Infographic by- GO-Gulf.com Web Design Company

In the meantime, if you are staying with gmail, here are a couple of alternatives. None of them were good enough to make me stay in the web interface though.

How to cope with the Gmail redesign.

Gmelius is a poly-browser extension that proposes a better and cleaner Gmail™ inbox. - Addon for most browsers

Cleaner Gmail - Extension for Chrome

NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 09: In this photo illustration, the photo-sharing app Instagram fan page is seen on the Facebook website on the Apple Safari web browser on April 9, 2012 in New York City. Facebook Inc. is acquiring photo-sharing app Instagram for approx. $1 billion. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

to what is happening. Yes, people will keep visiting web sites, but the world of the web and mobile is becoming about products.

PS: I think he is off the mark on PHP, but that is a discussion for another day.

It used to be that web people “published websites” — like the site you’re reading now. But today people who work on the web “manage products.” Im not sure when that changed, but clearly a memo went around. At one time, in the nineties, everyone was a “webmaster,” then for a while they were “site editors” or “site managers” and now theyre “product managers.” A website — even one as simple as Twitter — is no longer a singular thing; it’s a multitude of things from all over the place.

via Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out — Daily Intel.

Image via Wikipedia

fake, but in fact, personal branding is just a way to make sure you are telling people what is great about you. The key is to keep it real and truthful, so that your personal branding reflects who you really are and what value you can provide to others.

Personal branding doesn’t only have to be about branding for public speakers or celebrities. For example when I teach my MBA students at Florida International University, I teach them that there is no escaping managing their personal brand online and setting expectations in the workplace is crucial.

Gary Vaynerchuk is the focus of this article and he is a great example of someone that leveraged who he truly is into a powerful personal brand. He is rough and outspoken and a little crazy, but rather than try to push a fake personal brand, he has used his personal brand to turn the world of wine selling upside down.

What is your personal brand and what personal stories will help your portray your personal brand. Start with what you do and what you are best at and then get into asking other people what they see as your personal brand. This is a crucial step, because more often than not our personal image of ourselves is not what people see when they think of us, so it is imperative that you get the truth from others. It can be a difficult and painful step, but if you want to succeed at promoting yourself, then you must understand how people interpret and see you.

Tied into personal branding is understanding who you want to be and soul searching to determine if what you are is what you ultimately want to be. Imagine yourself now as you want to be and believe in that vision and that it is already clearly now and change will be a much easier process.

I have a marketing and personal branding client here in Miami that I am coaching, that presents himself as a dumb ole boy from Alabama, but he is brilliant in business. He uses self-deprecating terms about how he thinks he is on a personal level to make people feel more comfortable with him. What he means by that though is that he isn’t afraid to admit what he doesn’t know and that is one of the key successes to personal branding. Being able to be honest with yourself and your prospects about what you know and don’t know will save you a lot of hassles later. Too many people spend too much time trying to brand themselves into a corner, that they don’t really shine and then they have to spend all of their time trying to recover when people understand who they are.

What is your personal brand? Who are you?

Think about a few key stories that define who you are today. Write them down. These can be simple things that you remember from your childhood or entertaining stories from your adult life.  For example, one of the questions people often ask me is how I manage to do so many different things TV, writing, speaking, parenting. I could reply that Im just gifted with an unusual amount of energy, but the truth is that working is something I started very early on in my life.

via Mastering The Uncomfortable Art Of Personal Branding | Fast Company.

Related articles

• Personal Branding Your Way Through A Career Pivot By Rebecca Rapple on the Personal Branding Blog (leavingthepublicsector.net)
• Should Companies Embrace Personal Branding? (brandmc2.com)
• Personal Branding: When To Call In The Pros (personalbrandingblog.com)
• The Urgent Necessity for Personal Branding (foodstaycation.com)
• Return of the personal branding (pbadvisor.org)

Image via Wikipedia

things I like about Windows 8, but as a highly technical user able usually figure out just about anything in an application or an operating system, Windows 8 is a hot mess. There are a number of things to like about it, but they are far outweighed by the number of things I just can’t get past.

The number one problem is that user adoption is going to be abysmal. The interface and it’s mechanisms for interaction and how to get around will be completely foreign to everyone as they are to me. I still cannot figure out how to do numerous things in this OS and am constantly confused and irritated by the experience. Microsoft has tried to take a tablet interface and make it into a desktop OS and it just is not going to work. Yes, people can eventually learn it, but in the end I think more will give up and quit before they do.  In fact, I think this will actually increase the sales of Macs and help Apple.

• Right clicks no longer function as they should in the browser(Internet Explorer) as they should and as we are used to.
• Moving around and calling up interface actions to change settings, move between apps, and do just about anything else, require keystroke combinations that are not intuitive and completely different from everything we are used to after years of using Window based products.
• Jumping back and forth between the Metro experience and the traditional desktop experience is confusing and throws off the user experience.
• Because it is a tablet based experience, I am unable to drag a “window” from one of my monitor screens to another and my extended display will ONLY show me the traditional Windows desktop.
• Finding my running apps requires a strange left upper window click and then a drag down to actually see what is running.
• When I am in the Windows 7 interface, my other running apps are not in the Tack Bar.
• This is a beta, but Internet Explorer and the email client crash constantly.
• Figuring out how to slide apps in and out was confusing and difficult.

Bottom line is, that in order to actually gain anything from using this operating system, I have to completely retrain myself by reading online help and other articles about how to make things happen. It is completely anti-intuitive and I think it was a huge mistake to try to adapt a tablet experience into a keyboard and mouse experience and expect people to understand what is going on when it is completely different from what they are used to. Windows 8 is going to give IT departments an excuse to try out Macs and corporate adoption of this OS is going to be abysmal.

