Fry-Wagner Moving & Storage

Moving is a stressful undertaking.  Whether it is your business or your home, there are many forces working against you, including time, weather and people averse to change.  One of my best practices when faced with these types of situations is to bring in the experts and let them handle it.  I have been referring business to Fry-Wagner Moving & Storage for years and they always do a fantastic job.  The relationship has gone even deeper over the past 2 years because Earl Kawaoka and I are in a Vistage group together that meets each month, and I recently trained their Kansas City and St. Louis sales teams how to use LinkedIn more effectively.  Through all this, I have gotten a deeper understanding of how Fry-Wagner is operated and who the people are that make the company successful.  These guys are the real deal.  Whether it is a residential move across the country, or moving your small business from one location to another in Kansas City, you should call them.  I am going to have them move my parents from Wichita to Kansas City later this year when my father retires from Boeing.  That is how much I trust them.

Fry-Wagner has the process of moving your business down to a science.  I have seen it many times with companies like Bishop-McCann, American Association of Veterinary State Boards, and more.  You tag and box each office with special stickers and there is a roadmap that shows which office in the old building is moving to an office or location in the new building.  The loading and unloading of the trucks are done in a specific order to make things run more smoothly.  Each office, made up by a collection of packed boxes, stays “together” during the move.  These moves usually happen in one business day because of their excellent planning, process and skilled movers.

I have toured the Fry-Wagner facility off of I-35 more than once, and one thing people don’t realize is the vast warehouse space they have available for storage of items.  For example, if your house is crammed with stuff, and you need to get half of it out so that you can stage it and show it, Fry-Wagner can pick up the first half of your stuff and store it in their warehouse until you sell your current house and buy your new house.  That way, it is not sitting in a container in your driveway (even though they offer that service also).  The storage is by weight and is reasonably priced.  The other thing that Fry-Wagner uses their storage space for is Records and Asset management.

This blog post has been another business recommendation of mine based on the fact that many of you reading this wanted to know the companies here in Kansas City that I trust and respect.  Fry-Wagner is one of those companies.  If you are moving, give them a call at 800-394-0049 for a free estimate.  And no, I don’t get a dime for these recommendations. 

Google Local Business Center

A friend and client of mine, Karen Maxwell, mentioned Google Local Business Center to me recently.  Millions of people search Google for businesses and it is a good idea to make sure that your business is listed on Google Maps.  I use my iPhone to search for businesses all the time when I am on the move.  I never thought about the fact that I might need to submit my business to Google so that my business shows up in search results!  There is an entire resource center with videos and more on how to do this, and I just registered Blue Gurus.  It took about 5 minutes, and I verified the business listing with my phone, so the Blue Gurus profile will be available in Google Map Searches within 24 hours.  Get started by going to the Google Local Business Center!

My recommendation is that you search for your business on Google Maps (visit maps.google.com).  If you find your business listed, it is most likely that your business information was included in bulk map data that Google bought.  Check the listing for accuracy.  If it is not accurate, you can “claim your business” if you have access to the listed phone number or mailing address in the listing.  By default, your business listing is probably very basic information and by claiming your business on the Google Local Business Center, you can add business hours, contact information, payment options, photos of your business inside and out and more.

Here is how you would go about claiming your business as described by Google:
Some of our listings inevitably will contain incorrect or outdated information. You can easily correct such errors. In Google Maps, click on the listing, then click the “Edit” button at the bottom of the bubble. If you have access to either the phone number or the mailing address in that incorrect listing, click “Claim your business” to claim and then suppress the listing. Otherwise, click the “Remove place” link to suggest that we remove it from the map.

Go get listed today if you haven’t already!

NameChk.com

One of the biggest pushes we are seeing in the world of Social Media right now is the concept of “Claiming Your Name”.  It is reminiscent of the .COM gold rush days when everyone was scrambling for their .COM domain before someone else bought it to use it for their web site or to try and sell it to the highest bidder.  There are so many social media web sites that you may not realize that you have not secured your personal name or your company name on.  I am excited to share a tool that I found that will point you in the right direction… NameChk.com.  This web tool makes it easy to check 145 social media web sites to see if your name is taken or not. 

I used this tool over this past weekend to make sure that the names JasonTerry and BlueGurus were secured on the sites that mattered most to me.  I was surprised to find that there were a couple of MAJOR gaps in the accounts I had secured and quickly corrected the problem thanks to NameChk making it easy for me to see which social media web site Vanity URLs were taken and which were available. I recommend that you use NameChk to figure out which sites you need to create an account on and do it immediately. 

