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If you are not promoting your business on social media, you are asleep at the wheel. Here is what eight social media masters and Advisors in The Oracles told us about the channels and tactics that impact their businesses most.

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With social media engagement hovering below 0.1%, networks showing more ads than ever, and organic social visibility in a continuous decline, social media does not seem like the lucrative marketing channel it once was.

However, user bases are growing, customers are using social to interact with brands, and most importantly, social is having an impact on purchasing decisions.

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Once you have decided to invest in social media marketing, your next key challenge is to decide which platforms you should be focused on.

This used to be relatively easy - you started a Facebook Page, set-up a Twitter profile, and then added others over time. But now, things have changed. Instagram is a much bigger consideration, Facebook's dwindling organic reach means it may be less of a priority, Twitters algorithm changes the equation, and LinkedIn's seeing more traffic. Pinterest, too, is on the rise, while if you're going to create video content, then YouTube definitely should be on your radar.

But you can not be active on all of them all the time - so which platforms are right for your business and marketing efforts?

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1. Plan a content strategy and create an editorial calendar for your social channels.
Marketers are sometimes at a loss at what to post on social media.

Successful social media marketing doesn't happen on accident -- there's a strategy in place, just as there is with a blog.

Look at the big picture and come up with social content that will resonate with your audience.

Map out seasonal content, as well as content related to events or launches your company is planning.

Work closely with your editorial and marketing teams to know what's coming down the pipeline and strategize the best ways to promote it.

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A sound, effective strategy involves these four steps.

A whopping 3.2 billion people, or 42% of the world's population, uses social media. On average, people spend over two hours of their day messaging and surfing social media networks.

After having a positive experience with a brand on social media, 71% of people will often recommend the brand to their friends and family. On top of that, 49% of people are taking their cues on what to buy from social media influencers.

Based on these statistics, it's crucial for businesses to have a solid social media marketing strategy in place. Unfortunately, many business owners have no idea how to handle social media marketing.

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The method of getting your podcast out to the world might not be the way you think.

Unlike most popular forms of online content, podcasts utilize a form of forbidden arcane knowledge; an ancient method of internet distribution discussed in hushed tones and under furtive glances as really simple syndication or RSS for short.

Learning how to make your own podcast-only RSS feed is a crucial element for any successful show.

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Updating your brand bio can be a great, simple way to boost engagement, especially heading into the new year. Your profile bio can play a key role in perception, and in driving subsequent action, so it is worth reviewing your details and ensuring that everything is as you want it.

Writing a Great Social Media Bio for Your Brand [Infographic]

None of us are getting out of this alive. With the advent of consumer tech and the internet, you can now make your wishes known in a myriad of ways. For starters, if you are wondering where’s the best place to make sure your loved ones follow your will directives and have access to your passwords, you can do this online.

Specialty sites can store all your important documents from wills, trusts and passwords to your funeral preferences. While most sites are subscription-based, there is a free option that is HIPPA-compliant with secured bank-level encryption.

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If you are a hard-core Slack user, you might find yourself spending more time within the confines of that collaboration tool than any other. If that's the case, why not get your news there as well? Sound like something you might want or need? If so, it is a good thing Slack allows the addition of RSS feeds.

complete article

The method of getting your podcast out to the world might not be the way you think.

Unlike most popular forms of online content, podcasts utilize a form of forbidden arcane knowledge; an ancient method of internet distribution discussed in hushed tones and under furtive glances as really simple syndication or RSS for short.

Learning how to make your own podcast-only RSS feed is a crucial element for any successful show. Feel free to jump to a section of your choosing if you’re looking for something in particular:

What is a podcast-only RSS feed?
Why you need a podcast-only RSS feed
How to craft a podcast-only RSS feed
How to switch to a podcast-only RSS feed

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One of the unwritten rules of Instagram management is to create a cohesive feed. The posts you upload on the platform should be logical in terms of visual concept, timing, captions, and hashtags.

