One of the most important decisions you can make for your company is your brand. This is the images, logos, and tag lines that people will associate with your company. There are a lot of decisions that go into creating your brand and applying it, that will help you maximize it’s exposer to make it common and recognizable to the companies and public you are targeting.

Some famous brands  to think of can be very simple and just text and some are more intricate, but no less recognizable.

Here are a few you may know…

Your company/group identity should be strategic and not cosmetic. It will capture the uniqueness of the organization and the strengths that make it different. It should bring your people together under one flag.

Questions about your brand that you should know the answers to:

Application of Logo

• How is your logo to be used, Physically.
• How small can it be?
• What are the true 4 color settings for all of your logos.
• Can your logo be one color?
• Black with white? White with black?
• What is the shape?
• What is the padding (if any) needed around the logo?

Brand Colors

• What are the true print colors of all of your colors?
• Do you have a standard for logos, vs headers, vs text?

TypoGraphy

• What is the font your company uses for all of its correspondence?
• What are applicable substitutes?

Endorsement

• Does your company endorse events or other groups? How should that always look when other groups use you for endorsement?

Do you have standards for all of these?

• Stationary
• Business Cards
• Letter Head
• Envelopes
• Templates
• Email signatures
• Faxes and Memos
• Direct mail
• Direct email
• Website
• Presentations
• Posters/Banners
• Pamphlets

Branding your company gives you a professional look, and feel. It lets customers know that you ahve thought about the details, and that is how you will work with them

Bringing your company under one flag will help keep your company in the front of your customers minds. Take the time to brand your company correctly and you will find your business grow.

Friends, I rarely send these out and I hope you will all help me with this great cause. After having a possible cancer scare in our family this year, it has become more important to me than ever to do all I can to help raise funds to fight Cancer. I am currently taking part on the committee with the Ride 4 Yellow Steamboat team and partnering with the the Livestrong Foundation to help raise money to help fund cancer Research Globally and help fight cancer in Steamboat Springs, CO.

Please take a minute to go to learn about this important event and then help me reach my goal of at least $1000 to go towards this amazing event.

Please donate on my behalf at:
http://fundraising.livestrong.org/grassroots2010/seememedia

Any Amount will help $5, $10, $500. Thank you all for your support and help with this amazing event! All donations are tax deductible and are guaranteed to go to a great cause.

I have included the press release below for the even sent out by the Steamboat Ski Resort with more information about the event.

Check out these great sites for more information if you would like to join the cause or even ride with Lance across the divide and raise money with me:

http://www.ride4yellow.com/

http://www.facebook.com/ride4yellow/

If you are a cancer survivor or know someone who is, please upload pictures to the Survivor Site:
http://www.ride4yellow.com/cancer/cancer-fighters/

Thank you to all my friends in advance for your time and your donations! Feel free to pass this message on!

So you have finally decided that your company, business, cause or group should have a fan page on Facebook.  You did this for a one of many reasons. No matter what has brought you to this point, you are here and you are asking yourself one question, how do I get people to like us? Here are 3 easy steps to growing your Fan base and having people express that they like your business.

1. Suggest the page to your friends
   This one should be a no brain-er. Even though not all of your friends will “like” your business, these are the people that will associate your business with you. They are your friends after all. Here is a quick how to on suggesting to your friends:
   1. Login to Facebook
   2. In the search button, search for your company page and select it.
   3. Once the page it up, you will have the picture you have chosen for your page in the upper left area of the page.
   4. Under that is a menu of options like “Edit Page” or “Promote with Ad”. Look for a link entitled “Suggest to Friends” and click on it.
   5. This will bring up a window with all of your friends pictures.  Select all of the people you feel will benefit from “Like”ing your page. If they are highlighted in Blue you have selected them.
      • Some names may be grayed out. Those people either already Like the page you are suggesting to them or have been invited to like the page. Just skip those.
      • There is no fast way through all of your friends. You have to hand click each one of them.  A pain for those of you with lots of friends but that is the price of being popular.
   6. When you are done selecting your friends, click the “Send Invitations” button and you are done with step one.
   7. WARNING: Don’t do this often for your own page. Once a month is more than enough. If people like your page great if not, they won’t. Don’t keep pushing your company down their throats. They will just learn to hate you for it.




