LinkedIn: The Professional Playground For Professional Connections

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LinkedIn: The Professional Playground For Professional Connections
Apply For One of These Small Business Awards or Contests Today
QuicklyChat: A Faster Way for Remote Teams to Do Video Chat
PHP MySQL: The Missing Manual is A Great Tech Find

Posted: 19 Aug 2012 02:00 PM PDT

There are so many tangible examples of how online networking, especially LinkedIn can, has and does open doors and connections, not only for me but many others I know who are using it with very good results.

Very good results come from not only understanding how it works technically, but why it works. LinkedIn is a professional platform — not a social platform. That’s important to know so you use it right and get the best results.

People connecting with each other, making referrals, introductions and recommendations are nothing new really in business. The difference today is how BIG the networking world has become with the web and social media. This is why LinkedIn used strategically can help you make those smart, qualified connections.

LinkedIn is the professional playground for professional connections. If you seriously want to engage the professional community and their decision makers, then LinkedIn is THE place to play. LinkedIn profiles are now hybrids of resumes, websites, Facebook and blog pages. It’s the most complete presentation of who you are and what you are up to … professionally. I send people to LinkedIn first!

Here are 7 benefits of LinkedIn that professionals should take advantage of:

Make smart, right connections. Only the serious apply here. This is where the professional community engages, interacts, connects and refers. Start your process on LinkedIn if you want to get a company or person to notice you. Develop your profile, put up a professional head shot, link your blog, and post good content as often as you can and respond to other people’s posts.
Who do you want to meet? Make a target list of who you want to meet-companies and people. Make LinkedIn a prospecting, research and engagement tool. Use the information you gather to send thoughtful, smart messages.
Who do you want to meet you? This is where “mutual magnetism” works both ways. There are people we all want to meet for the value they bring to us, but there is value in what you bring to others too. Use your connections, wisdom, experience and personality to both meet people and initiate people meeting you. Develop your profile and keep it up to date!
Link up on LinkedIn: Identify people in your sphere and community that would be great to meet each other and make introductions. When you want to be connected, those connections you made can come in very handy!
The Rules of Engagement: There is an etiquette on all the social platforms, but especially LinkedIn. Just because we connect doesn’t give anyone permission to start sending frequent, non-permission based sales emails. Spend some time interacting with people, supporting their content, causes and company before launching into salesy stuff.
Use brand power — your brand, your company brand, your industry brand: LinkedIn is the perfect environment to leverage ‘brand power’. Remember there’s your brand, your company brand and your industry brand. Promote and connect all three and watch relationships grow.
You + new media = smart connections: Your strategic, consistent and value driven communications used in a thoughtful way on LinkedIn can and will open doors. LinkedIn is a great place to start, it makes it easy to add Twitter, your blog and other sites that all work together to professionally present you in a single page snapshot.

Check out these LinkedIn Demographics and Stats further demonstrating the power of LinkedIn.

How are you using LinkedIn to make smart connections?

From Small Business Trends

LinkedIn: The Professional Playground For Professional Connections

Apply For One of These Small Business Awards or Contests Today

Posted: 19 Aug 2012 11:30 AM PDT

Here’s our latest roundup of contests, awards and competitions — specifically for small businesses. Find one to participate in. Enter. And get financial rewards or just recognition (we know you need that!).

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Dell $100M Innovators Credit Fund
Ongoing

Dell has launched a $100 million Innovators Credit Fund, with the purpose of helping entrepreneurs "maximize potential for innovation, speed to market and job creation." The credit fund will offer both funding and technology resources with IT support, depending on what each start-up needs.

To be eligible, you must have already received some angel funding or venture capital before you can apply. Start-ups can get up to 10% of its current funding or up to $150,000 with limited credit terms. See website for details and application.

The New York Times Make Your Pitch Contest
Enter by August 29, 2012

Submit your pitch on video, telling about your product or service, your marketing plans, your customer base. Tell what makes your business different — why it is one to watch? Do you need capital? If so, how much and what for? Most important, how are you going to make money?

All video pitches that meet the submission guidelines will be featured on The New York Times small-business Facebook page and selected pitches will be featured on the New York Times You’re the Boss Blog.

PITCH NYC 2012
Enter by August 31, 2012

After hosting the successful 5th Annual PITCH 2012 in the Silicon Valley, Women 2.0 is excited to launch the inaugural PITCH NYC Conference & Competition 2012 (PITCH NYC 2012).

Open to early-stage high-growth ventures around the world, PITCH NYC 2012 invites companies with at least one female in the founding team to apply. Applying companies must be in beta stage and have received less than a million in funding. They are looking for the most disruptive web/mobile ventures, connected device companies, double and triple bottom line ventures, etc. Prizes include $25k cash, services and more.

