If you're bewildered by the thousands of plugins for WordPress, you're not alone.  The official WordPress site for the self-hosted variety, WordPress.org, lists over 12,000 in their directory alone. So what's a site owner to do?

Well, here's my top 10 for 2010, based on actual usage. REMEMBER: Always back up your site before adding new plugins, and if adding multiple plugins, view your site in a separate browser window and reload with each plugin addition. That way you can catch any conflicts immediately and know which plugin is responsible (you can deactivate the plugin and visit the plugin website for documentation on bugs, or delete the plugin entirely.)

ALL IN ONE SEO: Yes, WordPress is structured for SEO (search engine optimization) in the most basic ways. But why limit your site to the basics. The All in One SEO Pack allows you to create search engine friendly titles, meta descriptions and keyword tags that will amplify your posts for the engines.

NEXT GEN GALLERY: If you have a ton of images to manage in your site, whether it's pictures of rooms in your accommodations or photo albums that go in a particular section of your site, Next Gen is a great way to manage them. Drag & drop sorting, description and tag editing, multiple galleries, automatic pagination and easy to place shortcodes for showing them on your pages or posts. Flash addons are available (remember, they won't work on iPhones or iPads).

ULTIMATE GOOGLE ANALYTICS: Sure, you can go with the vanilla stats that wordpress.org provides in the plugin that mimics the environment of their public wordpress.com site. But why limit yourself to that when you can use Google Analytics. It's like strapping on a real rocket instead of lighting a tiny firecracker.

GOOGLE XML SITEMAPS: Now that meta information has dropped in effectiveness (too many people metajacking and abusing the system) sitemaps have become an indispensable tool for engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and others to find ALL of the information on your site.

ANTI-CAPTCHA: This is a transparent captcha solution that does not require users to enter in any special characters when commenting and protects against automated attacks by spambots - you know, all those bogus comments that need clearing out of the admin area. When a comment is posted without a valid Anti-Captcha token (automatically issued when you visit the site), the comment is instantly marked as spam. It requires javascript and cookies enabled for it to succeed.

SHARETHIS or SEXY BOOKMARKS: Make it easy for site visitors to share your blog or site with a plugin that appends social networking icons to the bottom of every page. Share This is the basic version, Sexy Bookmarks shows the icons popping up from below a line with a handwritten note recommending sharing (see this post). Choose from over 80 sites to share with, or select 'Most Popular' for the handful of the busiest sites. A sidebar widget version is also available.

TYNT: Somewhat similar to Highlighter, the best thing about this plugin is that if someone posts a part/excerpt of your post or page elsewhere on the Web, a small link is added to it (you control what the link says, for example, "Read the full post"). It's a great way to build backlinks to your site and control copyright using the Creative Commons licensing add-on.

WPTOUCH iPHONE THEME: Not an easy one to set up but worth the effort. When a mobile user visits your site a lighter version designed for the mobile market (almost all platforms and devices) is presented. You now have a fully mobile-friendly web site. Note: some plugins do not work with this mobile app: NextGen Gallery noted above, WP Super Cache are the notables.

WP-DBMANAGER: This nifty plugin allows you to manually create a backup of your site's database (not to be confused with exporting posts from the Settings area) or set an auto-backup and determine a regular schedule for mailing the .zip file to the address of your choosing. I set mine to send every two weeks as I only post occasionally on this site, and to optimize my database every 3 days. When it comes through to my email I delete the previous one so I only have the latest backup taking up space on my drive.

Have fun playing, and if you need help, contact Bad Dog Design at web@baddogdesign.com.

There's a couple of companies I follow on a regular basis because they regularly innovate, either in WordPress theming, or in developing unique plugins that enhance the user experience for visitors to WordPress-based sites.

Unique Blog Designs started out as a wordpress theming company, and that's where Bigpacific.com went for the design of our first WordPress foray online. They built us a beautiful, custom design that reflected all the beauty of the Sunshine Coast and allowed for extra promotional spaces for advertisers wanting a greater prominence on the site.