An important concept here is the term Vanity URL.  (Vanity URLs Definition of a Vanity URL at Wikipedia)

Assume for a minute that you have a LinkedIn.com account.  By default, the LinkedIn web site assigns you a cryptic link to your personal profile that would look something like this: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mynameplusabunchoflettersandnumbers234234234.  That is an ugly link, or what is also called a URL.  (URL stands for Uniform Resource Locater if you care).
It is a simple process to Edit the assigned URL in LinkedIn to be something that looks nicer, for example the URL to my LinkedIn profile is http://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonterry.  You can see that this looks much better than the cryptic and long URL that was assigned to me by default.

Be sure when you are setting up accounts that you specify the name you are trying to claim as the Username for the account.  So if I was trying to set up a YouTube channel for JasonTerry, I would create my account Username as JasonTerry.  If I was trying to set up a YouTube account for BlueGurus, I would create my account Username as BlueGurus.

When you first go to the site, NameChk shows you the most popular social media sites to test your name against.  If you want to test ALL the social media sites they support, you have to click the “Show All (145)” that is right underneath the search box. 

Here is a screenshot of the home page of NameChk that displays what they consider to be the most popular social media sites:
 

NameChk.com Social Media Sites

Google Buzz

Google Buzz was released on February 9th (more from the official Google Bog).  It is a social media site where you can share thoughts, pictures, videos and more.  I hear a lot of people saying one of two things…

ONE – Do we need another social media platform?
TWO – This is Google, it’s gonna be great!

If you already have a Gmail account, you already have Google Buzz.  (If not, get a free Gmail account here)  The important point to make is that at launch there were immediately 39 million users with Google Buzz ready to go.  Instant social network, just add water.  That number is roughly 25% more than the number of users with profiles on Twitter.  Interesting opportunities for Google.

I set up my Buzz profile in about 5 minutes.  I already have my social media picture ready to go and had already set up my Google Personal Profile.  If you have never done any of this, expect to spend 20 minutes setting up your Buzz profile.  I was able to connect Buzz to my Blue Gurus web site, my LinkedIn profile, my Twitter account and my YouTube Channel, so there is already good connection support for the popular social media web sites.  You can see my Google Buzz profile here.

My initial take on Google Buzz is that they have a good chance of delivering a strong social media platform and it is worth checking it out.  Recent reports say that there are 160,000 buzz comments posted every hour and the number of users is growing at a fantastic rate.  I am sure that Ping.fm will add update support to their broadcast service so that I can post to my Google Buzz profile just as easily as I can to LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.  Happy Buzzing!

IdentityGuard.com

We all know that it is a good idea to keep track of our credit rating.  Unfortunately, it often becomes one of those things you will get to later instead of staying on top of it.  I fixed that problem for myself about a year ago when I signed up for IdentityGuard.com.  I wish I could say that it was because I was being proactive, but it was in response to one of my credit card numbers getting out somehow and being used at online merchants.  (My credit card company called to let me know about the unusual activity on my account, so thankfully the problem was caught before affecting me.)

Identity Guard is a service that monitors credit activity with Equifax, Experian and Transunion.  I receive an email alert any time there is new activity on any 3 of these services.  One nice thing about this is that you can always see what your credit rating is as reported by these 3 services. 

Interesting fact, the national average credit score is 672.  If you don’t know what your credit scores are, you owe it to yourself to find out and see if you have any open lines of credit, etc.  (How many hands raise when I ask if you have an old credit card that you don’t use anymore but aren’t sure if you ever cancelled it?  Scary…)  When I first signed up with their service, I found that there were 2 credit cards from HIGH SCHOOL that I had never closed. I closed all of those old accounts and felt good knowing exactly what kinds of credit lines I had and that they were in good standing.

Identity Guard will monitor your social security number, bank accounts, credit cards, credit reporting activity and more to give you an early warning system for fraudulent activity related to your credit and your accounts.  I get an email update about once each month based on new activity relating to my credit and the information is always correct, and kind of scary.  They know EVERYTHING.   