See website for entry rules (you have to send in your business plan on a napkin!)

The Big Reboot
Multiple Contests & Entry Dates

Toshiba, Intel and Staples have teamed up to help small businesses share their stories and win thousands of dollars in new technology. Throughout 2012, they will award $10,000 technology makeovers to American businesses and free Intel-powered Ultrabooks to the people who support them.

Categories include Powering Knowledge, Powering Innovation, Powering Service, Powering Products, and Powering Good. See website for details and entry guidelines.

Hands Off My Stapler Contest
Enter by September 30, 2012

To enter, contestants must email a photo in jpeg format to stapler@ofminc.com with a short description of how they make sure their stapler stays at their desk—whether it's attaching it to a chain made out of rubber bands and paper clips, writing their name on it with white correction fluid, or some other creative idea. Brought to you by OFM and Swingline, first prize is an OFM desk of your choice and a red Swingline stapler.

FIU 2013 Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame Awards
Enter by September 30, 2012

The annual Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame celebrates the College of Business Administration’s ongoing commitment to entrepreneurship and honors alumni who not only are successful entrepreneurs but who also have contributed significantly to the entrepreneurial business community.

The Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame was established in 1999 to recognize Florida International University alumni who have achieved distinction as founders and builders of new business enterprises.

Best Places to Work in Connecticut
Enter by October 5, 2012

To be eligible for consideration, companies must meet the following criteria:
Be a for-profit or not-for-profit business or government entity
Be a publicly or privately held business
Have a facility in the state of Connecticut
Have a minimum of 15 employees working in the state of Connecticut*
Must be in business a minimum of 1 year

MillerCoors Urban Entrepreneurs Series
Enter by October 26, 2012

The 2012-2013 MillerCoors Urban Entrepreneurs Series (MUES) business plan competition is now open and accepting entries.

Since 1999, MillerCoors has invested more than $1.7 million in the dreams of entrepreneurs. This year brings new opportunities for entrepreneurs like you. Enter your business plan for a chance to vie for a $50,000 business grant and potentially become a MillerCoors supplier.

Infusionsoft Battle of the Apps
Enter by December 31, 2012

Do you have a great idea for an Infusionsoft App, integration or plug-in that will enhance the Infusionsoft user experience? Then you have a shot at being crowned the Kick Apps Champion in the Battle of the Apps 2013. First prize is $10,000. See website for details.

Shopify Build-A-Business Competition
Enter by December 31, 2012

Shopify has teamed up with four world-class entrepreneurs to
help you build a million-dollar business in just months. Come up with a product to sell, open your online store and pick a mentor. The Shopify community and your mentor will give you great advice and guidance along the way. At the end of the competition, the four stores that sell the most over a two month period will each win a $50,000 investment from their mentor.

The list of awards and competitions is brought to you by Small Business Trends and Smallbiztechnology.com.

To find more small business events, contests and awards, visit our Small Business Events Calendar.
If you are putting on a small business contest, award or competition, and want to get the word out to the community, please submit it through our Small Business Event and Contests Form (it’s free).

Please note: The descriptions provided here are for convenience only and are NOT the official rules. ALWAYS read official rules carefully at the site holding the competition, contest or award.

From Small Business Trends

Apply For One of These Small Business Awards or Contests Today

QuicklyChat: A Faster Way for Remote Teams to Do Video Chat

Posted: 19 Aug 2012 08:00 AM PDT

If you have employees or co-workers working remotely, communication can be an issue. Video chat programs often require team members to call one another. That can seem a little excessive for just a 10-second question. Now a new product has been introduced that lets teams communicate via video just by pushing a button.

QuicklyChat

QuicklyChat has introduced a push-to-talk video chat solution made for companies that have employees working remotely. The system is different from others like Skype because it doesn't require users to "make calls" to other people. You just double-click on a user name and a small video window pops up down in the right corner, connected to your co-worker. It also updates employees' availability automatically.

The push-to-talk feature can help teams communicate more quickly and with less hassle. When team members are in the same physical office, they can just stand up above the cubicle or call out across the room to ask a quick question. Companies with employees who work remotely haven’t had a good substitute.

QuicklyChat aims to change that. The system tries to make it simple to ask a quick question or have a fast chat remotely, and still have visual communication clues that text chat lacks. It includes a status indicator that lets team members know who is available and who isn't, without users having to change their statuses manually. The indicator automatically updates co-workers' statuses based on what they're doing on their computer, without actually telling other team members what they're doing — by using a red light, yellow light or green light system.

The system has default settings that detect what the employee is doing on their computer and update status. Or the employee can customize the settings.

