Daddy and me.

If you’re like me, you’re got albums of old photos tucked away showing baby pictures, high school and college graduation, wedding pictures, the birth of your children and other significant events. But nobody other than you ever looks at them — and you only see them once every five or 10 years when you’re cleaning out boxes or moving.

Now there’s an online record of all the important dates in your life — a place where you can upload photographs, your thoughts about important events, like a journal, and display this record to your friends and family. And you’ve already begun this record and only have to add, change or remove some information to make it the story of your life.

Would such a record be fun for you and your friends to look back on? Would it be a valuable digital record for your children and other family members?

This is exactly what Facebook is doing with Timeline that replaces the profile page, but it’s wider and a lot more visual. You will have a home for all the great stories you’ve already shared and the ones you are yet to create. If you haven’t enabled it yet, what are you waiting on? Eventually Facebook will automatically replace everyone’s profile page, so don’t be timid! Adopt! It’s great!

Unlike before, your stories don’t disappear when you add new things. Everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook is there — yes, even those things you should have thought twice about — but no worries! You can delete them. You can also fill in special events in your life all the way back to your birth, forming a complete timeline of your life, if you want.

Over time, your profile has evolved to better reflect how you actually communicate with your friends. Now you can can share photos of what you did last weekend, and updates about how you feel today.

As always, you’ll want to think about security with your Timeline. There may be dates and events that you don’t want everyone to know, therefore consider carefully your security settings and/or what you post to Timeline. Remember that you can create lists in Facebook and grant those lists of people rights to see specific content that others cannot see. This may be one of those things that you will only want trusted friends and family members to access.

There are predictions that Facebook will soon introduce a variation of Timeline for business pages, providing yet another storytelling option for businesses, nonprofits and brands of all sorts. One thing is for certain — don’t get comfortable with Facebook, because it will always change!

Facebook Timeline allows everyone’s personal story to unfold from birth to present day. is a post from: The Buzz Factoree

Get these free social media magazines with just a click!

It was only a matter of time until somebody turned social media into  magazines. A company called Worldmedia has done it, and the distribution model is free and online.

There are four magazines, called Facebook & Business, Tweeting & Business, LI & Business and The Big G & Business. You can subscribe for them all by entering your email and one click. When you do, you then receive an email and a link to a free, 351-page e-book, “The New Entrepreneur’s Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know to Start and Run Your Own Business.”

The magazines, with a circulation of 13.8 million, are supported by advertising. The editorial content includes actionable, how-to kind of information that teaches business people how to use these powerful services to enhance their businesses.

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Free social media magazines debut (with a free downloadable book for entrepreneurs to boot)! is a post from: The Buzz Factoree

This cool pen helps you recall details by recording every word of your conversation.

A colleague recently introduced me to new technology that I’m finding extremely helpful with note taking. It’s called the Echo Smartpen, and it is a pen and recording device in one.

To confirm your notes, it comes with special paper that allows you to play back your recording by touching printed commands at the bottom of the sheet. You can control the speed and even the location of the playback with the touch of the pen. After you’re finished taking notes, it transfers your notes and audio to your computer and recharges your Smartpen using a standard cable connection.

A digital version of your notes and audio come to life as an interactive document called a Pencast. Pencasts allow you
to hear, see and relive notes exactly as they were captured. Then you can use Livescribe Connect to send Pencasts to people and destinations of your choice, such as email, Facebook or Evernotes, all from your paper or Livescribe Desktop.

There are some amazing apps that come with the pen — draw a piano scale or guitar and play the instruments on paper with the touch of the pen! There are other apps that transcribe your written notes into text, plus dictionary, thesaurus, foreign language, game and other apps. The pen is available with various storage capacities, ranging from 2GB to 8GB. I paid $150 for my 4GB pen at Best Buy, but Amazon has them for a better deal — their 4GB is $132 and the 8GB is $166.66 vs. the standard $199. The smaller 2GB is close to the original price of $99 at $96.87. You may want to get the special notebooks and extra cartridges, as well, though you can also print out the special paper from the Internet.

I wish this device had been available when I was a newspaper reporter — it would have been invaluable when trying to conduct interviews and get every word down perfectly, and nobody would ever have been able to accuse me of misquoting them! Students are reportedly using these to enhance their grades, since they can take fewer notes and concentrate on the lectures. I’m still having fun discovering all of the uses!

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A cool pen that 007 would be proud to carry — and will make your work life easier. is a post from: The Buzz Factoree

This creepy Facebook site is a reminder to be careful about what you upload -- and always check your privacy settings.

Just when you were getting used to the idea of Facebook having your personal information out there for the world to see comes Take This Lollipop, a hot new Web site that is making the rounds just in time for Halloween. It plays on people’s fears by showing a sweaty, twitchy guy, sitting in a darkened room, using a computer to nose around Facebook. And get this — he’s not just looking at anybody’s Facebook page, he’s looking at YOUR page.

