If you own or manage a small business, Twitter and Facebook are tremendous tools to grow your business.  The Economist Magazine’s newest special report covers the effects of social media in our society.  One article in particular covers social media’s effects on small business.  This post summarizes and builds off the examples and suggestions in the article.

1. Even The Advertising Playing Field

Social media is free (so far).  This means that the budgets of huge companies like Comcast, Starbucks or Dell doesn’t matter that much anymore.  There is nothing that these companies can do that you can’t.  All that matters now is your creativity, not your budget.  So if you didn’t have a marketing budget before tools like Twitter and Facebook this is your chance to increase your customer base.  If you do spend money on traditional marketing, the article mentioned a survey reporting small businesses in Britain have saved over $8,000 by using social media.

2. Get Feedback From Customers

If you don’t know what the customer wants your business is going to be at risk.  Social media gives you access to customers that already appreciate your service or product.  Use them to better understand their needs.  If you can improve existing customer’s experience of your brand, they will be more likely to tell their friends about the great things you do.

If you are at a small business or building a start up, by definition you won’t have a budget for market research.  Thus making social media so important.  Social media can be a useful substitute for intense market research.

3. Promotions Made Easy

The Economist article reported that 44% of Twitter users who follower brands do so because of the exclusive deals offered.

The most famous example of a company using Twitter for promotional uses is Kogi BBQ.  They are a mobile Korean food company.  They use their tweets to alert followers to where their trucks are located.

If you offer weekly events like book readings or musical acts social media are great ways to promote these activities.  Maybe you offer an awesome happy hour, twitter to remind followers about it.  Another idea mentioned in the article is to offer a password to followers which can be redeemed by a select number of customers for cupcake in this case.

Most of the example here are about increased access to your customer.  Whether you want to know more about them, tell them more about your company, or promote your product, social media does the job.  Use these tools to growth your business on a shoe-string budget.

If you are lacking a direction or just don’t know where to begin your social media campaign contact us and let’s see if m2volt can help you out.

This post was written by Cameron Plommer, Project and Social Media Manager at m2volt.
Follow him on Twitter.

Here is a cool jQuery effect which lets you preview an image when you hover over its thumbnail. It pretty much a tooltip that follows your mouse around while having an image rather than text. The image previewer will also adjust itself depending on how large the image is in relation to the x and y coordinates of your mouse.

Regular demo
Grid demo

Heres how to implement:

1. Link your JS

Sources:

jQuery
img_prev.js

2: Set up your HTML.

Start by adding a class to your image called “imgPrev”. You then want to add the src attribute, the src will be the URL to the thumbnail. Finally add your rel attribute, this will be the URL to the full sized image you want to preview.

3: Add your CSS

You only need to add css to the imgPrev id, this id is appended to the HTML body via the JS. This is the container that holds the images.

#imgPrev {
	position: absolute;
	background: url('img/trans_bg.png');
	padding: 5px;
	display: none;
}

Background image source:

trans_bg.png

Regular demo
Grid demo

Here are some links to the tools we like to use for twitter…

• Tweetie 2 for iPhone: http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/

• Seesmic for Web and Desktop Application: http://seesmic.com/

• Tweetdeck is another popular tool: http://www.tweetdeck.com/

• Twitter Search: (This is where the power is at) http://www.search.twitter.com

If you are new to twitter or need to know more about setting it up, you should read this guide put together by Mashable. Really, the possibilities are endless and it is only limited by your imagination. Just start talking and building new relationships, that is what it is all about. Use twitter search to find people talking around you. Simple as that. Start Talking.

We build websites. We customize blogs. We do all that backend stuff so you don’t have to. We pretty much do anything web. We are also passionate about talking with customers and business tools to streamline how you do things. Please call us anytime at 309-453-8175 or subscribe to our feed via RSS or Email to receive notifications on new business tips and dev tools. You can also follow m2volt on twitter or join our fan page on facebook.

This post was recorded by Shane Mac and Cameron Plommer. Read more about shane or follow him on twitter here.

You can follow Cameron on Twitter Here.