Are there any positives? It’s pretty and the immersive experience of full screen apps is a great way to work, so I am going to start using my browser and other apps in full screen mode in Windows 7.

This is a really sad turn of events. I was very excited for Microsoft when Windows 7 was released, because it finally seemed like they got it right in an OS and there is nothing to say that they couldn’t do much of the cool things they have done, but still retain the Windows interface metaphors and still give us Metro as our “start” menu, but instead they are forcing users to COMPLETELY change the way they are used to computing and it’s going to be a disaster for them. Here’s the ultimate test: would I install this for my Mother or my wife to use? No way and if they buy a new PC with it installed, I will probably wipe out the computer and install Windows 7, because I don’t want to have to retrain them and spend all my time supporting their learning curve.

I can certainly see how this could be usable on a single screen tablet and it’s probably a fantastic experience. It may even be usable for people transitioning from Windows phones and tablets to Windows 8 PCs, but for the majority of users it will be a no go.

I really wanted to like it, but I will be taking back my partition right after I post this and start using my apps in Windows 7 in full screen mode. Microsoft blew it and it could be a disaster for their bottom line unless they make it up in tablet installs.

Related articles

• Windows 8 Consumer Preview downloaded 1m times (techradar.com)
• Listen up Google: Here’s what Windows 8 can teach you about tablets (venturebeat.com)
• Windows 8: Sugar coating on Microsoft’s hard-to-swallow tablet (go.theregister.com)
• Windows 8: Last of the big bang consumer releases? (news.cnet.com)
• Windows 8 Consumer Preview: What Do You Think [OPEN THREAD] (mashable.com)
• Windows 8 Consumer Preview: ‘Windows Frankenstein’ (infoworld.com)
• Windows 8 Consumer Preview business features revealed (slashgear.com)

pregnancy test - negative (Photo credit: slayerphoto)

How Companies Learn Your Secrets – NYTimes.com.

This is an absolutely fascinating article on how marketers in large companies figure out brilliant ways to target specific people at specific times in their lives. It is also an incredible insight into how we work as humans and for average marketers like us, it also gives us something to think about when we are releasing a new product and how we can best approach adoption of that product, by being where people already are in their daily habits.

The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop — cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges. What’s unique about cues and rewards, however, is how subtle they can be. Neurological studies like the ones in Graybiel’s lab have revealed that some cues span just milliseconds. And rewards can range from the obvious (like the sugar rush that a morning doughnut habit provides) to the infinitesimal (like the barely noticeable — but measurable — sense of relief the brain experiences after successfully navigating the driveway). Most cues and rewards, in fact, happen so quickly and are so slight that we are hardly aware of them at all. But our neural systems notice and use them to build automatic behaviors.

Habits aren’t destiny — they can be ignored, changed or replaced. But it’s also true that once the loop is established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making. So unless you deliberately fight a habit — unless you find new cues and rewards — the old pattern will unfold automatically.

Are you asking customers to change their habits without layering on top of their existing ones?

 In one project, 256 members of a health-insurance plan were invited to classes stressing the importance of exercise. Half the participants received an extra lesson on the theories of habit formation (the structure of the habit loop) and were asked to identify cues and rewards that might help them develop exercise routines.

The results were dramatic. Over the next four months, those participants who deliberately identified cues and rewards spent twice as much time exercising as their peers. Other studies have yielded similar results.

The most compelling thing about this article is how Target could find out when women were pregnant and when they were due, without looking at public records and without them saying anything about it.

Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

Now go read the entire article, because I guarantee this one will really make you think.

Great set of questions to use with Facebook, but really for all of your marketing and relationship strategies.  Are you asking your clients the right questions everyday about your brand, your marketing, your product, and your services?

1. Would you rather drink ACME-Cola from a straw or straight from the can?
“Would you rather…” questions provide instant, succinct insight, which is great when you need quick customer feedback to help you make a decision.  Just think of how many decisions your brand makes in a day that could benefit from a little customer input!  Your community of fans can provide instant feedback, so why not ask them!

This is the slide show for the most recent version of the class I teach at Florida International University’s MBA program called Building a Professional Personal Brand and Image. This isn’t your standard “personal brand” pitch though, but rather it’s more about how to identify who you  are, what you are really about, and to understand that all human interaction is about perceptions. It also contains practical tips for job hunting, resume production, networking, presentation, social media, and self marketing. Tried to film it, but had some technical issues that would present an opportunity for an app….

You can see it embedded below or you can watch it full screen here.

Building a Professional Image / Personal Brand

people to have their existence validated. It is a central component to being successful in marketing on Facebook and why I always tell my web marketing clients in Miami to be sure they understand, that marketing in general is never about you, but rather about me – your customer. If my interests, my needs, and my ego are at the core of your marketing then if your product is worth a damn – you win!

Yay me! I’ve been validated…

Everyone just wants to belong, right? In the online aspect of our lives, Facebook offers us that virtual sense of belonging. The study claims that Facebook meets two basic social needs: 1 the need to belong and 2 the need for self-presentation. Self-esteem and self-worth are associated closely with the first basic social need, to belong.

via Study: Why Do People Use Facebook?.

And in terms of time spent, social networking consumes more time than going to church; communicating by phone, e-mail, and snail mail; and exercising. “It’s just a little less than shopping and child care,” Colony said.

Today’s status quo won’t last, he predicted.

“We are in a bubble for social startups,” he said. When it bursts, “this is going to sweep away some of the nonsense, like FourSquare. We are going to move to a post-social world that’s a little like the Web in the year 2000. A lot of companies launched, but they did not survive.”

The next wave of social services will be “more efficient and more time-saving,” he said.

via Social networking’s salad days are ending, Forrester says | Deep Tech – CNET News.