You have to give permission for the site to interact with your page, and they promise that the information is not stored or used for any other purpose and that it is 100-percent safe, but when you see it up on the screen with YOUR pictures used in the video sequence, it’s enough to make you want to delete your profile …. almost.

Jason Zada, a television and music director who works in Los Angeles and San Francisco, is behind the site. His previous work includes interactive campaigns such as the “Elf Yourself” videos for Office Max and commercials for Ray-Ban and Coupons.com. He told The New York Times that the site was just a fun side project, collaborating with a cinematographer, an actor and a developer to polish the final product. He insisted that it was not a stealthy attempt to garner attention for a brand or product.

In the first 24 hours of the site being open to the public, more than 300,000 people gave access to their Facebook accounts. He thinks that it is attracting attention because of its novelty, but also because it taps into broader concerns that people have about how their personal information could be misused. He says the site is intended purely for entertainment, and a fun, seasonal thrill.

Thrill or not, it’s a reminder to be careful about what you post on Facebook and other social media sites. Never post your address, and consider how you adjust your privacy settings. You can allow only your close friends and family, for example, to see your photographs by putting your friends in lists and restricting access.

Caution: preview this Web site/video before allowing children to see it.

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A scary Facebook story starring YOU … just in time for Halloween! is a post from: The Buzz Factoree

I have coffee with Galia Kouzmanova, managing partner at TheSmallBizCFO, at Fair Grounds Coffee in Norfolk after meeting on LinkedIn. We found several potential opportunities for collaboration. Make the time - it's worth it!

Frequently I hear chatter or read blogs that question whether social media really works to produce results. Bottom line? Like anything else, you get out of it what you put into it. If you expect to make direct sales by simply increasing the number of your Facebook friend to 5,000 or sending tweets every five minutes, you will be disappointed.

Social media has many benefits, including branding, awareness building, customer service responding, and moving contacts up on the know-like-trust ladder. And, yes, in some cases, people have been able to use social media to drive direct sales, but that is not typical for offline businesses. So where’s the benefit for the rest of us?

You have to take it to the next level. Once you’ve made a contact online, you’ve got to go offline. Make an appointment to meet for coffee or lunch. See where it leads. You can’t meet everyone in person that you meet online, but you will get much better results with your social media investment if you set a reachable goal of selecting one person to meet or two people to phone per week.
Have a real conversation with a real person — after all, they that’s why it’s called social media — it’s about people!

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Does social media work? It does if you put down the mouse! is a post from: The Buzz Factoree

What is left to be said about the death of an icon such as Steve Jobs? The reaction to his death has been more like that of a rock star than a corporate titan. That, perhaps, is because of Jobs’ skill at storytelling. Nobody could generate excitement over a new product launch like Steve Jobs. He didn’t just build products, he unleashed dreams. You might take a look at this Slideshare program, “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs,” for ways to incorporate his strategies into your own storytelling, whether you are selling an idea to your boss, a story to your child or a new computer or phone to the world.

If you haven’t heard Jobs’ Stanford University commencement speech from 2005, “How to Live Before You Die,” you owe it to yourself to watch it now. Not only is it a breathtaking wisdom, it represents the best in storytelling. In fact, Jobs divides the speech into a trilogy of short stories, the first about how dropping out of college turned out to be the right thing to do because it allowed him to take courses he wouldn’t have otherwise taken, such as calligraphy, which impacted the typography design of the Mac. “You can’t connect the dots going forward,” Jobs says, reflecting on how decisions affect your life. “You can only connect them looking back.”

The second story is about getting fired from Apple — the company he started — at age 30, and how it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him.

In his final story, Jobs talked about his initial brush with death when first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004. “Death is very likely the single best invention of life,” Jobs says. “It’s life change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the way is you. But someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and will be cleared away… Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living somebody else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living by the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other people’s opinions drown out your inner voice, and, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They some how already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Beyond the machines that Jobs created over a lifetime that ended too soon, Jobs left a much larger legacy — one that reflects strength and creativity honed through the challenges of being human. Go make and tell your own stories.

Photo image by bangdoll@flickr

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Saying goodbye to Steve Jobs, storyteller extraordinaire is a post from: The Buzz Factoree

Tell your story better by creating your own custom app. Now it's cheaper -- and easier -- than ever.

There are approximately 350,000 apps in iTunes and 65,000 in the Android marketplace, according to a recent post in Mashable. Yet as a small business, you may find that your own app would be just the thing to set your restaurant, yoga studio or independent bookstore apart from the crowd.

Can’t afford to pay $10,000 to a developer to make one for you? Well, with a little patience and Web savvy, perhaps you don’t need to. There are numerous sites that have popped up recently that allow you to create your own mobile apps.