How much does this cost?  Check out the 3 programs they offer that range in price from $9.99/month to $17.99/month.  I am using the Total Protection plan and have been very happy with the service.  There are tons of reports and the site is easy to use to get to the information you need.  If the whole credit monitoring thing has been in the back of your mind, take the time to give IdentityGuard a look.  I was glad that I did.

PIPL.com

So I didn’t get very creative with the title for this blog post.  It is straight from the PIPL.com web site.  Not a problem since the statement is true!  PIPL.com is an information aggregator that pulls data about people from multiple data sources and is the most comprehensive people search I have seen on the internet.  I learned about this site from a client of mine, Jenny Redix with The Henning Law Firm.  Jenny uses this tool to do research on their defendants and plaintiffs.  I couldn’t believe some of the things that were found when I searched for my own name.  My Amazon.com wish list… are you kidding me?  Granted, when doing a search on my name, Jason Terry, some of the results were for the professional basketball player.  Still, there was a lot of relevant information, including my birthday, street address, etc. that are all public record.  Crazy.  Go see what results you get when searching on your name!

Here is a link to the page on PIPL.com that shows some of the data sources they pull from.

So why does this matter?  I think it is important that you know just how much information is freely available about you on the internet.  I recommend a credit monitoring service like IdentityGuard.com that can alert you immediately when there are changes to your credit scores (early warning system for identity theft).  I will be writing a blog post next week about IdentityGuard.

P.S.  Everyone is talking about the Apple iPad, and yes, I will be buying one in 60-90 days like everyone else.  (Fanboy)  I will review it for you when I have had time to see if it lives up to the adjectives being used to describe it like magical and revolutionary.  Tough words to live up to, but Apple has done it before.

Yelp.com

For many purchases, I research what other people say about the products that I am considering buying.  Sites like CNet.com, Amazon.com and Buy.com have good product information and a wealth of customer feedback from those that have bought the products and experienced them first-hand.  Sure, some of the reviews are probably planted to promote the product, but I have to believe most of them are real reviews from real people.

Yelp.com is a social media site where people can come to give open and honest feedback about local businesses.  One obvious use for this is food related reviews for local restaurants.  And they have plenty of them.  Click here to see a bunch of restaurants reviewed near my home like Spin Pizza, Jack Stack BBQ, Mi Ranchito and Ingredient.

Like other social media sites, you create a free profile, provide some information about yourself, and then start reviewing businesses that you like or don’t like.  I haven’t written any reviews yet, but my profile on Yelp is jasonterry.yelp.com in case you want to see what a user profile looks like.

If you own a business, you can create a profile for your business that can be found by other Yelp users when looking for information on businesses in their area.  Watch the 90 second video on how you can use Yelp to grow your business!  Also, this gives you the ability to respond privately or publically to people that have said things about your business.  (You can read and respond to positive or negative messages regarding your business so that you are more in control of the public perception instead of some random reviewer giving your business a positive or negative spin.)  I just got done setting up a Yelp profile for Blue Gurus and it takes only a few minutes.

Regardless of type of business (B2B or B2C = Business to Business or Business to Consumer) I recommend setting up your business profile so people that don’t know about you can find you!  The price is right compared to other forms of ad space… FREE.

Indeed.com

If you or someone you know is looking for a job, there are some great tools out there to help in the search.  One of the sites that has been on my radar lately is Indeed.com.  It is a job posting aggregator.  Indeed.com is like Travelocity.com or Kayak.com for finding the best fares on hotels or car rentals.  Indeed.com is for finding jobs from multiple job posting sites like Dice, Monster, LinkedIn, and CareerBuilder. They also pull job postings from newspapers, associations and company career pages. 

I read Business Week every week and lately there is always some mention about how high the unemployment rate is and that we are experiencing a jobless recovery.  (In other words, the economy is coming back, but companies are not rehiring the positions they cut over the last 12 months)  I have never seen so many resumes or been asked “Do you know anybody hiring <insert position here>?” as I have in the past 6 months.  The good news for those searching for a new job is that I have been involved in as many people finding a job as I have in them losing a job at my client companies. (Employers, post your job opportunities on LinkedIn.com for $200 for a 30 day posting… you will be surprised how many qualified candidates you find.)

I helped one of my clients post a job on LinkedIn recently and we received 24 qualified resumes.  We hired one of the candidates.  On their first day, I said to the new hire, “you must love LinkedIn because you found this job on their site.”  His response was that he found the LinkedIn job posting through Indeed.com.

