The most difficult jobs are usually described as rocket science or brain surgery, as here the brilliant Mitchell and Webb are pointing out:

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Merry Christmas to you all. The video below is not really what you imagine as the best festive music but it definitely puts me in the mood:

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This post is for people that run a small business or are about to start one and are unsure whether their current hotmail, gmail, yahoo or other free Email address is ok to be used on their business card.  It is not! Please read on to understand why and how to address this important issue.

I see a fair number of new business cards every month and I cannot avoid noticing random Email addresses that are immediately telling me how little care people pay to this important aspect of their marketing mix.

An Email address should always be considered by its definition: an address.  People should be able to relate to you and being able to send you relevant messages.  As a minimum it should be give hints about your name and company name.

In order to help this simple process your thinking should be equally simple.  If your name is john martin blogs and your company is called my company limited then as a minimum you should first ensure to have an adequate domain registered, ideally mycompany.com and/or mycompany.co.uk (if you are based in the UK) see my other post about domains for more information.  When you register your domain you probably will need some hosting for your website and in the same package you should be able to get also Email management for very little money, usually under £50 per year.

Once you have your hosting sorted you should ensure to register at least two Email addresses.  The first one should have of the following formats:

• john@mycompany.co.uk
• johnmblogs@mycompany.co.uk
• jmblogs@mycompany.co.uk
• johnm.blogs@mycompany.co.uk (perhaps the most used by large companies)
• johnmb@mycompany.co.uk

This is the Email that should go on your business card.  The second one could be:

• info@mycompany.co.uk
• sales@mycompany.co.uk
• office@mycompany.co.uk
• enquiries@mycompany.co.uk
• contact@mycompany.co.uk
• or similar, depending on the nature of your business

The second Email address is the one you want to advertise on your website: it gives a more professional look to your company, particularly if you are on your own.

Having a free Email  address like the ones indicated in the second paragraph just shows how little you care about your company and personal image: keep your personal free Email to exchange messages with your friend but ensure to have a professional looking Email for your business.

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More and more people start using twitter as a marketing tool and yet too many fail to understand how it works.

In a nutshell Twitter is a microblogging site with a very distinct limitation: all messages are limited to 140 characters very much like an SMS message.

If you see Twitter as a (micro) blog you start understanding a few key things:

• your followers are more likely to see your tweets (similarly to the subscribers to your blog) although everybody else can
• when you write a tweet it simply goes out and appears on your followers’ feeds
• because your followers are (very probably) following other people they will see your Tweet just if they are looking at their followers around the time you write your tweet.
• Any of your followers can go back and check what you tweeted about in the past but that is really if they are looking for something.

Why growing your followers?

Given the short life span of any tweet you would like to make sure that many people find your tweets interesting and do something about it, e.g.:

• follow up a link that you included
• re-tweet it to their followers
• post it to other social media

How to Grow Your Twitter Followers

Start by following other people.  In general if you follow people on twitter there is a high probability they will follow you back: this is not guaranteed if you are following celebrities, companies and other famous brands.

A rule of thunb to determine that is whether is likely that a person will follow you back is about checking the ratio between following/followers:

• People with a similar number of following/followers are likely to follow you back, probably using an automatic follow back system (see below for details)
• People with a much greater number of followers than people they are following tend to be those celebrities, companies and famous brand I described above: avoid them unless you are really interested in what they tweet about.
• People with much smaller number of followers than they are following are the kind of people desperate for followers, again not very useful to follow.

Remember to be nice and thank all people that follow you, this is to start a possible conversation with these people.  Now I know what you are thinking: if you start following 20-50 new people at a time (I would not increase people I am following by more that that to avoid being mistaken for one of the third group above) and they all follow you back how many thank you messages doyou need to send? quite a lot! so here is the trick, much of it can be automated

Automating the process

• Create an account on http://www.socialoomph.com/ and authenticate it with your twitter account(s).  This will allow you to create an auto responder (thank message) and set up an autofollower (follow all people that follow you).
• Create an account of Twellow, the yellow pages for twitter, setting up a decently complete profile and registering you in categories that apply.
• Start following people using the twellow browsing tool that allow to both seach people by category (e.g. Executive Coaching) and geographically (e.g. in Cambridgeshire)
• sit back and relax, your followers will start coming

Although there are people that do the above and then leave it I still believe a twitter account should, like a blog, carry fresh content so keep tweeting and help other people by re-tweeting what they tweet about. If you establish good relationships with your twitter friends (e.g. people that you follow and they follow you back) you are likely to enjoy your experience much more.

