March this year, we celebrated our seven years of experiences in IT business. Along with ups and downs, there always something goes forward, age it is, and we can’t go back to undo things that imperfectly done. Together with those, we have learned our lessons and will not stop.

Now in this seventh years in business, we are proud to announce new partnership with PT DMC, PT SKU and PT Dekomindo. Those serve in different industries and surely together we will work in new area thus most likely more business unit. A milestone for NET.

Now we are experiencing a new working environment as we had moved to new office at Jalan Berlian 36, Cawang. Still in Jakarta, and still with the same business lines. We grow and we definitely strive for the best.. We hope you do too..

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Twitalyzer Home Screen

This week we witnessed the birth of yet another Twitter tool. Its name is Twitalyzer. What makes it special in the midst of so many other Twitter-related tools and applications ? Well, at first glance, it did not became apparent for me either as it looks like one of those tools to analyze your “influence” on Twitter by measuring such variables like the number of times people reply to you and mention your name.

That is, until I discovered a tiny menu on the top right of its homepage, mentioning “Twitalyze Brands”. Interested, I clicked on the menu and voila ! I was taken to a page where there was this big title banner of “Twitalyzer Brand”. Now it got me intrigued, and just for the sake of testing, I entered “Nokia” as the brand to be analyzed. I waited like three minutes before I got to see the results, but it’s all expected because Nokia is such a big brand and must be getting a lot of mention from the Twitter crowd. Fair enough.

It was not until I got to the result page that I realize that this is indeed an excellent tool. Of course, by now we need not mention again the importance of online reputation management. But until now, I was only aware of Twitter-search based tools in order to do just that. Twitalyzer Brand takes it one step further by giving you the important parameters right in the first page of the result of your brand.

Twitalyzer Nokia Result

After it has finished analyzing Nokia, – in this example -, Twitalyzer Brand told me that “NOKIA most recent brand strength in Twitter was rated as mind-boggling based on a calculated score of 88.4 out of 100…” Furthermore, it also measured the brand as having 70.5% of signal-to-noise ratio, 4:1 positive brand favor, 22.3% of brand passion, and 77.5% of clout. Now, of course I’m aware that for the curious side of us, it may not be enough. We might want to know on what calculations and algorithms such assessments are based upon, but that’s beside the point here.

My point is that, at the very least, Twitalyzer Brand can be used as a very splendid method to analyze your brand’s mention on Twitter, – and thus, manage your online reputation. Bear with me for a second, and I’ll tell you why. Excited by a neat execution of its analysis on Nokia, I clicked “learn more” under the parameter of “brand favor”. I then was taken to another page where it gave me the definition of “brand favor” ( “the ratio of citations that are generally positive to those that are generally negative” ) and the list of actual public updates where people mentioned Nokia in their tweets, – both positively and negatively. I don’t know about you, but for me, that alone is a big enough appeal to use it as a tool to scan feedbacks from people who used my products.

I suggest you do the similar thing with the other parameters. Explore the site. Also don’t forget to take a look at their features of “Time-Based Analysis”, “Benchmark Your Success” and “Twitter Brand 100” list, which are located in the bottom of the page. If there is a time that I recommend a young site, then this is it.

NOTE :  The Twitalyzer site can also analyze your personal Twitter statistics other than your brand’s.  Just click on the “Twitalyze People” menu in the top right of the page.

Disclaimer :

NET is not affiliated with any of the software / application company. While I am helped by certain features of these programs, in no way I can guarantee that they will give the readers the same results. Always back-up your file before doing major changes to your computer.

OK, I’ll readily admit it. I have a weakness in getting my tasks done. Sometimes I let myself get too immersed in the details that I have difficulty in prioritizing and managing my tasks. That, and the all-too-common dilemma of procrastination of course. Am I getting familiar already ? If you share the same problem with me, read on to discover a possible method to get out of this productivity inefficiency trap.

