Sheri Larsen’s Flying Cloud

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I’ve been unable to find a way around MS Outlook.  I tried Zimbra, Thunderbird and GMail at various times without success.  Each of them were too hard to migrate to and the learning curve was just too high for me.  I couldn’t invest the time to learn a new system while still keeping up with all my critical projects.

The two biggest productivity blocks related to Outlook have been 1) organizing and then finding historical emails and 2) keeping up with my current tasks.

I used to organize my email into folders inside folders inside folders, but I had trouble keeping up with the filing and then could not always remember where I had put a particular item when I needed it.  Also it was hard to decide how to handle an item that it covered more than one area?

My work life and sanity has been saved by the Taglocity: Email Productivity / Knowledge Sharing Outlook addin.   For a minimum cost and time investment, I have been able to organize my entire Outlook library with tags and can now both keep up with tagging new items and find items when I need them.  Unlike other Outlook addins that slow down or crash the software - Taglocity doesn’t seem to have much of an impact.

With regard to task management, I’ve had good luck using the followup flags native to Outlook for keeping up with tasks.  (I’ve never been successful with the “Tasks” functionality in Outlook - why turn an existing email into a Task when you can flag it?)  I know there are a number of task oriented products - but so far nothing has seemed worth investing in.   I’d love some suggestions on tools more task management.  What do you suggest?

Here are some links on this topic that should be helpful:

• Scott H Young’s Blog: The 7 Bad E-Mail Habits that Make People Want to Kill You
• Seth Godin’s Blog: Email checklist
• Web Worker Daily: 10 Tips for Organizing Your E-mail
• Web Worker Daily: 8 Tips To Make the Most of Microsoft Outlook
• Wall Street Journal: Tech Companies Join to Stop Email Addiction

These are my links for June 23rd:

• A Technical Manager’s Perspective: Web 2.0 is Not Enterprise 2.0 - “Enterprise 2.0 is about the Business and is about providing solutions for Business. When I think of Enterprise 2.0 solutions now, I think of tools and solutions usually delivered via Web Services, with much more collaboration built into the tools and solutions.”
• The Engaging Brand : Blogging Brings Internal as well as External Benefits - “However, the benefits of blogging go beyond just using the tool - it helps give clarity to the culture, the talent and the strength in depth within the organisation.”
• The First Rule of Customer Service « Blogging Me Blogging You…”is that you never talk about customers in front of other customers.”
• Overcoming Sales Objections the Easy Way - “Price is the famous one, but is surprisingly one of the easiest to overcome. In fact most objections come down to risk. Do not underestimate the fear of looking foolish, that is a big risk also for the decision maker.”
• Facebook faux pas: The geek’s guide to netiquette - Features, Gadgets & Tech - The Independent - “Here’s a more comprehensive look at how not to get irritated, or indeed irritate others, while you’re social networking.”
• The New Atlantis » The Myth of Multitasking - ‘in his book [the author] calls multitasking a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously.”’

Tools
Here are the best tools (and lists of tools) for Twitter that I’ve uncovered over the last few weeks:

• Online Marketing Blog: Five New Twitter Tools You Should Know
• Web Strategy by Jeremiah: My Essential Twitter Tools
• ReadWriteWeb: How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients
• SearchRank: 7 Gadgets That Are Sure To Enhance the Twitter Experience
• Unclutterer: Uncluttering with Twitter - another list of tools
• Frantic Industries: All Twitter tools and mashups in one place
• Twitter 100 - view your followers at a glance - wish it showed which I was already following but it is interesting to see when was the last time each person lasted posted to Twitter.
• Twhirl - I recently switched from using Twitbin in Firefox to using Twril on the desktop. I find it much better for keeping up with my Twitter feed.
• Summize - search Twitter in realtime. Summize recommended by my Twitter community when I was looking for a better search tool.
• Tweet Scan - I’ve had pretty good luck setting up alerts in Tweetscan.
• Twitter Meter- let’s you query an index of all the words that have been sent to twitter since 11/6/2007 and then plot the number of times that word was used over time. Interesting and fun, but I’m not sure useful….