2. Be sure to tag your wall with comments
   Every wall should have a good tagging in my book and Facebook is no different. You write on your own wall all the time, why not make those comments useful by Tagging your Company’s page in your tags. Tagging in Facebook is a way of linking to other pages in Facebook so you can direct people easily to pages or people.
   Here is a quick lesson in tagging:
   1. Log into Facebook and go to your wall.
   2. In that little box that says what’s on your mind starting writing something about your business’s page.
   3. When you are ready to type your business’s name Type the “@” symbol and without adding a space, start typing your company’s fan page name. Your company should show up in a box underneath your comment.
   4. When you see your company’s page name, click on it and Facebook will automatically put the full name of your company’s page in the post you are creating.
   5. Finish off your post and send!
   6. A fair bit of warning here. If you edit the name in any way, the link to your page will go away, so avoid that. Also, this trick currently only works in Facebook online, but not on any of your mobile devices.  Not my fault, I am not the programmer.




3. Get your Fans to suggest your business page to their friends.
   Having a fan page is about reaching outside of your group of friends, so this is the most vital step of all getting fans. This is however the toughest step, because this takes a little 1 on 1 message time.
   1. First off, login to Facebook and head to your Fan page.
   2. Once there head to the box on the left marked”(#) friends Like This” and click the “See All” link in the window. This will pull up a list of all of the people that you know that like the page.
   3. Pick out a few names of people that you see on Facebook a lot and that have a good number of friends.
   4. Either click on their name in the window to go to their page or Search, one at a time for these friends, in the box at the top of the Facebook page.
   5. Once you are on their page, under their Profile picture will be a link to “Send ____ a Message”. Click on it.
   6. In the window that has just opened write them a message saying how much you love that they like your business and ask them, in your own way, to suggest your page to their friends. It might be a good idea to give them a short instructional guide, like Step 1 above, if you are not sure if they know how to do it.  In your message, include the URL of your page (hopefully a vanity URL at this point).  This will make it easy for them to get to your page.
   7. If they come through be sure to by them a drink the next time you see them. It will be worth it!

Growing your fan page is a huge key to having success on Facebook. Now get out there and make people like you!

It is time for a little video update on the power of social media.

For our mobile friends, be sure to check out the video here…
Social Media Revolution

Back in March 2007,  John Pozadzides, CEO of iFusion Labs, talked about password security in his blog.

Conclusion, the majority of Internet users use passwords that offer little or no security at all. Here is an excerpt from his site.  Do you think you are any smarter today?

NOTE: Figures below are based on computers from 2007, not in today’s numbers.

If you invited me to try and crack your password, you know the one that you use over and over for like every web page you visit, how many guesses would it take before I got it?

Let’s see… here is my top 10 list. I can obtain most of this information much easier than you think, then I might just be able to get into your e-mail, computer, or online banking. After all, if I get into one I’ll probably get into all of them.

1. Your partner, child, or pet’s name, possibly followed by a 0 or 1 (because they’re always making you use a number, aren’t they?)
2. The last 4 digits of your social security number.
3. 123 or 1234 or 123456.
4. “password”
5. Your city, or college, football team name.
6. Date of birth – yours, your partner’s or your child’s.
7. “god”
8. “letmein”
9. “money”
10. “love”

Statistically speaking that should probably cover about 20% of you. But don’t worry. If I didn’t get it yet it will probably only take a few more minutes before I do…

Hackers, and I’m not talking about the ethical kind, have developed a whole range of tools to get at your personal data. And the main impediment standing between your information remaining safe, or leaking out, is the password you choose. (Ironically, the best protection people have is usually the one they take least seriously.)

One of the simplest ways to gain access to your information is through the use of a Brute Force Attack. This is accomplished when a hacker uses a specially written piece of software to attempt to log into a site using your credentials. Insecure.org has a list of the Top 10 FREE Password Crackers right here.

So, how would one use this process to actually breach your personal security? Simple. Follow my logic:

• You probably use the same password for lots of stuff right?
• Some sites you access such as your Bank or work VPN probably have pretty decent security, so I’m not going to attack them.
• However, other sites like the Hallmark e-mail greeting cards site, an online forum you frequent, or an e-commerce site you’ve shopped at might not be as well prepared. So those are the ones I’d work on.
• So, all we have to do now is unleash Brutus, wwwhack, or THC Hydra on their server with instructions to try say 10,000 (or 100,000 – whatever makes you happy) different usernames and passwords as fast as possible.
• Once we’ve got several login+password pairings we can then go back and test them on targeted sites.
• But wait… How do I know which bank you use and what your login ID is for the sites you frequent? All those cookies are simply stored, unencrypted and nicely named, in your Web browser’s cache. (Read this post to remedy that problem.)