But consistency isn’t something that can be accomplished overnight. You need to take time and think through each caption, the relevance of tags, the whole grid layout style and posting frequency. To streamline this process and plan your Instagram posts and stories, you can use Combin Scheduler, a tool for Instagram content planning.

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These days, your boss can be watching your Instagram stories or liking your posts. Social media blurs the line between work and personal life. While this can bring you closer to your team, it also adds pressure as any faux pas may affect your role or office dynamics. To explore the effects of ones social profiles on their career, WhoIsHostingThis, wanting to quantify what constitutes digital hoarding, the extent to which people do so, and the potential privacy risks of this behavior, asked over 900 employees, and the findings were interesting:

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The SEO landscape is very dynamic. Sure, some things stay the same: put relevant keywords in your titles, make it a priority to optimize for mobile users, etc.

But other things continue changing in a never-ending spiral. This year, Google, along with other huge platforms, is trying more and more to be the end destination of their users journeys.

This, more than anything, defines major SEO trends for 2020.

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If you are a hard-core Slack user, you might find yourself spending more time within the confines of that collaboration tool than any other. If thats the case, why not get your news there as well? Sound like something you might want or need? If so, it is a good thing Slack allows the addition of RSS feeds.

With this feature, you can always be up to date on your favorite topic-specific RSS feed from within your favorite Slack workspace. It is a one-two punch of efficiency. If that sounds like something you might want, lets see how it is done.


The only things you will need to make this work are: An RSS feed to follow and a Slack workspace that allows you to install apps. If your workspace doesn't allow the installation of apps, reach out to the Slack admin for your company or team and see if they can install the app for you.


The easiest way of installing apps on Slack is either via the desktop app or the web-based interface. The good news is that, no matter which route you take for installation, the RSS feed will show up on your workspace, no matter if you're using the desktop app, the web-based interface, or the mobile app.

1. Open the Slack desktop app
2. Click the + button under Apps
3. In the resulting window, type RSS and hit Enter on your keyboard.
4. Click the Install button associated with the resulting RSS app listing.
5. When your default browser opens, click Add To Slack and then click Allow.

Our stress levels are at an all-time high right now, which means our attentiveness to our own self-care should be, too—especially those of us with wanderlust. Traveling from the living room to the kitchen and back is no one’s ideal of a vacation, yet here we are. On top of that, our social media platforms seem determined to remind us of better days: Hey, look where you were a year ago today! blares Facebook, serving up a photo of a gorgeous beach or other getaway spot much more alluring than the permanent butt-groove you have formed in your couch.

For many of us, looking back on our travels past is not doing us much good at the moment. Luckily, there are a few methods to keep them from showing up in your social media feeds.

The method of getting your podcast out to the world might not be the way you think.

Unlike most popular forms of online content, podcasts utilize a form of forbidden arcane knowledge; an ancient method of internet distribution discussed in hushed tones and under furtive glances as really simple syndication or RSS for short.

First of all, we need to draw a critical distinction between traditional RSS feeds and podcast-only RSS feeds. An RSS feed is a format of internet file that can contain any sort of content, while the podcast-only variety is, unsurprisingly restricted to only podcasts.

A podcast-only RSS feed is a subtype of the internet file type known as RSS. This file can be easily distributed to a variety of different directories that updates the displayed content in real time alongside changes made by the creator.

This format restriction is what allows podcast directories to so easily display and showcase new content; everything that is submitted is, from a technical standpoint, completely identical!