Since then, UBD as they are widely referred to today have broadened their themes to serve the affiliate, email and online marketers niches. These are not niches where I generally spend a lot of time, but I did review and test the themes for customers who do wish to work them, and they are loaded with features and plugins that automate and leverage a lot of the elbow grease that goes into running a great blog or marketing site.

Now UBD has launched a new product, a very handy plugin for WordPress sites called 'Highlighter'. If you've ever used an old-fashioned highlighter (don't laugh, some younger people haven't!) you'll be familiar with the concept, now employed in a unique digital format that makes for a novel way to share content online with colleagues and friends.

With the highlighter plugin, the barriers are removed for user engagement.Visitors to your site can highlight a word, phrase, sentence - even an image - and instantly share it online, with a comment via Facebook, Twitter or Email. The Highlight Box packs all the related comments and sharing in one handy spot - and the webmaster can moderate highlights the same as comments.

You can also collect email addresses with the Highlighter tool integrated with Aweber, MailChimp or GetResponse.

This is a FREE tool that will increase visitor engagement, build your email network and create conversation points in novel ways.

Use Highlighter on this post and share it with friends!

For the purposes of this post - which is geared to beginner level web marketing - we're going to go right back to the basics with Google Analytics.

In the old days of the frontier, everyone had to install complicated web statistics programs like Urchin or Unix based log files to be pored over to glean information about how many people visited, how long they spent on a site, what they clicked on - and these all took up monstrous amounts of space on hosting accounts. These bloated files - which even I feared to remove after reviewing the data - would crash sites, clog directories, and require overly technical maintenance to manage.

Well, no more. Google Analytics has been around for a number of years now. It is free, comes with great instructions, and arms the web site owner with real, factual data about how visitors are getting to their web site, what they're doing while they're there, where they're leaving the site and other important information that is critical to measuring and refining an Internet marketing strategy.

There is simply no excuse to not be tracking your marketing online if you have your own web site.

Anecdotal information, such as questions like "Where did you find us?" is extremely unreliable. The visitor may say 'the internet'. But what does that mean? Nothing. They may say, 'Google'. A direct search on Google and a click to visit your web site? A direct search on Google and following a link to a directory site where your business is listed? Without being able to get factual answers to these questions, this kind of information is not only ineffective, it's potentially damaging to your business.

If you are making emotional decisions about marketing based on anecdotal information you might as well be throwing spaghetti at the wall or giving those marketing funds to the people you like the best.

HOW TO SET UP GOOGLE ANALYTICS

1. First, go to Google and sign up for a free account. This can be done using your existing email address; I recommend using the one supplied by your Internet Service Provider.
2. Then sign up for a free stats account at Google Analytics.
3. Type your URL on the next screen.
4. Choose your country of origin and time zone (800 GMT Vancouver for example)
5. In the next screen add your contact information.
6. Follow the prompts to accept policies.
7. Create account.
8. Copy the block of code on the next screen

ADDING CODE TO YOUR WEB SITE

To insert the Google Analytics code, you will need an editor to get into your html code on the site, and access to an FTP (File transfer protocol) program to upload the changed files. OR, simply get your web designer to do this, or hire a designer to do this for you (about 30 minutes) and provide them with your FTP information.

If you are using a service like WordPress, you'll need to open the footer.php file to place this code OR add a plugin like Google Analytics for WordPress to paste in the UA portion of the code.

1. Look for the </body> tag at the very bottom, just above the </html> bit of code.
2. Paste the Google Analytics Javascript immediately above the </body> tag.
3. If you have templates, insert the code in the same place and make sure all pages are updated with the new template and saved.
4. Uploaded the pages to your server, overwriting the existing files.
5. Return to Google Analytics to verify that data is successfully being collected.

For WordPress sites, click on Plug-ins, Add New, search for Google Analytics, select Google Analytics for WordPress, and then enter the UA string where indicated and save.

RELATED INFORMATION:

• Video tutorial, setting up Google Analytics

Next post: The Top 3 Google Analytics reports critical to understanding your Internet marketing plan's effectiveness.

