Must. Resist. Temptation.
One of the things we have been wrestling with at work is building a sound disaster recovery plan for our business. If you have never done it, DR quickly turns into one of those never ending rabbit holes that take a lot of planning to get it right. But all of this time I never really translated DR into my personal life.Until... I lost the hard drive on our main iMac in our home. All of our digital pictures, our entire iTunes library, lots of documents, you get the picture. I have talked about some technology sins that I have committed on the past but not having a good backup of this system had to be my worst. I know better, I know how to build a good backup and recovery plan for a business, have done it several times in the past. But I sure didn't have a good one for home and I will bet that I am not alone.
I am more of a tech guy but its pretty easy to see that social media has the potential to change the way that people and businesses go about finding and sharing information about products, ideas, and even general life.Its pretty powerful stuff and I set out to try to learn more about social media, what levers needed to be turned, practices to follow to make this thing work. See, that's the type A, technical side of my brain talking. Pretty soon I realized that there is this intangible thing with social media that is hard to pick up on and understand right out of the gate. A lot of people simply "get" social media right from the start but it also a case where nothing happens without hard work and some of these people have built great communities. Chris Brogan, Seth Godin, Michael Hyatt, have all worked like crazy to build their followers and they are now reaping the benefits.
As you can tell from a series of posts that I was, and still am, pretty excited about the change that Square could bring to a lot of people and organizations.
One side effect of starting a company that is basically trying to reshape how normal people receive money is that you run into some unforeseen challenges. Square is charting some new waters and have hit two pretty big roadblocks:
Ok, for all of you Wordpress lovers out there who just took a sharp breath, hear me out.
I am in no way discrediting Wordpress and I will admit that it is the Cadillac of blogging platforms. The thing that I see over and over is that for the most of us, a simple Honda Civic will do. If I were a Chris Brogan or a Techcrunch, people who make their living by blogging, I would use Wordpress in a heartbeat. For me and this blog, I like to focus on simplicity, and Posterous fits this perfectly. For those of you who haven't heard of Posterous, here are a few of the features that make this a consistently great blogging platform that is edging closer and closer to Wordpress lite types of features:
If you are thinking about signing up, a couple of caveats. First is that shipments of the fobs that you use to take payments are really delayed. So much so that Jack Dorsey released a letter asking everyone to have patience with them as they grow and expand their service. Another is, based on your credit, a per transaction limitation of $100 and a weekly limitation of $700. I have heard of others who have higher limits but it seems this is what most start with.
Let me get this out of the way..
I will admit that at first glance the title of this post might seem like I am encouraging you to be deceptive. I'm not encouraging anyone to be something they are not. In the business world all you have is your reputation and the only way to keep it is to be open and honest about what you are and what you aren't. That being said, the business world is a big, crowded, space and you MUST do everything that you can for your business or organization to, honestly, give it the best appearance as possible. Too many businesses starting up miss the mark and some are able to overcome and move on but for others it could be the third strike. If you have read this blog you know that we are not going to sell you on some high cost, complicated solution so there is no reason for you not to adopt these tips to get your business on the same playing field as the big boys.
Matt Martin (bio) is Manager, Technology and Services at Ingram Marine Group based in Nashville, Tennessee.
Unabashed Apple fan, lover of all things IT, father of three.
I can be reached via email here. I am also active on social hubs like Twitter and LinkedIn.
