Using Social Media for B2B Marketing

When people think about social media marketing, many focus on the idea of business to customer marketing. However, there's a whole other level of social marketing - business to business.

Companies are just starting to discover the full potential of social media marketing and what it can do. A business can save time and money gaining realtime market feedback, and even gain new ideas for products or services. At this stage, there's a lot of room for growth and change.

There's a lot to be excited about as we look into B2B social marketing. We're just learning how powerful it can be. Currently, a lot of businesses only use this marketing for basic advertisement, but some companies are starting to utilize and engage tools like video to create constructive conversations between businesses.

Social media provides an outlet for displaying who your company is; creating a personality and 'human feel' beyond just broadcasting your business. Having an active blog with posts that highlight your company's expertise is going to help you stand out from the crowd.

Everyone knows that social media is a great tool for communication, but not everyone realizes they can use it as a research tool. B2B marketing is different than B2C marketing. Your audience is narrower, so the use of your social media should be more focused to the perspective audience. If you're trying to partner up with a larger corporation, follow their social networks and learn their customers. Follow keywords related to businesses you want to sell to, and this can help open your eyes to new trends and help you design new plans for potential clients. By following social networking, you can learn more about what the business and their customers value.

Don't underestimate how much information is on the internet. By creating a strong social presence, it's easier for potential partners, clients, and businesses to find you. It's about finding a way to stand out to your clients, and with social media this goal should be easily attainable.

Basically, with B2B social media marketing, you need to have a goal and find a way to achieve it. Create a custom plan to market yourself to other businesses and customers. You know your company best and what your company's main focus is. Figure out which tools are best suited for your company to reach your target audience while showing potential buyers that they are buying from a business they can trust and relate to - not just a company logo.

Budget Laptop - A tight Slap to business?

' Is Budget laptop ($100) a Tight slap to Business? '

Ambitious announcement:

In January 2005,during the World Economic Summit there was an announcement to make laptops, at only $100 each, to be distributed to world's needy school children.

Programme - One Laptop per Child:

A non-profit group - known as the One Laptop Per Child, supported by international big wigs like Google, has been sphere heading across the world to distribute this great machine in countries ranging from China, Brazil, Thailand, South Africa as well as India. 


Negroponte, the chief of this project , talks about the ambitious project, its relevance to India and the following are the Excerpts:

Question : 
You had announced about the $100 laptop in Davos this year. Where does the program stand currently, when are you commercializing it, and how have you managed to cut costs so dramatically?
Answer:
We are not commercializing the $100 Laptop. 

NO SALES AND NO MARKETING:
That is one reason the price will be so low. We will have no sales, marketing or distribution costs. Typically, that accounts for 60 per cent of the cost of a laptop. The remainder can be divided in two more or less equal parts, the display and everything else.


In the case of the display, we have reduced the price to about $40. It is a dual-mode display, that is both rear-lit, colour (640x480) and front-lit B&W at 3X that resolution. 


Linux run:

This allows it to be readable in sunlight - which is very important. We lower the cost of everything else by running the laptop on Linux. 

It is by no means a network computer or dumb terminal. 
Fat operating systems spend most of their energy supporting their own fat.

Our machine will be instant on and feel like it is running much faster than your current laptop. 

It does not have a disk, but flash memory. 

Each machine has 500 MB of flash, which can be shared with wireless broadband, so kids in a classroom can easily have 10 GB among them.

Q:
What is the kind of investment that MIT Labs has put in this project?
A:
MIT does not invest in projects. 

It has been part of funded research on "learning". 

The ideas go back to 1982, when we were working with Apple in rural Senegal. 

Recently, we spun off a non-profit Association, called One Laptop per Child. 

It sits across the street from the MIT Media Lab and has $24 mn of funding to bring the prototype, its software, and education plus rollout plans to launch. 

Q:
Who are the main supporters of the project? Who will manufacture the product?
A:
The nine companies supporting OLPC are: 
Google, 
Quanta, 
AMD, 
3M, 
RedHat, 
Nortel, 
NewsCorp, 
Brightstar and 
Marvell. 

The support we get differs from player to player. Clearly, Quanta plays a significant role and will manufacture the laptop. 3M is helping with the display materials and backlight. Marvell is designing a mesh network chip, and so on.

