I would love for some folks to check this out and give me a little feedback. Thanks.

It is in the valley that we slog through the lush grass and rich soil, learning and becoming what enables us to summit life’s next peak. – Jones, The Noticer

The situation in which you find yourself is fraught with difficulty, yes. It is also piled high with benefits. – Jones, The Noticer

Remember, whatever you focus upon, increases. – Jones, The Noticer

What is it about me that other people would change if they could? – Jones, The Noticer

These are a few lines from the latest book by Andy Andrews titled The Noticer. And this is just in the first chapter. I knew I was in for some good stuff.

If you don’t know Andy Andrews, you should. He is quickly becoming one of America’s most influential and in-demand speakers. Speaking for four different US presidents certainly gives him credibility as someone with something important to say. Having read his previous best-seller, The Traveler’s Gift, I could appreciate his easy style and masterful storytelling. He draws you in and takes you on a journey; teaching, guiding and providing wisdom like a kind and loving father that is tough at the same time. I started reading The Noticer with the belief that this was but another great story with a great message. And it is. But it’s so much more. It’s real. This is Andy’s story. And it will blow you away.

Check it out. You can purchase it at Amazon.com by clicking on the book cover to the left. you can also purchase The Traveler’s Gift by clicking on it in the Amazon Books ad in the sidebar on the right.

If you aren’t familiar with TED, let me encourage you to get on iTunes and subscribe to the podcast. Lot’s of great thinkers sharing lots of great ideas. I recently watched this talk given by Clay Shirkey titled How Social Media Can Make History and thought, T”this guy gets it and lays it out in such a way that helps others understand it.” Take a few minutes, if you can, and watch this.

Any questions or comments? Did this make you think about how you can use social media in your business? If you need any assistance or would like some help, contact us over at Digital Design Solutions.

What would happen if we put less attention on organizing relationships and more attention on giving people something to organize around? For example, what if we focused on serving opportunities? Would people naturally gather around those initiatives to serve others? What if we focused on the content we were generating to help people better understand the Bible and its application to our daily lives? Would people naturally organize around that content for conversations together? And what if we embraced social networking to encourage people to find their own friends…like they’re already doing? Would people initiate their own relational connections? 

via The New Traditional Church: Community | TonyMorganLive.com.

Excellent questions by Tony Morgan over at his blog. Questions that hopefully get folks thinking about church and how we do it. And hopefully thinking about how we can do it better.

I like the direction he’s headed with these questions and I like challenging the status quo. I think there are quite a few churches that are leading the way in this regard, but I truly believe we are just scratching the surface of a radical change that is taking place in how church and organized religion is practice in this country. What do you think?

Twitter Basics

If you had no idea what Twitter was walking into this article, we’re going to start you off at the very beginning. To sign up for Twitter, go to twitter.com and click on “Get Started – Join!”. Fill out the information and voila – you have your own Twitter account. I set up two accounts; one on my personal name, and one for my business. It’s important to grab your names before someone else does, even if you don’t plan on using the account for a while.

via The Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter | Webdesigner Depot.

For all my friends and family that are still unsure about “this Twitter thing”, here is a great guide that spells it out for you. Let’s call it Twitter 101 and class is in session. Enjoy. And you can follow me here.

The market is not free if it is not free to fail

via The Tragedy of the Commons | Krypted.

Excellent words and valuable insight by a colleague. I once heard, during the Clinton administration, from a Cuban immigrant, that he saw America “slouching towards Communism”. If we were slouching then, we’ve downright laid ourselves out prostrate on the floor with the current administration’s actions. Take a look at the post by Charles. What do you think?

WPtouch 1.8: Coming Soon

We’ve also been hard at work on WPtouch 1.8, the next update to our popular WordPress mobile plugin. The update will offer a couple significant new features, along with solving some bugs that cropped up in the 1.7.x series. Look for it out in the next couple days.

via BraveNewCode’s New Look, WPtouch 1.8 Coming Soon ? BraveNewCode Inc..

