Once you have some ideas for potential marketing tactics, you’re ready to begin weeding through them to find those that you think are most likely to work for you. In next week’s post, we’ll discuss tools to help you with tracking and organizing your options and then begin prioritizing them into a plan of attack.

What tactics do you use to market your business now, and what ideas are you thinking of adding to the mix soon?

Photo by Flickr user dps, licensed under CC 2.0

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A QR code is basically a real-world link to a virtual destination. It takes the manual entry aspect of URLs out of printed website addresses, by allowing people interacting with a printed document or graphic display to simply scan a barcode with a mobile device, leading them to the desired web page. Other info can also be conveyed via QR codes, including contact information and map locations.

Creating and using QR codes is so easy, it struck me that they could also be incredibly useful for enterprise deployment, especially if you or your office still uses paper for a portion of your record-keeping or communication purposes. Here are some sample applications of the kinds of implementations that I’m now using to help make the process of going from paper information to digital destination as painless as possible.

An Appendix of Links

When preparing a printed document for review by a coworker or collaborator, I’m now including an appendix of links as QR codes, with coordinating in-text citations. It’s much better for the reader, since they aren’t interrupted by lengthy URLs that, even if they were actually going to manually enter them as they read, would be a huge pain to input. Instead, with an appendix of QR codes, if a reader finds that they really need to check one of the included contextual links to access the background info for a particular passage, all they have to do is snap it with their mobile to be taken to the article or document in question. This is especially convenient if the person you’re preparing the document for does a lot of work while travelling, but there are even desktop readers, like the multi-platform Adobe AIR app QReader that can use your computer’s webcam to capture and interpret QR codes.

Record Keeping

Many organizations still keep paper files, even when much of their business and bookkeeping has gone digital. If you want tighter integration between what you have in print and what you keep digitally, QR codes are a great way to make the link. You can even encode QR symbols with ftp:// or file:// links if your records are stored locally or on an intranet server, and then read these using a webcam and a program like QReader, mentioned above. Contact information can be saved entirely as QR codes, in case you find yourself needing to get in touch with a former employee or coworker who is long gone from the active duty roster.

Inter-office Memos and Posted Bulletins

Some offices still circulate printed memos and post printed bulletins. QR codes are perfect for this type of communication. Phone numbers for RSVP requests and map locations for events or meetings can be included as QR codes for easy retrieval using cellphone cameras and apps.

In fact, even if you’re sending out an event notice by email instead of print, including a QR code with map coordinates might be a good idea, since recipients can just snap a photo of their screen before leaving the office and instantly have directions to the right location in Google Maps, leaving out the possibility of human error that comes along with manual entry of such information.

1,000 Other Possibilities

The way I see it, if you’re still using paper for whatever reason, there’s no reason that paper shouldn’t also include QR codes. Even if there’s just one, and it links directly to a digital version of the very same document it appears on, that would be a huge boon to most workers, who in most cases have to follow through with at least one digital action as a result of any paper-based request or imperative. If you’re a part of a larger organization, you can even try implementing a customized organization-wide QR-based app that lets you do whatever you need to with the technology, since the type of info it can store is virtually limitless (it can hold over 7,000 numeric characters).

The paperless office may still be a dream for many, but with QR codes, you can make sure that even with one foot in the papered past, and one in the digital future, as little information as possible is lost in the gap between the two.

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Language evolves, but the web has provided a hothouse for the overblown blossoming — and just as swift demise — of fad language, jargon and discipline-specific words. Last year’s Word of the Year, “Tweet”, and the Word of the Decade, “Google,” were also technology-related. How do web workers keep up with the breakneck evolution of online language? And how do we avoid misusing words and sounding out-of-touch in a field where being connected is the most basic requirement?

The Linguistic Society of America’s naming of “app” as its word of the year points to the speed at which words and word usage evolves online. App –  an abbreviation, of course, for application — is a technology-specific word that, for a while, was heard all too often in the phrase, “There’s an app for that!” “Nom,” a word made popular by the Cookie Monster, has taken hold in the world of social networking — a world in which the Cookie Monster has quite the following.

