Have a business presence on the web and not sure how your social media is set up or how you did? One World Social Media is offering a free 8 point checkup on your social media efforts. Questions include:

• Are the social media icons prominently displayed on the home page?
• If there is a blog, is the link easy to find on the home page?
• Have Facebook, twitter and/or blog’s been recently written to (within 30 days)?
• All the profiles filled out completely on all social media platforms?
• Is the branding carried across all social media platforms?
• Is the “Like” button for Facebook fan page displayed website?
• Is the title, description and meta tags filled out completely?
• Are Google Analytics or other web traffic collection program hooked up to monitor activity?

Visit our site today and resister for free to see how you are doing at http://oneworldsocialmedia.com

Thinking about the global nature of the web and your web presence? I came across this information that shows the top 10 Internet Users by Language. It is very interesting to see the Spanish are ranked third in number of users.

Internet Users by Language

This Internet Users by Language information my be very helpful when designing your site for a global presence. The rest of the worlds internet users are increasing and is you do business globally, you may want to capitalize on these users.

For more information and to read the entire article, click here.

Startup legends – Marc Andreessen of Netscape, Kevin Ryan of DoubleClick and Gilt Groupe, Thomas Gensemer of Blue State Digital (the company that developed Obama’s online campaign and fundraising efforts), and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg – reveal their strategies for innovation and give tips on how to build a successful company.

Recently a friend of mine sent me a really neat video about Google Wave. It shows what it is, the purpose of it, how it is better and why I need it. My marketing hat goes off to EpipheoStudios.com for doing an excellent job of explaining the benefits of Google Wave.

It really started me thinking about all the email threads I have been a part of in my many years as a programmer or business developer. This intertwined threading nightmare rally comes to light if you have to go back and attempt to reconstruct a thought process of a threaded email from over a year ago. Recently someone asked me to the reason why we did something. I quickly found the email, but it took about 45 minutes to follow what was being said, buy whome and why the decision was made. Had we been using Google Wave, we could have played it back and watched the email conversation take place over a year later. Pretty cool.

I am going to start to use Google Wave in the next several months and will comment when I find some cool things. Thanks Simone for showing me this video!

We all have BIG plans for the New Year. This next year will be the best year of our lives, things will be different, and my New Years resolution will allow for this to happen.

Gal Setting. While some people achieve their goals, most fall short or don’t even come close. Why is that? There are a number of reasons why; lack of desire, lack of accountability or just no will power. Whatever the case may be, we need to be easier on ourselves and have a plan when we set these goals so we can see what we are going to need to accomplish this goal and what it will take to get us there.

There is a great tool I have come across from Zig Ziglar. I allows us to put thought into setting these goals for ourselves. What obstacles are we going to face achieving this goal, what skills are required and what benefits will we realize? And finally, what is you plan to make this happen?

I hope you take a look at this and set a goal or two for the next year. I will set some myself with this worksheet and let you know over the next few months how I am doing!

Have a happy New Year.

As part of my MBA studies in financial accounting at Benedictine University, we we studying the topic of analyzing a companies financial performance and the point came up of “Where is this company in the corporate lifecycle?” I did not know the answer to this but one of my fellow graduate students sent me this link. Having been involved in start up companies all my professional career, I could not help to want to share this with all of my clients. It clearly shows all the points in the corporate lifecycle, how the founder(s) have an impact on the life cycle and where things can go right AND go wrong.

To see the corporate lifecycle web site, click here.

If any of you have opinions or comments, I would love to hear them. I think this graph is pretty dead on, and all entrepreneurs should take a look at it and see what a corporate lifecycle truly is.

This weekend we lost a great business philosopher, Jim Rohn. Take a moment to watch these videos and reflect how easy it is to listen to him and to learn from the master.

Somebody taught me long ago that one of the first things you need to do to be able to get what you want is to be able to ask for it. But it seems difficult for some people to be able to ask for what they want. When I am in business and selling me something, I almost always gave a discount if someone asked me for one. Whenever I go somewhere, I always ask if there is a discount. More than half the time I get between 10% and 30% off, just by asking. And if they don’t offer me a discount, that is fine too.

One time I opened my Verizon wireless bill and saw it was $400 more than normal. Seems I had gone over by 900 minutes on my account. Instead of calling them up and yelling and bitching out the customer service agent, I politely said that the mistake was mine, I failed to keep track of the minutes and is there anything we can do to reduce the charges now and in the future. I was accountable and asked for what I wanted. She said she would be happy to go over my plan with me and knocked off $300. Now, I am not saying this will happen to you or you will get the same results, but remember to ask for what you want.