Following and Being Followed
I don’t post to Twitter that often (maybe a few times a week), but I my followers have grown from 15 to over 100 in the last few months. I follow almost everyone who follows me . I skip people who post primarily in languages other than English or who use Twitter only as tool or making product annoucements (I like to follow real people, thanks!).

• Follow me: http://twitter.com/shlarsen
• Technobabble 2.0: Top analyst twitters / micro-bloggers… updated - looking for experts to follow?
• Marketing Pilgrim: 200+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter - links to a tool on Seocracy.com to quickly follow all the gurus.
• Blog Herald: Gridjit,A Social Portal for Twitter

Twitter for the Enterprise
Some thought provoking posts on using Twitter as an enterprise tool. I use Twitter primarily as a work tool and find it great for:

1. competitive intelligence
2. keeping up with online marketing trends
3. (very few) corporate announcements - again I want to be a “real person” not a corporate shill, so I keep this to a minimum
4. tracking mentions of me and my company

• TechCrunch: End Of Speculation: The Real Twitter Usage Numbers - ever curious as to who is using Twitter? This post says 200,000 active users a week (up from 50,000 in April).
• Performancing: Twitter As Resource? - one person’s journey from skeptic to fan
• Text Technologies: Enterprise Twitter - the author’s thoughts for an enterprise version of Twitter with real-time short communications with collegues, real-time wide outreach with customers, a replacement for existing IM services, all existing outside the corporate firewall
• Fast Forward: Trends to Watch: Twitter in the Enterprise
• MarketingProfs: 7 Ways Marketers Can Use Twitter
• Online Marketing Blog: Guide to Twitter as a Tool for Marketing and PR
• 
  

These are my links for April 14th:

• Pragmatic Marketing - found this organization for technology product management and marketing while researching job descriptions.  Lot’s of good stuff, with a strong focus on product management.
• RoboForm Password Manager, Form Filler - I love not having to remember my passwords, or fill out web forms anymore and I feel safer not using the same 3 passwords on every site.
• Web Worker Daily: 10 Tips for Organizing Your E-mail
• Which led me to Taglocity - user assigned tags for Outlook email. I’ve been using it for about a week and I like it a lot. It doesn’t seem to slow Outlook noticeably, although it doesn’t always load completely everytime. I am trying to get away from losing emails deep in my folder system.
• Read Write Web: How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients. I use Twitbin, but I may try some of these others for comparison.
• LifeDev: 10 Ways History’s Finest Kept Their Focus as Work - start early, do lot’s of different things, excerise
• The Telegraph: The 101 most useful websites. An interesting list…many you know, but some you might not. The Telegraph is a UK paper, so there is some local bias, especially in the entertainment section.
• Groundswell: Should you talk about your competitors? It’s hard to pretend your competitors don’t exist on the social web, Groundswell argues that you shouldn’t try.

I went to a forum a couple of weeks ago to discuss social media marketing . The format was to discuss a series of questions in rotating small groups. The discussion that stuck with me was over whether companies should add social media to their marketing mix right away or wait and see how the tools and usage evolve. To my surprise, many people were very hesitant about social media marketing. They were worried about liability for their companies and about doing the wrong thing.

My own approach was to just dive right in to social media marketing. Last summer I started this blog (albeit in a much different format), set up profiles on Facebook and Linkedin, and subscribed to an ever growing set of RSS feed from blogs and news sources. It tool a little while longer to warm up to Twitter, but now I use it everyday - at least for following the news. You can check out my social graph here - http://sherilarsen.com/about/.

Initially, my goal was just to understand this new set of tools and communities. I soon found them irreplaceable both personally and professionally. I have found a couple of great communities that have made a real impact in my personal health and happiness. But the real benefit has been to my professional life. Twitter and Bloglines are indispensable for keeping on top of industry news, competitors, general marketing and management topics, and for tracking mentions of Northern Light and its products in the press and blogosphere. Delicious is great for saving and sharing the best news and for finding “that story” later when I need it. Linkedin is a great tool for researching prospective clients and partners. Over the last few months I’ve built a network of fellow marketers and prospective customers that I can reach out to for feedback on new products and features and who act as passive references for anyone researching me or my company online. These tools have made me better informed and more productive.

