Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

I am speaking at the Big Morning 4 Your Business Free business seminar Thursday 29th May.

I am presenting on two topics:

Stop Your Website Sending Your Customers to Your Competition

and

Move Your Business to the Cloud Cost-Effectively

The event is a caffeine-injected morning of FREE interactive business development sessions giving you the tools and contacts to grow your business in ONE big hit! (hope that means good coffee!)

Put on by the Regional Development Australia – Moreton Bay Group the morning is:

• A high-quality program delivered by 18 industry experts
• Meet the experts one-on-one
• Visit the trade tables
• Learn from the region’s businesses
• Network with other business owners

Here is the slide show I am presenting. Hope you can make it!

Paper.li allow you create personalised newspapers – summarising your tweets, and community news in various areas.

I have been running two for some time now – the Tim Miller Daily and the SpyJournal Weekly.

Check them out and subscribe if you want an easy grab of my twitter feed in one bite

Right now Social Media is huge. For some people Facebook is the internet. Every TV show you watch has a back channel on twitter, and live commentary on most sports shows are now mentioning the tweets they are reading during the broadcast – indicating the commentators are well aware of how their performance as well as the sport itself are being discussed in this live manner. People were even given early warning of a recent earthquake in the US via Twitter.

As companies and brands race to adopt social media and harness the obvious power in the potential engagement with their fans and others there are scores of tools and analytics being produced and made available to users. Some of these are free, others have a free component as a teaser to get you to purchase their premium services and others are far more consultative and personalised and thus more expensive from the get go.

I have been trialling and researching a lot here recently. My tweet cloud shows my most used word in twitter is #socialmedia.

Here are some of the tools I have been using and trialling. This isn’t a “thou should use these” type of post, but i do invite you to check these out and see if they suit your requirements. No particular order to these.

The power of the human spirit never ceases to amaze me. But this last weekend I was treated to some pretty unusual displays of just how incredible humans can actually be.

I attended, photographed and even competed in an ultra running event, the 24 and 48 hour ultra event at http://geoffsruns.com/. I saw people run 280+km (175 miles). I saw records broken, i saw pain and suffering and individual determination and grit, and most importantly I saw the incredible power of encouragement. I saw friends and relatives camp over night in cold uncomfortable conditions in order to be able to get out on the track and walk a couple of laps with competitors and mentally assist them to over come the physical demands they were placing on their systems. i witnessed first hand the incredible power of transformation of a persons face from resigned grit and determination (or even pain) to sheer joy through a simple spoken word – a “you can do it”. I saw the camaraderie of those who shared the same trials, and for a brief 1.5 hours i was amongst it. As I churned out laps (more of a slow grind then a churn) I was guaranteed of numerous encouraging remarks from complete strangers on the sidelines, a “well done Tim” and “you are looking great” from other competitors who went flying past me, and the cheers from the crowd around the timing tent.

And at the end they were no longer strangers. Many of these runners I have seen and photographed (and run with) before, but as Tamyka put it – “you got to be friends with someone you shared the same physical space with for 48 hours!”

The ultra running community is a small tight knit friendly group of positive goal orientated cheerful people. I’m proud to be associated with such amazing human beings.

Here are some pics. More at http://dreamsportphotography.com/results/2012-caboolture-24-48-hour-race

Here are some videos I made also