(sorry if offended by title, I mean no harm but it got your attention…)

Prostitution. Horrible. Disgusting. Illegal. Not Always… Wait! Before you leave, did you know that prostitution is considered the oldest profession in the world? With that said, I think we can all learn something from the oldest model of business if you forget about the morals. Here are 3 things I believe all of us can learn from the business of prostitution.

1. You know where to find them.

It seems so obvious. We tend to assume that people know where to find us. Small and medium size business owners, myself included, tend to think that because we know exactly where to find ourselves that everyone else does too. While people may be able to find you if you are bad ass at PR and marketing, but the truth is that it’s much easier to find the street corner where other businesses are standing and setup your shop there. Think about McDonald’s, Hardee’s, Burger King, and other large chain restaurants, they are usually built within blocks of each other. The same can be said for automotive dealers, bars, online networks, and any other business you can think of. It is usually easier to be where people are looking rather than making them take a detour. If you do take the “build it and they will come model,” you had better be worth it. Go find your corner, work it, and make sure you take the time to look better than all of the others.

2. You know what they are selling.

I can’t tell you how many times I talk with businesses, especially online, where I find myself thinking, “what are they trying to sell.” Once people find you on the street do they know what you have to offer? They should be able to look at you from head to toe and know exactly what you do. Content is more important than you think. I find many companies who assume that because you found your corner that people will know what you are selling. Don’t ever assume and make sure you dress the part, walk the walk, and realize that no one will know what you do unless you show them.

3. You know you’ll have to pay to get more.

This is where you have to be good. If you suck, you are not getting anyone to pay for more. If you are good, then you can keep them wanting more and more and more and more and more and… you get the picture. Have confidence that you can give a little bit up front and that people won’t be able to resist what you have to offer. This is especially important online and you should have enough confidence in your product that you can offer it up for free knowing that people won’t be able to resist wanting to use it more. Perfect example is Basecamp by 37signals. They tease you for 30 days and get you to bring in all your buddies for the party and then right when you are about to get off they ask for the money. You can’t resist and you keep coming back every month because it is good, really good. There are technology companies across that board that forget this point and try to run out the door selling shit. Build something of value, give a little taste of it, listen to them tell you how they like it, then only give it all up if they want to pay. The secret is figuring out how to charge for each little pleasure you give. If you are no good then you will get kicked to the curb anyways so focus on building kick ass stuff. Do your clients know where to find you, what you offer, and how much it cost to get their lips wet? Ask yourself… Are you “Down on the corner?” We build websites. We customize blogs. We do all that backend stuff so you don’t have to. We pretty much do anything web. We are also passionate about talking with customers and business tools to streamline how you do things. Please call us anytime at 309-453-8175 or subscribe to our feed via RSS or Email to receive notifications on new business tips and dev tools. You can also follow m2volt on twitter or join our fan page on facebook. This post was written by Shane Mac, co-founder of m2volt, and he only ‘interviewed’ a few prostitutes for this post, a while back. Read more about him or follow him on twitter. Photo Credit: ricardo.martins

Let me start off by saying that I think meetings, for the most part, are held for the complete wrong reasons.  It seems to me that most meetings, which for the most part I no longer attend, are geared towards dates, schedule, and checklists.  I tend to agree more with a post by Andrew Swenson who writes at wordpost.org.  He argues that,

If you really want to, you can still meet with your department, but instead of passing information, use the time for creative problem solving.

Like myself, he believes that

…the simple solution to preventing the monumental time suck of departmental meetings is an online forum using a service like Google Wave, Ning, Facebook, or a custom install behind the firewall.

I would go on to add basecamp, staction, and google docs as other key players in the online collaboration arena as well.

With that said, if you are having a meeting to actually solve a problem or talk creatively around a project, would you please leave your phone behind or at least leave it out of sight?  Alright ya, I have done it before and I understand that everyone is “doing it,” but lately it has been driving me nuts.  In the recent months I have made a point to turn off my phone during meetings and actually listen to what the people have to say in the meeting.  What do i hear? I hear the same people, the same question, at every meeting.  “Can you please repeat that?” or “What were you asking?”  If we wanted to come to the meeting and type on our phone’s the entire time we could have stayed at our desk’s and had a circle text.  I mean really, why don’t we all just sit in a circle and text each other then?  It isn’t until you stop, look around, and realize that everyone in the room is typing on their damn phone that it will drive you crazy.  Especially when the person talking has to repeat themselves 2, 3, or even 4 times.  If there really is a need for a meeting and all of the participants indeed need to be in attendance then we should have a new “golden rule.”  No cell phones are allowed during meetings, Period.