So here's my tips for preparation, power conservation, and emergency backup measures:

MOBILE PHONES:

• Turn off 'Ask to Join Networks' on iPhones, Blackberries and other smartphones.
• Turn down brightness on display or put on auto-brightness.
• Turn on airplane mode and enable access only when you can group your posts, social network updates, and uploads
• Turn off GPS location based features
• Turn off Bluetooth unless it is in use - most people forget and leave it on when they don't need hands-free access
• For the iPhone consider a charging skin/case, such as the Mophie, which can double battery time
• Avoid games and long calls, and writing lengthy emails, which can cause the screen to stay lit for long periods of time
• Buy a regular battery powered phone charger, such as the one sold by Energizer, the Energi to Go. Use rechargables in the Energizer device to reduce toxic waste.
• On the iPhone turn off audible sound effects for key clicks etc.
• Turn off push notifications for applications
• Turn off 3G if not available
• Minimize auto-lock time so the screen darkens as fast as possible after use
• Turn off camera apps when the shot is complete! The camera will stay on even if it's in a dark pocket.
• Shut down apps before locking on the iPhone, by pressing the home button. Otherwise the app is still running in sleep mode, drawing power.
• Turn off vibrate setting - vibration takes a lot of juice. Just check your phone visually more regularly.
• Turn off the equalizer on iPhones in the music settings.
• Bring a power charger and plan a coffee break in a wireless enabled cafe that is plugin friendly. Starbucks and Blenz are two chains in Vancouver where mobile users are frequently seen availing themselves of this tool. Better yet, bring a 4-plug power plugin - if all the plugs are taken by other users they'll happily share if you have the hardware.
• Special note: BC Ferries has cubicles on board with power outlets for laptop and mobile charging use, and they're free. No wireless coverage yet however; there's a black hole lasting about 20 minutes on the Horseshoe Bay/Langdale run for example.
• Update the firmware for your phone. We all hate this chore, but developers are always making improvements to the code that runs our phones, and often in the areas of battery usage and conservation.

CAMERAS

• Invest in a double or triple set of rechargeable batteries for small HD video cameras. Have two differently marked bags for keeping hot/good or cold/dead batteries so you don't have the wrong ones in for that important part you absolutely have to cover. Turn off the camera between shoots as keeping the display lit drains the batteries quickly. Don't review the footage on site unless you have to - better to do reviews, edits, purges at home with a card in a reader or with all footage downloaded to a computer and wiped off the device.
• Have a second lithium ion battery charged for any digital SLR cameras that use them. Bring it with you, even if you're sure the one in the camera is also charged. Better to have it than be gnashing your teeth in the middle of an event with a paperweight around your neck.
• Double-check your camera before departure to ensure the memory card and battery are actually IN IT. I once hiked up a brutal trail in a scratchy forest, lugging my Nikon D70 - with its spare lens - and got to the top only to discover the battery wasn't even in it. Turn the power on and off and take a test picture before you leave in case there's any problems with the card.
• Bring a spare memory card, and don't go more than 4gb in size unless you're a professional shooting in RAW mode. Better to split your shots on multiple cards in case one gets damaged or fails. Carry them in a proper case - especially the small and easy-to-damage SD cards.
• If you're covering something truly epic, bring a storage device you can download images into to keep space open on your cards, and your images backed up.  You can either go with a standard portable hard drive of 500gb - 1 terrabyte, or you can invest into an actual photography-specific storage device, such as the Epson P-6000 Multimedia Photo Viewer, which offers instant shoot and save, RAW file support, and a large viewer so you don't have to port them into a computer just to review them.
• Take every opportunity to do this kind of housekeeping and charging whenever you can, and even ask at restaurants or hotels if they provide such a service either for free, for a fee, or with your meal.

GENERAL TIPS AND TRICKS:

• Research your transportation route on a computer before you leave home so you're not looking things up on your phone
• Know where the closest electronics stores are relational to the route you'll be traveling
• Be prepared to spring some cash if you don't do your preparation beforehand. My camera battery died en-route to the Olympic hockey venue for the much-anticipated Canada/Sweden womens hockey game, and we happened to see a Best Buy along the skytrain route. Hopped out and $60 later were back on board with the exact lithium ion battery my Nikon needed, and it was pre-charged to half strength. I guess I can take comfort from the fact that there's enough people like me to constitute a market for this product.
• FREE BUT PRICELESS TIP: label all your chargers with white tags that denote the device it's for and store accessories by device and not by type (ie. charger, spare battery, extra lens for camera all together; charger and mophie pack for iPhone together - NOT all chargers together - that's a recipe for a distastrous mixup.