The changing language of the digital space points to the evolution of the web and online culture, as much as to our growing technological vocabularies.

The Common Vernacular

Back in the 90′s, it was common to “surf the ‘Net”, to “ICQ” a friend, and to hang out on “bulletin boards”. Within a few years, we were talking about static websites as “brochureware” — with a negative inflection — and communicating in acronyms: IMHO, ROFL, and so on.

Today, better search facilities, and our improved ability to control our own online experiences, preclude most of us from having to “surf the ‘Net”. Similarly, changes in the way in which online properties are run has severely reduced the number of “webmasters” online. The declining popularity of these terms points to the changing way we use the Web as much as to simple word usage trends.

Similarly, the adoption and adaptation of concepts like “Web 2.0″ puts their associated fad terms out of use almost as quickly as they come into the industry’s consciousness. The growth and persistence of digital brands impacts our language, too. I’ll still “Google it”, but I’ll no longer “ICQ” you the results of my search — I’ll more likely “IM” them.

Beyond the popular language of the Web lies discipline-specific terminology, or jargon. While this may stick around for longer, its evolution is still incredibly fast by comparison to the rest of our language.

Take “usability”, for example. Initially, “usability” was the buzzword, until awareness of “accessibility” became widespread. Around this time, “user testing” could usually be taken to mean physical testing with users in a room with a computer.

We’ve seen these areas unite and expand into the broader field of “user experience”, which includes the design focus that many readers of Jakob Nielsen’s AlertBox used to long for. Where once they were ends in themselves, usability and accessibility are seen today as two elements of the broader discipline of user experience, a term which has overtaken the other two in the conversations I’m hearing online. Oh, and “user testing”? These days, that could mean anything from in-house, on-site testing with actual users, to virtual testing carried out by an offshore agency you’ve never met.

Interestingly, it’s often the practical terms within an area or field that outlast the bigger-picture or trend terms for that field: talk of wireframes, use cases, information architecture, and so on persists. But to speak of “usability” or “accessibility” when you mean “user experience” immediately implies a lack of knowledge and expertise.

Staying Up-to-Date

Many web workers take the evolution of online language with a grain of salt, and few of us expect to be across all of the common buzzwords. That said, my web working friends seem to know — and use — more jargon than they realize.

It’s true that the majority of these words aren’t restricted to online usage: word themes that begin and grow online are inevitably carried into the offline world. We use them in general conversations, often with people who aren’t tech-savvy or web workers.

For most of us, staying up-to-date with the evolving online language is less about looking up words we don’t understand than it is listening to the conversation of others, reading widely and heavily, and avoiding using terms whose meanings we’re not sure of.

Most of us know the current language of our fields, and have a general, less-developed knowledge of those of related disciplines. Our knowledge of general web terms is usually commensurate with our degree of online submersion and socializing. And for most of us, that’s enough.

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Setting up the Router

Probably the most important step is configuring your router.  The router must support NAT Port Mapping Protocol (NAT-PMP) or Universal Plug and Play (UPnP).  Using Apple’s AirPort routers, the configuration is straightforward:

1. Launch the AirPort Utility and click on Manual Setup.
2. Click on the Internet icon.
3. Make sure Share a public IP address is selected under Connection Sharing in the Internet Connection tab.
4. Under the NAT tab, check the Enable NAT Port Mapping Protocol checkbox.
5. Update to apply the changes you made.

Setting up a Shared Drive

Another great feature of the AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule solutions is that they both support hosting connected drives over MobileMe.  This would include access to several external drives connected via a USB hub. This is a great solution if you don’t have multiple Macs, but do have home storage that you connect to when you are at home. Keep in mind that these instructions apply to Apple AirPort routers only:

1. Launch the AirPort Utility and click on Manual Setup.
2. Click on the Advanced icon and select the MobileMe tab.
3. Enter your MobileMe credentials.
4. Update to apply the changes you made.