Q:
So will the PC have any hard disk? What kind of storage space do we get in the laptop?
A:
It has three USB (Universal Serial Bus) plugs. There is a $100 server for schools. We have people making a $10 DVD and a $20 hard drive. 

But, as I said above, FLASH plus shared FLASH is probably better. Also, remember that each laptop comes with an Internet connection. 


Human power:
Q:
India faces serious power problems. And laptops also need power. How do you propose to resolve the issue?
A:
Our laptops will run on human power. 
It will come with at least two means of charging: with your arms and your feet (one each, as a minimum). The satellite connection would need a generator, but we would provide that too.


Human power is not dependent on the number of hours, but the ratio of human movement to subsequent run time. I mean that, simply in the worst case, one minute of cranking means 10 minutes of operation. If you use your legs, like a bicycle pump, it skyrockets, perhaps as much as 25 minutes.

Please note that the laptop has many modes, one of which is eBook mode, which uses the least power, but where we need human power the most.

In situations where you are running the processor and backlit display full blast - in what we call DVD mode - the ratios are much worse and electric power or fully-charged batteries are a better approach. We could also do gang charging at school - the idea being that each laptop can have a second battery ($4-6).


In this case, if there's no electricity, there would be a selection of devices, like playground equipment, where kids can charge them during recess or even animals can be used. Solar and wind are also options, of course. 

We have found that making a laptop for $100 is easier than making one that runs on 1 watt. Your laptop runs at 30-40 watts.

Conclusions : As a whole , if useful media equipments can be brought down to this affordable stage , the process of poverty eradication has begun. International charity and welfare organizations should unite and do these types of activities in a big way to make global impact immediately. 

Ways to Extend Your Laptop’s Battery Life

1.) Dim your screen - most laptops come with the ability to dim your laptop screen. Turn the brightness to a minimal.

2.) Cut down on programs running in the background. Programs such as desktop search add to the CPU load and cut down battery life. Shut down everything that isn’t crucial when you’re on battery. Use very little programs.

3.) Cut down external devices - USB devices (including your mouse) and Wireless cards drain down your laptop battery. Remove or shut them down when not in use. It goes without saying that charging other devices (like your iPod) with your laptop when on battery is a surefire way of quickly wiping out the charge on your laptop battery.

4.) Users should not charge their mobile devices (HTC, Samsung, etc.) using USB cable. This is another good reason behind battery getting drained out. Always charge the devices using power adaptor.

5.) Lower the graphics use- You can do this by changing the screen resolution and shutting off fancy graphic drivers. Graphics cards (video cards) use as much or more power today as hard disks.

6.) Don’t multitask - Do one thing at a time when you’re on battery.

7) Regular defragmentation helps to arrange data more efficiently thus making the hard drive work less to access the data. The quicker the moving hard drive works lesser is the load placed on the battery. Thus, your batter can last longer and efficiency increases with hard drive maintenance.

8) It may be a defrag or a virus scan, but make sure it is scheduled for a time when you are near a power outlet. If not then nix them for the moment.

9) Even if you don’t intend to use it, don’t leave any CD/DVDs as leftovers in the drives. A spinning drive sucks battery power like a sponge.

10) In the Stand By mode or sleep mode, the computer turns of the hard drive and the display, but memory remains active while the CPU slows down. This draws on the battery. In contrast, hibernation mode is better because the computer saves the current state and shuts itself down completely thus saving power.

Planting and Caring for Flower Bulbs

There is nothing quite as welcome as those beautiful spring flowers that seem to emerge from nowhere to welcome the arrival of spring. Bulb type flowers are really unique plants, because they spend most of their days resting quietly beneath the surface of the soil. Then right on schedule, up they come, full of bloom and vigor, and then almost as fast as they came, they go. Except for the green leafy part of the plant that tends to linger longer than we would like them to. 

Despite their short bloom time and unattractive foliage after the blooms are gone, they are still a wonderful addition to any landscape. But how should you care for them? First let’s talk about how to use them in your landscape. Flowers of all kinds are best when planted in groupings. Many people buy 25 or 50 bulbs and just go around the yard planting helter skelter. That’s fine if that’s what you want, but when planted that way they tend to blend in with the landscape and really don’t show up well at all. When you plant them in large groups they are a breathtaking showpiece. 

