Tag Archives: orm

Are you using your Facebook cover pic effectively?

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Facebook launched Timeline in February 2012, and ever since then it has had strict rules for business pages and their cover photos.  The cover photo is a powerful marketing tool for Facebook business pages, and you should never neglect it.

How effective is your Facebook cover pic?

Here’s a Facebook cover pic that we used recently.

The photos couldn’t contain calls to action, prices or purchase information, contact information or references to Facebook features. You were limited to just posting a picture. You had to be creative.

But times have changed, and now business owners can (almost) forget those rules.

Facebook recently relaxed its cover photo guidelines. The only rule left standing is that your text cannot take up more than 20 percent of the cover photo space. This is great news for page administrators who are eager to use cover photos to their full potential.

Here are six ways businesses can take advantage of the new cover photo rules: Continue reading →

FaceTime or Skype?

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SKYPE OR FACETIME?  WHICH IS BETTER?

Video meetings are becoming increasingly popular.  In our digital world, it saves travel time and costs and allows us to be immediately available through our computer, laptop or mobile device.  We even find that we’re having video meetings with clients who are in the same city, but instead of travelling for 40 minutes, it’s quicker and cheaper to video call.

facetime vs skype

Whilst there are many options available, we have found that, locally, most of our clients and friends default to Skype.  The big plus with Skype is that it’s multi-platform friendly – ie.  you can use your smartphone, PC, tablet or laptop.  You can also make international phone calls through Skype which, for those with international contacts, is a major draw card.

The other option, that we have just started using, is FaceTime.  Initially it was dismissed by the fact that so few South Africans have Apple computers.  However, we realized that our clients who don’t run on Mac mostly have iPhones and iPads.

Today we successfully FaceTimed a client who struggled to get Skype to connect, but had a seamless meeting through this platform.

The picture was better than our Skype calls, the audio was better and we had zero fallout.

With this new experience under our belts, I decided to check the forums for more info and found this great summary of Skype and FaceTime:

Question: Why would I use FaceTime over Skype?

Answer: JD McInich

Use both. Facetime integrates with your contact list and phone application and, when the connection is decent, provides much better audio and video than Skype with very rare drop-outs or disconnects — FaceTime is point-to-point video-calling. FaceTime also does not require the FaceTime client to be running to receive a call, a feature that saves batteries.

Skype, on the other hand, supports more platforms (esp. mobile), provides IM, a contact list in the cloud, and Skype-to-phone and long-distance calling features. However, to receive incoming calls, the Skype client needs to be running and connected, costing you battery power and some data usage. Skype also uses a peer-to-peer routing model which sometimes results in spurious disconnects and degraded audio and video (when peers resign suddenly).

Apple’s iMessage (check their site on iOS 5) [will] add the IM features of Skype (without the need for persistent connections).  I would avoid running any video-chat over 3G unless you have unlimited usage, however, as it’s a huge bandwidth hog.

So, if you have an Apple computer, iPhone or an iPad – perhaps FaceTime is a reasonable consideration for your online meetings?  We’d love to view your comments and experiences!

When To Capitalize…

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Know when to capitalize

Whenever I am training a client to use Blogger, so that they can self-manage their ORM, we have the same debate – without fail.  No matter what their online reputation management strategy may look like, here’s the questions that’s always posed, in some fashion or another…

“When creating a new post, do I capitalize the first letter, or all of them, or just some of them… and how do I know?”

Whilst much of this depends on personal taste and style, there are some rules to try and stick to.  For many of our clients, we advocate the headline kicker rule:  keep you blog titles, short, punchy and all caps.  But for some, they prefer to be more conversational.

For them, here are 10 great rules to remember!

1. Capitalize the first word in a sentence.
Yes, this is the most basic rule of capitalization – that too many forget…

2. Capitalize the pronoun “I.”
Another basic one, but in today’s information driven world, it bears mentioning, especially in the lazy age of fast-texting mobile communicators.

3. Capitalize proper nouns: the names of specific people, places, organizations, and sometimes things.
For instance, “Austin, Texas,” “Patrick O’Brian,”  “Supreme Court.”

This seems to be the rule that trips up many people because they don’t know whether a word is a proper noun. But as the AP Stylebook points out:

“Capitalize nouns that constitute the unique identification for a specific person, place, or thing: John, Mary, America, Boston, England. Some words, such as the examples given, are always proper nouns. Some common nouns receive proper noun status when they are used as the name of a particular entity: General Electric, Gulf Oil.”

There are also derivatives of proper nouns. Capitalize words that are derived from a proper noun and still depend on it for their meaning, such as “American,” “French,” and “Shakespearean.”

But lower case words that are derived from proper nouns that no longer depend on it for their meaning: “french fries,” “pasteurize,” “darwinian.”
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