by Productivity Expert Shawn Kershaw, Shawn Kershaw, Inc.

At a recent CCPA event hosted by Keller Williams, productivity expert, Shawn Kershaw, presented an awesome seminar for members. Here are a few of the tips which Shawn presented on the topic of How to Manage your Email, not let it Manage YOU!

Step 1: Practice FAT on EVERY incoming Email.Make a decision to File it, Act on it or Trash it

Step 2: Use Email Appropriately. Make sure that you and your colleagues are using Email as it is best used: for OUTGOING information to many people, in many locations possibly across time zones. Use the phone or face to face communication for decision making, discussions and sensitive issues.

Step 3: Send Well Crafted Email. Use the subject line to indicate the “intent” rather than the subject of the Email. Use key words like ACTION, INFO, DUE DATE to make it easier for the recipient to process your messages.

Step 4: Trash Unneeded Emails. The first sweep through your Email should be to rid your inbox of the “visual noise.” Trash any and all Emails you can without opening.

STEP 5: Act on Task Emails. Once you have decided that an Email is actionable, create a technique for acting on it. Opening an Email, closing it, and marking it unread is Not a productive technique! Move it to Outlook Task List, One Note, a reminder application on your smart phone or jot the action down on your paper To Do List. Another option is to change the subject line and add a “flag.”

Step 6: Act on Obligation Emails. Move Emails regarding due dates or appointments out of your inbox and onto your calendar.

Step 7: File Emails Later Use. Create a filing system of 5-7 large information buckets in Email Folders which support you FINDING an Email for later use. Get into the habit of moving Emails you need to keep. This reduces the volume of Email in your in box and helps you store like items
together.

For more Email tips or for a step by step “how to” in Outlook, click here for a free resource provided by Shawn Kershaw, Inc.

For more productivity tips from Shawn Kershaw, sign up for her STEPs Newsletter, Simple Tips to Extraordinary Productively.

By Martin Weinberg, VP of Digital Strategy, eCity Interactive

It was a pleasure to speak on the panel discussion Creating a Better Customer Experience Using Social Media in January. All of the panelists shared good case studies and advice, and we got excellent questions from an engaged audience.

One topic of particular interest was the various free and low-cost social media management tools that were discussed. Anyone who wants to engage in social media for business eventually settles on a suite of tools to manage the process.

Unless you are a large company with a broad fan base, you really don’t need a mission control setup like Gatorade. It’s very easy for all of us to fall prey to the “new shiny toy” syndrome. On the other hand, new tools are being released every day, each one offering something new or better. At some point you have to select a few, get good with them, and put them to use to serve your business needs.

That being said, here are the tools that were discussed at the panel discussion. It is not meant to be a complete list, or necessarily a “best of” list, but it’s good place to start.

Tools

HootSuite
One of the most popular tools for managing social media feeds. Primarily used for Twitter, but you can also use it for LinkedIn, Facebook and more. The free version is fine for most small businesses.

Buffer
As you curate interesting things to share with your audience, it’s good to schedule posts so they appear throughout the day. Buffer makes it very easy to do just that. Just send the article to Buffer, and it takes care of scheduling automatically.

Google Alerts
It’s like having your own private clipping service. Easily set up searches for your company, your products, your competitors and anything else of interest to your business. It’s a great way to find interesting things to share with your social media followers.

Google Reader
Looking for a way to follow a collection of websites and blogs? Google Reader is your personal information dashboard. Bonus idea: deliver your Google Alert to a feed, and then bring the feed into Google Reader for a convenient list of alerts.

Yammer
Want to help your team practice business social media and idea sharing? Yammer is like having your own private Facebook/Twitter just for the people in your company.

Job Change Notifier
Get an alert every time one of your LinkedIn contacts changes jobs. Very handy for B2B businesses. And it’s free.

GetSatisfaction
Create a user-friendly public forum that allows customers to ask questions, share ideas and more.

Resources
These next 2 links from the panel discussion are not tools, but provide excellent points of view on social media for business.

The Definitive Guide to Facebook Publishing and Social Media
Excellent, clearly written guide on how to handle various social media response issues. Includes examples that nicely illustrate the interchanges.

ZMOT
Why should small businesses bother with social media? Learn about the Zero Moment of Truth, and why your customers make buying decisions about your company even before they reach your own website.