Bizznessapps, Mobiflex, AppMakr, Red Foundry and Buzztouch have different features and price points — but they’re all still very reasonable, especially compared to paying a programmer. Check them out to see which one works best for your purpose.

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Serious about telling your story? Create your own app. is a post from: The Buzz Factoree

Zemanta is a great addition to your blogging arsenal.

If you blog or maintain a Web site, you’ll find that the Zemanta widget is a huge time-saver when you write your posts or articles.

Zemanta is a revolutionary new platform for accelerating on-line content production for any Web user. Any text (a blog post, article or web page) is directly “read” by Zemanta.

Zemanta combs the Web for relevant images, smart links, keywords and text, instantly serving the results to the user to enrich their content. It provides links to your own posts as well as relevant posts by others, and copyright-free photos that you can install into your content with one click.

Zemanta can be deployed on all major content publishing platforms and Web browsers through a simple download. Zemanta helps you get more traffic by recommending your posts to others, and keeps your audience engaged by keeping your audience on your site longer through recommended related posts and articles. It even provides suggested tags and links for your post, making SEO a snap.

It’s hard to believe, but you get all of this for the price of — NADA! It’s totally free! Check out their video!

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Zemanta makes blogging and maintaining your Web site a snap — for free! is a post from: The Buzz Factoree

In standard business writing, repetition is wordy and detracts from clear communication. But when trying to persuade, such as in a speech, sales materials or advertising, using repetition with skill can make the difference between ordinary and memorable communication.

If you heard President Obama’s speech last month about The American Jobs Act, you will recall that he repeatedly challenged Congress to “pass this jobs bill right away.” Martin Luther King’s famous speech repeated, “I have a dream.”

John F. Kennedy was a master at using the technique of repetition in his speeches.

In President Kennedy’s inaugural speech, he addressed a list of entities, “to those old allies …,” “to those new states .l..,” “to those people in the huts and villages ….,” “to our sister republics …,”  “to that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations…” and “to those nations who would make themselves our adversary …” From there, he went on to repeat the phrase “both sides” five times when referring to America and the Communists, as The Cold War heated up.

Repetition is used not only in speeches, but also in poetry, music, creative non-fiction and fiction.  Wherever good storytelling is happening, you’re likely to find repetition employed as a tool – not just because it helps get the point across simply by hearing it repeated – it does. Repetition also helps with the cadence of speech, building a rhythm that, like poetry and music, mimics the heartbeat. It helps us to literally feel the words in our organs, tissues and bones.

When we feel the language we are hearing, it becomes part of our nervous system and speeds into our amygdala, part of the limbic system involved in the expression of emotion, bypassing the filter of our neo-cortex or rational portion of our brain. Like a steady drumbeat, we find ourselves easily at one with the message.

Whenever you need to get your audience on board with you – whether you’re speaking at a Rotary Club about a fundraiser or writing an article for your business’s newsletter – remember that repetition is in your toolbox. Play it again, Sam!

Photo: snre’s photostream

Use repetition to help make your point effectively in speeches or business writing is a post from: The Buzz Factoree

Create multiple topical papers to brand your business with social media.

If you’ve got a Twitter or Facebook account or an RSS feed from a blog or other source, you can create a daily online newspaper/blog on any subject with a few clicks. Not only that, but you never have to touch it again, and it will republish to either or both your Twitter or Facebook accounts.

The site for this is paper.li. There you open a free account and start as many topical newspapers as you like. Content is pulled from up to five sources: keywords, Twitter accounts or lists, or RSS feeds that you identify. I currently have five newspapers that I publish to my Twitter feed: The Humor Buzz, The Writer’s Buzz, The PR & Media Buzz, The Internet Marketing Buzz and The Hampton Roads, Virginia, Buzz.

The cool thing about the papers is that people assume you slaved all day over them, and they are very grateful to see their content included. You’ll receive numerous “thank you’s” and retweets of the links to your paper, building your visibility and social capital. I’ve even gotten phone calls and email requests to include press releases in the papers because they they look so authentic.

The downside is that you have no control over the look of the paper and the content that is published in individual issues. What appears in each day’s issue is a matter of chance, and it may or may not exactly match the topic you’ve selected if you are pulling your content from a Twitter list you’ve created based on topics. Just because someone’s “brand” is creative writing, for example, doesn’t mean that they won’t also tweet about politics. That means your creative writing newspaper might have have articles about politics or other unrelated subjects. You may also pick up some content that you might not want associated with your brand — content that includes four-letter words, for example.

Still, for no money and the little effort expended, it’s a great tool for getting your brand some visibility.

Photo:   ElvertBarnes

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How to create your own online newspaper in less than 60 seconds is a post from: The Buzz Factoree