Archive for the ‘On The Go Blog’ Category

The computer swallowed grandma,
Yes, honestly its true!
She pressed ‘control and ‘enter’
And disappeared from view.

It devoured her completely,
The thought just makes me squirm.
She must have caught a virus
Or been eaten by a worm.

I’ve searched through the recycle bin
And files of every kind;
I’ve even used the Internet,
But nothing did I find.

In desperation, I asked Jeeves
My searches to refine.
The reply from him was negative,
Not a thing was found ‘online.’

So, if inside your ‘Inbox,’
My Grandma you should see,
Please ‘Copy, Scan’ and ‘Paste’ her
And send her back to me.

This is a tribute to all the Grandmas and Grandpas who have been fearless and

learned to use the Computer…. …. They are the greatest!!!

As I’ve just become a Grandma I guess this applies to me

I don’t know who wrote the poem but whoever did – many thanks!

According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, while both male
and female reindeer grow antlers in the summer each year, male reindeer
drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually late November to
mid-December.

Female reindeer retain their antlers till after they give birth in the spring. Therefore, according to EVERY historical rendition depicting Santa’s reindeer, EVERY single one of them, from Rudolph to Blitzen, had to be a girl .

We should have known… . . . ONLY women would be able to drag a fat man in a red velvet suit all around the world in one night without getting lost!

A MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL

2010 has been an interesting year with business continuing to grow with existing clients and new.  I am happy to say that On The Go has just celebrated its 3rd year!  As with all businesses we need to re-group, sift out what works and what doesn’t and then decide what direction to take into the New Year.

I have made the decision to concentrate my energy and time on Social Media.   I believe in everything it stands for, it’s not going to go away and will only progress to bigger and better things.  I enjoy providing a service to businesses that simply don’t have the time to concentrate on Social Media. Therefore in December On The Go VA Services became On The Go Social Media Services.

This does not mean I won’t be continuing with the VA services I provide to my existing clients however it does mean I will be focusing all future business towards Social Media.  Here’s to new beginnings for 2011.

Have a wonderful festive season and enjoy the video below, a compilation of the businesses I have worked with this year and the people who have supported On The Go during 2010.

Best wishes

How easy do you make it for your prospective clients to contact you?  Do you have a contact form on your website with direct email ?  Are all your telephone numbers visible? If you are on Social Media do you have all the widgets in place connecting through? For a lot of us this seems standard practice but I have recently visited a fair few websites that don’t make it easy for me to contact them.  Their telephone number is hiding in the bottom left hand corner of the page, an email address will be displayed but doesn’t link through and although they talk about following them on Twitter and Facebook again the URL doesn’t link me up.  How frustrating is that?

Surprising isn’t it that so many companies have websites but omit the most crucial information.

Check your website and make sure that the following are in place:-

• Telephone number is displayed clearly – best position top right hand corner, in my opinion, it’s where I always look first.
• Have a separate tab on your site “Contact” which will have a pre-set email form where they can send you a message direct
• If you don’t have this and only show your email address then make sure that is hyper linked
• Ensure your Social Media Links actually link to the relevant sites

As I say, it might be common place for a lot of us but there are a lot of sites out there that just don’t want to be contacted – amazing!  Why make it impossible for your prospective clients to contact you?  What will they do?  They’ll move on to the next provider they find on Google search.  Now that is a missed opportunity.

Debra Ellis wrote about this recently too.  Note:  If you are not already registered on The Social Customer you will need to sign up to read the report – well worth it.

Take a moment now and check your website is working for you.

I am an avid fan of Seth Godin – I look forward to reading his daily blogs. Without fail there is one every day!  Some of them are a little obtuse for me, some go way over my head, but I check in every day to see what words of wisdom he has compiled for the day.  Today his blog is Reasons to Work

Undoubtedly we all work to earn money – don’t we? If it wasn’t to earn money then surely that comes under the banner of being a “hobby”.  How do you separate the two?

Here are my views on Seth’s 8 points – what are yours?

1. For the money - Most definitely
   
2. To be challenged - Running your own business is always going to be a challenge however with it being your own business you will only get out of it what you put in.
3. For the pleasure/calling of doing the work - I enjoy my work, I can choose what I want to do and what I don’t.
   
