Do your members actually use your agency website?  
Sounds a bit ridiculous to ask, but often the simplest of questions opens our eyes to the inadequacies of our work.  GreenIT has been working with a number of partnerships and member driven agencies that have looked beyond the informational website to create an interactive mix of collaboration, specialized knowledge and social media. 
Take a good look around at your stakeholders and you will quickly realize how many now look for (EXPECT) constant updates, input and feedback.   The choice to work with a tool like Wordpress allows you to share and interact with those people that sustain your cause.  
GreenIT has been working with Wordpress and a number of community building plugins to create sites that allow the kind of functions that these stakeholders expect:  member forums with email commenting back and forth;  organized private folders of up to date knowledge; connections and feeds from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube;  member info sharing and maps.   Using combinations of tools,  WordPress can deliver a really easily managed package of information and sharing that is accessible to those whom you want to support and engage in your cause.  
Do you use WordPress?  What does your site do for your members?  Comment below...
Want to learn more about WordPress and communities?  See what it could do for your members?  Call us or email

GreenIT offers amazing value and quick turnaround for dynamic project websites.  
$mall budget ? 
Short timelines ?
No problem - we can work with you to quickly create an appealing presence that reflects your agency, the project and your goals. 

• Web Pages
• Pieces of web design
• Tools
  
• Modules & plugins

We will partner with you to get you exactly what you need.  Contact us today! 

Stories have been an intricate part of society for as long as there have been people. We use them to express ideas and concepts and to entertain. The ability to tell stories remains important but the way in which we tell them has evolved. There are many different ways to tell a story, whether it is using a more traditional blog format, Twitter, your website, video, audio or even games. The stories you tell are important and often an overlooked aspect of your online presence. Effective storytelling will enhance the experience you and your audience have. It can bring people closer to your organization or push them away. 

The most important thing about digital storytelling is that you are telling your story. If you are telling your story, you accomplish several things. First, you attract an audience that is genuinely interested in what you are doing. These are people that will engage with you and are interested in your organization. If you are not attracting the right audience, you are going to lose people or lose focus on your goals. The next thing this will do is allow you to connect to your audience. When you get a lot of similarly passionate people, they will connect much better than those that  aren't really interested in what you have to say or the things you are doing. Finally, you want your message out there. Your message is the entire point and if it isn't being expressed or received, the effort is wasted. Make sure you know the story you want to tell.

The next important thing is to decide how you want to tell your story. With so many different mediums, you need to know how you want to tell your story. It is important to use mediums that will really highlight your message and using the best medium for each message. Often, visual mediums like photographs and video will be more engaging than just a blog post but it really depends on what your message is. For example, if you are wanting to tell your story about community gardens and are wanting to promote a fundraiser or a garden planting the day before, you may want to create a short tweet regarding the event. If you are telling the story of one of your events after it has occurred, a stronger option is using pictures to show what happened (perhaps in conjunction with a blog) or posting a short video to YouTube. 

An important consideration to take is that while certain mediums may seem exciting, they can involve a lot of resources to create. Technology is becoming less expensive so things like photos and videos  are easy to take and still maintain decent quality. But if you want really high quality images and video, the equipment can still be expensive. Software is also needed for editing but there are more affordable, even free, options. The biggest investment is usually time. Photos can take time to go through and select the best ones, even if you don't have to do very much editing. Video can take a great deal of time to create. While having a video is fantastic, it is important to keep in mind that even a short video that's only a couple minutes long can take even experienced editors several hours to complete. 

People want to hear your story and you want to make sure your message reaches them in a meaningful way. There are no hard and fast rules for telling your story because it is your story. There are things that will help, but playing to your strengths and staying true to your story will do more for you than any set formula could. 

The world is smaller than ever and this means that we're in contact with more people every day. Whether that is on Facebook or interacting on message boards and various online communities, we are more exposed than ever before. Cyber crime and identity theft are very real threats but there are simple things you can do to help keep yourself safe. Some are programs and applications that you can get, others are simple behaviours and habits that will keep you safe.

Get an Anti-virus program and Firewall

Make sure you have an anti-virus program and a firewall installed on your system. There are a lot of very good options out there that are free and easily installed and maintained. Whether it's Windows Defender, Avast or another program, they will help to keep your system and your information safe. It is especially important to get these programs before you get a virus or malware as it is easier to prevent an infection than to get rid of it.