So if an employee is browsing YouTube, the light would be green to let other team members know he or she is available to talk. If an employee is preparing reports in Excel or coding a new website, the light would likely be red to let other team members know they are busy at the moment. And if an employee is checking email, the light is probably yellow, depending on how that employee customized the settings.

The QuicklyChat system is designed to make remote co-workers feel like they're just walking up to someone's desk to ask a question, while knowing it is and acceptable time to interrupt. The program is currently in free beta, but plans to move into a freemium service in the future.

From Small Business Trends

QuicklyChat: A Faster Way for Remote Teams to Do Video Chat

PHP MySQL: The Missing Manual is A Great Tech Find

Posted: 19 Aug 2012 05:00 AM PDT

PHP MySQL The Missing Manual In a past review, I praised Dennis Mortensen's Yahoo Web Analytics guide for its mentions of Javascript while explaining the functions of a web analytics solution. The passages illustrate how technical a solution can be, and how essential the explanation are to wring value out of the applications that can make or break a business online.

I've done a few reviews on books covering marketing to finance, with a splash of analytics thrown in. But programming books have been left out because very few make a worthy attempt to bridge technical proficiency while appealing to people who still yet don't know if Kirk or Picard was the better captain.

Well now, we are closer to an answer…not to epic Star Trek captain debates, but to the missing balance of tech and everyday-man's language.

PHP MySQL The Missing Manual, by Brett McLaughlin, focuses on how PHP and MySQL fits in internet development. It's a perfect beginning programmers book that can serve double-duty as a skimming guide for curious small business owners. I discovered the book as I had planned to sharpen some skills, and purchased a copy for this review.

PHP + MySQL = A Better Understanding of Internet Dynamics

Quick overview: PHP is a programming that sends sets of text to a web server as a command. If you can't imagine it immediately, think about every contact form where you've collected website information – the instruction for what to do with information is usually PHP code. With that, envision you get the idea of where this programming language fits in. It makes your website (or web application) an actionable asset, depending on how imaginative you are with code, and makes database concerns more clear.

If you hold that imagination, you will envision a great understanding from McLaughlin's perspective. He takes you through set up and first commands. MySQL is added in a few chapters in, along with planning databases tables and regular expressions (if you use segmentation and goal filters in a web analytics solution, you'll appreciate this treatment). Security minded business owners will appreciate the chapters regarding authentication.

This is not the only book that pairs PHP and MySQL. Features from each operate hand in hand in many instances, and there are books that introduce other complimentary languages as well. But The Missing Manual is one of a few at a reasonable size. Reading its organization of chapters will not pull you too far from other business tasks.

Asides That Never Step Aside to Explain Code Clearly

McLaughin enhances the basics with his asides. Inserting notes are typical for this kind of book – such as The Complete Idiots Guide to WordPress or Search Engine Optimization for Dummies – but McLaughlin's selection really does speak to programmer concerns and layman's what-was-that-for questions.

A segment on planning an error page, for example, ends with useful tips on not overpromising delivery of a page correction:

“If you're just getting started or have limited resources, you might do well to simply say that you get notified when errors occur and you usually fix problems within 24 or 36 hour…You can set up a rule in email to highlight mails with that subject. Whatever you do, make sure that your responsiveness matches what your error page promises, or you're going to have a lot more than a programming problem to deal with.”

Programming and Database Talk that Makes Small Business Owners Wiser

As you can tell from the previous quote, McLaughlin's approach is to explain what most programmers encounter. Small business readers may feel the comments don't speak to them, but the nuggets can help understand a bit about what a programmer undergoes, which can potentially aid a discussion with a developer to articulate website and application needs for the business.

It's not the same structure as Ramon Ray's book, Technology Resources for Growing Businesses, which is planned at the onset to explain a technology (cloud). But McLaughlin's programming nuggets work.

Check out this comment about SQL and MySQL. McLaughlin emphasizes that SQL is a language, that MySQL is a database program, then delivers how those observations can aid your IT-related choices later:

“If you can keep the difference between SQL and mySQL in your head, you're ahead of the game. That's because when you work with PHP, you're connected with a MySQL database, but you're writing SQL commands and queries. As a result you can change to another database, and almost all your SQL work as long as the database accepts SQL.”

Making an effort to understand some programming nuances like this can be a plus. And McLaughlin works to make that plus as helpful as possible.

PHP MySQL The Missing Manual is no doubt a programmer's book. It’s a no-brainer result given that its publisher, O'Reilly, specializes in technical webinars, training, and books on programming language and web development.

But small business owners who have already exhausted HTML and are growing the complexity of their sites may want to check out this particular book for learning some of the right technical concerns. The text is a beginning coder's delight, first and foremost. But I feel a few savvy small business owners will feel some delight, too, after a light read.

From Small Business Trends

PHP MySQL: The Missing Manual is A Great Tech Find