Think about it, as books and print transition more and more onto digital screens, our phone is a newspaper, book, and dvd player for that matter.  Imagine sitting in a meeting or a classroom and flipping through the newspaper during the creative briefing.  It just wouldn’t make sense.  Just because the phone fits nicely in the palm of your hand and slightly below the surface of the table doesn’t mean the concept is any different.  Now that the phone is our main source of content we need to realize that collaboration and creativity come from the interaction of individuals coming together and brainstorming ideas, not from staring at a leash we have come to know as a phone.  So ask yourself 2 questions, is this meeting worth having and if so then should we all bring our phones to talk to each other?

I find that most people will agree with me on this subject but are not really sure how to approach the issue in meetings.  I believe it is a lot easier to make suggestions to people when you ask them how they feel about a subject and then if you have agreement among the group it doesn’t come off as you trying to “lay down the law.”  Instead of situations where it would seem as though you were calling people out for something, I would simply ask at the beginning of a meeting if all in attendance would agree that we should put away our cell phones and get through the meeting as smoothly as possible?  I think you will find that most people will agree and hopefully then take your advice with them to their own meetings.

We build websites. We customize blogs. We do all that backend stuff so you don’t have to. We pretty much do anything web. We are also passionate about talking with customers and using business tools to streamline how you do things. Please call us anytime at 309-453-8175 or subscribe to our feed via RSS or Email to receive notifications on new business tips and dev tools. You can also follow m2volt on twitter or join our fan page on facebook.

This post was written by Shane Mac, co-founder of m2volt, and he only ‘interviewed’ a few prostitutes for this post, a while back.  Read more about him or follow him on twitter.

Image Credit: www.cartoonstock.com

We have built so many different websites from e-commerce, to portfolios, to database solutions but I wanted to go back to where it all started and dig up a simple video that I made which shows the process of developing the wire frames for the homepage of our company’s site, m2volt. The software I use in the video, Curio, is what I still use today for project management, concept of design, mind-mapping, and wire frames.  It is an awesome program for the mac that combines simplicity of use with some incredibly powerful features.  I will posting more videos in the future of tips and techniques with Curio but for now I hope you enjoy the very beginning of how we started m2volt.  If you would like more detail of Curio you can read about it in another post that I wrote, Business on a Mac? Simple. You can view the video more clearly if you view in full screen so I would suggest doing so.  After you watch the video be sure to check out our homepage and see how the wire frame came to life.  Enjoy the not so quick 5 minute video and feel free to fast forward if you like….

Do you use a wire framing software?  What do you prefer?  Do you use any programs that do multiple functions like Curio or stick to unique programs for different tasks?  Would love your input.

-Shane Mac

You can follow me on twitter here.

The Mac is for creative stuff, the PC is for Business. I would say I beg to differ and in the recent months I have taken small companies including my own from concept to opening their doors all on a Mac. I am always trying to find the easiest, most efficient way to help companies perform all the different tasks that are associated with running a business and the list below is a few programs that I think can help out any company looking to increase efficiency and/or cut their labor on the admin tasks.

1. BILLINGS: Invoice and Billing made easy

There are so many bookkeeping and invoicing programs out there but I have found the quickest and easiest to use is a program for the mac is Billings. A lot of start ups and small companies use Freshbooks, an online cloud program that makes invoicing and book keeping simple but sometimes Software as a Service, SaaS, is a costly way to go when having to pay a monthly fee. Freshbooks is a good program though and may be worth a look for your company. Billings integrates with a CRM program, Daylight, which can turn all of your leads and contacts into clients easily and make it easy to stay on top of prospective clients. It is basically a scaled down program that is similar to Salesforce.com.