Keep your software up to date

Now that you have an anti-virus and a firewall program, you need to keep them up to date. It is also very important to install Windows or OSX updates as they're available along with things like Java and Flash. The reason these are so important is the updates are typically done to close security holes in the programs. If there is a security hole in your operating system (Windows or OSX), your entire system may be vulnerable. If programs like Flash or Java have holes, they can be exploited to install malware and the like. 

Use effective passwords

An effective password can be tricky to understand. Most think an effective password has to be a difficult to remember jumble of letters, numbers and symbols. While a password like X314Jev#2 is more secure than "password," it can be really difficult to remember. Longer passwords that aren't easy to guess are the best choice. Instead of using a long series of various characters, try using a passphrase instead of a password. For example "MydogFredisagoodboy!" is an incredibly secure password and relatively easy to remember. If you do have to go shorter, don't use obvious things like pet or family names or words like "password" or your name. Try for random words with a mix of capital and lower case letters and a few numbers and symbols if you have to use a short password.

 

Use different passwords

You should use a different password for each of your accounts. That way if your email, for example, gets hacked, they shouldn't have your passwords to other sites as typically hackers will try to match the same email address and passwords when they manage to get them from one site on other sites. This does mean you'll have a lot of passwords, but you can use programs like Last Pass (https://lastpass.com/) to keep track of them. If you're not comfortable with programs keeping track, you can write them into a small notebook or a day planner. 

Be wary of links

Most of us know by this point that the prince of Africa doesn't really need help smuggling fifty million US dollars out of the country and those emails are scams. A common practice now is what is termed as "phishing." You will receive emails from various sources, might seem like your bank or companies like PayPal or other seemingly legitimate companies. The email can look very convincing and they will ask you, for various reasons, to open a link and log in to your account. If you get an email like this, your best course of action is to open a new browser window and go directly to the site in question and log in there. Be very careful clicking on any links.

Do not trust those calling on the phone

One of the more common scams lately that gets a lot of people is that someone will call, claiming to be from Microsoft, advising that there is a problem with your computer. They will then instruct you to install a remote application that gives them control of your computer. Never give out a password or any personal information what so ever over the phone. Companies like Microsoft and Google will never call you for any reason. Make sure you know who you are talking to before giving out any personal information.

Following these general tips will help to keep you safe as you navigate the virtual world. The dangers out there are very real but with these steps you should be able to steer clear of trouble. A few last bits of advice: if you use a free webmail account, Gmail tends to be much more secure than Hotmail. Make sure that the web address shows "Https" instead of "Http" when you are doing financial transactions (in fact, enabling Https all the time isn't a bad idea). And finally, if you are unsure about a site or a link, your best bet is to avoid visiting the site or clicking on the link. 

Our world is rapidly changing and evolving. Looking back just ten years, the world can look as out of date as the Victorian era. It is now common for people to have cell phones and even more common for those cell phones to be used for more than just calls. With incredibly powerful cell phones, tablets and increasingly affordable laptops, people are more connected than ever. One of the major results is that people are flocking to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and not being active in these places can limit your ability to be as effective as possible. But the social media scene can be frightening and needs to be used effectively to be worth it. Let's take a look at some things you should know about this new frontier.

The first thing to mention is that when using social media, it is most important to actually use it. You need to be active on Twitter and Facebook to see the best results. It doesn't have to be a huge time commitment, but you need to monitor your account and you need to interact with people. Twitter in particular has conversations that happen quickly and you can lose people with late responses. If you don't have time to be active for at least an hour spread out over the course of a day, social media may not be the best way for you to operate. 

If you are already doing a blog or newsletter, you can integrate these as part of your social media strategy. While you can't post an entire blog to Twitter, you can link to your new blog posts to drive people to your site. Even sending out short pieces of trivia or relevant, interesting quotes daily can be a good way to keep people interacting with you. Building relationships is an important part of any social media plan but keep in mind that anything you put out there is very public. It is important to interact with people and not just use it as a broadcasting service. You need to consider what you post and make sure it isn't just being used to advertise as this can easily turn people off.

Both Facebook and Twitter can be used together but you'll get a richer experience when these services are integrated with other online resources like a blog, website or video sites like YouTube and Vimeo. While you want to have a range of social media options, you also need to be careful not to overwhelm your audience (or yourself) with a lot of unnecessary options. For example, if you like to share photos and have a Twitter account, you likely do not need an Instagram account. Twitter is great for quick, short messages and interaction, Facebook allows for moderate to long posts and you can set both so that posts on either show up on both. If you need to make a longer post, I would suggest using a blog as Facebook and Twitter are better with shorter posts and interacting with people.  Videos on YouTube and Vimeo can be shared on your site, Facebook or Twitter. 