It’s not that there isn’t a possible solution for my problem. The basic, underlying issue is time ( and self ) management here. The “First Things First” method of Franklin Covey quickly came to mind as I outlined this post. Yet I particularly want to make a certain emphasis on the wildly-popular way of “Getting Things Done” ( GTD ) as preached by David Allen, a recognized author and productivity coach across the globe. There’s a reason for this. While whether or not GTD works for you will remain up to you to decide, the benefit of practicing it can best be summed b y its tagline : “The Art of Stress-Free Productivity”. Now, that’s a promise I heartily embrace, to let go of the stress of daily life.

At its core, basically GTD works by collecting your thoughts ( I like to think of it as actually get the stress blocks off my head ), processing them ( by assigning them to the appropriate contexts ), organizing, reviewing and doing them. I am summarizing a lot here. For more information of how exactly this system can get the stress out of your head and help you increase your productivity, the Wikipedia article of GTD has an excellent set of article references that should help you. My focus, instead, is to point us into one of a great ways to practice this action management method.

Enter Thinking Rock. Developed since 2005, it is a free, open-source and multi-platform (Linux, Mac OSX, MS Windows, …) organizer software, designed to practice GTD. Now I have been an avid user of task managers like Rainlendar or Outlook, but Thinking Rock differs from them radically by employing the GTD method straight from the home screen itself.

Thinking Rock

From the home screen, you are straightly coached and encouraged to employ the GTD method of collecting and processing your thoughts. This has forced me to alter my old task-management way of simple listing, to actually classify them as actionable or not. In the end, it saves me a lot of time and help me prioritize my life in such a way that I now have more time to do the tasks themselves rather than just pondering about them. Translated, it should spell less-stress for my life.

In their own words, Thinking Rock “is NOT another to-do list. It allows you to:

• collect your thoughts, also called dump your mind;
• process them into actions, projects, sub-projects, reference items or someday/maybe items;
• actions can be done by you, delegated to someone else or scheduled for a particular date;
• projects can be planned into ordered list of actions and sub-projects;
• you can review all your actions, projects and other information quickly and easily to see what you need to do or to choose what you want to do under your current context at a particular time. These views can be easily modified by you to tailor for your needs;

Having been using it for more than two weeks now, I can certainly testify that it helps me organizing my life. And as the title of this post series implies, I hope that it will also help you all. I certainly enjoy it.

The free community version of Thinking Rock can be downloaded here.

According to the Wikipedia, the term “Enterprise 2.0”refers to :

“social software used in “enterprise” (business) contexts. It includes social and networked modifications to company intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication. In contrast to traditional enterprise software, which imposes structure prior to use, enterprise social software tends to encourage use prior to providing structure.”

I believe that we do not need to delve further into the importance of incorporating Enterprise 2.0 in your business. The fact that you are reading this is a clear enough sign that you realize the need to evolve into such kind of enterprise, rather than staying true to the prehistoric status quo of one-way content feeding of Web 1.0. The question is how are we going to do this. In this post, I am going to suggest three ways which seem to me are the keys to plot your successful presence in the world of social networking :

• Register as a member in as many social network as you can afford to maintain. I would suggest three of the most important there is, – namely Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Other than that, be a member of other social network relevant to your business. Remember that the key phrase here is “as many social network as you can afford to maintain”. Having one too many account may stretch your time and resources in such a way that you can’t keep up with the need to update them all.
• Provide useful contents to your networks. Update your company’s official blog. From time to time, post some useful links to quality articles. It doesn’t matter that you don’t produce the content themselves, as long as you mention the necessary accreditations and don’t claim them for yourselves. This way, people in your network will eventually recognize you as a source for good content.
• Engage in conversation or other interaction in your networks. In Twitter, this means actively engaging in conversation by replying to other people’s updates. In Facebook, this may mean commenting to others’ contents or useful links in their profiles. In your company blog, this spells as the need to reply to the comments that your visitors leave in a welcoming and accommodative way.