If you have some tips to share, please send them along. As for me, on day 7 of the Vancouver Winter Olympics I finally feel properly prepared to take in all the sights, sounds and events with my gear.

I've done it. I stopped in at Simply Computing on Broadway in Vancouver last week to get an uber-cool skin/case/battery pack by Konnet for my iPhone, which has quickly become as integral to my work habits as my desktop and laptop, and came out with a 27" quad core iMac on order for Friday.

This is not my first time with Macs, it must be pointed out. The first time was at a college newspaper, putting out a 16 page paper every week on the ridiculously small screened MacPlus. You haven't lived unless you were doing 5 college courses and working until 4 am with Pagemaker on a screen the size of an appetizer plate.

The second time was an absolutely brutal week in the community newspaper industry, when we switched from PC to Mac - platform, software, recreation of all standing ads and classifieds, in one 100+ hour workweek. I literally slept with my eyes open learning Quark on a totally new platform.

The last time was on the newer generation iMac of the early 2000s, the cute G4 with the half globe foot and swinging monitor that was simply a colossal waste of money as it was almost useless for anything Internet related and quickly became a really expensive paperweight.

Three bad experiences have kept me away from Macs ever since, but three compensating factors have finally overcome the bad memories:

1. New functionality on the Mac combined with big screens and great resolution makes the Adobe CS environment I work much more productive
2. A growing market share means as a web designer and online publisher I need to be experiencing business online on both platforms
3. I can run Windows and PC programs on a Mac without having to reboot - critical factor to save time & money in replacing software

Plus the iMac is just plain a gorgeous machine and can double as a media centre. Add to that increasing piggy and sluggish anti-virus management and program freezes on the PC and the Mac looks like a prescription for some really bad business headaches.

So follow me on this blog as I go through the metamorphosis to becoming a Mac user, chronicling the improvements, pitfalls, time investment and more.

Use this information to look hard at your own business platform decisions. Just because you've had the same system for a decade or more doesn't mean you're stuck with it... and that goes for converting in either direction.

Tips for reviewing your own business platform needs:

• Track your time from a computing efficiency perspective. How long to boot? How many crashes and what kind? How much time spent in installing operating system updates? (PC fans say my computer is stable if I religiously install updates; considering it can take an hour or more and I need to be present and the machine can't be used for anything else = a lot of lost billable time). I've discovered through this kind of intelligence gathering that time savings can pay for my monthly leasing costs.
• Track functionality. What do you have in your current platform environment that you can't live without? What does the other platform have that would have a significant positive impact on how you do business? (I've spent about 25 hours searching for and evaluating flash movie creators for the PC when iLife comes resident on the Mac.)
• Total cost of upgrading. How many computers are in your small business network? Does everyone need to change or can you do it slowly? Do you have to make any software upgrades at the same time? Do you need to buy a standalone Windows or Mac OS (your copy of Windows OS that came pre-installed on a machine won't work for Windows-within-Mac computing)?

Next post: inventory your existing machine, back up, disaster management recovery planning.

Over the holiday season, I made a wonderful discovery of a very cool knit hat company. They make 'critter' toques of all varieties of animals: donkeys, raccoons, tigers, cats, dogs, floppy dogs... even skunks! Their hats sport a signature, unique look, and come with available matching mittens. Think sock monkey zoo.

These hats are crazy, fun, attention-getting, hilarious, and inexpensive to boot. I was immediately smitten and emerged from one of my favorite Vancouver shops - Bang On, on Robson Street - having metamorphosed into... what else? An ass. A donkey for you folks who get the other word confused with swearing.

My toque (interestingly, according to Merriam Webster's Online Dictionary, it can also be spelled as 'tuque') proved a magnificent purchase right from the start. It prompted conversation with strangers. It triggered smiles from passers by. It entertained many small children. Imagine my delight, strolling the Robsonstrasse, wearing the ass hat.

There was only one small problem. I was heartbroken.

