Musings of a Marketing Maven

Christine Thompson> What's on my mind: life and work

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Entries Tagged as 'Tools & Technology'

What Does It Cost to Embrace the Groundswell?

May 5th, 2009 · 3 Comments · Social Media for Business, Tools & Technology

Indus­try pun­dits and mar­ket ana­lysts have lots of advice to offer com­pa­nies pon­der­ing the impli­ca­tions of Web 2.0, Enter­prise 2.0, PR 2.0, social media or con­ver­sa­tional mar­ket­ing. The blo­gos­phere and con­fer­ence cir­cuits are full of what experts have to say about the urgent need for busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion, for com­pa­nies to “embrace the groundswell.” Threats loom, […]

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A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

April 30th, 2009 · Comments Off · Creativity, Tools & Technology

Thanks to Wor­dle, here’s a visu­al­iza­tion of my blog post­ings: What a fun way to mark the end of a work day!   Print PDF

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SP2 & Bootcamp">Windows Vista SP2 & Bootcamp

April 29th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Tools & Technology

I just read on ZDNet that Microsoft has released Win­dows Vista SP2 (offi­cial RTM can­di­date). Peo­ple are spec­u­lat­ing that it will be avail­able to end users via Auto­matic Update in early May, if not sooner. Techies are already find­ing ways to down­load it. The ques­tion is, how long before Apple updates its Boot­camp dri­vers so those […]

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Is Now the Time for E-Books?

April 20th, 2009 · Comments Off · Bookshelf, Tools & Technology

Today’s Wall Street Jour­nal fea­tured an in-depth arti­cle about the poten­tial dis­rup­tive impact of dig­i­tal books and e-book devices. (The author touched on impli­ca­tions for new pric­ing schemes and busi­ness mod­els for the pub­lish­ing indus­try, but that’s not the sub­ject of this post.) The ques­tion is, should book lovers like me switch over to e-book […]

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A Solution Within Reach?

April 8th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Tools & Technology

Like most small busi­ness own­ers, I oper­ate with­out ben­e­fit of an in-house IT func­tion. Unlike most, I was an early adopter of the Inter­net, and have owned a domain name for almost 15 years. As a con­se­quence my in-box has been infested with spam, despite lots of dif­fer­ent spam block­ers and my ISP’s attempts to […]

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Social Media Marketing, Enterprise Style

March 18th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Marketing, Social Media for Business, Tools & Technology

After wrestling with taxes and Sched­ule C arcana, it’s a relief to blog. (I’m sure the IRS would pre­fer my cre­ative ener­gies go else­where…!) While work­ing with a client on ini­tial strate­gies for social media mar­ket­ing, I keep being reminded of how much murkier the B2B social media land­scape is. Almost all the pun­dits you […]

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What Happened to Windows Live Writer?

January 13th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Tools & Technology

A few months ago I wrote that Live Writer, then in beta, was the best prod­uct I’d seen from Microsoft in a long time. It was nim­ble, per­fectly suited to the pur­pose, and well inte­grated with the lead­ing blog­ging tools (includ­ing tools not offered by Microsoft). And the price was great: free! Well, now things […]

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PC Is Still a Mac">My Favorite PC Is Still a Mac

January 7th, 2009 · Comments Off · Tools & Technology

I’ve now installed Win­dows Vista for the sec­ond or third time on a Mac, and I have to say – Vista runs bet­ter on my Mac­Book Pro than it does on some of my ded­i­cated PCs. I’ve been run­ning Vista on a Mac­Book Pro for over a year, and am still happy. I con­fess to using […]

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Acrobat Connect, Take Two

September 24th, 2008 · Comments Off · Marketing, Tools & Technology

Last win­ter I tried an early ver­sion of Acro­bat Con­nect, and panned it. It was unre­li­able, so using it with clients was too risky. Since then Adobe has over­hauled the ser­vice, and it’s become quite use­ful when meet­ing with small groups for online demon­stra­tions or col­lab­o­ra­tion. I par­tic­u­larly like the fact that no IT staff or […]

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Insider Tip: How to Remember Conversational Interviews

April 10th, 2008 · Comments Off · Tools & Technology

Con­fes­sion: after so many years of com­pos­ing on a key­board, I can no longer write or take notes quickly using a pen. Plus, my mem­ory for details isn’t what it used to be. My job requires me to inter­view key stake­hold­ers or sub­ject mat­ter experts on top­ics that are impor­tant to my client, but often unfamiliar […]

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