Billings Screenshot

2. EVERNOTE: Remember Everything

Whether it is remember an idea you have in the car, taking a picture of the whiteboard from your meeting, or keeping an electronic business card database, Evernote is a must have for anyone. With the text in picture search technology, the program reads all of your images and then you can use the search feature to find any words inside of a picture you have taken. Have you ever been in a meeting and after a long mind map whiteboard session you wanted to take that with you? Now you can and it is pretty dang awesome. You just set up all your own categories and write tags with each entry for easy to find info later. The best part about Evernote is that it is everywhere you are. It has a mobile app, desktop client, online version, outlook plugin, and browser plugins so anytime you want to save something just select some text or an entire page then Evernote it. After you have all of your ideas in Evernote you can take it right over to one of my favorite tools, Curio, for just about everything from project management, simple design, to-do’s, and more.  Evernote works on both Mac and PC.

Evernote Screenshot

3. CURIO: MS Project on Steroids

It’s a mindmapping ,project management, simple yet powerful design tool, powerpoint engine, and much more. (and it integrates with Evernote). Curio allows you to create a start to finish project plan with all the documents, designs, live web integration and action items built into a simple to use tagging function that even my 5 year old niece could ace. The integration with Evernote is an awesome feature as well. It allows you to drag and drop any notes or images you have saved in Evernote straight into the project plan or mindmap and then tag it to any individual in your address book. It is simple to drag any contact onto an individual task and it keeps a clean list on the right hand side of the page of each individual’s tasks for the day. Integration with the new MacBook’s touchpad also makes designing in Curio a breeze for beginners. Don’t get me wrong, it is not photoshop or programs similar to it, but it can be a good starting point for design for any designer due to the quick and simple interface. This is basically a must have (my top recommended program) and should be the first step in putting Microsoft Project into the garbage. Who doesn’t hate managing projects with that program and with Curio it opens the door to creativity and innovation along with organization. You will soon find yourself with 50 different mind maps and ideas coming out of thin air.  Here are some design mocks, wireframes, and project management tools that we use daily at m2volt and helped in the creation of our own company.

Curio Designing Screenshot

Curio Wireframe Screenshot

Curio Project Management/Mindmap Screenshot

4. WORDPRESS: Websites made easy

While there are so many platforms for websites, social media, or online advertising, I think the easiest and most efficient way to build a website is through Wordpress. (For one, I am writing this article using the Wordpress platform right now). It is as easy as Microsoft Word or the rapidly growing Google Docs to update and it can be set up to feed any of your Social networks automatically whenever you update your site. There is also an endless supply of plugins that can be added by the click of a button and add some pretty advanced features to your site without knowing any code what so ever. Along with that, there are many wordpress experts out there if you ever wanted to customize your site beyond the template layout you are using and did I mention changing your entire layout is as simple as clicking one button. Wordpress is a super easy and efficient way to keep your site up to date and looking good and is much more than just a “blogging” platform these days. I hope you find these programs to be as useful as we have in starting m2volt.  Contact us if you want to develop a custom site powered by Wordpress since that is what we do here at m2volt.  Wordpress is a web program so it will work on any operating system.

Wordpress Screenshot

What do you use for your company?

What do you use for your small business?  Have you tried any other programs that we should know about?  Would love feedback in the comments for programs on either Mac or PC.

This post was written by Shane Mac, co-founder of m2volt.  You can follow him on twitter @shanemacsays.

As websites move towards the “web 2.0″ look and feel, a glassy rounded corner button or image is pretty standard. There are many websites out there that will generate buttons for you automatically through their design tools such as My Cool Button and As Button Generator .

The tools are nice to use, but I thought I would show the technique I always use when designing these buttons. Its very easy to do, its simply just a rounded corner rectangle with a gradient.

Open your favorite editor, I personally use FireWorks and sometimes PhotoShop. If you are looking for a open source editor I would suggest GIMP

Creating the Image

Start with a basic rounded corner rectangle for the first layer of your image.

I then give the image a slight inner glow. This is an option in the filter section of FireWorks.

Use the rounded corner rectangle tool again this time with slightly more roundness to it. Select the fill option, choose gradient and set both the colors to white. A white with 10% opacity to a white with 35%. You can play with these numbers until it looks right. Put this gradient on the top half of your image.