Martin Weinberg is VP of Digital Strategy at eCity Interactive. eCity Interactive is a full-service interactive agency in Philadelphia that creates award-winning websites and online marketing campaigns for major brands, mid-sized companies and non-profits. Follow Martin on Twitter at @MartinWeinberg.

by Pat Rocchi, Pat Rocchi Communications

Nobody likes a one-way conversation. It can be pretty boring. Similarly we should not expect our audiences to put up with the same.

As a rule, I take questions from my audiences throughout most presentations rather than wait until the end. I think you show your audience a measure of disrespect when you expect them to sit passively while you talk to them. On the other hand, audience participation is a way to spice up your talk.

Is this a hard and fast rule? No; it can impractical due to the particular circumstances, such as the size of the audience or the room, a limited amount of time or the nature of your presentation. If you are delivering an emotion-packed speech, such as a eulogy or fund-raising appeal, you certainly don’t want to break the mood with interruptions. But, in many other situations, a dialogue with the audience is desirable, and there are several ways to generate interaction:

• Give a dollar to the first person who asks a question without prompting. Reward the next questioner with the same dollar. Passing that dollar around the room generates fun, but also participation.

• Ask a question and then toss a sponge ball into the audience. Whoever catches it is obligated to answer. Then have that person toss the ball to another responder.

• Create an exercise that requires attendees to get out of their chairs to solicit input from others in the room.

For more ideas, I recommend the book Preventing Death by Lecture, by professional speaker Sharon Bowman. She gives lots of fun tips on how to engage your audience so they are involved in your presentation and are more likely to remember you and what you said afterward.

by Pat Rocchi, Pat Rocchi Communications

When counseling others on how to be successful as a speaker, my mantra is: “It’s all about your audience; it’s not about you.” That includes building a relationship with your audience members, before and after your presentation. Here are some actions that have worked for me.

Find ways to reach out ahead of time. I recently spoke to a group of people in career transition. The web-based sign-up system gave me information on each participant as they enrolled. I sent each of them an e-mail telling how much I appreciated that they had signed up, how much I looked forward to meeting them and how I wanted to serve their needs.

Be there as they arrive. I got to the event ahead of the audience to set up the room. As each arrived, I gave them a copy of my handout and engaged them in a short conversation. (Those who had received my introductory e-mail felt as though they already knew me.)

Say goodbye to as many people as you are able. At the end, I stood at the front of the room and shook everyone’s hands, thanking them for coming. I asked how the presentation met their needs, and I requested their feedback.

Reach out afterward, just as you do prior to the event. I sent a thank-you e-mail to everyone who attended. I personalized each message a bit, such as thanking someone for a particularly provocative question asked or for buying my book.

Forget starting your presentation with a grand, dramatic entrance, which are for rock stars, divas or ham actors. Instead, connect with your audience members more intimately. The more we do that, the more likely we are to meeting their expectations of our speeches and help them meet their objectives.

by Brigid Kaye, Creative Characters, Inc.

newsletter’s design has a big impact on reader reaction and often is the reason a reader is attracted to read in the first place. The design can also determine whether a reader will continue reading or move on. To be sure your design is successful, remember the 3 Cs of design: consistency, conservative and contrast.

Consistency addresses the format of your newsletter. If printing in black with an accent color, select a color palette and maintain it throughout each issue. If it’s an e-newsletter, use consistent color choices and don’t create a masterpiece of your own. Color is used to emphasize the message, not the message itself. Use an underlying grid to organize each page, story or section. If your newsletter is short (4 pages/stories or less), use the same grid for each page. Use templates and style sheets to control headlines, subheads and body copy.

Be conservative in the use of fonts and graphic elements, especially in a short newsletter. A good rule is to limit the number of photos, graphic accents or clip art to two per page. Pick a photo that means something. Random handshakes rarely say anything at all except, “I’m here to fill space.” Select one font for body copy and another for headlines, and use them exclusively. Stylize the two fonts with italics, bold, and condensed but do not introduce additional fonts.

Use contrast to direct the reader’s eye and to establish the hierarchy of importance. Headlines should contrast with body copy and with subheads. Drop caps, extra-large initial caps or an illustrated capital letter will draw the reader’s eye and create graphic interest. Use white space in the form of gutters please define and margins to lighten up dense body copy.