Why, you ask? Why, because I really really really wanted the skunk hat the store fellow was wearing, having snagged the one and only out of the mixed box sent by the hat company.

I begged him to sell it to me. I offered to pay more, even though it was pre-worn, in fact, more skunky. All to no avail. It's the first time I've ever considered mugging someone for an article of clothing, Ed Hardy be damned.

There I was, standing amid masses of people, feeling exactly like I looked: an ass.

And then it occurred to me! The hat had a label, identifying it as a Knit Wit creation. AHA! I could google the company, and maybe order my favorite hat online! The first available opportunity I checked it out. And got my first disappointment.

Man, were they hard to find. I could find some of their distributors - barely... it seems there's a lot of knitwits around these days - but not the corporate site. I'm normally a 2 minutes or less searching kind of gal so they had me flummoxed for a bit. Through much ferreting around I discovered there was a secret handshake required for Google: Delux Knitwit. Finally.

There they were, if you really looked and didn't skip right past it:
knitwit2009
d e L u x. knitwits.
www.knitwits.com

Useless title, strange capitalization, no description, no keywords, nothing. Wow, even their SEO person is a nitwit, I thought to myself.

I clicked on the link. You should too.

Cute little faces in squares, sort of like Hollywood Squares, without the famous people and funny lines. Or the KnitWit Brady Bunch. NOTHING that said or showed what the company does on the front page. Not even an email address.

I thought, Oh! Maybe that's what those other links are. I clicked on 'About'.

Nope, nothing that says what they ARE or what their company DOES. It says what these mysterious somethings are made from, and the wonderful qualities of the whatever-they-ares, but not one word about toques, hats, chapeaus, or any other manner of calling an ass an ass HAT.

Oh well. I still LOVED my toque, and still desperately wanted a skunk toque, and still wanted to tell these KnitWits about how cool I thought their company was, how I wanted to blog about them, how I had a dozen Bang On cards in my pocket to hand out to anyone who asked about why I was (wearing) an ass for a hat, and maybe could I give out their cards too?

I found their email address and wrote them a short but passionate letter including the above. I asked if they had ever considered making some West Coast animals, like seals, or otters or even octopi. I raved about KnitWits. I WAS a nitwit about their product. I begged them to sell me a skunk knitwit directly, since Bang On told me they just got a mixed box and it would be hard to tell if any store had one in stock as the types weren't 'ordered' per se.

And here was the second, and much bigger disappointment. Someone named Sabrina wrote me back and perfunctorily pointed out that no, they don't drop-ship, and hey, here's a pdf list of the stores that carry the hats. No hi, nice to meet you, thanks for writing, we're so glad you love our crazy hats. No response to the other parts of my message.

No job title or contact information. Was this an assistant knitwit, or was I dealing with the Grand Poohbah Delux Knitwit? No way of telling, and I usually have my wits about me.

It was deflating to say the least. My ass hat felt more like an Eeyore than a jaunty heel-kicking happy-go-lucky kind of ass.

I still love it. Deep in my heart of hearts, I still yearn for the skunk hat (which in retrospect seems a strangely symbiotic illustration of KnitWit's customer service and marketing model). I confess I still want to love this company... to be a raving fan, to be a joyful knitwit as it were, but that sentiment is languishing somewhere along with Sabrina's email.

And that is the story of how a company with a great product missed out on being a great company.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO AVOID THESE MISTAKES:

• Make sure your web site has a good title, description and keywords and that you can be easily found.
• Describe what you do for us ordinary folk. Don't make us guess. It's also good for your search engine rankings.
• Have a clear policy on your site for how people can buy your products. Don't make them ask for the list of stores via email... have the list there and downloadable NOW.
• RESPOND fast to any passionate communication. That customer is just dying to buy your product and tell everyone they know that they did or is a raging inferno only you can transform into a cheery little hearth fire.
• Include your job title and contact information in your signature. Make it easy for people to talk with you.
• Thank the writer for their interest in your product. How about "We're so glad you love our hats!" It starts the conversation off on the right foot.

Have I got the solution for you.

If you're like most of us, you've probably got dozens of passwords or logins, sprinkled over the web like squashed breadcrumbs leading to the Gingerbread House where some nasty old crank is going to ask you to check out the inside of the kitchen oven.