Before you start, you need to pick how you are going to use social media. Are you going to use it to try to drive people to your website? Are you just wanting to interact more with your community? Or are you trying to increase awareness? Perhaps a combination of all of the above. It's important to know what you want to accomplish with your social media platform and then to focus your efforts. If you want to drive people to your website, you'll need to use it to draw people to your site. If you want to interact with the community, you'll need to be much more active on the various platforms. 

There can be reluctance to use social media as there is a lot of misinformation and it is a very new area. There are some important things to keep in mind to keep yourself safe. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that you're posting to a public forum, whether it is YouTube, Twitter, Facebook or your own site. Things on the internet, although they can usually be edited or deleted at the source, tend to remain forever.  Be very deliberate about what you share and who in your organization can share it. Links are a very common occurrence, especially on Twitter, and need to be approached carefully. If you receive a random message from someone with a link, don't just click on it. As most people use applications to shrink URL lengths, deciding which links are safe to click on can be much more difficult, even when they come from a trusted source. The best rule is if it seems fishy, don't click on it. Other standard security precautions should always be taken. 

The best way to start using social media is just to start using it. It might just be a small presence, with a Facebook page that you list upcoming events or using Twitter to share bits of things you are working on or get a bit of feedback. Don't feel like you need to do everything at once. Take it slowly and it will come over time. Trying to bite off too much can ruin the experience and be very overwhelming when you are starting out. Taking it slowly, one step at a time is the best way to get started. 

Age catches up with all of us. Our backs start to get sore, our pants get a bit tighter and hair gets a bit whiter. Your computer is not immune to the ravages of time. Even though it might not lose any hair nor need to get a case that's a size larger, computers do not age well. However, there are ways to slow the deterioration and improve performance that are easy, cheap and relatively painless. There are some simple things you can do to maintain your computer and get it running faster if it is slowing down. The biggest thing you can do is to do some cleaning of both the hardware and software that makes up your computer.

Before we start anything, you will want to back up your hard drive just in case something goes wrong and turn off your computer. The first thing to do is a simple matter of maintenance and that is dusting out your computer. We will start with the case. If you have a desktop unit, the outside of the case can be wiped down with a damp cloth as can the bottom, sides and top (back of the screen) on a laptop. An important note is that you should never spray ANYTHING on to your case, desktop or otherwise. This risks getting liquid inside, which is never a good thing. Spray it on to the cloth instead and do not use too much.  Another thing to mention is that alcohol is recommended for general cleaning as it evaporates quickly and doesn't leave residue that can be problematic. If you prefer to use water, try to get distilled water as it doesn't have the contaminates that come in tap water. Whichever you use, less is more and shouldn't be over used.

Now it is time to exterminate the colony of dust bunnies that are turning your computer into their burrow. The best tool here is a can of compressed air. They can be purchased online or from most hardware stores. There are a few precautions to take before you start to clean the case. First, make sure you're somewhere that can get dusty and is well ventilated. Do not touch the components inside the case or use a vacuum as you may inadvertently discharge static electricity, damaging your computer. Make sure that you keep the can upright while you are blowing out the dust as leaning it to the side can cause it to excrete liquid. Do not clean your fan by just blowing compressed air on it as it can cause the fan to spin faster than it was intended to. You can wipe the blades with a cotton swab with a bit of 99% alcohol or wipe it with a dry cloth. Now that you're set, remove the side of your case and blow the dust out . Be careful to blow dust out of the case and not blow it farther into the case. If you are working on a laptop or unibody Mac, run a vacuum over the ventilation area to get the dust out. You do not have to take anything apart.

Click here to see how to properly dust your computer.

While we have everything turned off, this is a good opportunity to clean your mouse and keyboard. If you are using a laptop, running a vacuum over the keyboard and wiping them down with a slightly damp cloth should do the trick. If you have a traditional keyboard, again wiping the keys with a slightly damp cloth will help and you can use a cotton swab with a bit of alcohol to clean between keys should there be a need. For your mouse, if you have an older mouse with a ball, you can take off a piece at the bottom allowing you to remove the ball. You can clean out the area holding the ball, the ball itself and the cover with a dry cloth. If you are using an optical mouse, you can clean the lens with a cotton swab and alcohol. If the outside of your mouse is really dirty, a cotton swab or cloth with alcohol can be used along with some elbow grease to get it clean. Otherwise, a quick wipe down with a dry or slightly damp cloth should suffice.