After years of usage, your WordPress database can contain weird characters, be filled with data you don’t need anymore, and so on. In this article, you will learn about SQL queries to clean up your WordPress database. Two things to note: First, any of these queries should be preceded by a backup of your whole …

Useful SQL Queries To Clean Up Your WordPress Database Read More »

Browsery RC569.5.I54 P75 2017

Browsery BF692.2.I26 2018

Mother's Day 2020: Simplest way to thank your mom on this day

 The Great Courses has made available a free and rather timely course--Building Your Resilience: Finding Meaning in Adversity. Divided into 24 lectures and taught by Molly Birkholm, the course gets introduced with the following text: Recent research shows that we grow into our best and most joyful selves not when we avoid our problems […]

<i>Building Your Resilience: Finding Meaning in Adversity</i>–A Free 24-Lecture Course is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

How we came to answer the question in Memphis.

Monali Thakur speaks about her journey, about becoming an actor and working with Nagesh Kukunoor, and her next film Mango.

Check this out!

Join in the fun!

Amitabh Bachchan talks about PINK, working with younger actors and social media!

Aamir Khan looks leaner, fitter and younger on his 52nd birthday.

Tips from Sunny and Rannvijay on how to spice up your marriage.

Relationship advice from Sunny Leone and Rannvijay Singha.

After the Antakshri Challenge, Bollywood stars have taken up the Safe Hands Challenge, launched by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organisation.

Angie Ward discusses cultivating leadership amid ever-changing responsibilities.

Angie Ward, author of the recently published I Am a Leader, has 30 years of leadership experience in diverse roles in ministry. I was excited to talk with Angie about how our calling shifts through the various seasons of life.

How can a woman’s calling change over the course of her life?

Sometimes we think as young women that we have one calling, and that’s it. We just have to find it, and we put so much weight on that one thing. But for most people, it changes how it looks and how it’s lived out based on seasons of life and age. Our calling can also change because we change. Who we are, our gifts, our passions. And that’s okay.

For me, I started out in youth ministry, but then God expanded it. It didn’t shift entirely. It was still vocational/occupational ministry, but it went to more broad ministry—leadership and to leadership development. When I was 22, just out of college, I didn’t have the experience or the wisdom to train other leaders. I was just working with students who were sometimes only four years younger than me. The Holy Spirit moves and flows. Working with kids in children’s ministry at your church may make you aware of the needs of foster kids. It opens a door to a whole new thing.

How can we discover what our calling is today?

Cultivate an ear for the Holy Spirit—a heart and a mind that's receptive, that knows the Shepherd's voice, and a heart that's obedient and responsive to whatever it is during that season. A lot of times we get focused on the wrong question: What is it? We focus on trying to figure out the it. Instead, the real focus should be on cultivating our relationship with Jesus and walking with him. We want steps to cling to. If I ...

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As hardships come, you have 1 of 3 options.

This was not how things were supposed to work out.

Every night for a year, my husband and I had prayed that God would direct us to the right place in his right timing. Based on our own prayers as well as confirmation from others, it seemed that the “right place” would be a church where Dave could serve as senior pastor, giving him more opportunities to exercise his gifts of preaching and shepherding. Now that we had two little boys, we also desired to be closer to family. We told God that we would go anywhere he led us (and we meant it!), but that we would love to end up somewhere in the southeastern United States, ideally within three hours of Dave’s parents.

We explored options around the country. We prayed, waited, and sought counsel from wise and mature believers. We continued to serve faithfully in our current ministries. We prayed and waited some more.

Twelve months later, our little family made the 1,200-mile journey from Minnesota to our new church in North Carolina—just two and a half hours from our sons’ beloved Nana and Papa—where Dave would serve as lead pastor. We felt God had clearly answered our earnest prayers, as evidenced by all sorts of confirmations that seemed like way more than coincidence. I mean, at the boarding gate for our flight home from our interview weekend, we discovered that our pilot “happened” to be a friend who first came up to Dave a year earlier and said he felt God was preparing my husband for a lead pastoral role!

We were over-the-moon excited. We felt we had come home, and we thought we’d be at that church and in that city for life.

Yet three years in, our dream situation had turned to a nightmare. Our church was slowly dying, our marriage ...

