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Let me explain why. Twitter is a great tool for you to firstly find out what is being "spoken" about 'out there' in areas that interest you and secondly, promoting your own views and products through conversation. This is a very important point. Twitter is not a one way feed of information. It is not about sending out a weekly newsletter with "information" for the potential readers. It is about a two-way (or 20-way if you get involved in a twitter party) interaction. Not only do you get to provide your views, products, services to a large number of people around the globe, but you get to converse with them on how they feel about your views, products or services often times providing constructive feedback. And the same goes for you.

I have come across interesting blog articles, like 'Unplan your business' (original article here), that I would NEVER have found through the usual Google searches. I have interacted with other twitter users in conversations that are of a very personal and deep nature that have improved everyone's understanding of the topic at hand or at least provided a new perspective.

In order to be able to make sure that I keep the brand integrity of our business, I have separate accounts for myself, @RozBatson and for Neural Networks Consulting, @NNConsulting. My personal account is all about my interests and passions - running, motherhood, women in business, social media, wine and a myriad of other things. Meanwhile the @NNConsulting account is all about what Neural Networks Consulting does in the areas of performance based leadership, business strategy, sales and recruitment effectiveness programs. I send out sales tips, leadership blogs, recruitment advice, inspirational quotes, information on our learnings from current programs with some of our clients, strategy tips and theories, and the like.

Here and there I let our followers know about upcoming public programs such as the dates for our next Neuro Linguistic Programming Practitioner course. I retweet (sending on other people's tweets) blogs I have read that are aligned with our organisation philosophy, quotes I like, links to sites that provide particular services we support. I also get involved in twitter conversations on topics such as leading a strong life, or leading for change, and having a life on purpose. I have also had many experiences of people retweeting what I have said to their networks creating a ripple effect of influence that cannot be underestimated.

From the statistics, it looks like I have increased traffic to our website which can only be a good thing as we work on improving our online shop and available products. Twitter is a little world inside the larger online world. The like minded people that you can connect with in 140 characters (or less) is incredibly inspiring and can be a hell of a lot of fun, not to mention brilliant for building your brand and your business. If you want to talk more about my experience - happy to chat. You can have a read through one of my favourite blogs here

Six years later (that's now), Google plans to have about 10 million volumes of digital copies of various publications by 2015. It's obvious that many authors and publishers will raise an eyebrow (or maybe both) at this. So how does Google plan to keep them all quiet? With money of-course!

The court settlement requires Google to set up a $125 million Books Rights Registry. Authors have an option of opting in to be a part of the registry, giving the publication rights to Google. The authors would get a 'one-off' chunk from the $125 million but no proceeds from the sales of their publication thereafter. The authors who don't like the whole idea MUST opt out before January 2010 to ensure Google doesn't scan any of their publications.

If you're an author, the choice seems fairly simple - opt out and keep the right to yourself. However, knowing how Google web-services become popular, the authors stand a fair chance of losing out on sales anyway. Although Google is kind of breaching copyright laws by making money from someone else's work, they are making the world's information "universally accessible and useful" - one of their original mottos (ironically, the other one was "Don't be evil").

So if you're Dan Brown and you know people will pay for every book you write (even if they're just about destroying historical monuments to solve a puzzle), you'd opt out and keep your work away from the Stanford graduates. However, if you're an average literature graduate trying to make a name for yourself, you'd opt in to the Books Rights Registry to make a few quick bucks, get some free PR and help keep the world's information universally accessible and useful.

Domai.nr
So you've come up with a funky domain name for your next website. You pitch the idea to your Marketing team - they give you a thumbs up. You get the green signal from the Finance guys and then finally, you brief your "web people". They give you a quote and you do a good job convincing the Finance department and justifying that extra zero in the cost to your Board of Directors.

The next day the "web people" tell you the domain name is not available. You heart sinks like a well-known ship hit by an iceberg. You're broken, tormented and distressed.

There are heaps of tools that tell you if a domain is available or not, almost every domain registrar provides a basic online tool for this. But none of these "basic tools" compare to Domai.nr, which not only shows you availability but also suggests how you could stretch that creativity a little bit more to end up with the perfect name for your website. You can choose between the usuals (.com, .net, .org and so on) or get adventurous with Top Level Domain (TLD) to end up with something like "mo.jo"

It's fun, it's cool and yes - it's FREE.