For your screen, whether an LCD flat screen or attached screen on your laptop, care needs to be taken. The best method is to use a soft, dry cloth to gently wipe the screen. Do not press hard on the screen or use chemicals like Windex on the screen. If there is a mark you can't remove, use a bit of distilled water, a mixture of equal parts water and vinegar or alcohol or store bought cleaners but don't use too much force on the screen or you may damage it. If you are still using a traditional CRT monitor, you can clean the screen with a soft cloth and most glass cleaners. The outside of cases can be cleaned with a damp cloth. 

Now that the physical cleaning is over with, we can plug everything back in and do some software clean up. The first thing to do is to go to your control panel and select either add or remove program or uninstall program. Go through the listed programs and uninstall any programs that you don't use any more (this includes all those toolbars clogging up your internet browser). Go to your desktop and clear up any clutter you find there by deleting files you no longer need and arranging files do you need in folders will allow your computer to operate better. Running a program like CCleaner is a good idea as it will help you to clean out extra files from your computer. Next, you need to make sure all your system files are up to date. Windows update can be run from the Control Panel if they are not set to automatically update. Updating your flash and java also help with improving performance and should be kept up to date as this also helps prevent security issues. Flash can be downloaded directly from Adobe's site and Java can be downloaded from java.com. 

See how to uninstall programs here.

See how to take out tool bars in Internet Explorer here.

The next and likely most important step is to run your anti-virus program and do a deep scan of your computer. Most scans are not a full, deep scan of your system so a deep scan is a good idea from time to time. Running malware detection software like Malwarebytes' Antimalware or Ad-Aware is also a good idea. Viruses and other malware can cause massive slowdowns in addition to other negative consequences. If you don't have an anti-virus program, there are some very good free options available. The two most popular free options are AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition and Avast Free Antivirus 7. Both are very effective and powerful and will provide you the assurance you need in an Anti-Virus program. The down side is that the free versions don't have much in the way of support, aside from forums and some documentation scattered across the internet. Microsoft has an Anti-Virus program called Security Essentials that has been getting better with every iteration and comes close (even surpassing in some estimations) to the AVG and Avast offerings.  Windows has a built in firewall and it is a perfectly viable option. However, it can be difficult to control and change as needed. A third party firewall, like the free Zone Alarm offering, is a very good option and will allow you better control over your firewall. 

Finally, you can run disk cleanup and then disk defragmenter. These processes, especially the disk defragmenter, can take a lot of time but will help to increase your system's performance. If, after all of these steps, your computer is still running slowly,  it may be time to look at your actual hardware. Two of the cheapest and most effective options are to upgrade the amount of RAM in your computer and the hard drive. RAM is usually the more effective upgrade. If you are running a 32 bit operating system, getting over 4 GB of RAM is a waste as the operating system cannot use any more memory than that. Even with a 64 bit operating system, often going over 8 GB is going to see no real improvement but going to 16 GB, if the price is right, not a bad idea. When buying RAM, it is important to match the size of the sticks. What this means is that if you are getting 8 GB of RAM, two sticks of 4 GB each will run better than a 4 GB stick and two sticks of 2GB each.  If your hard drive has less than 10% free space (15 - 20% is preferable), you need to either delete some files or get more space. Options for more space include replacing your drive all together or supplementing it with a second internal drive or an external drive that plugs in to a USB port. The big rage right now is to install solid state drives (SSD) for your operating system. These do offer speed increases, but are expensive for the amount of storage they offer. If you just want speed, this is a decent option, especially since you can get a drive now for around $100. If you need storage, a traditional HDD (hard disk drive) will be cheaper for far more storage space. 

These are just a few simple, easily affordable ways to speed up your system. If you are running an older system, these steps may help to extend its life cycle but there are limits to what can be done. Hardware not only doesn't age well, but newer software is needing more RAM, disk space and processor power every day. Eventually, upgrading is something that has to happen. Some programs are making it easier to run older hardware, like Windows 8 has faster boot and shut down times than Windows 7 running on the same system, but the rest of the operating system functions at essentially the same pace. These things are also good to do every few months to keep your system running and well maintained. Keep the case clean and your drive clean and you will see better performance.