These three simple steps may seem obvious to you as an avid web user. However, one concept that runs behind them all spell the difference between the successful web personas like Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki, – to the rest of the world who seem to never raise up beyond the level of mediocrity. This concept is contained in one simple word : consistency. As I have mentioned once in my previous post, whatever you do in the Internet, you need to update, update and update your page or status or blog. There’s nothing worse than seeing a company’s blog which hasn’t been updated for a long time. It gives your audience the impression that you can’t finish what you started, or even that you are a company that lacks commitment to do your job. Hardly the impression you would want your company to have, would you ?

The good news is, once you hold fast to the concept of consistency, the three methods I mentioned above are easy enough to do, – or at least to manage. You can update them all yourselves, or you may opt to delegate the tasks to a staff specifically dedicated to do just that. However you choose to do it, just don’t give up easily. After all, tenacity is a close sibling of consistency. Do what you need to do, and embrace the fact that you are entering the new, excited realm of Enterprise 2.0. Good luck !

“A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.”

• Wilson Mizner ( 1876-1933 )

In my last post, we talked about social media and its implications to your PR strategy. I promised you that we were going to cover the issue of listening on what people say about you and/or your company.

Before we start, it will be very crucial to remember that listening is a very big part of communication. In fact, it could even be argued that listening is a part of life that we can’t live without. Any good communicators out there will confirm this fact. Just ask somebody you admire for his / her communication skills. It’s undeniable.

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In the context of Social Media, it can become quite confusing, – especially for a first-timer -, to scan and monitor what people say about you. As in real-life communication, it takes a skill to listen. The good news is, it’s easy to acquire the ability to listen in Social Media. Enter the “Search” function.

To elaborate more on this, we’re going to use Twitter as an example. By now, you must know already about what is it. If you have not join Twitter, do so now. You owe it to yourself. Find some important people to follow, – or better yet -, some people who is relevant to your field.

Assuming that you have already done all of the above, what you need to do now is searching the public timeline for the topic pertaining to your field. Owing to Twitter’s wild popularity, there are some excellent tools out there to do this very thing. Make use of them. Followings are three of them that I myself use most often :

• Twitter official search tool
• Tweetscan
• TwitterTroll

Official Twitter Search page

Now all you need to do is go to their sites and type your topic, much as the way you use Google or other search engines. For example : Peter is in the business of airlines. He would want to search for “airlines”, “flying”, “flight” or other similar search terms. The search tool will then give him tweets from people that used such words in it. Don’t just stop there, however. Push your listening act a little bit further. You might want to even search for your brand. Type “Apple” for instance, and you will see what I mean.

Once you reach this point, it will become easy for you to see what people say about you and/or your brands. Don’t forget other valuable information like what their needs, preferences or anything else that might help you to sell more. Good luck !

A couple of days ago, we discussed about the basics of RSS. While a lot of people know about it already, we still need to touch on some basic points to help those who don’t. Once we got on that, now I am going to suggest some ways to utilize RSS to help your business.

Here they are :

• Subscribe to feeds that you read often or daily

This is just a practice based on a common sense. By doing that, you’ll save huge chunks of time from your typically-busy day.

• Find some feeds from a field that’s relevant to your business, – and subscribe to them

If you are in the tech business, you should subscribe to TechCrunch, Mashable and other prominent tech blogs out there. If you’re into news, catch the feeds of CNN, New York Times, and the likes. It goes similar way in whatever field your business in.

At first glance, this is also a sensible practice. Yet many of us ( – including me back then ), missed doing this because they can’t see the point. Please refrain from doing the same mistake. It will help you heavily in staying abreast of the most recent development in your particular business field. It will help you catch the newest trend and fad in the way you never thought possible.

There are 2 ways of doing this :

· If you already knew what sites are relevant to your business, you can go to their URLs, and subscribe manually. The process is elaborated in the first post of the series.

