BUSINESS and more

While Facebook can absolutely help build your brand awareness, you need to learn to avoid some of the most common mistakes.

Facebook marketing is on the rise among businesses of all sizes today but still far too many struggle with the basics. There are many who have a hard time even getting a page set up and others who don’t understand what they are supposed to post on their page. While Facebook can absolutely help build your brand awareness, you need to learn to avoid some of the most common mistakes. Learn them, avoid them and rock on with a popular brand page!

Many things can go wrong during the process of creating new products, services or business models. Let me give you ten examples from my own experience. You may recognize this as an array of all too familiar scenarios. If so, rest assured, you are not alone.

1. We´re not sure what we want.

Ideation of new products and services happens ad hoc, usually at a time when a problem arises or the turnover decreases suddenly or when a competitor enters the market unexpectedly. The first question is: “What now?” Then the creed becomes: “We’ll get Smith to create a list.” From this moment it becomes clear that any current strategic business plans no longer provide much direction for innovation. Ultimately, the lack of clear directives leads to random thought processes and frustration. Frustration because the management, further down in the innovation process, decided to concentrate on something else than what you were focusing on before.

Learn about LinkedIn's new Contacts tool and how you can benefit from it in managing your marketing relationships.

Bring people whom you have interacted with into the conversation by using a simple “+Amanda Blain have you tried this wine?” Also remember to +1 people who comment on your posts, as a ‘thank you’.

You shouldn't listen to an employee who wants help to solve a conflict with another. You might feel proud of “mediating” among your team members as you discuss the problem with each one

Facebook hashtags could improve how business owners and entrepreneurs network, interact and market on Facebook. Here are 5 ways to use them.

Reports have been unspecific about when the company may roll out the new Facebook hashtags feature.   But until then, below are five ways suggested by Janette Speyer and Katrina McNeill of Web Success Team about how to use hashtags in your business marketing.

Creating online courses is fun! What happens though, when you are in the promotion phase? Find 8 great ways to promote your online courses in this mini tutorial.

Apart from using compelling content, you can support your eLearning activity with a series of other actions.

When looking at Best Practices by our customers (both from eFront and TalentLMS) we notice thatmost educators invest in specific things.

Financial KPIs and metrics are the ultimate measure of your organization's performance, whether your business is small or large. These are the measurements your stockholders, potential investors, and customers will use when assessing the performance of your business. That's why these financial metrics are an integral part of any executive or enterprise dashboard. By providing decision-makers with the right data, they can direct business initiatives more confidently to improve the performance and profitability of the entire organization.

To help get you started on your executive dashboard, we've put together a list of the top 10 financial ratios and metrics your business should monitor.

The debate about remote working has raged for the past week following Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer's opposition to her staff working from home. Now Michael Bloomberg has said he's always thought working from home is 'one of the dumber ideas I've ever heard'.

I have enormous respect for Michael Bloomberg and have rarely disagreed with anything he has done or said. However, on this occasion I disagree completely. Many employees who work from home are extremely diligent, get their job done, and get to spend more time with their families. They waste less time commuting and get a better work/life balance. To force everybody to work in offices is old school thinking.

Is Cloud Computing a Fact or Fiction?

Cloud Computing: Fact or Fiction? is a new infographic from Devry University helping to explain the basics aboutcloud computing, and the clear up the common misunderstandings people have about the Cloud.

Cloud computing allows you to store, access and share data from Internet-connected devices in one central location.  As technology careers continue to grow across the U.S. and cloud computing creates nearly 14 million jobs by 2015, the Cloud is more important than ever.  Here are the fact you need to know about the Cloud – and the fiction than many believe.

This is a really clean and easy-to-read design, with a great color scheme.  The statistics to support each section are good, and clearly sourced in the long list of data sources in the footer.

To maximise a tweet's effectiveness you need to use the 140 characters in the most efficient manner possible. This post offers five simple suggestions to optimise tweets for engagement and ultimately CTR. 

The number one rule before applying these quick fixes is ensuring your tweet content is relevant to your audience. Although these are generic tips applicable to any industry your tweets must communicate the value of your product/service to your customers.