And how fast could this be done? Well, that depends on three main things, the length and complexity of your password, the speed of the hacker’s computer, and the speed of the hacker’s Internet connection.

Assuming the hacker has a reasonably fast connection and PC here is an estimate of the amount of time it would take to generate every possible combination of passwords for a given number of characters. After generating the list it’s just a matter of time before the computer runs through all the possibilities – or gets shut down trying.

Pay particular attention to the difference between using only lowercase characters and using all possible characters (uppercase, lowercase, and special characters – like @#$%^&*). Adding just one capital letter and one asterisk would change the processing time for an 8 character password from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries.

Remember, these are just for an average computer, and these assume you aren’t using any word in the dictionary. If Google put their computer to work on it they’d finish about 1,000 times faster.

Now, I could go on for hours and hours more about all sorts of ways to compromise your security and generally make your life miserable – but 95% of those methods begin with compromising your weak password. So, why not just protect yourself from the start and sleep better at night?

Believe me, I understand the need to choose passwords that are memorable. But if you’re going to do that how about using something that no one is ever going to guess AND doesn’t contain any common word or phrase in it.

Here are some password tips:

1. Randomly substitute numbers for letters that look similar. The letter ‘o’ becomes the number ‘0′, or even better an ‘@’ or ‘*’. (i.e. – m0d3ltf0rd… like modelTford)
2. Randomly throw in capital letters (i.e. – Mod3lTF0rd)
3. Think of something you were attached to when you were younger, but DON’T CHOOSE A PERSON’S NAME! Every name plus every word in the dictionary will fail under a simple brute force attack.
4. Maybe a place you loved, or a specific car, an attraction from a vacation, or a favorite restaurant?
5. You really need to have different username / password combinations for everything. Remember, the technique is to break into anything you access just to figure out your standard password, then compromise everything else. This doesn’t work if you don’t use the same password everywhere.
6. Since it can be difficult to remember a ton of passwords, I recommend using Roboform for Windows users. It will store all of your passwords in an encrypted format and allow you to use just one master password to access all of them. It will also automatically fill in forms on Web pages, and you can even get versions that allow you to take your password list with you on your PDA, phone or a USB key. If you’d like to download it without having to navigate their web site here is the direct download link.
7. Mac users can use 1Password“>1Password. It is essentially the same thing as Roboform, except for Mac, and they even have an iPhone application so you can take them with you too.
8. Once you’ve thought of a password, try Microsoft’s password strength tester to find out how secure it is.

By request I also created a short RoboForm Demonstration video. Hope it helps…

Another thing to keep in mind is that some of the passwords you think matter least actually matter most. For example, some people think that the password to their e-mail box isn’t important because “I don’t get anything sensitive there.” Well, that e-mail box is probably connected to your online banking account. If I can compromise it then I can log into the Bank’s Web site and tell it I’ve forgotten my password to have it e-mailed to me. Now, what were you saying about it not being important?

Often times people also reason that all of their passwords and logins are stored on their computer at home, which is save behind a router or firewall device. Of course, they’ve never bothered to change the default password on that device, so someone could drive up and park near the house, use a laptop to breach the wireless network and then try passwords from this list until they gain control of your network – after which time they will own you!

Now I realize that every day we encounter people who over-exaggerate points in order to move us to action, but trust me this is not one of those times. There are 50 other ways you can be compromised and punished for using weak passwords that I haven’t even mentioned.

I also realize that most people just don’t care about all this until it’s too late and they’ve learned a very hard lesson. But why don’t you do me, and yourself, a favor and take a little action to strengthen your passwords and let me know that all the time I spent on this article wasn’t completely in vain.

Please, be safe. It’s a jungle out there.

Source: How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords [One Man's Blog]

If you have ever run into me at a coffee shop, you may end up seeing me working with 2 computers. People always look at me as if I am crazy and wonder why 2 computers. As much as I may be crazy, the truth is, they serve two different functions. One is provided by a big corporation with all of the special services and private networks of the corporation, and the other is a Walmart special, a simple tool to get online and work in the non corporate world that is the open Internet. One is a $3000 Computer with all the bells and whistles with programs I may never use, and the other has just the essentials that I know I need to get all of my work done.

As high school students start to head off into the world, parents everywhere are pulling their hair out as their kids try to talk them in to the latest and greatest computer for their upcoming college experience. Your kids are going to hate this, but I am going there anyway. Parents, beware of spending too much on a computer your kid may never use for more than typing up papers and spending time planning parties and sit ins on Facebook.