· If you are not sure, then Google is your friend. Find the best sites there is, and subscribe to their feeds. Alternatively, you can go to Google Blogsearch, and search for your topic. On your result page, just click the “RSS” link under the “Subscribe” menu in the left side of the page. You will then be asked to enter your preference of Feed Reader, – and you’re done.

• The last point you really need to consider has something to do with your business online activities. Does your business have its own website / blog ? If yes, then by default it will provide an option for people to subscribe to its own RSS feed. In this sense, you are a feed publisher.

What I will recommend for a serious feed publisher is : signing up for a feed optimizer service. The most well-known ( and so far has proven to be reliable for me ) is Feedburner. Acquired by Google in 2007, you can sign up for their service for free. Once registered, you can optimize your feed by customizing it in such a way to fit your readers’ needs. For example, you can include a menu below each feed, where any reader can bookmark your post to social bookmarking sites like Delicious or Digg; – all without going to your site. There are many other features to browse and use. Bottom line : better publication for you and your business. Try it.

There you go. I don’t pretend to be an expert on this matter. That’s why I said I “offer” some suggestions. One thing I do know : RSS is a very powerful thing to use, – both for personal productivity purpose, and as a platform to help growing your business. Have fun !

Before we start, let’s look at some definition quoted from Wikipedia on what RSS ( Really Simple Syndication ) is all about :

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video – in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content quickly and automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader“, “feed reader”, or “aggregator“, which can be web-based or desktop-based.

Quite a lengthy definition by itself. When simplified, RSS basically means a way to publish / send a content to the reader without requiring him / her to visit the source site. Hence the word “feed”. Think of it this way. If you’re a busy business person, but still need to keep yourself abreast of the latest updates from the news sites, you’d relish a way to have all the updates sent to you. It saves your worthy time.

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The way you do this is by using a feed aggregator / reader. It’s a small piece of software ( desktop or web-based ) that acts as as if it’s “pulling” all the contents you subscribe. For easiest adaptation, you can try the web-based Bloglines. All you have to do is signing-up and start to subscribe for your preferred feed. If you prefer a desktop application, Snarfer would be a good choice too. Download the software, install it, and there you go.

Next, is the part of subscribing to the feeds. Both Bloglines and Snarfer have their set of feeds that you can browse and pick. For most users, these are enough to start with. I myself only added less than ten feed to my selected ones in Snarfer. Don’t make the beginner mistake of subscribing too many though. If you do, it will be very easy to get yourself lost in thousands of unread contents on a daily basis. You wouldn’t want this to happen, as this may mean that a particularly useful news for your business gets lost in the pile. Be selective.

Also, chances are some regular sites that you frequent are not there in the default subscription list. This is the point where you have to go to the site itself and find its RSS link. For example, I really like to read The New Yorker. What I need to do is going to its site, and finding a link / icon / menu where it says something about “RSS / feed”. In this case it looks like this ( look for the right area where I made a red circle ) :

In most cases, any RSS link from any site will look similar to this. It may mention only the link text ( “RSS” ) or even maybe just the icon ( the orange RSS icon ). Familiarize yourself with the way they look. The rest is easy enough. All you have to do is clicking on it, they will give you some links where you can copy and paste to your feed reader. Give it a few minutes and you should start seeing their updates in your aggregator.

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To sum it up, RSS is a handy way to stay updated on important contents scattered all over the web without visiting the sites themselves. A powerful time-saver, it’s easy to use by some simple steps:

• Pick your choice of a reader.
• Sign-up for its service ( if web-based ), or install it ( if desktop-based ).
• Pick your choice from its default set of RSS feed.
• Add to your subscription by visiting the site you frequent, and copy/paste its RSS link to your reader.

That’s basically it. It is proven time and time again that RSS is a very powerful method to utilize the web to your advantage. Why not taking part and join the crowd ?

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P.S. :

ZDNet has a good video on the basics of RSS that you can view here.

Next, I will be talking on how to utilize RSS for your business. Stay tuned.