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Presentations Made to Stick from Dan Heath

Here’s another follow up to a topic I’ve discussed before on FPPad (Reinvent Your Presentation Style).

Consider what you are trying to accomplish when you deliver a presentation, be it to allied professionals evaluating your firm, potential clients, or guests at a client appreciation event.

Often the most effective way to deliver your message can be accomplished through three simple tips shared by Dan Heath, co-author of Made to Stick.

Click here to view Made to Stick: Giving Presentations, Dan Heath’s three and a half minute video on FastCompany.com

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Free Web-based OCR Conversion from WiseTREND

Thanks go to rileybeebs on Twitter for bringing a simple-yet-effective OCR conversion tool from WiseTREND to my attention.

WiseTREND is an organization that, according to its website:

…provides a set of specific industry-tested Solutions, as well as customizable Software applications for OCR, Document Conversion and Data Capture projects.

I’ve written on FPPad before (Improve Your Paperless Document Searches) about applying OCR to each and every document captured with a scanner. Doing so allows document management and search programs to look inside documents and match keywords entered in a search query.

Adopting intelligent search for documents means no more wasted time digging though seemingly endless trees of subfolders on a company server in an attempt to find one elusive document that ended up being misfiled when it was captured in the first place.

Read More…

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View the Archive of Tweets from FPA Business Solutions 2010

Today was the final day of FPA Business Solutions 2010 in Dallas, TX. To capture the back channel discussion on Twitter, I used the Tweetdoc.org website to create a PDF file of tweets with the #FPABizSol hashtag.

Tweetdoc is free and extremely easy to use, and it outputs a fairly pleasing document to boot.

Click here to view the 96 tweets captured for FPABizSol.

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Email Archiver LiveOffice Jumps Into Social Media Archiving Market

In a press release yesterday, LiveOffice, an email archiving and compliance provider to financial advisors, announced the release of its LiveOffice Social Archive service.

According to the LiveOffice press release, Social Archive is:

the first social media archiving solution to capture and retain content from any public website, including popular social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as blogs.

Now I debate the statement that Social Archive is the first archiving solution (I’ve tweeted and blogged before about Arkovi Backups, Smarsh, SocialWare, and several others). Nevertheless, LiveOffice joins a short list of providers aimed at providing compliance solutions to registered representatives and independent RIAs who want to use social media websites.

Read the entire press release by clicking here.

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FPA Business Solutions 2010 Conference Twitter Hashtag

In response to several inquiries on yesterday’s post, I’m going to use #FPABizSol as the Twitter hashtag for updates from FPA Business Solutions 2010 next week. That is, unless I’m overruled by a majority of tweets from other attendees using a different hashtag.

Nevertheless, you can click here to view all tweets with the #FPABizSol hashtag.

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The Necessity of CRM at FPA Business Solutions 2010

Today I put the finishing touches on a CRM presentation prepared for next week’s FPA Business Solutions 2010 conference. I’m appearing along with Laurie Gripshover, a professional coach and consultant to financial services professionals, in a session titled CRM: No Longer a Luxury: A Necessity on Monday morning. Davis Janowski, the technology reporter for InvestmentNews, will be the moderator.

Click here to view the entire conference agenda.

I’ll be attending most of the sessions on Monday and Tuesday, so if you see me, stop me and say hello.

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FPPad Readers Have Spoken: New Image

Thanks to everyone who cast a vote in last week’s poll on selecting a new profile image for my blog and select social media sites.

By a 3-vote margin, this is the winning picture:

I eventually want to get around to updating the template used for the FPPad blog design. I’m thinking of selecting some themes from WooThemes. Anyone have any feedback?

But first I need to get through my current work helping clients with technology, writing several columns, and speaking at upcoming conferences.

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Smarsh Customers: Be Patient, Network Outage Disrupting Website & Phone Services

If you’re a Smarsh user, you undoubtedly noticed that email services aren’t working today. To add insult to injury, when their customer service number is called, the number isn’t working.

I first found out from Google Alerts I set up to monitor Smarsh, an email hosting and archive provider for the financial services industry. I saw this post on Compliance Insights, and then turned to Twitter for more information.

According to @roguebob and @safetyinnumbers, Smarsh is experiencing a severe network outage that has disrupted its website service as well as its VOIP phone system.

But the company contacted @safetyinnumbers and assured him that “emails are queueing and not being lost.”

Twitter appears to be the best source for updates at the moment, though the lack of network service obviously makes it difficult for the company to update its own Twitter account, @SmarshInc.

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Ask the Readers: New Profile Photo

I have new photos to use for profile pictures, but I can’t decide which one to select. So I’m asking FPPad readers to submit their vote.

Please submit your vote below by February 19 (if you’re viewing this post in your RSS reader and the poll doesn’t show up, click here to view the full post). Thanks!

[polldaddy poll=”2692976″]

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