Setting up the Host Mac (or Macs)

On the Macs you want to be able to access while you’re away, you’ll need to enable Back to My Mac using the following steps:

1. From System Preferences, under Internet and Wireless, select MobileMe.
2. On the Account tab, click on the Sign In button and enter your MobileMe credentials.
3. Once signed in, choose the Back to My Mac tab, click on the Turn On Back to My Mac button.
4. Then from System Preferences under Internet and Wireless, select Sharing.
5. Turn on Screen and/or File Sharing.

For security purposes, it’s important to limit the users who can access these features.  Keep in mind this may also limit what files are accessible remotely. There’s also a Wake for network access feature configurable in the Energy Saver preferences if you’d rather your computer not be running constantly.

Accessing Your Mac Remotely

Now you can log on to and access any files on your Mac and attached drives from anywhere. All you need to do is the following on the remote Mac you’re accessing your home machine(s) from:

1. From System Preferences, under Internet and Wireless, select MobileMe
2. On the Account tab, click on the Sign In button and enter your MobileMe credentials
3. On the Back to My Mac tab, click on the Turn On Back to My Mac button

From here, you use the finder to connect to your remote Mac.  Under the Shared section in the far left panel of your Finder, you should see the host name of your Mac, and the name of any Airport Extreme or Time Capsule for which you’ve enabled MobileMe access. If the computer you’re accessing from isn’t yours, remember to sign out of your MobileMe account under System Preferences when you’re through.

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First, you’ll need to have tethering enabled on your iPhone. Tethering allows you to share your connection with one device over Bluetooth or USB. If you don’t know how to enable tethering, or get it working on your Mac, iPhoneinCanada.ca has a great step-by-step guide.

Once you’ve got tethering enabled, you can share your connection with other devices using your Mac’s built-in AirPort Wi-Fi. You can do this in System Preferences under “Sharing.” The screencast below shows exactly how to do this.

You can also enable WEP password encryption by clicking on the “AirPort Options” button on the Internet Sharing screen.

Now that you’ve set up Internet Sharing, you should be able to find a Wi-Fi network on your other devices with the network name of your Mac, which in this case is “Darrell’s iMac.” Just select that network, and enter the WEP password you chose if you enabled password protection.

I’ve used this little trick frequently on family vacations, and will probably have cause to use it more than once before iOS 4.3 becomes available to everyone. Watch your usage, though, as you could hit your monthly bandwidth limit pretty quickly depending on who you share with.

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Maybe you can’t hire a famous cartoonist or Lady Gaga, but you could work with your employer or clients to incorporate something fun into an event. Cartoonists, artists, musicians and other talented people can help make an event fun. If you don’t have money to hire people to perform, you could hold a contest where people can perform and win prizes. This could be anything from a battle of the bands with real instruments to Rock Band competitions, talent contests, arm wrestling, juggling or any other fun and crazy scheme you can come up with to add a little excitement. Toys can also help make an event more fun: a few hula hoops, video games, puzzles, puppets or other toys or cool tech gadgets can help introduce some fun.

Most of us have some conferences that we are obligated to attend or that we feel that we should attend because they will have some benefit in the future, but many of them just aren’t fun. Spend some time thinking about which conferences you enjoy attending and try to find excuses to attend more conferences like those. We all have different interests and get enjoyment from different types of conferences. When I was consulting full-time and doing online community strategy, I attended a few community and social media conferences, but most were too marketing-oriented for me, and I didn’t really enjoy them. I prefer to attend conferences filled with geeky developer types and smart people building really interesting things out of cutting edge technologies, so I like to attend open source / Linux developer conferences, SXSW and various unconferences. Budget is always an issue with going to conferences, but you can often attend them for free by speaking or volunteering to work at a conference if money is tight.

You can even make your own event. We often forget to celebrate our work achievements, but having something to celebrate, even a small accomplishment, can make a great excuse for a little party. For the big things, it can be really fun to have a huge party with a nice budget. However, we can also throw little mini parties to celebrate the smaller accomplishments without breaking the bank. On the low end, you can do a team lunch, happy hour at a local pub or a celebration in the office with a few snacks. If you have a little budget, find something fun for the team to do together and throw a bigger party. Either way, you can make work into a fun event.

What is your favorite way to make work events fun?

Photo by Flickr user Dana Tuszke used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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