4. For the impact it makes on the world - I doubt anything I do has an impact on the world, but hopefully I do help others run their businesses a little smoother.
   
5. For the reputation you build in the community - I like to think I help build communities on social networks.  Interacting with different people helps stimulate the brain.  Different ideas, varying degrees of application enhance a stronger on line community.
   
6. To solve interesting problems - I do like solving problems, looking for applications that will make any business run smoother.
   
7. To be part of a group and to experience the mission - I have always worked on my own – however when I set up On The Go I had to go networking.  In doing so became part of many groups and enjoy meeting people.
   
8. To be appreciated - If you work right then appreciation will come.

I am just reading The E Myth by Michael E Gerber.  I have only just started it but already I can see where I have gone wrong over the past 3 years.  That reminds me – it will be three years on the 5^th December when I set up On The Go – time flies!

Let me know your reasons – are they similar to mine?

I have just finished reading with interest  The Big Decision: Personal or Corporate Brand?

Personally I have always felt my brand was personal.  This allows me to be “me” which I hope helps people get to know who I am, what I like and what I don’t.  I would find it difficult to express myself under “On The Go” branding alone. There is only so much you can write about with regard to “typing”

What is your choice?  Personal or Corporate and why?

I received this as an email today and had to share it and rather than forward to hundreds of people I decided to make it a blog post.

——————————————————

What would you do?…. You make the choice. Don’t look for a punch line, there isn’t one. Read it anyway. My question is: Would you have made the same choice?

At a fundraising dinner for a school that serves children with learning disabilities, the father of one of the students delivered a speech that would never be forgotten by all who attended. After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he offered a question:

‘When not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature does, is done with perfection.

Yet my son, Shay, cannot learn things as other children do. He cannot understand things as other children do.

Where is the natural order of things in my son?’

The audience was stilled by the query.

The father continued. ‘I believe that when a child like Shay, who was mentally and physically disabled, comes into the world, an opportunity to realize true human nature presents itself, and it comes in the way other people treat that child.’

Then he told the following story:

Shay and I had walked past a park where some boys Shay knew were playing baseball. Shay asked, ‘Do you think they’ll let me play?’ I knew that most of the boys would not want someone like Shay on their team, but as a father I also understood that if my son were allowed to play, it would give him a much-needed sense of belonging and some confidence to be accepted by others in spite of his handicaps.

I approached one of the boys on the field and asked (not expecting much) if Shay could play. The boy looked around for guidance and said, ‘We’re losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we’ll try to put him in to bat in the ninth inning.’

Shay struggled over to the team’s bench and, with a broad smile, put on a team shirt. I watched with a small tear in my eye and warmth in my heart. The boys saw my joy at my son being accepted.

In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay’s team scored a few runs but were still behind by three. In the top of the ninth inning, Shay put on a glove and played in the right field. Even though no hits came his way, he was obviously ecstatic just to be in the game and on the field, grinning from ear to ear as I waved to him from the stands.

In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shay’s team scored again. Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base and Shay was scheduled to be next at bat. At this juncture, do they let Shay bat and give away their chance to win the game?

Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was all but impossible because Shay didn’t even know how to hold the bat properly, much less connect with the ball.

However, as Shay stepped up to the plate, the pitcher, recognizing that the other team was putting winning aside for this moment in Shay’s life, moved in a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shay could at least make contact.

The first pitch came and Shay swung clumsily and missed.  The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly towards Shay. As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground ball right back to the pitcher.

The game would now be over.

The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could have easily thrown the ball to the first baseman. Shay would have been out and that would have been the end of the game. Instead, the pitcher threw the ball right over the first baseman’s head, out of reach of all team mates.  Everyone from the stands and both teams started yelling, ‘Shay, run to first! Run to first!’

Never in his life had Shay ever run that far, but he made it to first base. He scampered down the baseline, wide-eyed and startled.  Everyone yelled, ‘Run to second, run to second!’

Catching his breath, Shay awkwardly ran towards second, gleaming and struggling to make it to the base.  By the time Shay rounded towards second base, the right fielder had the ball. The smallest guy on their team was the one who now had his first chance to be the hero for his team.