You feel overwhelmed with password management, and sure you're not using enough unique ones, or rotating them, or generating new ones every month or so (as the 'best' security advice seems to advocate). You can barely remember the ones you have and thinking of changing even one of them just might be the one card you CAN'T remove without the whole house of them crashing down around you.

Well, fear not! I have discovered the most amazing little app around, and for most users it is FREE. It's called PassPack and it's the niftiest, most easy to use system I've ever found in a dozen years of surfing and working online, and you simply can't beat the security features.

The methodology is you set up an account with passpack, and every time you login to a site, you open up passpack, login, and enter the data into your list of passwords. You can ask the software to generate a mashup password for you, and by clicking on the Generate tab, you can make a new one whenever you choose. You can assign keywords to sites and logins, so if you're forced to go to some dumb long cross-your-eyes web address and enter an obscure password string, all you have to remember is to type your shortcut or keyword in and bingo! you're at that password file. It's that easy.

There's a video introduction for the application available, and all of the pertinent information you need to make a decision to sign up for your free account.

Passpack has been favorably reviewed by many industry heavyweights - PC Magazine, CNet, WebWare, MashUp, Google, Chicago Tribune, Blog Nation - it even made it on to NBC's National Tech Report.

Now, I can hear the protestations. How can it be secure?! Why is it any better than storing it on my hard drive or in my PDA?

• Passpack can not even access your passwords, even in an emergency. (Think about it, if you need to leave a backdoor for your backdoor maybe you shouldn't be logging in places where you might be at risk for loss of data)
• There is no security in keeping them in a word or excel document, even if you password protect that file on your computer. It's one of the easiest hacks there is and that false sense of security could really cost you.
• Your data is never 'in transit' online. You login, through rigorous, multi-level security, and only you can see it. You can't save it to a USB and there's nothing to download. Once you're logged in you can access all of your information.
• Don't just rely on me - here's what it says on the Passpack site about security: "Very secure. Passpack uses a US Government approved algorithm to encrypt your passwords to which only you hold the key (the Packing Key that is). Plus, Passpack is the only online password manager to offer Anti-phishing protection and Disposable Logins."
• You are the only one who knows your packing key (a sentence of your own construction and punctuation). This also means if you well and truly forget it, all of your Passpack data is gone. Hey, you can't have it both ways.
• If you work in a public place or shared office, Passpack starts with your passwords scrambled and hidden from view. You click on it when you're ready to view the password.
• You don't even have to provide an email to signup, it's that secure! Just remember, if you don't put it in, they can't help you.

Passpack isn't just for web logins, either. You can use it to track frequent flyer miles, store registration numbers for software or hardware, notes, or even links you need to store in a safe place.

A nifty add on is a desktop application that syncs with Passpack online if you live somewhere with power outages or intermittent access to the Internet.

I've been using it for a few months and as long as I remember to add new information simultaneous to registering at a new web site or setting up a new blog account, I've found it to be one of the best tools I've ever tried.

JUST REMEMBER: Don't write your username/secret and passpack key sentence down anywhere on your system or in an easy place to find in your files.

USER TIP: I also have a recurring reminder through Outlook to login every couple of weeks just to keep the login process top of mind so I don't have to go looking for it in a panic another time.

The free account stores up to 100 passwords. Above that is the Pro level, at 15 Euros, about $20 USD. New solutions are coming for groups, and centralized deployment within a company's own server environment (enterprise).

If you let it. It's also an incredibly effective tool not only for brand building, but for functional application of ideas that have always worked well offline.

Self-discipline online is up to each individual and company. Speaking as an easily-distracted self-employed business owner, I know the traps after a dozen years working online. Every day something new and exciting hits the web, and some are destined to truly change business and society. Well, maybe 1% of them. The other 99% are super-crackers, bursting on to the dark stage of the web with a crash of cymbals and lights, and their goal - whether by design or a changed trajectory of ambition - is to capture as much market share and $$$ as they can manage in the short window the flavor-of-the-day environment offers. In that funnel is the lost productivity of workers, at a scale impossible to calculate.

That's the downside.