Here are a couple of things that I would do before buying the latest and greatest computer for your budding academic.

Determine what you are going to need in the next 2 years, not the next 4. Two years from now, whatever you buy today will be obsolete, and if it isn’t, upgrading to what you would buy today would at least be cheaper.

Be sure to investigate the computer programs being used in the college your child is attending. An English Major may need nothing more than a computer that runs Word and the Internet, but Computer Science majors may need to run large amounts of processing power or graphics that require more speed and processing power. The truth is, even here, they may not need all that power until later in their college career if at all, because they have to learn the basics first, and the college will provide most of the high end computers needed by a program later in the process.

Don’t pay for color, back lit keyboards or anything you don’t “NEED”.  I know how it goes, you are already into a computer for $1000 bucks, so what is another $2o to make it blue or pink. Well in college terms that is 200 packets or Ramen, or 34 boxes of store brand Mac and Cheese (there will come a time that this is all they eat). Really they are all things you don’t need! Also, those pretty computers are the most likely to be stolen at college.

Size does matter. If you get a computer that is too big, physically, will be too hard to transport to all those study sessions. A computer that has a monitor over 15.4 inches will not fit into most computer bags on the market. If you only get that Mini computer, your kid may end up with carpel tunnel and bad eye site before they get out of college.

Don’t buy any programs for the computer from the computer manufacturer that you can get at a student rate later for less. This little tip will save you a TON of money. Virtually every single program your kid is going to use in college can be purchased at the Student Rate from the university book store. For example, Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 Master Collection sells retail for $2599 to the rest of us, but to students, $899. Microsoft Office Student Edition, Retail $149.95 , Student rate $59.95.

In about 90% of all cases, that $600 Walmart special will do everything they will ever need to do on a computer to get through college. I would rather have a new system every two years, that does what I need it to, with “newer” technology, then invest a HUGE chunk of change into a cutting edge system, that I would never be able to utilize to its fullest. Buy what you need, not everything under the sun, even if your kid says they need it. Make them prove to you, even if you don’t understand them, that they need everything that computer has.

Oh yeah, make sure you get that extended 2 year warranty.  It is common for a beer to spill in a dorm room.

Slowly sweeping across the country is a new social media phenomena, geo-location reporting.  As huge companies, like Facebook and Google, try to hone in on your location it is actually the two new players on the scene that are making waves. Foursquare and Gowalla have found their own niche within this growing market.
So what is a Foursquare and who is Gowalla? Foursquare and Gowalla are virtually the same in how they are executed, but the experience is different. As you travel the world you use your GPS  enabled smartphone to check into locations. You can tell all your friends on the site, on Facebook and on Twitter.  This allows people to find you out in the world.

Let’s look at Foursquare first.
Foursquare basically has three competitive games to play.

First, and the easiest to understand, who ever checks in most often at one location becomes mayor. Why be mayor? Some locations provide special deals to mayors, so the more mayorships you have the better your chances are of getting some deals or freebies from locations. Second, is the weekly point count. Built into Foursquare is a way for you to accumulate points for checking in to more locations than your friends. The more times you check in the more points you get. The more locations you create the more points you get.  Get more points in a week and you win…bragging rights. Third and final game is the collection of badges. There are all kinds of badges: Newbie, location counts, late nights, overshare, 4sq day, local and many more. Maybe you will even be able to get coveted Swarm Badge like these lucky people from SXSW.

Gowalla takes a different approach

For Gowalla users, you have Trips you can complete, user set up locations to visit to tour some special area of a city. As you travel you will find all kinds of items, like airplane peanuts, bats, tabletop arcade, apres ski and even a teddy bear. In Gowalla, you don’t become mayor, but you can become a founder or Top 10. Also, the passport and stamps(locations visited) are a big deal in Gowalla.  You can accumulate State stamps, as well as location stamps.

My Take
Foursquare has more users and a fun interactive way to compete with friends for location dominance.  Gowalla makes me feel good, great graphics, lots of little hidden items and it looks fun.

So how do you get started?
You are going to need a few things. First off, you are going to need a GPS enabled smartphone, (Iphone, Android, Blackberry, Palm) with an Internet Connection. You will need to visit the app store for your phone and install either one, or both, of the Apps. Now you can set up your accounts from your phone, but I would suggest, setting up your username online through the websites first.