Website evolution has been interesting to say the least. They started out as file directories with links to files. As the pages themselves evolved, we started with a lot of very drab, mostly academic pages consisting of walls of text. People soon started to add colours and decoration to the site which led into the horror of gifs (the little moving images that repeat) that still makes developers cry to this day. Slowly but surely, sites evolved, adding interactivity and becoming easier to use as each day passed. Now it is common to have a fully interactive site with video and multiple feedback options, including email, various social media outlets and commenting right on the site. With so many different options and expectations for sites growing every day, your site becomes more essential and complicated as time goes on. WordPress is an invaluable tool allowing you to manage your site. Let's take a look at that now.

We'll start by taking a look at what WordPress is. Originally, WordPress was developed as a blogging platform. The emphasis was on blogging and it allowed for focused development. Since it is open source which means that anyone can use, modify and edit the code however they would like,people have taken advantage of this and developed other uses for the platform in addition to blogging. There are a ton of amazing tools (called plug-ins) that make building and managing your website easy without the need for a lot of code. 

Being open source, it also means that there is no additional cost to use this platform on your website. You can download and install the software quickly and easily on to your server yourself but many hosting services have auto installers that will install WordPress with a few quick clicks and no downloads required on your part. There is premium content available for various fees that have various applications but these are always optional and never required. 

Choosing a look for your site is as simple as picking a theme. There are literally thousands of themes available free of charge through your WordPress dashboard. They are easily applied to your site with a few simple clicks. Depending on the themes you are changing to/from, you may need to tweak your content slightly to fit the new design but a drastic change to your site's look is very easy. There are a few pitfalls of using free themes. The most important one is that if you download free themes from random websites, they can often be used to store malicious code or other things that can get your site flagged. The good news here is that the free themes provided by WordPress are free of issues like that. The downside here is that a lot of people use WordPress and use the free themes. You can pick up premium paid themes for reasonable amounts so that your site doesn't look like everyone else's. 

The editor for the pages is known as a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor, meaning that what you see in the fame is what you will see on the site. This allows you to place things as you want them and WordPress takes care of the code. For making posts, the interface is very similar to MS Word. You can change your font (which are limited but this is due to the way font selection works with websites), make it bold or italic and change the size of the font. Inserting photos is a matter of uploading them through the image button and then dragging it where you want. You can also edit other options for the image in a separate menu. Whether it is making a post or a new page, the process is similar and with plenty of easy to understand options, you can make quick updates to your content easily.

Something important to mention are widgets. Widgets are commonly used to display information and bring up controls. Widgets are available in a variety of applications (including Windows) and function similarly here. You drag and drop the widgets to the areas you want them and they add functionality to your site. This could be something like buttons for social media, a list of previous blog posts or even to display recent tweets on your Twitter account. There are over 100,000 widgets available from WordPress and they do a bevy of different things. This makes it incredibly easy to add features to your website, including dynamic content.

There are a lot of other plug-ins that can add all sorts of functionality to your site. Plug-ins can let you collapse content, play media files, register users, accept donations and much more. When you want to add a function to your site, not only do these tools make it easier to do so, there is also a massive WordPress community to help you accomplish your goals. They can recommend plug-ins, give you coding options, help to troubleshoot issues and even improve your overall  results. WordPress receives regular updates and is showing improvements all the time. Many plug-ins are developed to either fill a need or fix an issue with WordPress which they often fix with new releases. They also like to integrate the more commonly used plug-ins to improve the product and allowing you to use less plug-ins.

With more information being put on to sites all the time and the need for better functionality and more dynamic content, a CMS makes sense. WordPress is free, supported by an incredible community and very powerful. With a WYSIWYG  editor, drag and drop widgets and a familiar, Office like environment for posts, the system is intuitive, easy to use and requires next to no knowledge of code, although you will have to learn the software to some extent. You can also keep your site feeling fresh with themes and change them as time goes on quickly and with limited reworking of the content and features of your site. We can get you started with your very own WordPress driven site right here at GreenIT and provide support. Contact us for more information.  

The world is shrinking  every day and distances that once made certain things difficult are now less of an issue. Better access to phones and the internet have made access to people easy, even when they're on the other side of the world. People are working from remote locations and it can be hard to identify with someone that you generally only deal with over phone calls and emails. Video chat has become increasingly popular as webcams have been integrated into many devices. They allow you to get a version of a face to face meeting when other elements, like distance or weather, might have otherwise prevented it. We will take a quick look at a few of the more popular (and affordable) web chat services and look at some of the advantages and disadvantages to each.