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Barker Library - PS3601.T784 A795 2019

Dewey Library - PS3557.O35819 F43 2019b

Imagine you’re ready to apply for your next job. Like most busy professionals, you probably haven’t updated your résumé or your portfolio since you looked for your current job. 

Now you need to update both, and you can’t remember what work you’ve done over the past few years. (In fact, you can barely remember what you’ve done over the past few months!)

So you scramble to update your résumé with new content. Then you spend all weekend scraping together a new portfolio using screenshots of whatever work evidence you can find on your laptop. You submit the résumé and portfolio with your application, hoping you didn’t forget to include any major career milestones you achieved over the last few years. 

This is the process most of us use to approach our job search. We wait until we’re ready to find a job, panic at our lack of résumé and portfolio, and pull together a “good enough” version of each for the job application. (Trust me, I’ve done this many times myself.)

This is a stressful and ineffective way to approach a job search. There’s a much better approach you can take—and you can start working on it now, even if you’re not on the job market.

The Career Management Document

A Career Management Document (CMD) is a comprehensive collection of your résumé and portfolio content. It’s a document you update regularly, over time, with all the work you’ve done. 

When you’re ready to apply for your next job, you’ll have all the résumé and portfolio pieces available in your CMD. All you need to do is assemble those pieces into résumé and portfolio documents, then send the documents off with your job application.

I update my CMD about once a week. I start by reviewing evidence of my recent work. I review Slack messages, Basecamp posts, emails, and any other current work-related content. I write my accomplishments in the format of résumé bullets, using the framework of responsibilities and accomplishments from this Manager Tools podcast. Then I add those bullets to the CMD. 

Here are some examples from my CMD:

• Coached a student on writing a stronger portfolio story to showcase their advanced UX skills, resulting in the student getting a job interview.
• Facilitated an end-of-study analysis in under 90 minutes to help the team synthesize user research data from 12 participants.
• Led a remote retrospective with teams in two offices, developed actionable takeaways, and ended on time despite a delayed start.

My CMD has several hundred résumé bullets, and it continues to grow. I organize content by year and by project. Within each project are responsibilities and accomplishments.

I add any content to the CMD that might go into my résumé someday. I include everything I can think of, even if it seems insignificant or trivial at the time. 

For example, I sometimes help with social media marketing at Center Centre, the UX design school where I’m a faculty member. I include it in my CMD. I don’t plan to pursue social media marketing as a career, but it may be relevant to a future job. Who knows—I may apply to work for an organization that makes social media marketing software someday. In that case, my social media experience could be relevant.

Include portfolio artifacts with your CMD

In addition to capturing bullets for my résumé, I capture content for my portfolio. Each week, I gather screenshots of my work, photos of me working with the team, and any other artifacts I can find. I store them in an organized system I can reference later. 

I also take brief notes about the work I did and store them with the artifacts. That way, if I look back at these materials a year from now, I’ll have notes about what I did during the project, reminding me of the details.

For example, after I facilitated a user research analysis session late last year, I captured evidence of it for my portfolio. I included photos of the whiteboard where I recorded public notes during the session. I also captured brief notes about who attended the session, the date, and when it took place during the project. 

You can use whatever tools you’d like to gather evidence of your work. I use Google Docs for the résumé portion of my CMD. I use Dropbox to store my portfolio artifacts. I create Dropbox folders with dates and project names that correspond to the contents of my CMD.

The key is to collect the evidence regularly and store it in an accessible, organized way that works for you. To know if you’re storing work evidence effectively, ask yourself, “Will I understand this CMD content a year from now based on how I’m capturing and storing it today?” If the answer is “yes,” you’re in good shape.

Update your CMD regularly

For the CMD to work when you need it, it needs to be comprehensive and up-to-date. As I mentioned before, I update my CMD once a week. I schedule thirty minutes on my calendar each week so I remember to do it. 