It’s frustrating isn’t it when you can’t find that file? When you’ve searched every folder imaginable on your computer, and somehow it got lost….or worse, deleted. Now, there are excellent search tools for Windows that allow you to find your files, but they only work if you know the name of the file. And you don’t want to open up a program to find every file and folder that you need. It’s just nice to have things neat and easy to access whenever you need them.

I’ve put together a list of 9 things you can do to manage computer files and get the most out of your computer. Because that’s its purpose – to be moreuseful, not less useful. But computers are often more complicated in some ways when they’re not set up and used properly, which is essentially counterproductive.

Part of what made me fall in love with the San Francisco Bay Area was the palpable energy of so many people in one place, so determined to change the world through entrepreneurship. People here tend

There's a serous disconnect between companies and potential employees in the United States—one that may be holding our entire economy back. And, contrary to the conventional wisdom, it's a problem that has been caused—and can only be cured by—companies. So says Peter Cappelli in his 2012 book Why Good People Can't Get Jobs. 

In Cappelli's view of the state of the modern employment landscape, there are several issues preventing companies from finding the talent they need—and none of them are related to the conventional cries from businesses and the media about a lack of talent in the pool, or the failure of the American education system to turn out people with appropriate skills. 

Andrew Grill talks about why you need a Social Business Strategy.

So impressed was I with a recent report from Altimeter group on Social Business titled “The evolution of social business – six stages of social business transformation”, that I decided to do a multi-part blog post. The first post can be viewed at lc.tl/asb1. In this second post, I am looking at the section of the report that looks at defining a social business strategy. The Altimeter report looked at 698 companies in medium-large sized companies, as well as deeper interviews with 26 executives and social strategists at 15 companies. The Altimeter definition of a social business strategy is the following: the set of visions, goals, plans, and resources that align social media initiatives with business objectives.

The owner of one of my favourite cafes recently started using Twitter and Facebook. However, when you interact with her business online, you get very little sense of the woman behind it. Her online footprint is polite but, frankly, it lacks personality. In reality, she is a larger than life character who epitomises her brand. She lives and breathes her cafe — and is well known (in real life) for her food, unique decor and events.

She told me: "I just don't want to be in the spotlight. I want people to interact with my business, not with me. I don't want to be the centre of attention."

Fair enough. However, in a world where consumers are bombarded with marketing and advertising messages, some experts believe we are living in an age where personal branding is vital for success. And that means NOT shying away from the spotlight.

Project managers and subpar employees will turn your company into a zombie, says Nir Zuk. The founder of Palo Alto Networks is obsessed with making sure that doesn't happen to his company.

Not all social platforms fit the needs of a particular business. For example, LinkedIn may provide an audience of potential clients interested in your marketing or Internet services. However Foursquare provides zero.

The video game industry is worth more than $100bn worldwide, so it's no surprise that businesses are using gamification to try to boost sales.

The idea is that by adding gaming elements to the sales process, such as small challenges and rewards, you can increase customer loyalty and advocacy.  

As in every game or competition, the participants have to be motivated by a worthwhile reward. It’s also true that the greater the reward, the more you can ask people to do to earn the reward.

Social media is great for making new friends, but it also attracts the creeps.

Things are about to get personal.

Social media has made it easier than ever to connect: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and other services have greatly amplified everyone’s personal brand message. This is fun, and beneficial inasmuch as we can get a sense of someone’s professionalism, character, and personality before we ever meet them in person.

If you're an employer, there are lots of signals about a young person's suitability for the job you're offering. If you're looking for someone who can write, do they have a blog, or are they a prolific Wikipedia editor? For programmers, what are their TopCoder or GitHub scores? For salespeople, what have they sold before? If you want general hustle, do they have a track record of entrepreneurship, or at least holding a series of jobs?

These days, there are also a range of tests you can administer to prospective employees to see if they're right for the job. Some of them are pretty straightforward. Others, like Knack, seek to test for attributes that might seem unrelated, but have been shown by prior experience to be associated with good on-the-job performance.