Want to add a hover over effect?

Here is a little technique I have picked up. Double the canvase height of your image so you can put a duplicate directly below.

Add some color to the bottom layer of the image on the bottom.

Now add some css.

a.myButtonDiv
{
  display:block;
  width: 271px; /* Exact width of image */
  height: 74px; /* Exactly half of the overall image */
  background: url("http://www.marioedgar.com/images/blog/5.jpg") no-repeat top left;
  line-height: 74px;
  text-align:center;
  color: #fff;
  font-weight:bold;
  font-size: 16px;
}

a.myButtonDiv:hover
{
  background-position: 0 -74px;
  text-decoration:none;
}

And finally the html

     Look at my Button!

Look at my Button!

jQuery? Why not?

Let make this thing stand out a little more by using some animation, start with the CSS tweaked a little bit:

      a.myButton, span.firstBackground, span.secondBackground
      {
          width: 271px;
          height: 74px;
          display:block;
          line-height:74px;
          text-decoration:none;
          font-weight:bold;
          color: #000;
          text-align:center;
          position:absolute;
          top:0;
          color:#fff;
          font-size: 16px;
      }

      .firstBackground
      {
          background: url('http://www.marioedgar.com/images/blog/5.jpg') no-repeat;
          background-position: 0 0;
      }
      .secondBackground
      {
          background: url('http://www.marioedgar.com/images/blog/5.jpg') no-repeat;
          background-position: 0 -74px;
      }

HTML markup is the same, but we need a parent container now that we are using absolute positioning.

         Look at my button!

Any lastly, the jQuery.

jQuery(window).ready(function(){
    jQuery("").insertBefore("a.myButton");
    jQuery("span.secondBackground").css("opacity","0");
    jQuery("a.myButton").mouseenter(function(){
    jQuery(this).parent().find("span.secondBackground").animate ({
    opacity: 1.0
    }, 500); });
    jQuery("a.myButton").mouseleave(function(){
    jQuery(this).parent().find("span.secondBackground").animate ({
    opacity: 0
    }, 500); });
});

Here’s a post for beginner HTML/CSS soon to be ninjas. About 90% of the sites I have built use this same technique for layout. I generally use a 950px wide layout but this can be any size you would like as long as you adjust the width of the columns accordingly.

1: Set up the HTML

2: Add the CSS

The first thing I do before I start coding my CSS is use a CSS reset. I tend to use Erik Meyers reset CSS but there are many CSS resets such as yahoo’s.

Believe it or not thats all you have to do for the layout. Just remember if you are adding a border to the left_column or right_column that you are increasing the overall width of each column.

Check out a little demo page I created.

I enjoyed building my image slideshow so much that I had to do another. I have used many open sourced html slideshows in my years, but again I wanted to build one that is very simple and customizable. The html slideshow I have created will fade in and out through any html content of your choice. Here are the steps to create this slideshow.

1: Link your JS.

Three files will need to be linked in your on your page, the jQuery library, the preloader JS(optional) and my slideshow JS.

Sources:

jQuery
preloader
mariosSlide.js

2: Set up your HTML.

Start with a division and give it any id that you would like, just keep in mind you will need to define this name later in the JS.

Inside of this div will be your containers holding your content, each container will need to have a id starting with id=”slide1”, the next id=”slide2” etc. You will also set each style of these elemts to display:none, you can either do it inline or in your CSS file.

          SLIDE 1 CONTENT
      

          SLIDE 2 CONTENT
      

          SLIDE 3 CONTENT
      

3. Edit mariosSlide.js

There are a few variables to set, alter the code as needed save then you should be ready to rock.

var divName = "slideShowDiv";
var numSlides = 3;
var pauseTime = 6000;
var imagePreLoad = true;
var imagesPath = "http://marioedgar.com/homepage_slide_images/";
var imageType = ".jpg";
var slideShowWidth = 910;
var slideShowHeight = 300;
var loaderName = "loader.gif";
var loaderWidth = 32;
var loaderHeight = 32;
var navigationButtons = true;

Click here to download source files.

A working example of this is on my homepage, check it out here.