My next project is to integrate social networking features into our search portals. We have already launched an editorially seeded public Market Intelligence Wiki (http://wiki.northernlight.com) and can host integrated research wikis in our custom SinglePoint research portals. We also have company internal wikis for collaborating and sharing information. We have a nascent corporate blog (http://blogs.northernlight.com). Our search alerting system has been upgraded to allow alerts through RSS as well as email. We have launched a new industry authority blog search (which you can see in our free business new portal at http://www.nlsearch.com). We have several “widgets” in our SinglePoint portals that leverage user generated content for tag clouds of top search terms, lists of most searched for or downloaded documents, and lists of other portal users that have searched on my topics or viewed documents I have viewed. The response has been great and users are clamoring for more!

I don’t mean this to be a sales pitch for Northern Light, but unless I, in my role as head of product marketing, had just started using social media services we would have been far behind the requests of our customers. I have seen that it’s very difficult to understand the value of social media unless you actually use the tools - and for more than a just few days or weeks. So, my experience is that it is imperative for companies to make a start, at least by becoming users of social media services, and then by determining how the tools could be leveraged to better serve their customers (and shareholders).

Splash!

These are my links through February 2nd:

• Business Intelligence Resources
• evhead: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
• Digg CEO Jay Adelson’s Take on the So-Called “Revolt” | Epicenter from Wired.com
• Google Health Shows its Face | Epicenter from Wired.com - Would you let Google store your health info?
• George Gilder: The Internet Is Going to be Zettabyte Huge | Epicenter from Wired.com

• Over 6000 stories to review in Bloglines! This is what happens when work gets in the way of research. #
• Would you let Google store your health info? http://tinyurl.com/33xarw #
• I don’t really like letting them know about my search habits. #
• Why is Google creating so many off target services? Seems like they are really reaching. Why not make search better and sell more ads? #
• I think the new pricing structure is smart. It takes the risk out of not selling an item for the casual user (like me). #

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One of the most time consuming aspects of my role designing and improving enterprise search products and for keeping customers of those products happy is keeping track of all the requests and comments made by customers, industry leaders and writers. I’d much rather focus on making those request reality than on organizing the data. In the past, my approach to keeping track of all those passing comments was a crazy combination of emails, Outlook tasks, word documents and actual scraps of paper. Not the most productive approach - especially as scraps of paper keep going missing and I can never seem to find that email I remember receiving when I need it.

In early January, I became aware of Microsoft’s OneNote software. Apparently it’s been around for some time, but used mostly by students for note taking or by users of tablet computers. I downloaded it to help my husband figure it out when he got it with MS office home edition for his new laptop. After about 15 minutes, I realized it was going to change my work habits profoundly.

Basically, it works like a series of virtual spiral bound notebooks. You can create “notebooks” - each are a discrete file that can be shared or not. Each notebook can have “sections” - like the dividers in a spiral bound paper notebook. Each section has pages for taking notes. You can type pretty much anywhere on the page - it seems to automatically create Word-like text boxes wherever you type - and you can create Outlook tasks from withing your notes. Whenever you paste text, it tags the text with the location and file the text originally came from.

So far, I have created notebooks for:

You can download a 60 day trial at http://us1.trymicrosoftoffice.com/product.aspx?re_ms=oo&family=onenote&culture=en-US

An upgrade version is only $79.95 with any 2002-2007 MS Office suite.

Try it and let me know what you think.

If you’re reading this then you are on my new blog domain! My journey as a blogger, while fairly brief, has been pretty eventful. I started in August by using the built in software in Bloglines. I pretty much held my nose and jumped in using the first tool at hand. After a week, though, I realized I needed something more robust and so moved to a blog on WordPress.com.