Powered by . Mp3

[audio http://dial2do.com/l/fe544dd4-c570-4ac5-ab6b-bc9f9dfc205c.mp3 ]

So, everything above here is the post as it came from Dial2Do. I edited the word “WordPress” in both spots as well as added an “s” to the word “post” in the next to last sentence. Potentially very cool, since this also adds a link back to the actual recording of me speaking my entry.

We’re off to a good start this year with my two and a half year old business. We’re really making great strides in developing strategic relationships with the Apple Stores’ Business Sales Departments as well as reworking and improving our web presence and making the most of the Web2.0 tools that can help us promote ourselves and our services, or, simply put, our brand. One of the tools we’ve found that has a lot of promise is HootSuite. HootSuite is a web-based Twitter client that allows for managing multiple accounts and also provides metrics. Why are either of these things beneficial to a business, or more specifically, what is it that we hope to accomplish by using HootSuite and these features.

First, we decided to officially set-up a company Twitter account, which is located here. Please feel free to follow us if you’re on Twitter. And if you’re not using it, you might want to check it out. Second, we have a new initiative called StudioD.tv which we are billing as the virtual classroom of DDS. We will be posting screencasts with tips and tricks on Mac software (both from Apple and third parties) as well as tips and information on how to make the most of your online social experience on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and many others. Third, we also set-up a Twitter account for StudioD.tv, which is here. Also, both Jay and I have our own personal Twitter accounts, wkeving and skeggsjp. To top all that off, we each have our own personal blogs (Kevin’s here and Jay’s here) as well as the main company blog, for which you can get a sneak peek at our new design here. Now I don’t expect you to be keeping count, but between us, there are 4 blog feeds and 4 Twitter feeds. This doesn’t even include our personal Facebook accounts, LinkedIn accounts and our company page on Facebook. (Did you even know you could set up a company page on Facebook? For Free? And post content and send event invitations and update your customers and fans with timely news and info? If not, be watching for an upcoming episode at StudioD.tv that will show you how to do this.) So, you might think I forgot my own question, which has happened before. But, don’t worry. I’m still on point here.

What we hope to accomplish by using HootSuite is a more centralized place for managing our communications. We set up an account, using our company name and proceeded to add each of the company twitter accounts and our own personal accounts. Now, either of us can use the streamlined interface to “tweet” from our personal account or “tweet” from either of the company accounts. Where it gets really useful is we’ve also set up the blog feeds, or RSS feeds, from both company blogs, The DDS Blog and StudioD.tv as well as our personal blogs. What HootSuite does with these feeds is pretty cool. HootSuite will check periodically to see if the feed has been updated, meaning we’ve posted new content. If we have, then HootSuite will automatically “tweet” a message to our followers letting them know that we’ve posted new content. Where it gets even more useful is in the fact that HootSuite will take the link for our new post, and shorten it to a very tiny URL. This helps keep our “tweets” short, but more importantly, HootSuite can now track how many times a link was clicked. This lets us know which messages generated the most traffic for our websites. The more traffic, the more likely we are to establish ourselves as experts in what we’re doing and hopefully generate more leads for business.

So, once I post this blog entry, within an hour HootSuite will know and will “tweet” a link for the “Twitterverse” (I know, I didn’t come up with the names). Users will click on it to come read my brilliantly crafted post. Ok, the brilliantly crafted may be stretching it. The advantage to a user or organization is this:  create your content once, but distribute that information across many networks at the same time. Consider this, a TV show airs on only one network, unless you’re the President giving a news conference. Well I’m not the President, but I play one on the internet and now I can have my message broadcast to many networks at once. Seriously, our goal is to utilize these tools to distribute our message, or our brand, to as many networks as we can in hopes of generating more traffic and subsequently more business.

Next time, I’ll tell you how Facebook and LinkedIn are automatically updated. Keep checking StudioD.tv also for screencasts that show you.