Does that makes sense?
I love Apple products, even if the shopping experience was terrible, I’d probably still purchase them for their quality and content.
When I read a story like the one below, I realize that it isn’t just the products themselves, it’s the experience and people that make me want to come back.
10-year-old girl has memorable experience at Apple Store
What can you do to make every customer’s shopping trip a wonderful experience?
Many years ago I did a bit of programming on a hugely expensive computer named Lisa. Years later, i saved up to buy my first Mac. It had no hard disk, just double floppy drives and an amazing ability to outshine my PC. It actually spoke. A colorful IMac and laptop followed. My first Macbook Pro lightened my backpack weight, eliminating my need for a heavy PC laptop.
Today, i have an iPhone, an IPad 2, a 27 inch iMac and a Macbook Pro. One or more of them are always with me. Steve Jobs is responsible for making technology accessible and portable. His innovative ideas and his ability to lead others to implement them changed our lives.
Steve Jobs died peacefully with his family around him. I hope he was able to die knowing his innovations had a huge impact on our day to day lives. He goes down in history with many others who changed our lives.
Apple, the company he co-founded, was removed from, rescued from near bankruptcy and ultimately led to being one of the world’s most valuable companies, will go on without him. I hope that it will pick up the vision and move beyond it, above it. I hope they learn to stop asking themselves ‘What would Steve do?’. Instead, concentrating on solving the problems that technology can solve and sometimes creates.
Steve has a lesson for us all. He loved what he did for a living. He rose every morning and lived it to the fullest. Steve, you will be missed, but thanks to your visionary mind, you will be remembered and your legacy will live on.
Maybe you’ve already taken a sip of the purple drink and have your own iPad. Perhaps you’ve sworn that you will never buy one. Maybe you’re still on the fence and attempting to justify the expense.
You couldn’t pry my iPad out of my cold, dead hands, I plan to be buried with one. At least the most recent release of one. Let my kids figure that one out.
I use a product called RescueTime that detects what I do all day long and lets me have reports on how productive I am. I can definitely say that a few things have increased my productivity and reduced my spin time.
One is Evernote. I would spend my internet browsing time getting lost, following link after link and eventually forgetting what I was looking for in the first place. Now I spend a fixed amount of time, pop all the interesting pages into Evernote and spend a bit of downtime on the iPad reviewing what I wanted to read. I also blog in Evernote and automatically post from it using a plugin for WordPress called EverPress. I write a note I want to post and put it in a specific notebook. Everpress takes it from there and posts it automatically for me.
Two is my iPad. I used to cart around my heavy binder full of planning pages. Every year, I’d update the binder if it was falling apart and update the pages. I didn’t always use all the pages that were provided, so there was always a big waste of paper. My iPad functions as my library, currently its holding samples of books I want to read, books I’m currently reading and free content that I put into PDFs or ePUB format. Everything I need is there, in one place.
Writing and Reviewing documents. I receive and send a lot of Word and Excel documents. If its a lengthy document I’m writing, its going to take some back and forth review on my part before it looks how I want it to look. I can collaborate and share documents with people using Dropbox. I can annotate PDF documents, adding comments to something I want to get more information about.
My calendar. I use a laptop, a desktop, a client site computer, my iPhone and my iPad. Keeping it all in sync is fairly simple, even the parts that I publicize with clients.
Planning. I’m a planaholic. I can spend volumes of time putting things to do in one place, categorizing them and checking off what’s been done. Its fun and iPad apps like Bento, Things and Omnifocus make it enjoyable to be a bit more productive.
Books and News. I’m a big book reader. I call myself a bottle reader. If I don’t have something to read, I’ll read the label on the nearest bottle. I’m usually juggling several books, a couple in the throne room, a few in the living room. Magazines are stacked in the same places. I’ve switched many of my books over to the iPad and even more magazines over as well. Tech books don’t work as well, but I think that’s my own limitation.
Do you love your iPad? How does it help you?
One of my daughters lives in Okinawa, Japan with her husband and two dogs. Now, you have to realize that 35 years ago, I was on the same island with my husband for our very first military tour. The one thing I regret not doing while we were there was traveling more often. We did some sightseeing, the island has quite a few historical locations and the culture is quite different. But I didn’t do any traveling off the island to Japan or anywhere else. Then the kids came along and money and time dwindled.
I’ll recommend to you what I’m recommending to my daughter. Do as much travel as you can. See the sights, even if that means hitting the local spots around your hometown. If the opportunity strikes for you to travel to a land far away, say yes. Do it now, because life is short and you may never get the same chance.
Eat the food, experience the culture, learn the language of where you live, especially if its a foreign land. But I’ll tell someone who is moving to a new city of state or across the country to do the same thing. If you end up living in Paris, France or Paris, Texas, learn everything you can, see everything, eat everything.
If you’re a military person or married to one, you have no excuse that you’re bored. Stop living on base and get up off your butt and out the door. If you’re by yourself, just do it, if you have a spouse, kids, grab them and hop into your car, on your bikes or just go on foot. Hit the beach, climb the mountains, visit the caves, explore it all.
