Is your business ready for the next SharkNado.

Are you ready for the Next SharkNado Attack

It you missed it last week of the biggest events on Twitter in a long time was the premier of the B-grade monster movie SharkNado on the SyFi channel.  As the title implies, it was a monster movie featuring man eating sharks which sucked up by a tornado and then dropped on the unsuspecting population of Los Angles.  News anchors from cable television, celebrities of all stripes, and political figures chimed it to remark how awful the film was.  It generated so much buzz that the network decided to rebroadcast the film early because the overwhelming demand.  There is a lesson here for any business person.  The web and social media can be a powerful thing creating demand for your business.  In this blog post, want to encourage you to be ready when the next SharkNado hits.

The universe of social media is composed of many services; Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit being the largest and most influential services on the web.  Facebook acts as a global community for everyone from your parents to people who are interested in dressing up as cats to go for contact.  According to Yahoo news, about 1.1 Billion people call Facebook the place they go to share information with friends and family.  Twitter is known as a micro-blogging service and users can only type 140 characters at a time.  What makes Twitter so popular is the speed of how information is shared and it is also relatively unfiltered so it is the tool of Occupy Wall Street and rebels in Turkey.  Rumors and misinformation swirl about but within this river of information are plenty of nuggets of information gold.  Watching Samuel L. Jackson root for team USA during the Olympics was extremely funny and I highly recommend Jack Tapper’s feed from CNN.  Finally, Reedit acts as a clearing house of blogs and photographs on the web. They also have an “Ask Me Anything” or A.M.A feature which has become the place for politicians and other thought leaders to try out new ideas.  For the sake of disclosure, I use Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn as my social networks to promote this business.

So what does this mean to you a small or medium sized business? It means you also need a presence on social media web sites; at the very least Twitter and Facebook.  You can promote specials and talk about your business in an unfiltered manner.  If people like your content they will share your tweets and Facebook messages extending your reach.  It is also cheaper than advertising on radio, television, or newspaper.  This makes it a low cost means to promote your business.

We at E₃ systems understand this strange world and would like to help you.  We leverage Facebook and Twitter and can show you how to do the same.  Please contact us and we will show you how.  So the next time a SharkNado hits you will be able to use it to boost your business.

Until next time.

Our New Website

Dude Nice looking website.

Rebuilding a web site is a big deal.  It is not undertaken lightly and usually includes a committee of people attempting to be creative.  I hate redesigning web sites because everyone seems to know how a web site should look but many people do not understand how to make it happen.  This leaves me confronted with power point slides and Photoshop graphics with marketing people telling me that it should look exactly like the file they sent me.  Thoughts about cross browser compatibility and how the site should look on a mobile phone seem like secondary considerations.  It was a website redesign which finally pushed me over the edge and convinced me that I should be an entrepreneur.

It has been almost a year since I formally founded E₃ systems.  When I did I had a clean and easy to understand website which leveraged the latest web technologies and looked good on all the major browsers.  I decided to ignore IE6 because Google and Yahoo decided to. I was pretty proud of it but I knew as we were reaching our one year anniversary we needed a refresh. 

I took inspiration from Microsoft's MSDN website.  The good folks at Redmond are getting ready for the fall release of Windows 8 and are slowly changing over their web sites to have a more metro look and feel.  I decided that I should do the same.  This biggest challenge was finding an easy way to create the tiles and icons used in a Metro layout.  Searching around Microsoft's blog network, I was pointed toward a company called Syncfusion and they had a tool which manufactured Metro style tiles.  Armed with this tool I began the site redesign. 

To avoid making the swap too jarring, I decided that I would only change the front page of the web site and keep the remaining pages in the same format with Metro style flourishes.  I also wanted to make sure that users of the web site had access to all of our social media venues including our YouTube channel.  I also wanted to see if I could leverage the grid 960 css frameworks.  It was like putting together a complicated puzzle which would better appeal to our customers. 

The results speak for themselves.  The landing page contains all the information which old landing page did.  The social media icons are not as distracting.  Users do not have to scroll through the page to digest all the content.  It also looks good on tablet computers and PC's. 

Look over our web site and let us know what you think.

Until next time.

Logistics is changing and you are going to need college grads...start now.

The future of logistics is graduating now.

Since I have joined Twitter, I have found it interesting to learn about other people and events taking place in my industry.  As fate would have it, I noticed two articles side by side that made me notice how things are changing in the logistics business. The first came from the Fast Lane Blog from the Department of Transportation and the other from Yahoo Finance about how young people thanks to the recession are becoming a lost generation. Both articles have a grim tone with a touch of optimism about the future. 

Yahoo Says:

About 60% of recent graduates have not been able to find a full-time job in their chosen profession, according to job placement firm Adecco.

It sounds oddly familiar to me because when I received my bachelor’s degree in 1990 a recession made finding work very difficult and a living wage next to impossible.  Fortunately, for this generation of college graduates there isn't a cover story on Time Magazine telling them they are lazy and worthless.   It seems like a tragic waste of talent that these people are having such a hard time finding work.    

This is where the Department of Transportation blog comes in:

Transportation is a great place to start when creating jobs.  Across all modes of transportation—from roads, bridges, and buses to airports, trains, and maritime—America will always need workers to maintain our transportation networks and build new ways to connect goods and people.

But it’s not enough to just create new jobs. With 50 percent of the current transportation workforce eligible for retirement in 2013, and significant technological changes affecting all modes of transportation, we must educate the next generation of workers.

In other words, many of the people in the trucking, shipping, and warehouse business are getting ready to retire.  There is also a lot of well qualified college grads out there that need work.  Supply meets demand.  What business doesn't want qualified workers who are driven and intelligent?  It is up to these companies to start hiring these people and training them before their work force retires and the institutional memory of their organization walks out the door. 

If these companies are going to hire these people then they are going have a few culture changes.  These new hires are not going to accept AS400 or green screen systems.  They are accustomed to web based or narrow client server systems.  They know how to Tweet, post information on Facebook, and use smart phones rather than fiddle with fax machines.  Finally, these new hires move information at the speed of the internet.  They are going to be a great addition to these companies. They are also going to demand new systems.  This is where E₃ systems will help.  E₃ has the products and experience companies need to get businesses to move at internet speed.