Tech Tips for Busy Marketers

Nearly 1,500 people attended ABA Techshow in Chicago, which concludes on Saturday.  Attendance was up, I believe, because of all the buzz about blogging.  It’s the hot thing right now.  By next year everyone will have one, but for now, blogging is the bomb.

One of the programs I enjoyed most was “60 Tips in 60 Minutes” (on April 1, no fooling) featuring the collective tech wisdom of Reid Trautz of Washington, DC, Ellen Freedman of Pennsylvania, Daniel E. Pinnington, of Director of practicePRO in Toronto and Laura Calloway of Alabama.  I gleaned the following tech tips that marketers can put to use.

1. When buying gadgets, read TEST, a review by Wired magazine of 250 products such as phones, cameras, speakers, MP3 players and TVs.  Just go to www.whatsnextnow.com/WIRED12_13TEST and download the 8 MEG PDF. 

2. If you are looking to buy a new cell phone or service, go to www.phonescoop.com – which has news, features, and reviews of 533 phones, and comparisons of carriers.

3. For a more secure Web browser get Firefox 1.01– the browser from Mozilla automatically blocks popups, lets you set multiple home pages and offers tabbed browsing – so you can open multiple sites in different tabs at the same time, allowing you to move quickly from one to another.  It’s free.

4. Beware of metadata: it is automatically created in computer files like Word and Excel.  To see what it covers, click on File | Properties and you’ll see: the document’s date created, last printed, last accessed. If you send the document to someone, they can see all this as well as see deleted data by opening the reviewing screen.  To eliminate metadata use Payne Consulting’s metadata assistant – www.payneconsulting.com.  Better yet, send the file as a PDF.

5. When you donate your computers, be sure to clean the hard drives to avoid accidental disclosure of confidential info.  Use Disk CleanUp, www.gregorybraun.com/cleanup.html; Sanitizer, http://www.infraworks.com/it_sanitizer.htm; DataEraser; www.ontrack.com or Darik’s Boot and Nuke, http://dban.sourceforge.net.

6. Don’t be fooled by spyware disguised as anti-spyware software, which is actually spyware itself and will add more malicious software to your computer without your knowing it.  See http://www.spywarewarrior.com/rogue_antispywarehtm#products or www.doxdesk.com.

7. Email is inherently unreliable. Don’t assume your messages arrived even if they don’t bounce.  Don’t assume that delivery went through even if you got a delivery receipt.  Don’t respond with hostility because you assume your email was ignored – chances are it never arrived.  If you send something mission-critical, make sure you ask whether it arrived safe and sound.

8. Use a desktop search engine to find any Word, PowerPoint, Emails, or Excel files on your computer.  Versions are offered by Google, Copernic and Yahoo. (Google comes in 3^rd in the reviews.)

9. It’s very difficult to proofread your own writing.  So try text-to-speech conversion, which reads your work to you so you can catch proofreading errors faster. Visit www.readplease.com for more information. There is a free version; the full version costs $60.

10. Get a satellite high speed Internet connection for your laptop, desktop or PDA at www.ricochet.com, when you absolutely, positively must get online.

11. Use Google Image Search to find a picture or graphic of just about anything.  The best free online clip art, including photos, cartoons, animation and sound, is found at Microsoft Office Online Clip Art at http://office.microsoft.com/clipart.

12. You can recover lost data files, even if Windows doesn’t recognize the drive.  Use the software tools to recover your data from GetDataBack at www.runtime.org/gdb.htm and Recover My Files www.recovermyfiles.com.

13. Buy a USB memory thumb drive.  It provides quick, reliable storage that fits in your pocket, permits file transfer, spot backup, offers capacities from 128MB to 2GB and costs from $20 to a few hundred dollars.

14. View the full path to Word Files, rather than merely the file name (which can be hard to locate later on).  Open MS Word, right click on the task bar, select Customize | Commands | Web, left click on "Address” and drag it onto the task bar.

15. Printing for road warriors: buy the Canon BJC-85 portable printer with 720 x 360 dpi printing, only $290.

16. Surf the Web offline.  In Internet Explorer, go the desired Web site, select Favorites, select Add to Favorites, select Make Available Offline, select Customize.   Follow the wizard prompts to decide how much get down to three levels. Select OK to synchronize the website for offline viewing. The more levels you select, the more disk space you use and the longer it takes to copy. Remember to unselect Make Available Offline to free up disk space later when you no longer need the material offline.

17. Have you Googled yourself lately? You need to know how the rest of the world sees you through the eyes of the Web.  You will find good and bad stuff about yourself, so make it a weekly habit.  Remember to search variations of your name in quotes.

Comments

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[victor]

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