When Apple releases a new product, it tends to become the "must have" item of the season. With each new release seems to come a new software product that can often get lost in the new hardware releases. FaceTime was released with the iPhone 4 and has been slowly catching on with people. It is now available on essentially any modern iOS or OSX device and it is a good product. It works very well, even on the smaller mobile devices. You get a good picture and good audio, typically only affected by the connections of the people talking. But there is a major problem with FaceTime: it is only available on Apple products. This means if you have an Android tablet or a PC, you don't have access to this communication tool. And with the majority of computers still being Windows based and a large number of mobile devices not running iOS, this really limits FaceTime's usefulness. 

Far and away the most famous video chat software is Skype. The name itself is synonymous with video chatting.  It is a very affordable product and used by millions on a daily basis to stay in touch with people around the world. The first thing to note is that Skype offers both free and paid services. A paid subscription offers more features but the free version of Skype is still feature rich and offers high quality visuals and audio. The setup and installation process are simple. You can chat with friends, family and colleagues over video, voice, text or a combination of the three. This makes staying in contact in any situation easier as you always have options. The best thing about Skype is that it offers a fantastic mobile experience across multiple devices. It really can keep you in contact with just about anyone from just about anywhere. 

While the paid version of Skype can seem expensive for what may look like the same product, it actually offers good value, particularly if you pay for a year. The full premium subscription starts as cheap as $4.49/month on a 12 month purchase and can range as high as $8.99/month. There is a daily option but it is very expensive comparatively ($4.99/day). They all include the option to video chat with up to ten people (free version only supports two people with video although you can do more with just audio), ability to make conference calls, live customer support, gets rid of advertising and all the other features included with their free offering. The three and twelve month subscriptions do offer an advantage aside from just the significant discount. They also include unlimited calling to Canada and the US. This could save you a lot on long distance fees both at home and on your smart phones. 

A service that seems to have slipped the notice of a  lot of people is Google's offering called Hangout. Hangout is a completely free service that Google offers. It supports up to 10 people on a single call and offers the ability to have an unlimited number of spectators (meaning they can watch the call but not say anything). This is done through either a YouTube stream or Google+ stream and is very easy to set up and join. While spectators can't directly participate, they will be able to experience the chat without slowing down performance of those directly involved. If you do want people interacting, you can try things like Twitter and Facebook to get real time feedback. You can also share things like YouTube videos easily with a few quick clicks of your mouse.

One of the best things about Hangout is that it is free. You can use all of the features right out of the box with absolutely no fees. The service rivals Skype for quality and in some cases surpasses Skype. One downside is that, at least for Canadians, we can't use Google Voice yet to make free long distance calls but that is a feature available in the US. It doesn't offer nearly the mobile support that Skype does, which is a downside for those of us who like to use our mobile devices to communicate. It can also be more difficult to set up a private chat as Hangout is by nature an open forum where people can drop in and out of the conversation but it can be done without overexerting yourself. When you are done, you can record and post your session directly on YouTube. If you are trying to reach an audience, this can be an excellent tool. re to edit.

The last service we will take a look at actually caught me by surprise. We all can remember the sounds of "You've got Mail" that AOL made famous and the discs that were sent out in the thousands that we all threw out as soon as we got them. AOL has not been a revolutionary company and hasn't offered any significant offerings since the days of dial-up internet. When Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion, AOL announced a new service called AV. AV is AOL's video chat service. It is browser based and doesn't require an account or any software downloads to run. You simply go to the site, click as instructed and you'll be given a link which can be sent via text message, IM or email and will bring people in to your session automatically. 

The system is very intuitive and easy to use. While trying the service, I had a friend log on and join me. She'd never used her webcam before and is not overly tech savvy but was video chatting with me quickly and easily. The only issue was that the shockwave plug in would crash occasionally (and this was a common issue on all the systems we tried this with)  but it was easily solved with a quick refresh of the page. But this is a flash based service and that creates a problem as a lot of mobile devices cannot run flash, meaning the choice of devices is restricted. The video quality isn't as good as Hangout or Skype, but it isn't meant to be. It works well and for something you can get up and running in seconds with no account or software needed, this is a great tool because of its simplicity. Another downside is that it doesn't allow screen sharing, which the other two do. This can be problematic for productivity meetings where screen sharing is a real asset. You can also have a maximum of four people in a session. 

