We all get those emails that include a handful of email addresses of other people.  To CC emails without the recipients consent can be perceived as unethical, but you maybe wondering why people do not complain?  Well the answer to that is quite simple, a lot of people like us use outlook and since BCC is not included as default they think it is normal practice.  It is true!
Here is how to use the BCC in outlook:

First go to compose a new email ready to be sent out i.e. click on new.

Click the arrow next to the options button and from the drop down select Bcc.

Here you can see that the Bcc has automagically appeared.

You can close that email down since the bcc will always appear.  Now just send out an email out and have at least one recipient as normal and the rest as Bcc, everyone receiving the email will only see the email address of the first recipient.

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If the organisation you are with is looking towards Social Media as a medium to promote your services online or start a fundraising scheme or simply just starting, then you may want to check if the usernames on these sites are available.

The right domain name is always important to reflect your website, most charities especially national ones have the domain name that reflects their core branding; obviously you should be doing the same.  Social media is slighly different and although it may not be the core URL that matters when you promote your site, it does matter when you are promoting your services on that particular service.

For instance you want to use youtube as a medium for promotion of videos, you would certainly want to be able to use your brand as the youtube channel.  But if it is not available you obviously want to try another similar username. Now what you do not want to be doing is looking over a dozen or more sites trying to match the right username.

Here is were the feature of Namechk comes into effect.  This a simple but effective tool that will check over 76 social media sites to see if the username is available.  You simply type in a username into the text field, and a nice little ticker will run along each of the sites, within a few seconds you will see sites where your  username is available in a  green colour, and sites whereby the username has already taken appear in red.  To be totally obvious the words ‘taken’ or ‘available’ will appear.

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A co worker accidentally saved one of the files in a docm format which she originally created in Microsoft Office 2003, therefore unable to open without having a lot of gibberish appear on the screen.

There is a simple and easy fix to this problem.  Download the Microsoft compatibity tool.

A frustration that a new start up group or charity can have is keeping up with the technology.  At times there is not sufficient funds to support the purchase of a new PC or laptop and an older model has to used.  This older model will be Windows Xp with Office 2003.  However when you liase or communicate with other services they may send you a document in 2007, and this will not open on your PC.

The dilemma is that the person who sent the document does not know any different to you as to why the document did not open!  They either inherited the machine with Office 2007 or it was installed for them by the IT person and nothing was done further with it.  The problem you both end up having is spending a day trying to figure out what has gone wrong and end up wasting a lot of time sending emails back and forth!

Essentially I would suggest a PC checklist that you should create to make sure that you have all the tech’ in place to make your productivity seamless, at the very least install the Microsoft Compatibility tool.

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All over the internet and especially in the Social Networking arena like LinkedIn, Twitter, facebook, etc you will find bold claims of SEO {search engine optimisation} or SMO {social media optimisation} experts who are willing to lend their expertise to bring you upto speed in the latest development of Social Media.

The truth of the matter is that most are self taught!  And after countless hours on wiki’s, blogs, social networking sites and other social media have skillfully learnt how to utilise these tools to assist and help clients, friends and fellow bloggers/twitters how to harness the full potential of these tools.

But what difference would it make if you were actually had a qualification in Social Media? Not just a Qualification, but a Masters Degree? Not just a Masters Degree, but one of the first people in the world to recieve a Qualification, NO; a Masters Degree in Social Media!

Birmingham City University is delivering the Masters Degree in Social Media.  The course length is only 1 year and the University will provide the support you need to get a work placement.

What would the first thing you do?

You make it go viral! This is a massive opportunity.  Judging by the number of blogs I read today on this subject alone I know it has gone viral, the blogosphere is ignited and thrilled at this advancement.

I tell you what I would do.  A learning log, I would publish a blog that is a learning log of the entire journey.   I would tweet it daily, update the facebook live feed, get a facebook fan page, add it to my LinkedIn page, hell I would get a custom badge and add it to the LinkedIn Page.

In fact, you know what; I think I will!

I will contact Course Director Jon Hickman tommorrow and have a chat with him about this opportunity.   In fact here is the hashtag #masocialmedia that the tracking software can find this post.

I will give you an update some time this week once I have the conversation.  In the meantime I leave you with this youtube video’s:

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Any person who is on Benefits or over the age of 70 can gets these 2 energy saving freebies worth a total of £60 {applies to UK residents only}

The following text explains a little more about the scheme:

British Gas brings you this great- and free - energy saving offer:

“We are offering two useful products to allow you to monitor and reduce your electricity use. If you were to buy them it would cost a combined total of around £60.00.

The Standby Saver looks and works like a multi-plug socket and can help reduce your electricity bill by up to £33.  It’s easy to set up yourself, and once it is in use, will detect when you switch off your TV with the remote control.  It then cuts the power to everything else that is plugged in, saving electricity that would be wasted on standby.  Switch the TV back on and all your appliances are ready to use again.

