Regular – Page 8 – Anthea Whittle

In defence of email signatures

My contacts are at best, disorganised. An automatic email signature, in plain text, which lists direct dial and alternate phone numbers, alongside the position and company of the sender is my first port of call when my contacts list fails me.

Perhaps a little more information than that. I disagree with an email signature which regularly causes printing to span two pages, is attached to every message sent, and which contains images. Sometimes in corporate land these atrocities cannot be avoided.

Mobile specific signatures? I have one for both work and personal:

“Please excuse my brevity and typo’s, this message was sent via mobile.”

Some recipients think I write that after every email sent from my phone. Some don’t understand what “brevity” means. I like to think it excuses my email for being inarticulate and clumsy, by explaining it wasn’t written in ideal conditions.

Attach your automated email signature to the first message in a thread of email, not to replies, and preface it with your personal sign off of the message.

With respect,

Anthea

Pinterest for.. Business?

That time has come, Pinterest is now “popular” enough that all the “social media gurus” are formulating Pinterest strategies.

As with every social network, there are some businesses for whom a presence will be a seamless and logical fit. For others, it’s tit’s on a bull, as my kiwi-bloke dad might say.

Pinterest is very lifestyle focused, and is useful for aggregating boards of content relevant to particular topics. Personally, I use it to capture inspiration for things I want to do myself – DIY projects, fashion inspiration etc.

You’ll find a lot of twee girly stuff, a lot of macarons, home ideas and craft projects. Depending who you follow, it can seem to be one massive Frankie-magazine-girlfest.

Air New Zealand have climbed aboard the bandwagon and reined in over 200 followers in the past week since launch. But does their “strategy” offer any value? Is the content even that interesting? I guess we’ll see.

How might Pinterest actually be useful “for business”? Well, I can imagine the referring traffic for content shared on Pinterest would be pretty healthy, but you will need legitimately good content to share in order to do well. Great for those with an Etsy store or fashion, craft, or beauty blog.

If you’re on the fence, I’d suggest:

Create a personal account and try it out before trying to apply it to your business.
Create a business or brand account and start sharing your content
Make it as easy as possible for your readers or users to share your content on Pinterest. Yes, that’s a “pin this” button to add to your collection of like, tweet, plus, share, bookmark.
Make sure you have good quality images with your content on your site – Pinterest is all visual and most pinners will like or repin without even clicking through to the originating source.

There’s an “Ultimate Pinterest Marketing Guide” available from Hubspot, it’s worth a read if only to know what’s being said “out there” about marketing on Pinterest.

How to scrobble to Last.fm from your NZ iPhone

The Last.fm iPhone app isn’t available available in New Zealand (even for subscribers!), no doubt due to sticky licensing drama. In fact, unless you’re in the US, UK or Germany you’re out of luck.

Even though I can’t change my blasted username, I like to scrobble what I listen to – so I can track it, compare it, recommend it, see, touch and taste it… Well, maybe not taste it.

Fortunately, the ex.fm app for iPhone is available in NZ.

The ex.fm app allows you to listen to music you already have on your phone via the ingeniously named “iPod” feature, and it also scrobbles what you listen to if you connect it to your last.fm account (needs wifi or 3g, duh).

Make sure you dig into the other super awesome features of ex.fm – the Chrome plugin will scout pages you visit, collating MP3 URL’s into your own little streaming library. This is then available to stream on your phone too. More about that in my previous post.

Oh, and add me so I can judge your taste in music.

Some other ways to scrobble:

Pretend you’re American.
If you’re an Air NZ Airpoints member with a OneSmart account, your card counts as an American Credit Card – opening the door to all sorts of internet joy, including an American iTunes account from which you can download all the good stuff.
Use another app.
Rdio is now available in NZ with a 1 week free trial. It has a pretty limited catalogue available, again, probably due to licensing and probably because you will be given the option to actually store the media onto your device (there are different rules if you can stream but not store). Rdio scrobbles to last.fm, and I’m sure there are a handful of others that do similar – hit reply and let us know if you use any.

Nerveburger

Tomorrow I’m going to have blood removed from my body, mixed with citrate, and separated. The red blood cells and citrate will be returned to my body, and everything else donated.

It’s going to take an hour. The plasma taken from my blood could be shipped to Australia to create blood products which are returned to New Zealand for people’s medical treatment, or used in education.

I’m a regular whole blood donor, but recently the New Zealand Blood Service have been on a drive for more Plasma donors.

Plasma can of course come from whole blood donations, but not as much can be gathered, – if the donor loses too many red blood cells, they will become anaemic. By this method of donation, up to 12 times more platelets (which help blood to clot) and 2-3 times more plasma can be donated in one sitting.

Because the components taken from your blood with this kind of donation are faster to regenerate, plasma donors can make donations every two weeks – rather than the three months whole blood donors wait. Find out more about Plasma donations in this PDF.

I’m on the bone marrow list too, being a common Kiwi mix of “a bunch of races” – Maori, Irish, English, who knows what else… I could be a match for someone with a similarly tricky genetic combination. Cancer is horrible and if there’s a chance I can save someone from leukaemia, I’m up for that.

As usual before a donation, I’m nervous.

My left arm has a good spot of scars from my prvious donations (not really that many – this guy reached 500!). Once, when I was doing my second whole blood donation while at high school, I had an unfortunate experience which involved a bloodied white uniform shirt.

The plasters leave a dramatic bruise on my inner arm too, I had a pretty good one for last year’s Webstock and felt like a junkie with my messed up vein.

I don’t like donating blood. You get cookies, which are bribe enough for some, but my real driver for donating is that it’s something real that can be done to help people.

I like to think that if anyone I know was in a car accident or needed a blood transfusion (like my great aunt is having right this moment), I could potentially have helped save their life. Friends of mine are having babies now, and any one of them could need or could have needed blood to save their, or their babies’ life.

One day, I might need blood, and there will only be blood there if people keep donating.

If you’re not a donor already, hop over to the NZ Blood service website and have a read. The donor centre in Epsom is super well appointed, has carparks aplenty and is open late nights every week. The nurses are lovely, and yes, there are bikkies and free wi-fi aplenty.

We Can Create 2011 – Day 1 / Storify

Hosted by The Church, and spread over the 26th and 27th of August, We Can Create is New Zealand’s biggest art and creative industries showcase. This story takes a look at the lineup and catches the response from the crowd on the day.

Read the full story on Storify.

I’ve been experimenting with Storify. I like the idea that it lets you curate and capture information from around the “social web” to form something a little more cohesive. They even stretch so far as to call it a Story.

If you’ve been watching your dashboard avidly, you may have seen this story show as a post here. Storify has a feature which lets you export your story to your Tumblr blog. It’s about half way there – the initial push is great, but if you try to edit it on Tumblr as I did, it all turns to custard.

For the post to be a fair one on Tumblr, I needed to be able to add a break and “read more” link – because it really is very long. I added some tags too, and saved. But this completely ruined the formatting of the post, so I deleted it.

The story basically gives a rough outline of We Can Create, Day 1 – with a particular focus on content generated under the #WeCanCreate hashtag. It was an interesting excercise. The process was pretty simple, and the Storify facility easy to use – this story took two uninterrupted hours to put together.