They all have their advantages and their disadvantages. AV is incredibly quick and easy to use but doesn't have the fully fleshed features of the others and if video quality is a key concern, AV won't be your choice. But if you want to video chat with a client who is not technologically inclined, the ease of use may win out. If you want to broadcast your chats or archive them simply on YouTube, Google Hangout is likely your best bet. If you don't mind paying for a subscription and will use the long distance feature, Skype might be your best choice. The best way to know for sure is to try them out and pick the one or ones that work best for you.

Watching a movie that's over ten years old can feel bizarre. The internet they show, if they show it at all, seems primitive and foreign, even if it might have seemed cutting edge when the movie released. Few people, if anyone, had cell phones and when they did, they barely resemble what we use today. Our world has continued to change rapidly and it can be difficult to keep up with ever evolving trends, attitudes and perceptions. The pervasiveness of mobile technology, in particular, is something that drives society more than almost any other factor today. 

With social media and online connectivity, mobile devices are becoming more and more popular and are used incredibly often by people of all demographics. Whether it is a sixteen year old girl in high school or a CEO in his mid-fifties, people use their mobile phones constantly. This leads to the expectation of being readily accessible and having constant contact with people. People like to converse in quick, short messages whether it is through text messages, over Facebook or an online instant messenger program. Because of this rapid response expectation, it is extremely important that you stay in contact with your clients. This can be as simple as posting to your Twitter account on a regular basis (at bare minimum a few times a week) or responding quickly to emails. If people do not feel connected, you will tend to lose them. With people disconnecting faster and faster, making connections is more important than ever.

People are using their mobile devices to connect to everything and anything, which means two things. The first is that having a good, reliable, accessible web presence is more important than ever. If people cannot find you online, they are likely going to move on. General attention spans are short and people's tolerance for any sort of difficulty is very low. If your site isn't easy to use or is hard to find, you are going to lose clients and prospective clients. The second thing is that you need to have a site that works well on mobile devices. A lot of people surf the web from their tablets or on their phones and if it doesn't work properly, people won't want to use it, which will cost you. 

There is an app for just about everything these days. Whether it is for checking the weather or figuring out a how much C02 was saved by walking to work instead of driving, there are apps for just about everything. Often, the fact that a company provides a mobile app is a selling point that they will advertise on their site. While developing such software can mean increased appeal,  it’s not always worthwhile. The first thing to note is that app creation tends to be very expensive. The expectation of an app is generally that it is easy to use and does what it is supposed to do. This can be much more complicated than it appears at first glance and integrating an app can also mean a varying amount of work on your website as well. You can use apps effectively without creating your own through things like Twitter or other social media apps just by using those services. 

People want to be able to buy things online and not have to leave their homes or workplaces. They are also looking more and more to online methods of donating to the non-profits and charities they want to support. This can be done in just a few short minutes instead of having to spend the time to call and process information over the phone or taking the time to fill out forms and send them in by mail. Online donations can be set up easily and ecommerce operations are becoming easier to do by the day with companies like Facebook and Google getting in to the game and having payment services like PayPal available in addition to credit cards. People are spending their money with their mobile devices and eCommerce integration can lead to a huge boost. 

A big advantage is that now more people can connect with you in varying ways from essentially anywhere. While this means that you do have to make sure your site is mobile friendly, and maintaining contact with clients is more important, this also broadens your exposure to potential clients. If you are a regionalized organization, this is not as important as if you can operate on a larger scale, but it does mean that clients, regardless of where they are from, can connect with you from wherever they are at that moment. And just because you are limited in scope to a regional area, this doesn't mean broader exposure can't be beneficial. Whether it is connecting you with other organizations with similar goals, sharing information with others or reaching out to benefactors who are looking to back causes like yours, there are definite advantages to increased exposure.

In short, people are accessing more information from more places and want to be able to do more quickly and easily. They want to connect with people and business no matter where they are and they want organizations to interact with them, not just talk to them. They expect easy to use sites and options to do more things online, like shop or make donations. They want to have more movies and interactive content on sites and they want information available to them. Small steps towards accommodating an increasingly mobile world can make a huge difference, whether that is establishing a social media presence or doing an overhaul of your website to help with mobile viewing and modernize the look and functionality. If you're not sure what you can do to better take advantage, contact us and we can help. 

