Answer these questions before starting a new project

Do a reality check before starting your next project by answering these questions, also known as The Heilmeier Catechism.

• What are we trying to do? What is the problem we are trying to solve?
• How is it done today, and what are the limitations of current practice?
• What is new in our approach, and why do we think it will be successful? What gives evidence that it will work?
• Assuming we are successful, what difference does it make?
• How long will it take, how much will it cost, and what are the mid-term and final exams?

Does passion make you more persuasive?

Amy Showalter's book The Underdog Edge: How Ordinary People Change the Minds of the Powerful and Live to Tell About It explains how "underdogs" can influence up with "top dogs."

One of her findings was that "top dogs" may view excessive passion in underdogs as anger and deem their future behavior as unpredictable. Top dogs are wary of underdogs who are

• "too emotional" 
• "fist bangers on the desk" 
• "pushing me to make a decision quickly" 
• unable to "see the other side" 

Amy found that "...passion works if you make your top dogs feel like they're riding the highest white horse. That is, passion can be persuasive when a top dog is made to feel like a good and moral person."

How to copy and paste text from Kindle books

Let's say you bought a Kindle book on software programming. The book contains lots of programming code examples you want to try, but you don't want to spend your time retyping the code. But Kindle doesn't have copy-and-paste commands like Microsoft Word.

So what you can do in Kindle is highlight the text you want to copy and click on the "Highlight" button. Now go on the web to your Kindle account (https://kindle.amazon.com) and click on "Your Highlights" link. You'll see all the text you've highlighted in your Kindle books. From here, you can copy the text and paste it into another program.

For text that you want to copy from Kindle, first highlight it.

Next, go online to your Kindle account and click on the "Your Highlights" link. Now you can copy the text from here to paste into another program.

Social media triage chart

Here is Jeremiah Owyang's adaption of a social media triage decision chart. This is from his presentation Social Strategy: Getting Your Company Ready. And here is another decision chart on how to handle online comments. (Click on image to enlarge.)

How to easily group and total data in Excel

Let's say you have an Excel spreadsheet listing the address information of 4,000 people who attended an event. And let's say you want to know how many people came from each city grouped by state. Here's how you can quickly do this using Microsoft Excel's PivotTable.

Here's a snippet of the 4,000-row table we'll group by state and city. Be sure to include a header row. If you don't, Excel will prompt you to create one.

Now do the following:
1) Select the columns you want to group.
2) Click on the Insert tab.
3) Click on PivotTable.
4) Click OK in the Create PivotTable dialog box.

This is where you create your PivotTable by dragging the fields you want to group and total into designated areas.

After dragging the fields we want to group and total into the designated areas, we end up with the final PivotTable. The data is now grouped by state and then by city. And there are total counts for each city.

How to create a mobile website fast and free

Just because you're on a lean budget doesn't mean you can't make a basic mobile website for your customers. What you can do is create content on Google's free Blogger platform. After doing so, go to "template" settings to activate and choose a mobile template.

Once you activate the mobile display setting, then anyone accessing the site from a smartphone will see a mobile friendly version.

How to track QR codes

To create a custom URL for a QR code to track in Google Analytics, follow these steps:

1) Go to Google's URL Builder and fill in the requested information to create a unique URL. After you click the "Generate URL" button, copy the URL.

2) Go go Google URL Shortener and create a shortened version of the URL. The reason why is the shorter the URL, the less complex the QR code graphic will be. Now copy the shortened URL.

3) Finally, paste the shortened URL into a QR code generating website such as the ZXing Project.

After generating the QR code, begin using it in your marketing media.

How to scan and save business card info to your smartphone

Just a reminder that Google Goggles can scan a business card and save the information from the card as contact information on your smartphone--or at least on the Android smartphone. (I haven't tried this on the iPhone.) Once you launch Google Goggles, simply take a photo of the business card. The app will scan the card and convert the scanned image into text to save into your smartphone's contacts.

Here is my business card that I scanned with Google Goggles:

And here are the scan results, which I can now save to my smartphone's contacts.

4 Android apps for the well-prepared business traveller

Here is how these 4 Android apps can help you be better prepared for business travel:

1) Access and edit your Word and Excel files with Google Docs. Before you leave on a trip, upload important Word or Excel files to your Google Docs account. Not only can you view the files, Google Docs lets you edit them too.

2) Access files from your office computer with TeamViewer. Let's say there was a Word or Excel file you forgot to upload to Google Docs. You can still access this file from your office computer with TeamViewer. The program is free if it's used for personal or noncommercial purposes.

3) View airport maps with GateGuru. In addition to viewing maps, GateGuru shows you which restaurants and stores are in airports.

4) Download maps as a backup for no internet connection. Google Maps has a neat little feature that's probably more handy for international travel. For example, let's say you're traveling to Canada, but you want to keep your data connection turned off to avoid high phone bills. What you can do is download a map of 10 square miles of the area in which you'll be. To access this feature on your Android device, open Google Maps. Then press the menu button and select More > Labs > Pre-cache map area.