Archive for the ‘Event’ Category

This presentation trick uses QR Codes, those funny little scrambled bar code looking things that you’re now seeing all over the place. Smart phones with QR Code scanners can scan these QR Codes and be taken to the associated web address that are embedded in the code.

What we’re going to do is to add QR codes to a presentation, then allow your audience to scan or link to a mobile version of your presentation. That’s right, they’ll have the presentation in their hands and don’t have to do things like take pictures of the screen or re-type every single note into their laptops.

This is how to do the trick:

1) Create a special link for your presentation. I use the “Pretty Links” plugin in WordPress to generate these redirecting links. For example, if I have a presentation for the Santa Paula “Good Morning Santa Paula” event, I’ll make the link be: “http://www.jpluna.com/gmsp.” Using Pretty Links, I can direct the link to anywhere I want on the Web, including pages that are not on my JP Luna Media site.

If you use something like Pretty Links, you can also build in tracking codes but that’s an advanced topic. If you don’t have Pretty Links, you can create a Web page that uses that name and do a Meta Refresh to the new presentation Web location or use your other preferred redirect method.

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2) Create your Power Point presentation then generate a new QR Code that redirects visitors to your custom web address. You can use my QR Code Generator tool to create the QR Code. Yes, now you’re starting to understand the full extent of my geekiness.

Snapshot of QR Code Generator tool

3) Upload your Power Point presentation to Slideshare.net. This puts your presentation online immediately. Slideshare is a great tool because it has a strong social component and it works well on most smart phones.

4) Go back to your Pretty Links setting or your Web page redirect resource and make the pretty link redirect to the new slideshare.net web address for your presentation. The slideshare.net link will be something like “http://www.slideshare.net/yourusername/your-presentation-title” where “yourusename” is your Slideshare username and “your-presentation-title” is a portion of your presentation title.

5) At the beginning of the presentation, tell your audience that they can view the presentation on their mobile devices either by scanning the QR Code OR by typing in the pretty and shortened link into their mobile devices. This will direct them to a great mobile version of your Slideshare presentation and they can focus on your message and not on writing down everything they see on the screen.

Want to try a QR Code Scanner for you iPhone? So far, my favorite scanner is the ATT QR Code Scanner. You can either look for it in your iPhone’s app store or you can link to the online iTunes store. If you already have another QR Code scanner and want to try this one out, you can scan this code and it will take you to the app on your phone. This is a good example of why QR Codes are powerful.

Scanning a QR Code using and iPhone

It’s hard to describe the glee that shows up on people’s faces when they see the presentation on their mobile devices. This is especially true if their geekiness is rewarded for having a QR Code scan application on their mobile device.

First page of the presentation:

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Note, I found that embedding Slideshare on a WordPress page/post works fine for Web visitors using regular PCs, but it will only show a link to the Slideshare presentation on mobile devices. Clicking the link takes the user to the Slideshare site that will then properly load the device. But that’s an extra click. That’s why I link directly to the Slideshare site now.

Would you like to see a VIDEO TUTORIAL of how I do this? If so, I will create a video once I get to a total of 100 retweets of this blog post, Facebook comments on the JesseLuna.com FB page and Facebook “Likes” on this post.

Resources:

• View the Good Morning Santa Paula presentation on Slideshare.net
• How to Add QR Codes to your blog (VIDEO)
• Create your own QR Code

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I had the pleasure of presenting at the Tecnifícate seminar at Mission College in Sylmar, California this past Saturday. I presented on how small businesses can leverage social media for success. There were over 100 attendees eager to learn and share the latest in technology information. The event targeted Spanish-speaking small business owners, startups, and people looking to improve their job situations through technology learning.

Recent studies have found that Latinos are starting to accelerate their use of online and mobile technologies. Some are even calling this trend the end of the Digital Divide. I’m a bit more cautious about those type of proclamations but was pleasantly surprised to see such a strong turnout at the event. This really was a community event and there were entire families in attendance. I’ve never seen that at a tech conference.

The event was put on by The New Media and Entertainment Initiative, The Economic and Workforce Development through the California Colleges program, Ariel Coro (@arielcoro on Twitter) and Tutecnologia.com. Ariel Coro has a strong fan base from his TV appearances on Univision and on the show Despierta America (Wakeup America) as the technology guy.

The other speakers were Judith Valles (President of LA Mission College), Juan Carlos Perez (founder/President of mialtos.com), Steve Funes (a collaborator with TuTeconologia and proud tech student), reporting by Yeney Amaro, Eduardo Garcia (Consultant at Cisco Systems) Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes, and a representative from LA City council member Richard Alarcón’s office.

Many thanks to Ariel for inviting me to be a part of the seminar and for the warm reception by Mission College and by Ariel’s kind army of Tutecnologia users.

Video and Event Pictures

Univision channel 24 was in attendance and reported over the event on TV.

My photos from the seminar are below and you can find more at the Tecnifícate site.

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Email is still the killer app of the Internet. I wrote about unleashing your message a couple of months ago but forgot to include one important method – including social links. It’s easy to take email to the next level by adding social media friendly links to your messages.

In the example below, the EDC-VC (Disclaimer, I’m a business advisor there) is sharing information about an upcoming workshop for startups in the Ventura County, CA area. The EDC-VC uses Contact Contact for its email services.

Let’s take a closer look at the social links at the top of the email:

By adding an offline version of the email newsletter, you unlease the email content to be shared across the Web. That means allowing people to:

* Share it on Facebook. When someone shares an item on Facebook it will be added to their Profile page. Or, they can take the web URL and share it on any of their Facebook Pages.

* Tweet out a link on Twitter. You don’t even have to be active on Twitter to allow people to share links to the offline version of your email newsletter! I just tweeted out a link to the email below. Wouldn’t you want someone with over 8400 followers to be sharing your content?

I customized the default message that Constant Contact provided after clicking the little Twitter button. Here’s the tweet:

* Post to LinkedIn. More and more business users are posting information to LinkedIn. For some, LinkedIn is the only social networking site that they are allowed to post to during the work day so they like to share great and relevant content.

Viewing the email online

The other powerful link on this email message is the “Having trouble viewing this email. Click Here” section. By clicking the link, viewers are able to go to the online version of the site then use all their usual methods of sharing information. This is subtle feature but extremely powerful.

The power of content re-use

By adding social links to your email newsletter, you extend the reach of your message and are reusing that content for different platforms. How awesome is that?

Review

So if you’re building an email list for your business, I strongly suggest you look into any feature that allows you to share your content via social networks. It will help your messages run wild!

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The Small Business Development Center (SBDC) Los Angeles held its year-end event in Santa Monica this past Tuesday. Center directors, business advisors, staff and SBA staffers were all there.

I’m a marketing and social media advisor at the SBDC center as part of the Economic and Development Center in Ventura County (EDC-VC) and this was the center’s first trip to the year end event.

I was inspired after speaking with many of the talented and caring business advisors and staffers who are responsible for providing free and low-cost business services to the 17 million residents of the greater Los Angeles, Ventura, and Santa Barbara counties.

I was also impressed by the amazing client success stories. One client went from having sales of $200K to 1.2 Million after 2 years. Many of the SBDC clients worked with several advisors per site, getting help with capital infusion, business plans, marketing support, and foreign trade assistance.

Have you had any experiences working with the SBDC? Please share you stories in the Comments section below.

Here are some photos from the event. Enjoy!

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