The evolution of technology is moving at such a rapid pace, it can be hard to see what has come and gone and even hard to keep track of all the new innovations. The world wide web has been around for nearly twenty years now and in that time the world has changed dramatically. Science fiction shows that seemed so ahead of their time and farfetched can now seem antiquated and lacking in technology. Things that seemed impossible even ten years ago now seem to be just a matter of time. In the 80's, having a beeper or a cell phone the size of a brick was a major status symbol. Now mobile devices like cell phones, laptop computers and tablets are common place. These devices get more powerful seemingly every day and that trend continues as power goes up and prices go down, resulting in more and more people using these devices. A lot of people may dismiss these mobile devices as toys or gimmicks, but using mobile devices can bring a lot to an organization.

Technology has changed and continues to do so . Modern mobile devices now run faster than most full sized computers did even five years ago. This is a lot of power to have literally sitting in the palm of your hand. Even basic cellular phones purchased in the last five years can call, send text messages and email from just about anywhere. Now modern smart phones, like the iPhone or Galaxy S3, can do almost anything a modern computer can do. Information is at your fingertips with these devices. Trying to remember who played that character on a favourite TV show in the 90's? Or maybe you want to check reviews on a restaurant while you are walking downtown. Now it's as simple as a few screen taps and you can find out almost anything in a matter of seconds. 

 Being mobile and accessible is important in today's world. You want to be where your clients are. With a smart phone, you can have access to your appointments, emails, phone and more (including applications like Skype) essentially anywhere you go. This means that being out of the office doesn't mean you are unavailable and allows you to make a more personal connection with your clients. With tablets, you can even give a presentation or show a short video to people on the go without having to carry much in terms of hardware. The tablet screen is more than adequate to show something to a small ground around the table, enabling you to add multimedia and other interactive elements to your presentation. You can also bring someone in to the meeting that couldn't otherwise attend. For example, you are in Winnipeg to meet with a client and your boss, who is in Toronto, wants to sit in on a meeting. While you are at the clients' office, you set up your tablet and now your boss can see, hear and interact with everyone as everyone can with him. The conversation becomes much more fluid and natural and allows for a better meeting.

Mobile applications are also becoming more popular and more powerful. The superior software allows smart phones and tablets to do more than ever before. Although you can do some photo and video editing on these devices, they still aren't generally as powerful as modern desktop systems. One application that makes your mobile device even more effective when you are working from home or on the road are remote desktop applications. This allows you to control your computer from a remote location (essentially anywhere with internet access) from your mobile device. This means you can not only demonstrate a program from almost anywhere, you can also use much more powerful software through your mobile device on your computer.

Mobile devices aren't only convenient to have on the road, they can be very useful within the office as well. If your computer is occupied with a program taking up all of its resources (rendering a video for example), you can still use email or review a document while you wait using a mobile device. Since most mobile devices also include microphones and high definition video cameras, this makes video conferencing much easier, more accessible and extremely portable. Most online learning platforms also support mobile devices, meaning you can learn from anywhere. You can also process spread sheets, edit photos and use social media very efficiently. Mobile applications are generally easy to use and surprisingly powerful. The apps also tend to be very reasonably priced, often free to costing a few dollars for a full featured application.

The best thing about mobile devices, in addition to all the benefits they bring, is that they are now extremely accessible. The interface is very easy to understand and most will be able to pick up a device and begin to use it within minutes, if not seconds. Though they can take a long time to master, these devices are made to be used quickly and easily, especially for basic things like checking your email or browsing the web. They're also very affordable. You can get smart phones for $0 (although this usually requires signing up for a 3 year contract) and tablets can be bought outright starting around $200. For something that will allow you to take high definition video and photos, show high definition movies, conference and interact, create documents, edit pictures, stay connected with your office, attend conferences and seminars, make phone calls, research information on the fly and so much more, that's a great price. The best part is, aside from a case (and in some cases a cellular plan), everything you need for most tasks are included.

If you are wanting to do more and get more out of your time, mobile devices are a great tool. A lot of people already have devices that you may be able to integrate. They're powerful, easy to use and very affordable for everything they bring to the table. Being able to go out to where your clients are will bring you closer to them. Staying in touch over social media and being consistently available will keep you closer to them. Enhancing your presentations, strengthening your tool set and connecting where you need to be connected will only help to reach your goals.