Widgetbox
Widgetbox makes the complexities of sharing your ideas and experiences on the web simple. They make it fun and easy for anyone to turn their content into dynamic web apps that can be shared on just about any website, including: Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, and iGoogle.

Tumblr
"Follow me", "Latest Tweets", "Follow us on Twitter"...let's face it, the little blue-bird has done well in four years. Almost everyone is on Twitter and the rest are following suit.

If you want to be more than just a follower (no pun intended), you'd flip the bird and get something else, like Tumblr. Go on, give it a try. However, it does come with a price - it's addictive. Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors, to your theme's HTML.

AboutUs
Wikipedia meets YellowPages. An interesting concept, their mission statement says it all - "To build the world's most comprehensive, collaborative guide to the best places on the world wide web. We invite everyone to engage with our wiki: whether you're an organization, business, non-profit or individual. Come see why the knowledge of many makes us one of the fastest-growing and most powerful websites on the internet today. It's easy to participate because you can edit our pages!"

So basically, a free web-directory plus wiki. A source of free PR which is easy to edit.

ChromaticSites
A comprehensive checklist for websites.

HTML to PDF
Simply put, this is an online tool that converts any HTML webpage to a PDF document for FREE.

Fonolo
Calling up customer care is something I dread. They ask you to key in a series of secret numeric combinations and make you talk to the voice-recognition lady, who makes you repeat yourself three times before admitting that she can't understand what you just said. In short, nobody enjoys walking you through the convoluted maze of customer service.

Enter Fonolo, the good guys who'll make the call for you, wait till they get a 'real person' on the other end and then put them through to you. A simple and convenient tool for any business that requires a customer support system.

DropBox
Undoubtedly the most useful online tool for the 'well-organised'. Dropbox is a virtual online 'box' where you can 'drop' your stuff. You can use it to backup your data, access it from anywhere on any computer, sync it with a folder on your hard-drive and enable version control.

The FREE package gives you 2GB, which is a good start. A very useful tool for people who take work home (and bring home to work)

Appointy
Appointy is an advanced web-based scheduling software tool which allows you to manage your clients and market your services by speeding up your word-of-mouth publicity.
You can be growing your business and gaining new clients 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year; even while you sleep or go to the gym. Organize your appointment book, staff, services, etc., from anywhere in the world.

Appointy will keep you up to date with real-time updates while you are out and about or just away from your desk. A very useful tool for people who provide services which require prior appointments.

Really addictive game
Now that you've got some great tools that will get you organised and save you heaps of time and effort, you can afford to let loose with this really addictive game. Go on, give it a try...I've done it for over two minutes :)

When you pay $3 million for 30 seconds of fame, you have to do it well and you have to do it fast. You may say they're two completely different things which cannot happen at the same time but Google seems to have thought otherwise. Instead of going berserk on the budget (which Google could have easily done), they went minimal and highlighted almost every feature in their flagship search engine - organic keyword search, spell check, corrections, Google translate, definitions, Google suggest, I'm feeling Lucky, Google maps and even flight schedules. Fifteen lucky companies including CEA (a global education firm with a study-abroad program), Cabaret cafe near the Louvre and the Cacao de Chocolat in Paris got a free hitchhike thanks to Google.



These companies would've never thought of shelling out the media cost involved in a Super Bowl airing but the freebie was most welcome, especially for CEA. The Monday after Super Bowl, CEA recorded a five fold increase in traffic and got more visits than they ever got in a single day. Interestingly, most searches were for the Paris program, which was featured in the ad itself.

So what should you take from all this? Call up your Marketing manager and ad agency to order a $3 million Super Bowl ad? Well, yes if you really want. The point here is that Google may have taken some beating in terms of privacy infringements and trying to take over the world last year, but at the end of the day, they're the best out there and people trust them. Most of your existing and prospective customers ask Google for suggestions, directions and help. So if Google doesn't know you, chances are your customers won't find you.

So instead of calling your Marketing team, get hold of your IT department and ask them what they know about bounce rate. If they say "it's how many times a ball returns to your hand when you drop it on a hard surface" try getting hold of someone better or Google the definition or better yet - call us!

Bicycles Inc.

Pro-motion Bikes