So if you are following my advise, and lets assume you are, you need to log and set up your account at either:
http://www.foursquare.com
http://www.gowalla.com

Link you accounts to Facebook, Twitter or both. You don’t need to add your locations to each check-in so don’t worry about that for now.  Be sure to upload an picture, it will make your account look like you are serious and not just looking into the service and will help you make friends.

Next, find friends, either through your email accounts or your connections through Facebook or Twitter.

Now head out into the world with your GPS on and go to your favorite coffee shop, book store or movie theater and check in!

A few tips for newbies:

Hope to see you all checking in soon! Have a question? Please ask in the comments!

I travel a lot for my work and over the years I have acquired and dismissed many items to help me when working on the road. Obviously I need my computer, a cell phone is also handy, but it is the other items that travelers acquire to make that time we spend away from family bearable.  For some it is the latest e-reader (Kindle, IPad, Nook) and for others it is a music player (Ipod, Zune, mp3 player), and for the kid in all of us the portable gaming systems (PSP, Nintendo DSi, IPod Touch). Most of us road warriors also carry a GPS unit, or a phone that gets us to where we are going (that is another post). But I have three you may not have thought of.

1) Belkin Mini Travel Surge Protector ($25)
	In most airports, the hardest thing to do is find power to get all of your items charged up before you get on that long flight to where ever. There is always one person filling up one plug with their Computer charging and the other with their cell phone.  This little guy will be your savior! First off, it is a power repeater, so you can now take one socket and make it into 3.
This is great so when you don’t feel bad asking to share a plug. Second, it has 2 USB charge ports so you can get rid of the cell phone charger units from your bag and replace them with a much smaller compact cord or two. The last big bounce is it is a $75,000 surge protector. This will help with the peace of mind after you get put up in an old motel somewhere where the power is shotty at best.

2) Apple’s Airport Express ($99)
Now I know a lot of you Apple users out there use this little guy to send music from your computer to your stereo, or to make a printer wireless in your house for all of your computers to use, but I have a different use. With its compact size and easy setup, I use my Airport Express to create a personal WiFi network in every hotel room I travel too. I have found that in virtually every hotel I travel to now, the WiFi service provided by the hotel slows as more people are streaming Hulu and Netflix with more and more devices.
By using the in room Ethernet wire/plug, to plug into my Airport Express, I create a personal WiFi network that my computer, cell phone, Ipod, and other peripherals already know and now are connected, without interference, to the hotels router.  This little track speeds up my time to get online, and lowers my frustration level of getting all of my “stuff” up and running, just like I am at home.

3) Retractable cables ($3-$45)
	These little space savers help to keep my bag clean while I wait for a better solution from the guys at Powermat. Retractable USB, Ethernet and power cables help to keep my bag free of tangles when I do that preflight computer bag stuffing. I no longer have to worry about my cords being tangled when I get to my next destination.  This is one of the biggest time savers I have.

Future Items I am just waiting for: Powermat (more) portable
	The current Powermat (pictured) is a semi compact, semi portable charging station for every portable electronic item you can think of. I love their home mat, but have yet to buy into the portable mat that they have. It is too bulky currently, but they have a new version coming out soon. Having one station that can remove most of the plugs/cords and wires from my bag will be very welcome.  Coming this summer I have been told will be a 1 and 2 charging station, to relieve my bag from the size of the 3 station they have now.
The version of the mat that can charge one device is expected cost $49, and a version that can charge two is expected cost $59.  They will also be introducing replacement batteries for your phone, so no more plugging in of any kind.  I am looking forward to this addition to my travel bag later this summer.

Happy Travels!

Printing is an art or rather designing good printed materials is an art. As more and more companies turn their focus to the Internet for “cheep advertising” it is important to remember people need guidance to know know where on the Internet to go.

Step back for a minute and think of all of the ways your learn of sites to visit, for the first time. Most of the sites that people visit are given to them, in the form of business cards. Yes, business cards are a form of print advertising. A few other places you find print advertising is in the local papers, the yellow pages, fliers and even labels on products.

Now I will be the first to admit that I find a lot of my information online through search engines and online articles, but usually when I go to these searched sites, I rarely know where I am going, which makes it really hard to go back. When some one gives me a business card, with their website on it, I visit one time, and I keep the card, for future reference (or it just never gets taken out of the jacket pocket). When I come across the card again, I have yet a second reminder of that business, and the site to visit.

With ads in papers or printed fliers, there is something tangible to go back to to remember the website to visit.  I believe that a well executed printed ad can drive more people to your website than even the best SEO. Keep on advertising in the print media! It will help drive people to your website.