Test Drive: Posterous For Audio

I’ve been seeing the name “Posterous” pop up on articles and Tweets for a few weeks now. I had no idea of what it was or what it did. And, as usual, I’m already distracted enough (smile). Then I saw a Tweet from Tac Anderson at NewComm Biz that also mentioned this, talked about “audio blogging” or something to that effect, and had a link. I followed that link to a post on his blog and it was not much more than a link to something called ….”Posterous”. Hmmm. Clicking on the link I was taken to a site that allowed me to play his audio post. Pretty cool. Pretty cutting edge. I had to take a look further and get me some (smile).

Now Posterous, I believe, is another blogging platform. What’s cool is that you send your blogs in via email or you can also pull videos and photos off website and automatically post them using their “Share on Posterous” Firefox add-on. I have seen it compared to Tumblr which, like so many things, I am aware of but know nothing about. At any rate, I am seeing Tac’s post and, combined with my newest toy, WordPress text widget, I’m thinking that it would be pretty cool to integrate an audio welcome into our site sidebar. Man oh man. I had no idea of what I was getting myself into (smile).

I correctly surmised that I would need a microphone and some way to record sound. Duh (smile). I did find a microphone in a box that came with a Dell that I purchased about 8 years ago. I had never even plugged it in. Now for a recorder. Looking through programs on Vista I found one called “Sound Recorder“. Perfect! Or so I thought. Things continued to go down hill from there while picking up speed as I descended to the bottom (smile). I should step back and say that WordPress.com will allow you to post audio files but only if you buy a space upgrade. I was soon to figure out why.

WordPress.Com Text Widget – I Think I’m In Love

whiperinghillsmusic.com

So, what do you think of the new look for this site? There were a lot of things I liked about the old theme (functionally) but I found it to be kind of drab and heavy. I think a lot had to do with the color scheme and hues. I wanted something bright and cheery like……me (smile). I needed to change a few things around to make it layout correctly but I think I like it. Still some work to go on the home page. This theme also allowed me to create a custom header. My logo colors are blue and black and this site format is primarily blue so……… grabbed my Twitter background that was created for me by Scott Prock over at etweeple.com and….voila. She’s a beauty! (smile). So, what do the leaves have to do with anything? Boise is known as the “City of Trees”. And, I happen to be Canadian so those are maple leaves (smile).

At any rate, over the past several months that I have been doing this blog, I go and visit other sites and have been insanely jealous at their ability to incorporate photos, banners, badges, etc. into their sidebars. Why oh why not me? Then, to make matters worse, I see that some of these sites are WordPress.com pages and I know that WordPress.com does not support widgets other than those included in the software itself. I surmised that these were either WordPress.org pages (self hosted) using a .com theme or that maybe somebody had purchased the theme CSS and modified it to incorporate these features. I am also under the impression that doing so is best left to folks with much more technical prowess than I possess. Bummer. Yesterday I even Tweeted about how I wanted more flexibility and received replies directing me to hosting sites that supported “cpanels”. Don’t ask me, I have no idea what those are (smile).

Social Media To-Do List – FaceBook For Biz & Twitter

mobasoft.com

Is it just me or are these four guys about to break out in a rousing rendition of “Kumbaya” (smile)? For that matter, maybe this entire Social Media thing is based on that same soundtrack (smile)? Not sure but I am told by many sources that this is how business will be, and to a large extent already is, done.

I got a call this morning from a friend and colleague, Brandon Wright over at UltraClean Pro. I would call Brandon an “Uber Networker” and one with much loftier goals and projects than yours truly. You may know Brandon as the organizer of the monthly Smoke Out event and the recent Meridian Business Days. Among some of the things we discussed was his latest venture which is a radio show that will be airing on 630AM on Saturday mornings at 11:00AM commencing on July 18. I asked him the name of the show to which he replied “We don’t know.” I suggested that maybe they needed to work on that title a little bit before they went on the air. “We don’t know” don’t tell me much (smile). At any rate it will be about business and will feature actual live business people. What a novel idea (smile).

What was incredible about our conversation was that I had left a message on his FaceBook wall only moments before he called me and I later found out that he did not read the message until after he had called me. Strange forces are at work (smile). We went on to discuss that it would be nice to see some actual business generated as a direct result of our efforts with Social Media, something that neither of us has seen to date. However, we both agree that Social Media is creating opportunities in new areas that, once again, neither of us would have foreseen previously. Oh, to be young again and have the time to take advantage of said opportunities (smile). But, there is still time.

I left the seminar the other day with a pretty extensive to-do list and I have started working on that over the last couple of days. The two key areas that I have been concentrating on are FaceBook for Business and Twitter.

FaceBook: First let me say that while FaceBoook is great for posting stuff, I find it to be incredibly difficult to edit previously entered account information. Not user friendly in the least. My humble opinion and may be largely due to my lack of experience with this tool. However, I did manage to figure out a few things:

Strengthening and Creating Business Relationships Seminar

My apologies. I just tried to edit this post and WordPress cleared out the whole damn thing. Second time today on this post (frown).  It’s late and so you are going to get the short version. Then again, that’s probably a blessing (smile).

So, great seminar today put on by the folks over at MyReMa and Seybold Scientific. Seybold did an excellent job at explaining the different forms of Social Media including LinkedIn, Twitter, and FaceBook, gave great examples of how to get the most from each, and got into the important “whys of Social Media. As I like to say, evolve or die (smile). Seybold also discussed Google Analytics and Google AdSense. Very informative.

MyReMa is a CRM web based package that is due for release late this summer. It will integrate, and synch, your social media contacts from LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook, and maybe others into a functioning CRM which is something I have not seen done to date. Additionally, it will support multiple email accounts and calendars. Sweet! (smile). See my previous post on MyReMa to learn more.

Ultimately, I go to these seminars hoping for 1-2 “Ah Ha” moments. Things that I can take back with me and really put to work. Today I left with 8-10. Many thanks to both companies for putting on a fabulous presentation.

Thanks for visiting!

Craig

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Featured Speaker – George Condit – G.H. Condit, Inc.

Our guest speaker today was George Condit from G.H. Condit, Inc.. A little background information about George who, incidentally, is a very interesting man…..

George was born and raised in upstate New York, made his way west after college in the Army, where he trained as a Russian Linguist. He moved to Boise in 1995 with his wife Sarah and has lived here ever since. They have two children. Clayton who is 13 and Maya who is 9.  He has owned his own masonry contracting business since 1997. When the market in housing came to a screeching halt in 2007 George decided to go back to school to get his MBA. He graduated last December , and has now embarked on a new career as a strategic planning consultant and entrepreneur. He is the owner of Idaho Winery Tours, a sales associate for Seybold Scientific, and works developing many other top secret plots to take over the world (smile).

The topic of George’s talk today was  “Action Determined by Vision”. This is good.  Action without vision is not so good (smile). George also had the group fill out a short questionnaire that was the “Animal Kingdom” version of DISC. Lions, Otters, Golden Retrievers, and Beavers. I did a post a few weeks back entitled “Communication Style Flexing” that would be a good companion piece to read. Our members very much enjoyed George’s presentation and I know that they learned a lot about themselves. George also showed us this very cool thumb drive that is integrated into a rubber wrist band and incorporates a flash card that can be put into, say, a smart phone negating the need for a PC. Cool. Would make a great advertising hand out (your company name silk screened on the band) and I believe he said about $20 for the 4GB version. Sweet.