The Real Time Electricity Monitor shows approximately how much electricity you are using in your home in real time – shown in power or in pounds and pence.  You can check things like how much appliances cost to use, or the savings you could make from switching lights off.  Because you can see the amount of energy you are using, you will feel more in control of how much you are spending”

Both products are simple to use and come with full instructions.

Reply today, to claim yours whilst stock last! All you have to do is complete all your details on the coupon and return to the FREEPOST address provided.  British Gas will deliver them to your door within 28 days.  You do not have to be a Britsh Gas customer to benefit from this offer.

Download the  .doc file print off and fill it in.

british Gas coupon letter {doc}

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Branding should be an important element of any organisation.  No organisation is too small to promote themselves professionally.  Sure the community and the volunteer sector i.e. the 3rd sector is not the same as the commercial sector and most people are attracted by our values and not our corporate looks, but that does not mean we should not make a good impression.  

Branding can be attached to high budget and expensive marketing , but in this wave of social media and inter-connectivity all of this is done away.  There are many examples of small start-ups that have bootstrapped and made massive successes by making sure the branding and marketing is sound.  

I am currently using 5 volunteers to build a brand, the initial stages are focusing on Twitter and Facebook.  Within about 30 days each one of those facebook accounts will have approx’ 2000 friends each and the target for the Twitter account is 10,000 followers.  Each and everyone of these followers are selected from the demograpic’s of the target niche, it is very much so about quantity but quality is essential. 

For your marketing material it is the logo that defines your brand and it is your logo that people people will catch as they glance by for the 3 seconds of concentration that they give to any material before they make the decision to stop and look!

Anna who runs the T3SC health network designed 3 logo’s herself and sent them out to one of her networks to see which one they like the most, one of them came down as a hands on winner; but this simple method of asking your network, tribe, followers, client, or whatever you want to call them to vote is an effective method to get them to connect with your brand.

Here is a strategy that you can apply that not only gets you a logo design at a cost effective price but will also strenghten your brand to those who matter most to your organisation and potentially develop an increase to more loyal followers.  

99designs.com is a design service with a twist. 99designs gathers graphic designers and web designers to this one platform and they enter into a contest.  These contests basically ask designers to submit their work in response to specifications given by companies or individuals. These companies then award prizes to the winner. Those who want designs but have limited budgets could get great work to suit their budget requirements.  

The advantage you have is that you are a not for profit organisation and that in these contests you will receive at least 3-4 designs. 

You should take advantage of your situation.  

Express that this is for a not for profit organisation and that is why you have a tight budget {I suggest $100/£50} and the selected winner will receive credentials on the website and a link to their portfolio.  On average when a contest is approx’ $200 it can get results of 4/5 logo’s but since you may be on a tight budget you would express that you are a not for profit org’ and appeal to peoples good nature.  

Once you have got a selection of logo designs redirect your co-workers, clients, followers, etc to this page to make a vote for one of these.  Get onto facebook, twitter and other social networks to get others to vote.  In fact find the websites and bloggers that are in the same niche and send them an email or a comment about voting on a logo, having bloggers championing your cause can do wonders to get more exposure for your org’.

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I do not need to dwell on the importance of a web presence for your community or voluntary organisations. 

A few months back I supported Hannah in delivering a session on creating a web presence for community groups using Google pages.  It was a successful day and several groups created their first websites.  

During the session I was asked how to go about registering a domain name,  I gave a few links to follow and how to register. 

I want to extend an offer to community and voluntary groups to register a .co.uk domain name for FREE* and you can register as many domains as you want to every 24hrs,  not that you will need to register many but it sometimes helps to have a selection.

To do this simply subscribe to the RSS feed and when you receive an update of a new post to this blog there will be a link that will provide all the information on how to register your domain.

Alternatively subscribe to the RSS feed and then drop me an email to:

contact@socioclick.com

I will respond ASAP with all the information you need.

*Subject to availability.

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Events, conferences and seminars are important driving activites that allow us to network and promote services to a larger audience.

At T3SC we have several events that take place throughout the year and generally we send out booking forms to our networks and anticipate the response.

Online event management services can be an effective way to distribute more information, creating engaging conversations and convert leads to sign up.

Aminado is a service that can cater for such events.  if you are running a event that is free then they also have a service that is free.  If you intend to charge then you can sell the tickets online and be charged for each ticket sold at a rate of 7.5%.  This is expensive compared to other services that are available but the features that they offer are much more.

Although we intend to look at the free service in this post we can look at the costs that would occur if you were to sell tickets:

If a ticket cost £100 then the charges would be thus if you use PayPal as a payment solution:

£100/7.5% = £92.50, £92.50/3.4% + £0.20p {PayPal fee} = £89.15.

lets take a look at a demo of the service:

Amiando Demo from Azzam Sheikh on Vimeo.

The user interface to create your events page is user friendly.  You are present with a page that provides sufficient information on how that page can be edited:

Once signed up you will get instant access to creating an ‘event’,  the page is populated with ‘edit’ buttons for were changes can be made.