He could have thrown the ball to the second-baseman for the tag, but he understood the pitcher’s intentions so he, too, intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third-baseman’s head. Shay ran toward third base deliriously as the runners ahead of him circled the bases toward home.  All were screaming, ‘Shay, Shay, Shay, all the Way Shay’

Shay reached third base because the opposing shortstop ran to help him by turning him in the direction of third base, and shouted, ‘Run to third!’’Shay, run to third!’

As Shay rounded third, the boys from both teams, and the spectators,were on their feet screaming, ‘Shay, run home! Run home!’ Shay ran to home, stepped on the plate, and was cheered as the hero who hit the grand slam and won the game for his team.

‘That day’, said the father softly, with tears now rolling down his face, ‘the boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world’.

Shay didn’t make it to another summer. He died that winter, having never forgotten being the hero and making me so happy and coming home and seeing his Mother tearfully embrace her little hero of the day!

AND NOW A LITTLE FOOTNOTE TO THIS STORY.

We all send thousands of jokes through the e-mail without a second thought, but when it comes to sending messages about life choices,people hesitate.  The crude, vulgar, and often obscene pass freely through cyberspace,but public discussion about decency is too often suppressed in our schools and workplaces.

If you’re thinking about forwarding this message, chances are that you’re probably sorting out the people in your address book who aren’t the ‘appropriate’ ones to receive this type of message. Well, the person who sent you this believes that we all can make a difference.

We all have thousands of opportunities every single day to help realize the ‘natural order of things.’ So many seemingly trivial interactions between two people present us with a choice: Do we pass along a little spark of love and humanity or do we pass up those opportunities and leave the world a little bit colder in the process?

A wise man once said every society is judged by how it treats it’s least fortunate amongst them.

You now have two choices:

1. Delete
2. Forward

In this case – please share on your social networks.

May your day, be a Shay Day.

How do you prepare your blogs?  Does a topic just grab you in the morning and you think “I’ll write about that” or do you have pre-defined rules?  Are there specific topics you enthuse about or is a general overview of all and sundry more your style?  An idea came to me today that if I looked back on what I had posted on Social Media last week surely I would find more than one blog amongst the hundreds of posts I put out.  No doubt that’s where the idea of paper.li started.

Georgina Laidlaw posted Easy Content Scheduling for Bloggers which clearly shows  there needs to be a plan.  So working from this I need to be blogging about administration, social media … er – administration, social media.  Hmm… I appear to have a blank spot.  You know what – I’ll use the templates as a guideline and go from there.  I like writing about the odd episode regarding my cat “Butch”- he keeps me entertained and would you really only want to read about administration and social media?  I think not.

Let me know if you have a structured plan for your blogs or whether you just bang them out as and when.

This is the second day that my kitten Butch has brought in a bird. I guess he thinks he is bringing me a present but you know what, I don’t need one! He is cute enough himself without any extras. I did wonder if he was telling me to clean the house in his own subtle way. By bringing in his feathered friends and then removing 90% of its feathers the hoover had to come out which meant that after sucking up the feathers the rest of the carpet got cleaned too. Subtle little minx.

I had thought of sending an email to Whiskas informing them that their kitten food can’t be up to scratch. If it was why would he need to go out hunting? Is it just that he’s a creature of habit and that’s what he does?

This then led me to wonder, am I a creature of habit? What do I do day in day out, not necessarily because it produces the right outcome just purely because that is what I do. Switch on the computer, login to the various social media sites I am linked with, check updates, move to emails, check and prioritise, go through my “To Do” list and get on with the day.

Now I wonder what would happen if I decided to change my routine? Turn everything about and do it in a different order. How long would it take for that to become a routine? Would it throw me off course completely or would I enjoy the change?

Having wondered that I decided to utilise what we take for granted these days and did a search on Google only to find this article

So it seems that change is good for us, it gets us out of a routine and could even spark creative thoughts which in the end will enhance our productivity.

Are you a creature of habit? Do you have a set routine you follow religiously every day? Well, today is Friday, the working week is nearly over, perhaps I will spend my afternoon doing something completely different and muse on how I will begin next week.

P.S.  I hope Butch isn’t thinking of introducing Pigeon into his diet!