Be sure to check out the Advanced Job Search at Indeed.com where you can narrow search results more effectively.

There is a lot of competition out there for jobs right now.  I recommend that people searching for a job use the available tools (like Indeed.com) and their network of relationships (through LinkedIn.com) to find a good position that they can get excited about.  Once they have found the job opportunity, they need to figure out who they know at the company that is hiring by using LinkedIn and then leverage those relationships to get a warm introduction.  Best of luck to those searching!

Avatar

Watch the Avatar Movie Trailer in HD at YouTube.com.

Everybody is talking about the new James Cameron movie “Avatar”, and I can’t believe that it took me 4 weekends to see when I am normally up to speed on new movies.  I just saw Avatar in the AMC 30 IMAX in 3D this weekend.  I can summarize this post by saying that Avatar is one of the best movies I have seen.  Sure, I am the typical guy that likes a good shoot ‘em up with lots of digital special effects.  But I also enjoy a good chick flick with my soon-to-be wife, Trista, and cry when the underdog is victorious.

Avatar’s magic is the fact that you wind up feeling like you are actually in the movie.  I loved the AMC movie trailer that came out a few months ago where the teens in the theater seats become part of a forest with lightning bugs that grows up around them as they start watching their movie.  Avatar takes that whimsical concept up by an order of magnitude, mixes in some gritty military mud and sprinkles in some tree-hugging emotional drama to create an epic science fiction love story for the record books.  Watching Avatar reminded me what it felt like to watch Star Wars for the first time.  It made me dream.  It made me want to be there.

So here’s the deal.  Go see this movie in IMAX 3D before it leaves the theaters.  I don’t care how good your home theater is, you need to see it in the IMAX format.  It is a visceral experience, an investment in your inner child, you can witness a leap in movie making magic, and to be able to tell people 15 to 20 years from now that you were there when the movie opened and then became the best selling movie of all time.  How does this relate to business?  We all need to take the time to recharge, and this movie may inspire you!

The Huffington Post has a good article on Avatar and a quote that I really liked, “James Cameron, Hollywood’s reigning techno-geek, has humanized technology.”

Check out the article on Mashable that talks about Avatar earning 1.3 BILLION dollars in 4 weeks.

Ping.fm

What is Ping.fm???
Ping.fm is a web site where you can create ONE ACCOUNT TO RULE THEM ALL.  (Sorry, Lord of the Rings reference…)  In other words, you can create a free Ping.fm account and then provide your user name and password to sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, Delicious, Flickr, Wordpress, Blogger, and Friendster.  Then all you have to do when you want to update your status across multiple social media sites is log in to Ping.fm, type your message (recommend 140 characters or less) and click “Ping It!”  Ping.fm will then log in to each of the sites you have set up and publish that status FOR YOU!  And yes, there is an App for that… a Ping.fm client called Pingle (YouTube video review here) that works on the iPhone so you can broadcast your status on the go.

As social media continues to become a relevant and important part of doing business, we have more web sites to keep track of and interact with.  For example, you probably have a LinkedIn account for business associates and a Facebook account to keep up with your family news.  (And if you are like me, you somehow found yourself with a Plaxo account even though you never really use it.)  One of the best features of these social media sites is the ability to post a message letting your friends, family and peers know what is going on in your world.  I highly recommend updating your status on social media sites at least three (3) times each week to stay connected with your people.

Problem: You have 2 or more social media web sites that allow you to update your status
Solution: Ping.fm

Groups
I get the question “but what if I want to publish a status to only my friends… not business relationships?”  The simple answer is that Ping.fm supports the concept of groups.  You can create a group called PERSONAL and a group called BUSINESS and specify which social media sites should be included in that group.  Then, you choose which group to publish your status to by using a Dropdown Menu when posting.  You could say, “Hey, I just lost 10 pounds!” to your PERSONAL group followed up by a “Going to the Kauffman Center for a presentation on Social Media” to your BUSINESS group.

Good things about Ping.fm
- You can post updates via email!  (You set up a custom email address when you set up your account that you can email update messages to.)
- You can post updates via SMS text message.
- The Pingle iPhone application lets you post updates on the go.
- Ping.fm shortens lengthy web site URLs automagically.
- Ping.fm supports more than 40 different social media sites.
- There is an iGoogle Widget so that you can have Ping.fm on the default home page of your browser, making it easy to update your status when you get to the office every day-ish.

Get. Yours. Now.