Improving the design of your newsletter will pay dividends in reader interest and accessibility. It can enhance the perception of your company. And it is one of the first things you can do to start developing your reputation as an expert in the community. A well-designed newsletter with interesting current topics is often passed along to colleagues or taken home to give to family and friends.

The more you can provide relevant content that’s current and interesting, the more prospect mind share you gain.

by Brigid Kaye, Creative Characters, Inc.

File formats for printed images
The best file formats to use for images that will be printed are:
For vector images: .eps (Encapsulated PostScript).
For raster images: .tif (Tagged Image File Format).

Vector images are constructed from mathematical formulas. This means that they are resolution-independent and can be scaled (resized) and manipulated (flipped, rotated, stretched, cropped, colorized, combined) with ease using programs like Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw. This is an ideal format for the initial design of logos and illustrations and for clip art. It does not produce images like this one.

Raster images are composed of rows and columns of pixels (sometimes called a bitmap). Because raster images are hard to resize and manipulate, they reproduce best at the size and orientation of the original. Raster images can be cropped, colorized, converted to gray-scale or monochrome using image-editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Corel Paint Shop Pro. All photographs are raster images.

The .tif file format usually produces the best quality image from a digital camera. The other choice is .jpg (Joint Photographic Experts Group), a file format that has been optimized for continuous-tone full color photographs by incorporating file compression.

JPG compression looks at blocks of 8×8 pixels and selectively reduces the detail in each block. This maintains the physical size of the image, reduces the amount of space required to store it, but sacrifices the quality of the image. The extent of image degradation depends on the degree of compression (it is adjustable).

If you are editing or manipulating digital  photographs, work in .tif format rather than .jpg, since each new save in .jpg compresses the file.

The proprietary file formats .psd (Photoshop), .psp (Paint Shop Pro), .ai (Adobe Illustrator) and .cdw (Corel Draw) are good to use while editing images in order to have access to all the editing tools in the program. However after the image editing is complete, save raster images as a .tif file and vector images as an .eps file.

Use images successfully
For maximum effectiveness, any image you use in a document must reproduce well. This requires attention to the file format and adhering to production standards.

by Audrey Julienne, Raison d’Etre|Relationship Marketing

Located in Midtown Village, Absolute Abstract is a wall-decoration store specializing in frameless art, with a very diverse clientele and increased traffic as a main business goal. As of today, James McManaman and partner David White have put most of their online marketing efforts in building a customer data-base and a Facebook following.

After a short conversation with the storeowners, I would recommend the following to improve customer engagement and drive traffic to the store:

Targets: Focus the social media efforts on 2 main targets: Students & Empty Nesters. Those 2 audience segments have a very tech-friendly behavior in common and are more likely to engage on social networks.

Social Media Goals:
• Increase traffic to the store website and convert at least 1% of traffic into newsletter sign-up, Facebook Like, Twitter follow or blog subscription (see below).
• Monitor the web for art-related information and make content findable for the 2 main audiences.

Strategy: Bring the “decoration” experience outside of the store and into people’s houses. There is a very strong enthusiasm for home improvement and DYI deco stories; we recommend that Absolute Abstract surf on this trend and create a community of “home decorators.”

Tactics:
• Create a community based around decoration with customers, staff, partners, professional interior designers, partners, etc.
• Create an Absolute Abstract platform where experiences can be shared: follow a picture from the store to the wall, have professional interior designers help clients with picking and hanging their art and follow the process either with pictures or video, offer people to post a picture of their wall and have other community members pick which pictures to use…
• Use Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, Foursquare, Twitter, the existing newsletter and a blog to engage, and promote each story and encourage sharing.

by Pat Rocchi, Pat Rocchi Communications

At a recent speech competition, all 7 contestants opened with rhetorical questions, such as “Who here has a dream?” and “Who here has danced?”.

I cringed. It was not simply because most of us danced, or because few will admit to not having a dream. No, as a speaking coach, I was put off by all the indistinguishable openings.