This time I did a little research before hand. I wasn’t ready to spend the money on a private domain or the time to learn how to install and administer software. Wordpress was clearly the best reviewed service, so I started blogging at sllarsen.wordpress.com (the original Flying Cloud).

Note: If you’ve read my about page you know that I am a VP at Northern Light (a purveyor of custom research portals and search software). Northern Light is named after a clipper ship. The sister ship to the Northern Light was the Flying Cloud. Ta da!

I couldn’t figure out how to get my original posts from Bloglines into Wordpress.com, but they were “experimental” (shall we say). I was able to create a very nice site if I do say so myself - and I didn’t, thanks, Kyle!

I was very happy on Wordpress.com for several months until I realized how difficult/impossible it is do any advanced usage tracking or to leverage social media plugins. Also, I am working on developing an blogging program at Northern Light and clearly we would need to use installed blogging software on our own servers using our own domains.

Since my current hosting service for my personal website/email was about to expire, I looked around for a new host that would be 1) cheaper and 2) able to easily work with Wordpress software. I went with AN Hosting after reading several reviews and because of their program to support WordPress. I also bought a new domain - sherilarsen.com. Once I figured out my various account logins, I was able to use Fantastico from my cpanel administration site to install Wordpress in about 30 seconds.

In less than 36 hours I had my new site up and all my posts imported from my Wordpress.com site. All I had to do was export my posts from one and import them into the other. Of course now I have two parallel sites. I had built a small but hard won following on sllarsen.wordpress.com that I want to migrate to sherilarsen.com, but that is not so easy. I can find no way to seamlessly redirect a person from a post on one domain to the same post on the other.

My solution was to create a new post on sllarsen.wordpress.com announcing my my domain, remove all the widgets from the site, replace to delete all least popular posts from sllarsen.wordpress.com completely. For the popular ones I put links in referring readers to the versions on my new domain. I spent a lot of time looking for ways to automatically redirect, but couldn’t find anything that works with Wordpress.com.

My new tasks is to find all the places online that refer to my sllarsen.wordpress.com and replace it with sherilarsen.com. I keep finding them!

I did a lot of research on helpful plugins for a new Wordpress blog and here’s the list I’ve installed so far:

• What Would Seth Godin Do - shows a welcome box to new visitors
• All in One SEO Pack - adds titles, keywords and descriptions to the metadata of your posts
• del.icio.us for Wordpress - creates a headlines list of my Delicious bookmarks. I have it limited to just bookmarks I tag with “postthis.” Can also create a daily post from Delicious links - but I have not turned it on yet.
• Postalicious - creates a post from your Delicious links. I have it set to create a draft to see if it will help make my semi-weekly link post easier to create.
• Delicatessen - for seeing who’s linking to my posts in Delicious
• ShareThis - social bookmarking from each post - although I am thinking of trying Sociable to see the difference.
• MyBlogLog Widget - shows my recent readers
• Twitter Tools - shows my Tweets in the sidebar, creates a blog post from my daily tweets, creates a tweet when I post a blog entry
• Evermore - truncates my posts on the home page to no more than 3 paragraphs (this can be changed in the settings)
• Google XML Sitemaps - for automatically creating and updating a sitemap for Google to use when crawling
• Google Analytics - for usage tracking from Google
• FeedBurner FeedSmith - for managing my RSS feeds
• One-click Installer - installs any plugin or theme without having to upload them manually via ftp. Can also delete theme and plugin folders.
• Adsense-Deluxe - I signed up for Adsense just to see how it works these days, but I can’t get this plugin to work.
• WordPress Database Backup - on-demand backup of your WordPress database.
• Wordpress Reports - generates reports from Google Analytics and Feedburner data on a tab inside the WordPress administration

I also installed the Lijit search “wijit”. Let’s readers search not just your blog posts, but also the content of your other social media profiles (like your Delicious and Digg links and your Linkedin and Facebook profiles. Cool!

If you have some questions or need help with moving from WordPress.com to a hosted domain - I’d be happy to help as much as I can. Just leave me a comment or email me at sheri at sherilarsen dot com.