If you like this post the best thing you could do, once you automated your twitter followers, is to re-tweet it and perhaps even leave a comment.  Good Tweeting.

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Today is the international Water Day. Change.org has asked, to as many blogger as possible, to write, on the same day, a post about water: here I am.

Funny enough I am writing about something that I feel there should be many solutions available and often struggle to understand why there aren’t.

Water is the most abundant element on Earth: 3/4 of its surface is covered by water and yet providing clean and drinking water is one of the main issues to be addressed by developing countries.  Yes of course most of the water available is sea water therefore salty water that cannot be drunk directly but, hey, it’s just about removing salt from it right?

Removing salt from water requires desalination that is well known to require specialised equipment and infrastructure and to be an energy intense process.  Energy is required in terms of heat that is used to boil the water, produce steam and, more or less, distil it to separate it from the salts diluted in it.  A very simple observation I am making is that most developing country are hot countries, places where the sun is visible and very hot for most of the year.

The question I am asking with this post is:

can the energy required for desalination be derived by sun and build eco sustainable plants that run next to the sea, in very sunny areas and produce huge amounts of fresh water by using just the sun light and heat?

I wish some scientist could see this and consider whether my question is too simplistic or, perhaps, it just requires people to take action…

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More and more people are using twitter as a marketing tool and yet too many fail to understand how it works.  In a nutshell Twitter is a microblogging site with a very distinct limitation: all messages are limited to 140 character very much like an SMS message.

If you have a blog, very much like any other website (imagine a newspaper site) you don’t write to a particular person (Email and other messaging services can help for that) but to your audience.  If your blog is popular you will have many readers, if you are at the beginning probably just a few, unless you are famous person (e.g. celebrity) or a successful blogger at your third or higher number launch.  If you keep writing good content (what Chris Garret, one of my favourite bloggers, calls Killer Flagship Content) then you will build up a broad audience.  Your audience in Twitter is made by your followers.

Who are your followers?

Anybody interested in you and your tweets that decide to follow you. At the beginning you are likely to have no followers but as you start following other people many of them will start following you back and so on.  The more followers you have and more and more people will start following you.  When I encounter an individual with a Twitter account and many hundred or thousands of followers I feel more inclined to follow him or her than if he/she is a beginner with a few followers.

What do you do with Twitter?

You Tweet. You send out these messages and your followers have the opportunity of reading them, simple.  Considering that 140 char is not really lots of information many people have developed a way of writing words in a VERY succinct way or simply adding the URL of a site/blog/page they want to promote.

What do you tweet about?

Everything you like. Many neophytes of twitter tend to be confused about how to use their newly created account.  My style is to promote some of the business activities I am involved in and re-tweet similar content from other people I am following.  I personally find nearly disturbing those that mix business activities with random personal messages about their family life or what they just had for lunch… A Twitter account is free so it makes sense perhaps to have more than one and channel different content to different accounts and keeping each of them coherent to the main topic.  In my case the main business account maxgaet is only for my entrepreneurial activities while carismauk is used to promote my martial arts activities and saluswellness is tweeting about my other business venture.

Why re-tweeting?

To promote a tweet from a person you are following to your followers. People that ask this question usually don’t get the basic mechanism behind Twitter.  You can read what is written by people you are following: if you like what you see then re-tweet it so also your followers will get the same tweet.  If many people start re-tweeting a particular message you have what is called the viral effect and the original tweet, re-tweeted many times, become a very popular topic.

Twitter is a great marketing tool and is has been proven to be a great contributor to traffic generation.  If you found this post interesting perhaps the best thing you can do is tweet about it

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