The upside is that Twitter, used properly in the business setting, is incredibly effective at building brand, communicating with customers, and even driving immediate sales.

For example... let's say you're a brick-and-mortar real world business renting kayaks and selling outdoor marine gear. How can you use Twitter effectively in your company?

Firstly, post your twitter link everywhere you go online, with a "Follow Me On Twitter" tagline that takes visitors to your twitter page where a one-click push gets them in your 'twitter list' - or twist, as I call it. Now you're building your list.

What do Twitter users want when they follow someone?

NEED: A feeling of direct relationship with your company. As fast as you can get news out, they care enough to be the first to receive it. GET: instant information and being part of the 'inside crowd' for your business - a friend, even, of your company, often with the loyalty friendship suggests.

NEED: First mover advantage. GET: Blast a Tweet to a group you designate your best customers and let them know first about the launch of a new product, and perhaps even combine it with a real-time social networking wine & cheese after hours for your Twitter followers only.

NEED: You need to move product to make room for this season's incoming items arriving this afternoon. GET: Run a timed sale... give a start and end time, with discount and what items are covered and send it to your tweet list.

NEED: Your mailing list to grow. GET: Start or grow your list by offering a service like weather tweets, guide tweets out on the water, or discounts if someone brings a friend into twitter who buys something.

So you can see how powerful Twitter can be in comparison to traditional methods of communication such as newspaper advertising (do you really want to wait until Friday to start your sale?) or email newsletters (are they checking their mail? did you get caught in their spam folder?).

So think hard about how YOU can use social networking in your business and then build it into your schedule responsibly (I twitter once a day, on my coffee break and have alerts about who has joined my list turned off on my phone to minimize distractions).

Related post: Twitter Add-Ons

Technorati Profile

Most of the people I talk with in small business - unless they are specifically an online marketing business - have no idea of what twitter is at best. At worst, they've heard all the worst stories about Twitter and all other social networking tools and have dismissed them entirely.

I say: NOT SO FAST.

One should never dispense with gaining an understanding of a product or service that might be relevant to a business. Knowledge is power, and if you don't understand something, how can you possibly decide whether it might offer a benefit?

Twitter.com

So, first: What the heck is Twitter?

It doesn't help that the name of the app sounds inconsequential or cutesy. It is what it describes, for sure... quick social commentary. If you've been at a party and someone important has walked into the room, causing a sudden surge of whispered comments, or a pal called you up with a hot news flash, you're hearing the real-world version of twitter.

Online twittering happens by SMS text message - and really that's all it is, a big dressed up version of text messaging, with a whole bunch of bells and whistles the online environment can provide. For example, you can blast a twitter to a group of friends at one time, set up different groupings of twitter contacts, time delay your tweets, add pictures, and follow conversations with individuals instead of having everything all lumped together in one big inbox - like the one I have to wade through on my Blackberry.

Twitter is also often referred to as a 'micro-blogging tool', whereby authors post mini blog comments with a restriction of 140 characters or less. This month there were an estimated 6 million users of Twitter, and the service is the third-largest social network, behind only Facebook and MySpace.

For the full background and current development of everything Twitter, check out the Wiki.

Next post: Does Twitter Have a Place in Business?

Don't get me wrong - the configuration instructions at Spam Arrest are quite clear, I was having trouble figuring out how to deal with several kinds of spam: garden variety, spam generated by my own server as I hunt down and close all the relays spammers are using to spoof my address (thank you Verio, for all the great support), and trash to a bunch of aliases I just can't shut down in case the one random person tries to reach me.

When you manage a number of high-traffic web sites and your own virtual server, it gets pretty complex figuring out what rules to use, whether to allow mail from your own domain (I frequently 'mail' myself things between computers when my remote file transfer is buggy). For the average user though it is dead simple to set this system up, and customize the message your users get when you're asking them to take an extra step of adding themselves to your safe sender's list by completing a one-time captcha routine.

So far, I am picking through my unverified box a few times a day and finding 'real' addresses to authenticate, but on the good side, I got 10 pieces of mail today that landed in my Outlook inbox!! If I can keep it up, I'll soon be able to add this critical email account to my blackberry.

http://www.spamarrest.com