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Global climate change is obviously a big, big issue. So what can we as small businesses do about it? As part of Blog Action Day 2009, BatchBlue turned to our resident experts in all things small business (our customers and our contact network, of course!) to find out what they are doing not only to bring in the green, but also to be green in their business practices.
During Tuesday’s small business Twitter chat #SBBUZZ, we discussed how there are many small steps you can take to help green up your business (and thus help do the big work of saving the planet!)
We were fortunate to be joined on #SBBUZZ last night by green expert, author and professional organizer Candita Clayton, who helped guide the discussion about what small business can do to save energy, reduce waste and fight climate change. Here are some simple, easy-to-implement tips that came out of our discussion:
Recycle: Make it easy to recycle paper, glass and plastic. Set up separate bins where they will be seen and used. If your business doesn’t have a program in place, start one! It’s worth it to be the squeaky wheel on this issue since it’s so important. And many communities have programs in place where you can drop off unwanted computers, printers etc. Keeping these hazardous items out of the landfill will go a long way in helping to halt pollution and resultant climate change.
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Tags: blog action day, green, how-to, mobile web, small business, twitter, virtual office
I recently spent a few weeks vacationing with my husband, 3 kids and a rotating stream of relatives and friends at our family retreat on a tiny island north of Portland, Maine. Each day wondering if we should sail, climb the rocks, play on the beach, boogie board, collect starfish, hunt crabs, fish, play tennis, eat mussels, clams or lobsters, or all of the above. At BatchBlue we put a high premium on family time. We talk a bit about mandatory vacations in our Virtual Office Blue Paper, but a customer wrote in recently with the comment, “it is great that you know how to disengaged, but do you find it hard to re-engage?” It’s hard to benefit from the personal time if you are worried about the mounting workload, so I thought I would share a few of my tips on quickly catching up on the waiting backlog.
Here are a few of the things I did to quickly get back up to BatchBlue speed::
- Read staff meeting agendas – ok, alright, I did this one while on vacation. Not to prove I work harder than anyone else, but just because leaving your business for a few weeks is like leaving your kids for a few weeks. You can’t not check in once in a while. So on staff meeting days I would check our company wiki and read through the notes that the team had taken during the meeting. Great way to peek in without being noticed.
- Search of the daily staff updates – at BatchBlue each staff person sends around a daily report on what they are working on. I set up a filter in Gmail to collect these in a folder while I was gone, so it was pretty easy to quickly read through them chronologically and get a sense of what progress was made while I was out.
- Click back through the history of my Twitter feed on the BatchBook dashboard to get a sense of what the Twitterverse was saying about BatchBlue, SBBuzz, or me.
- I already have a “BatchBlue” folder in my Google Reader where I subscribe to a number of company related RSS feeds. So all in one place I get a quick glimpse of the following:
- BatchBlue Blog posts written by the staff while I was gone.
- BatchBook comments or notes added to contact records in BatchBook. For the most part these were silly remarks by staff about each other, but there is something comforting about catching up on some of the inside company jokes, as well.
- BatchBlue communications including all e-mails, phone calls, Twitter messages or other communications sent out or received by BatchBlue staff. I admit I would flip back into BatchBook reading most of these – such a great way to remind myself who some of the e-mails recipients are (thank you social media SuperTag!).
- Forum posts showed me all of the BatchBook questions and suggestions our customers posted in our online forums as well as the BatchBlue responses. I always learn something new in there.
- Hubspot Feeds are the nice messages our friends at Hubspot send telling us about anyone in the wonderful world of the Web talking about us. A little self-indulgent, but in a good way.
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Tags: batchblue, communications management, how-to, small business, work/life
This is the final post in a three-part series about how I made the BatchBook Screencasts. In Part 1, we recorded the screencasts. In Part 2, we encoded the screencasts and embedded them on the web. Today, we’re going to take your screencasts and turn them into a video podcast. We’ll also submit the podcast to iTunes.
Making the screencast into a podcast
First of all, what exactly is a podcast? Sure it’s audio, and you can subscribe to it, but really… what is it? Luckily, we included “Podcasting” in our glossary of tech terms!
Podcasting is a kind of audio broadcasting that uses the Internet, like an on-line radio show. The name was created by combining “iPod” and “broadcasting”. Podcasting involves making one or more files available in an RSS feed. A pod-caster (the creator of the podcast) makes a list of music and/or other audio files and makes the list available for other users to retrieve.
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Tags: enclosure, FeedForAll, how-to, itunes, podcast, rss, screencasts, tutorial, video
Earlier this month, I kicked off a three-part series about how I recorded the BatchBook screencasts with a post about the hardware and software I used to record the screencasts. I also included tips about scripting and recording the screencasts.
Today, I’m going to talk about how I exported the screencasts and embedded them within BatchBlue.com and BatchBook, our small business CRM.
When we last left our heroes, we had just recorded our screencasts (with Screenflick), done some simple splicing with QuickTime Pro, and saved a full-size, full-quality QuickTime video. This video looks and sounds great. The only problem is, it’s too big for the web. I’m not just talking about the file size. For example, the uncompressed version of the “Manage your contacts and social network” screencast came in at 27.1 megabytes. That’s not bad for a four-minute video.
The problem is the video’s dimensions. Before resizing, my videos were 1038 pixels wide and 758 pixels tall. While many users have large monitors now, there are still a ton of 1024×768 screens out there. That’s pretty much the size of our video. Factor in menu bars, task bars, browser windows, browser buttons, and other toolbars and we quickly realize we need to shrink our video.
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Tags: embedding, encoding, flash video, how-to, jw flv media player, screencasts, tutorial, video
We recently published an all new set of BatchBook screencasts. I often am asked how I record our screencasts, so I’m going to write up the process in a series of three blog posts. Today, I’ll tackle the actual recording of the screencasts. Part 2 will discuss encoding and embedding in your site while Part 3 will discuss building a feed for your screencasts and getting them on iTunes.
So, let’s get recording! First, what do you need?
Hardware
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Tags: how-to, micflex, quicktime pro, screencasts, screenflick, screenflow, tutorial, video
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