You get just one chance to grab your audience’s attention before they decide if you are worth their time. To have a strong start, pick one of the following ways to open:

• An anecdote — Begin with a story not only to grab the audience’s attention but also to state the  thesis of your talk. When I recently spoke to a Baptist church, I told a story that ended in a humorous reference to the Psalms. The audience laughed, and  the story also showed that I understood their religious culture.
• A bold statement — Go ahead, be strong. Grab the moment. In the 1964 speech that started his political career, Ronald Reagan opened by saying, “I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I have recently seen fit to follow another course.”
• A testimonial — Cite the opinion of an influential person to make your point. For example, many people say the deregulation of electricity in Pennsylvania creates new business opportunities. To support that position, you could quote Warren Buffet, who told Forbes magazine, “Energy deregulation will be the largest transfer of wealth in history.”
• Startling statistics — Sheer numbers are not always enough. Frame them in a way that gives them life. To say that Facebook has 550 million users may be incomprehensible. Instead, cite Time magazine, which said “If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest, behind only China and India.”

Now you can go on to introduce yourself formally, give your audience an overview of your speech, and then launch into it. A strong opening will succeed in seizing your audience, improving the odds they will be engaged as you serve their needs with your presentation.

by Brigid Kaye, Creative Characters, Inc.

Image resolution
Image resolution is the amount of detail in an image, expressed as the number of pixels in the image. Resolution for digital cameras is often expressed as the number of pixel columns (width) by the number of pixel rows (height), such as 640 x 480. For printing, resolution is expressed as dots per inch (dpi), meaning the number of pixels in a linear inch. The more pixels per inch, the higher the resolution.

The most important thing to understand is the relationship between an image’s resolution (dpi] and its print size (actual width and height). For a photograph to reproduce well in print, it must have a minimum resolution of 300 dpi in print size. Such a file is termed high resolution (hi-res). In some cases a printer may be able to use a 200 dpi image but almost never a low-resolution (lo-res) file (resolution below 200 dpi), because there are not enough pixels to adequately represent the image.

Even if a file’s resolution is high enough, it still may not reproduce well if the image resolution doesn’t match the print size. If you ask a printer to enlarge the image to print in a bigger size than it was originally, the pixels that make up the image will move farther apart. This changes the number of pixels per inch, reducing the resolution. If the enlargement is significant, individual pixels may become visible, creating jagged edges in the image. This effect is called pixelation.

File size
The size of a file is determined by whether it is a vector or raster file and whether it is binary, gray-scale or color. File compression is a way of reducing file size without compromising image quality.

There are two compression methods:
• “Lossless” compression keeps all the pixels of the original image but finds more efficient ways to represent recurring patterns of pixels in the file. TIF is a common lossless file type.
• “Lossy” compression eliminates pixels from the original image that aren’t needed to maintain quality. Data is discarded (lost) during compression. JPEGs (or JPGs) are common lossy file types.

By Linda Rink, RINK Consulting

Many people think they don’t need a business plan or perhaps feel overwhelmed by the prospect of sitting down and developing it. They are doing just fine without one, thank you.

Here are 3 important reasons why you should have a written business plan:
• Do you have a short-term and long-term vision for your business? Is it articulated in writing? If not, how are you going to focus your efforts to make it happen?
• We all have limited resources. Spend your time and energy where you get the biggest return – and that takes some thought and planning.
• How do you judge success? If you don’t have a plan, how do you know if you had a successful year?

You may be surprised to hear that a business plan need not be lengthy or complicated. A short, focused plan is better than none at all. These 6 action steps will give you a basic plan:
• Write down a description of your business.
• Write down your goals for the next year. They should be a mix of financial and strategic goals.

Some examples are:
• Grow revenues by x percent.
• Increase client base by x percent.
• Grow profitability by x percent.
• Diversify into at least one new area or add one more new services to offer customers.
• Review where your marketing dollars went the previous year. Are you satisfied with the results? Where was your money best spent?
• Review your revenue sources/client list from the previous year. Which ones were most profitable? Most aligned with your goals for the business?
• Repeat for next year the activities you are happy with; set aside budget dollars accordingly.
• How do you want to grow next year? Refer back to your list of goals. What will you do to get there? Set aside budget dollars to fund tactics.

I promise you, just doing this written exercise will give you value: clarity, focus, hopefully some energy and enthusiasm going forward. These days, we all can use that.