In the early spring start thinking about where you would like to create a bed for flower bulbs. Prepare the bed by raising it with good rich topsoil, and if at all possible add some well composted cow manure. Do this in the spring while you are in the gardening mood, you may not be in the fall. Over the summer fill the bed with annual flowers to keep the weeds down, and to pretty up your yard for the summer. Come fall all you have to do is pull out the annuals and plant your bulbs to the depth recommended on the package. 

If you think you could have a problem with squirrels digging up the bulbs and eating them, you can also wrap the bulbs in steel wool, leaving just the tip of the bulb exposed so it can grow out of the little wire cage you’ve created. Or you can just plant the bulbs and then cover the bed with chicken wire or plastic fencing until the bulbs start to grow in the spring. 

When the bulbs come up in the spring and start blooming, you should clip off the blooms as they start to wither. This keeps the bulb from producing seeds, which requires a lot of energy, and you want the bulb to use all of its available energy to store food in preparation of the bulb’s resting period. Once the bulbs are completely done blooming you don’t want to cut off the tops until they are withered and die back. The million dollar question is how to treat the tops until that happens. 

Many people bend them over and slip a rubber band over them, or in the case of bulbs like Daffodils tie them with one of the long leaves. This seems to work because it is a very common practice among many experienced gardeners. However, Mike is about to rain on the parade. 

I strongly disagree with this theory because back about 6th grade we learned about photosynthesis in science class. To recap what we learned, and without going into the boring details, photosynthesis is the process of the plant using the sun’s rays to make food for itself. The rays from the sun are absorbed by the foliage and the food making process begins. In the case of a flower bulb this food is transported to the bulb beneath the ground and stored for later use. 

So basically the leaves of the plant are like little solar panels. Their job is to absorb the rays from the sun to begin the process known as photosynthesis. If we fold them over and handcuff them with their hands behind their back, they are not going to be able to do their job. It’s like throwing a tarpaulin over 80% of a solar panel. 

In order for the leaves to absorb the rays from the sun, the surface of the foliage has to be exposed to the sun. On top of that, when you bend the foliage over, you are restricting the flow of nutrients to the bulb. The veins in the leaves and the stem are a lot like our blood vessels. If you restrict them the flow stops. 

You decide. I’ve presented my case. Bending them over seems to work, but I’ve spent a lot of money on my bulbs. I want them running at full speed. What I do is clip the blooms off once they are spent, and just leave the tops alone until they are yellow and wilted. If they are still not wilted when it’s time to plant my annual flowers, I just plant the annuals in between the bulbs. As the bulbs die back the annuals tend to grow and conceal them. If one shows through I clip it off. It seems to work well for me.

Masterpieces exposed at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence

Visiting the Uffizi Gallery in Florence you can admire several masterpieces of the Renaissance and beyond. Among all these, a special mention is up to the Birth of Venus by Botticelli, one of the flagship of the famous Florentine Museum. The work represents the goddess while it is going out of the waters and, at her sides, Zephyr and the nymph Ora, that is handing a mantle to Venus. Botticelli reproduces, through the characters represented in his work, an ideal beauty, with perfect shapes. The face of Venus, framed by hair, shows an expression witch in its sweetness implies a slight note of melancholy. Venus is also a symbol of the union between the  celestial and the earthly nature, and also of  the rebirth of the soul after baptism. Another painting worth noting is The battle of San Romano ,a painting (tempera on wood) created by Paolo Uccello dated 1438 circa. The work consists of three episodes, realized on as many panels, of the battle fought in June 1432 between Florentines and Senesi. The three panels depicting many salient episodes of day of fighting are stored by three different museums. Niccolò da Tolentino at the head of Florence is preserved at the National Gallery in London; the Bernardino della Ciarda Highsider (leader of the Sienese forces) is at the Uffizi Gallery at Florence; and the last Panel, decisive intervention alongside of Michele Attendolo (Captain General of Florentine militia under the command of the column of reinforcements) is currently in the Louvre Museum in Paris. The episode at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence is the only one of the three that still has traces of silver foil that covered the armor of fighters depicted. The figures of men and animals drawn by Paolo Uccello are geometric, but unreal, as the colors used: the horses were painted pink, blue and white, with some poses that at first glance may seem absurd. To book your tickets for the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and not to miss upcoming exhibitions of the masterpieces at the museum, I recommend you the following links: www.Uffizi-Firenze.com or www.MuseumTicket.it