Hey everyone,

Back in the day (as in.. a few months ago), you would have your entire Facebook friends list as one. Inviting people to events was both tedious and risky. You might invite the wrong person, and your finger would be tired by the time you got through the list.

Whether you’re doing marketing and promotions on Facebook for businesses or non-profits, you’ll want to make sure your event, group and page invitations get to the right people. So how can you do this? Well I’ve already talked about making multiple profiles. Although FB doesn’t like it - I think it’s a matter of choice. I have several profiles. One for strictly personal, family, fun stuff. Another for professional, work-related stuff. And yet another for marketing and community relations.

So how do you manage all those lists? The way to do it is to SEGMENT. You  need to go to your Friends list, and make individual lists of your friends. You can do this in the right-column beside where all your friends are listed. You can make as many lists as you like, and add friends individually or in bulk to each list.

Here’s an example of practical usage. You are on Facebook doing marketing for Barack Obama. You have 300 friends, from various locations throughout the USA. If you make seperate lists for the region of the country in which those friends live, such as East Coast, MidWest, etc., you can invite particular people to relevant Obama campaign events, groups, and pages. This will allow you to more effectively target your campaign marketing. Segmenting your audience list is a standard practice of email and conventional marketing, so it is no stretch to also apply it to your Facebook marketing.

Are you using lists? Any extra tips on this topic? Please share :)

-k.s.

Hey Everyone,

So just over a year ago, I purchased a new Dell Inspiron 9400 from the Dell.ca website. For the first eight to ten months, the battery would last at least 1.5 if not two hours without a recharge. Recently, however, whenever I’d pull out the power cord, the battery would give strange numbers about how much power is remaining. It would say something like “28 minutes…” and just a few minutes later it would say “8 minutes.”

So I decided to call up Dell technical support and was introduced to a catch in their sale of notebooks. The 3 year warranty with CompleteCare that I have apparently does not extend to the battery. I was not made aware of this at the time of purchase, and the friendly voice on the phone now told me that usually the battery is only covered for the first year. So I thought, “well that’s alright - I am within the first year right?” Sadly I was informed that I was just a few weeks past the first year mark and therefore the battery was no longer covered.

Then, the friendly voice on the phone said, “But what I can do for you, sir, is connect you to our [forget the name] department and they can quote you on the price of a new battery.” The tone with which he gave me this sales pitch, as if he was doing me a huge favour by connecting me to a sales person to purchase a new battery because this battery had barely lasted a year, was priceless.

In any case this post is just a heads up to all those who own or are planning to purchase a Dell notebook. Check your battery regularly and if it has issues, get them fixed within the first year. :)

stay in high spirits,

-k.s.

——

Photo Source: Kansir

Dot So Fast
My e-mail address is kulpreet [dot] singh [at] gmail [dot] com. So today, when I received an e-mail sent to kulpreetsingh [at] gmail [dot] com, I was surprised and thought the e-mail was sent in error. It turns out, when you register for an e-mail account with Google, the alphabetic characters in your username matter, not the dots. If you have dots in your username, you will still receive e-mail for the same username without dots. At least, that’s what this Gmail help page says.

Dot Be Gone
The reason I’m posting this is because I had always told people to e-mail me at the address with the dot, and then regretted it because it’s just annoying to mention the dot. So now I can just tell people to e-mail me without the dot. I have to admit I am still a little suspicious because I thought somebody else already had my e-mail without the dot, but I guess not.

Keep the Dot
One thing to keep in mind is, even though your e-mail address without the dot will work, if you originally signed up with the dot, that will remain your username when you login to your e-mail.

Dot’s all folks.

Hi Everyone,

You’ve probably noticed that in the new WordPress 2.5 series Admin Panel, the navigation menu items (Write, Manage, Design, Comments) are split from the option / settings menus (Settings, Plugins, Users). Personally I don’t like it separated, but I haven’t yet had time to fix it.

What I’ve done in the meanwhile is make the sizes same of the links on the left and the links on the right. The way to do this is:

In your wp-admin/wp-admin.css file, replace:

#wphead a, #dashmenu a, #adminmenu a, #submenu a, #sidemenu a {
text-decoration: none;
}

with

#wphead a, #dashmenu a {
text-decoration: none; }

#adminmenu a, #submenu a, #sidemenu a {
text-decoration: none;
font-size: 12pt;
}

That’s it - now the links on the left and right will be the same size. I like it better because I check the “Settings” and “Plugins” almost as often as I write a post or manage comments.

Also if you want to make the sub-navigation links (the ones in the white, below the navigation links) a different size, like maybe 11pt, use this:

#wphead a, #dashmenu a, #adminmenu a, #submenu a {
text-decoration: none; }

#submenu a {
font-size: 11pt; }

#sidemenu a {
text-decoration: none;
font-size: 12pt; }

-k.s.