Title, background image, dates and times, etc can obviously be changed but the simply interface allows you to edit each area individually.

Since Aminado allows user interaction videos and photos can be uploaded.  This gives an opportunity to get personal and really try to push the boat out for promoting.

The Guest-list feature allows visitors that are signed up to the event be displayed on the front-end.  This could potentially encourage others to sign up once they see the ‘delegates’ that are signing up to your event.  Networking is an a key reason that people attend events and if a particular person is attending this can encourage others to join up.

The wall feature will allow visitors to leave comments, again another tool that can  entice people to engage with the event.  Similar to twitter people can pose questions and your response will be visible for others to see.

Participants can be invited via email or from previous events.  The previous events feature can in the long-term be a powerful tool since the data is stored on the system and with a click can send an email to all previous participants.

There is also a widget that allows you to paste code into a website that will redirect visitors to the events page.

There is a question about why this can no be done on your own website? Well the simple reason is that it is a free service and the entire set-up has been simplified.

The ability to add videos, photos to the existing layout,  have guest-list displayed and a wall feature for commenting without have to consider the modifications of a website; this is all time consuming.

And not forgetting to mention the analytic feature,  which allows you to see statistic about the participants.

here is the demo page I set up looks like without any modifications:

http://www.amiando.com/3rdsector.html

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To create a successful following to your site or blog and then ultimately to convert these following into potential leads that will contribute to your cause is the ultimatum of an online presence.

Blogging is a standard now to creating branding and awareness, and people in general seek out the voices, opinions and expertise of bloggers.   RSS feeds are a way to keep upto date with the latest posts on any of the blogs you intend to follow, What if if you want to achieve more?

What if you want to create your own branding and awareness? what if you want to get the attention of those bloggers that are considered authority in your field?

If you think back to when you were at school about the pupil that is attentive to what the teacher says and is the first to respond, this is the student that gets the attention and develops a bond.

Here is were a smart little tool called CommentSniper comes to play!

CommentSniper offers you a way to build targeted, valuable, strong and lasting traffic to your website at no cost, by tapping into the first mover advantage of blog comment posting.

CommentSniper is a windows desktop tool, and here is how an effective strategy can be executed:

• You find the most popular & influential blogs relating to your industry and niche audience and load them into Comment Sniper for 24/7 monitoring of new articles being posted.
• You then configure the Comment Sniper with your mobile phone number (for optional SMS monitoring notifications), leaving Comment Sniper running in the background and connected to the Internet.
• You’ll receive immediate Desktop Notification and/or an SMS to your mobile phone the second a new post is made on any of the blogs you’ve selected to monitor.
• With the advantage of being alerted (regardless of where you are) of the new post, moments after it has been made, you can then visit and be the first to comment on the new post. Your comment should of course be genuine and add value to the article being discussed… readers will click through to your website more often if you take the blog article and add value to it with your comments.
• Repeat this as often as you can when notifications are received. Not only will you receive an immediate influx of visitors from the leading blogs in your industry, but the more valuable, targeted, and theme relevant links you create to your own website on these blogs, the better your overall search engine rankings will become.

Influential blogs related to your niche industry make new posts all the time, posts that may be read by thousands of people in the months to come. You only have one chance to be the first to comment on that post and ride that unique wave. There are hundreds of such opportunities, and the Comment Sniper gives you the edge to seize them before anyone else does.

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Start up organisations and the voluntary sector are very practical and spend a lot of the time in the field, and although trying to embrace social media and web development the pace that the whole internet culture is evolving is daunting.

Early adopters and developers need to understand that in the wider world and especially in the 3rd sector people  just are not keeping up with the innovation.  I am following the lifstreaming applications the are developed and the lifestream blog is reporting that a number of lifestream services are hitting the dead pool, this usually occurs for two reasons 1) not fullfilling the need 2) marketing, sure I am over simplifying it; but that’s the way it is.

Ben McRedmond a transition student spent a weeks experience with Contrast, an Ireland based web development team.  The interesting thing he mentioned on the Contrast blog that the biggest thing that he learnt from his week experience is that ‘less is more’.  This rings a bell with the mission of 37Signal that created basecamp with the same principal in mind which celebrated its 5th birthday on the 4th of Feb and now 3,000,000 people have Basecamp accounts.

Ben has created a simple web app Picomark that allows you to bookmark a web page and have it displayed to share with others.  Ben has completely stripped all features that you would find with an online bookmarking sharing services i.e the need of tags, search, filter, votings, etc.  In fact the simplification is so brilliant that true to the word of a discovery he made from Eoghan another member of the Contrast team who dislikes registration and login forms you can actually bookmark a page without logging in and it will be displayed on your page!

For me at work this will be a great tool since our offices are on two locations and members work remotely and to create a page that can display bookmarks that can be shared for all us is perfect.   I have made a suggestion to Ben to just add categories, I just hope keeping true to the style it can be done without the login function; since that is what makes this application unique.

Hes the video that explains how it works:

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