Soon enough you’ll be on your last wish, don’t let it be that you wished you had seen more of the world. What are you waiting for? Go see the world.
I see it everyday. Poor defenseless people being led around by a ring in their nose, someone else’s ring in their nose.
The ring is a plan, a plan that someone else has put together, put in place and is imposing on someone who doesn’t have the particular skill set that the plan incorporates.
Perfect example. You hire a person or a company to implement your marketing plan. Off they go, very little involvement on your part and a short time later, a plan emerges on your desk and waiting for implementation. You approve it, without knowing all the parts and pieces, frankly, you don’t have the time to review it. Off they go, marching orders limited, full scope implemented.
Time goes by and you don’t seem to see results. Or worse, things are definitely not working, and you don’t know what to do.
What’s missing in the plan? Ownership. You need to know enough about what’s being planned and implemented in order to determine if the plan is for you. How does that happen? You need to match up your Strategic Plan with whatever shorter term plan you are planning.
If you’re implementing a social marketing plan, you need to learn the basics about social marketing. Not down the to the details, but you need to know the basics. You need to decide what your mission, values and goals dictate for your social marketing plan. You might decide that you don’t want to use Facebook or Tweeting just isn’t your thing. When you get the plan from the firm doing the social marketing for you, make sure you understand it, ask questions, draw red circles around things you don’t understand. Draw red lines through things you don’t want on the plan. Work with them to make the plan your own.
Don’t abdicate your plan and let someone else run with it. It’s your plan, retain ownership, work as part of the team to get it done. Don’t let someone else lead you around by a nose ring.
I’m totally addicted to beautiful bags and folios. I’m not drawn to the typical bag, but bags made of unusual fabrics with impeccable quality. Two companies that have caught my eye recently managed to have both.
The first, Temple Bags, has computer bags, luggage and best of all, iPad and iPhone cases made of high quality leather and re-purposed WWII fabrics. My two favorites, the Medicine Bag and the iPad Folio. Both with a hefty price tag, but beauty has a cost.
The other company, Saddleback Leather Company, uses saddle leather, and if you’ve ever plunked your behind on a saddle, you know it has to be high quality and soft. I like the briefcase, large enough for my 17″ Macbook pro and again, the iPad case.
The extra here is both companies have a unique way of incorporating a blog and video into their marketing process. Saddleback uses a story approach, customer’s pop in with picture and word based stories of their own. Temple bags has travelogue based blog posts to keep you entertained.
What is a Strategic Plan? According to Wikipedia, A strategic plan lets an organization know where they are now and where they want to be some time in the future. Think of it as a map for where you’ve been and where you need to be.
Maybe you work four hours a week, maybe you work a 16 hour day. No matter how often you work, or the length of time, you need to work effectively and efficiently. One way you can increase both is to identify and categorize your work efforts according to focus areas.
1. The Money Maker – What do you do that makes money? If you work a 9 to 5 job, this is pretty easy to identify. And if you’re an independent like me, it should be even simpler. What do people pay you to do? It also makes a whole lot of sense that much of your time should be spent here, with the money maker.
2. Business Development – This is doing all the things that find you new people and companies that are willing to pay you for what you do. This includes your website, printed marketing materials, advertising, tweeting, posting on facebook, blogging, writing articles, etc.
3. Office – This one is equally important, but its in the background. You need to make invoices, file paperwork, work with your accountant, make sure your clients are being cared for properly.
4. Family – This is one we forget to schedule into our day, and its why we end up with children that have problems and spouses with divorce on their minds. Actually schedule some time into as many days as you can to keep in touch with your family. It may be as simple as committing to a nightly dinner, an early breakfast, a date night with your spouse. Put it on your calendar and realize that its just as important as #1 on this list.
5. Personal – This is the other one we forget. This includes exercise, spirituality and just plain spending some quality time with yourself. You only get one life, its a short one, ask anyone over the age of 50, it goes really quickly. Schedule some time in your day for yourself. Get up and away from your desk, take a walk, hit the gym, go to a bookstore, go window shopping at lunch. Have a special lunch with yourself once a week.
Put it all on your calendar and pay close attention to it every day. Devote time to your business, your family and yourself.
How you divide up your time will vary from person to person, but it’s important to assign time to each category throughout the week and work with it until you find a good balance. If you neglect one area the others will suffer. Revenue generating activities have to be consistent obviously, as well as Personal and Family time, but don’t neglect Business Development and Home Office time. You have to incorporate these areas into your week in order to effectively grow your business and prosper.
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iPhone delivered at 11:25am today. Out of the box and plugged into iTunes to activate. Session expired. Huh? I called Apple. Sure enough, he tells me that I won’t be able to activate the phone until tomorrow because that’s the official date.
He tells me that the people on line that have already received and activated their iPhones must be boasting and lying or they must have special access because they are bloggers. What is this guy smoking?
Disconnect from iTunes, restart and reconnect. All is well. I’m syncing as I type.