Sometimes I have a busy week, and I can’t spend thirty minutes on my CMD. So I spend whatever amount of time I have. Some weeks, I only spend ten minutes. Ten minutes per week is better than zero minutes per week. 

Occasionally, I don’t get a chance to update it because my week is so hectic. That’s OK because I’ll probably get to it the following week. 

I recommend updating your CMD once a week and not once a month or once a quarter. If you wait even a month, you’ll have trouble remembering what you did three and a half weeks ago. Even worse, if you schedule a CMD update once a month and then miss it, you won’t get to it until the next month. That means you have to think back and remember two months of work, which is hard to do. 

Updating your CMD every week, while the work is fresh in your mind, gets the best results.

The CMD benefits you in additional ways

The CMD can help you prepare for your job search beyond your résumé and your portfolio. 

You can use it to prepare for a job interview. Since you’re capturing work evidence from each stage of the process in your CMD, you can use that evidence to remember what you did throughout a project. Then, you can craft a story about your role on that project. 

Hiring managers love to hear stories about your work during job interviews. For instance, if you’re a designer, they want to know the journey you took during your design process, from the start of a project to the end. A detailed CMD will help you remember this process so you can share it in an interview. 

I’ve even used my CMD to write blog posts. I’ve been blogging regularly for the past two years, and I often refer to my CMD to remember work experience I had that’s relevant to what I’m writing. When I wrote the article “How to Tell Compelling Stories During a UX Job Interview,” I used my CMD to remember interview preparation exercises I did with students. 

The CMD can also help you track work accomplishments for your quarterly or annual performance reviews. Additionally, you can use it to write job ads when hiring for related roles on your team.

Lastly, I find it rewarding to peruse my CMD now and then, especially when I look back at work I did over a year ago. The CMD serves as a record of all my professional accomplishments. This record helps me appreciate my professional growth because I see how far my skills have come over time.

Learn more about the CMD from Manager Tools

At Center Centre, we originally learned about the Career Management Document through the Manager Tools podcast series.

Manager Tools’ podcasts explain how to use a CMD for your résumé. We expanded their approach to include portfolio work as well. I recommend listening to their podcasts about creating and maintaining your CMD:

• Systematic Career Documentation (Part 1)
• Systematic Career Documentation (Part 2)

Prepare for your next job search now

We tell our students at Center Centre that preparing for your next job search is a process that starts early. It’s like saving for retirement—the sooner you start saving money, the more likely you are to be prepared when the time comes. 

Similarly, collecting résumé and portfolio content ahead of time will prepare you to find your next job whenever you’re ready to do so. It also prepares you for a sudden job termination like an unexpected layoff. If you lose your job without warning, you’ll likely be under a lot of stress to find a new position. Having a CMD ready will relieve the additional stress of building a résumé and portfolio from scratch. 

If you don’t have a CMD yet, now is a great time to start one. Schedule 30 minutes this week to begin crafting your repository of work accomplishments. You’ll be glad you did when you seek your next job.

Hayden Library - RM324.8.P65 2018

Hayden Library - RM666.C266 F79 2018

In this entry I will describe and provide how to run a HTTPS server in your home network, in order to test new HTML5 APIs.

Rotch Library - G70.212.A7352 2015

Dewey Library - HD38.2.C55 2019

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Angie Ward discusses cultivating leadership amid ever-changing responsibilities.

Why have finance ministers over the years not done this? Because the beedi is the poor man's smoke, and the beedi industry employs millions. Yet, these are horrifying, cruel reasons for tax concessions for proven killers.

In 2018, industry research firm Gartner made a rather disheartening prediction: Some 85 percent of AI projects are doomed to failure. Wow. That’s a lot. Keep that number at the back of your mind. Now consider how many questions an organization must answer when it comes to this kind of project implementation: Do we have […]

The post Five Steps to Take to Give Your AI Project a Fighting Chance at Success appeared first on DevelopIntelligence.

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Dewey Library - HF5549.5.M63 C33 2019