Burke's Bits

It’s Monday – Do I Have To?

Sometimes I wake up feeling just like this. Scritchy, slow, cumbersome, and just plain icked out at the thought of it being Monday. What about you?

It doesn’t matter that I have great clients. Nor does it matter that I have interesting and challenging projects to work on. And I don’t recall a nightmare or uneasy sleep. Then again, I was sleeping, wasn’t I?

I guess my point is this: I am human and sometimes I just don’t want to participate in the day.

With Rube Goldberg in Mind – A Delightful Video by OK Go

If you’re on the internet much, you’ve probably already seen this. Personally I find it intriguing and delightful, fascinating and fun. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

I’m naturally curious, inquisitive and persistent in my pursuit of answers. Another trait that I am known for is ‘doing things the hard way’. Just ask my mother…my husband…my father…my brothers…my friends…okay, just ask anyone who knows me.

When approaching a project for a client, I have a process that I follow to help me avoid the hard way and keep me focused.

When approaching a project for myself is when my knack for finding the most convoluted path to the final answer is allowed to flourish.

Which is why I love Rube Goldberg. And the competitions (I’ve not had the opportunity to participate in one, but follow the contests locally and nationally) that have grown around his idea of taking the simplest of tasks and complicating them as creatively as is possible.

Reuben Lucius Goldberg (July 4, 1883 – December 7, 1970)  Rube Goldberg was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, sculptor, and author. Best known for his “inventions”, Rube’s early years as an engineer informed his most acclaimed work. A Rube Goldberg contraption – an elaborate set of arms, wheels, gears, handles, cups, and rods, put in motion by balls, canary cages, pails, boots, bathtubs, paddles, and live animals – takes a simple task and makes it extraordinarily complicated. He had solutions for How To Get The Cotton Out Of An Aspirin Bottle, imagined a Self-Operating Napkin, and created a Simple Alarm Clock – to name just a few of his hilariously depicted drawings. Check out the website for more info…www.rubegoldberg.com

#FollowFriday on Twitter

Every Friday tweeters post their #FollowFriday lists on Twitter. Inspired by my friend Sara Chi’s post on her blog, I’m sharing my #FollowFriday recommendations here as well as on Twitter.

First, what is #FollowFriday?

Quite simply, it’s a recommendation I make of people that I believe fellow tweeters would benefit from by following.

5 Steps to The Perfect Business Model

Inspired by this post written by Chrysty Beverley Fortner, where she lists 7 steps to keeping up with the changing times in your business, I thought I’d refine the ideas a bit to better suit my current state of business; not only my new business focus, but also being flexible enough to respond to my clients, the economy, and my desire to learn new skills:

Journalists Depend on Social Media for Story Research?

  From a January 20, 2010 Press Release on Cision’s site:

A national survey conducted by Cision and Don Bates of The George Washington University’s Master’s Degree Program in Strategic Public Relations found that an overwhelming majority of reporters and editors now depend on social media sources when researching their stories. Among the journalists surveyed, 89% said they turn to blogs for story research, 65% to social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and 52% to microblogging services such as Twitter. The survey also found that 61% use Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia.

The first question that comes to mind for me is this one: once they find the information are they verifying it?

Do they make the phone calls to the poster?

Do they follow up with phone calls and emails to the sources the poster cites?

It's About Time I Got Organized, What About You?

Don’t let the picture fool you, it has been a productive and interesting week here. Every day was spent working on a client project, while also attending networking events, a professional development webinar, and a Toastmasters Officer meeting/training session. The highlights for me were meeting with a CPA who trained me on QuickBooks Pro 2010 , meeting with the President, Sales Director and Marketing Director of an exciting start-up company needing online marketing services, and hearing an Efficiency Expert present at a local networking event and talk about the how-to of creating a sustainable process for organizing the office that results in increased revenue and an environment of increased energy. Whew! I believe I got the message that now is a good time to get organized. Now look at the picture and that’s how it sometimes feels to be in my workspace!

Did You Know? Human Sacrifice

And now it’s time for another segment of Did You Know? The occasional post about interesting, odd, unusual and sometimes downright icky facts from around the world. Based on my curiosity or someone else’s inquiry. Today’s request comes from a client who wants to know more about human sacrifice. The price was right so I didn’t ask too many questions, and besides, I can’t reveal the answers because of who the client is – so chew on that for a moment!

The research started online, and I went to Google books first. From the many books I have read, the many history documentaries I have seen, I knew that most of the information would be contained in archeological finds and anthropological studies. What a treasure trove of information I found! Anyway, before I get onto a tangent, let me summarize a bit of what I found.

Are You Ready to Start Your Small Business ?

Burke Research Services was officially started in 2008. It would have been much sooner, but I didn’t have access to high-speed internet (DSL) until summer of 2008. Then in March of 2009, Search by Burke was born as a division. Why? Because not only do I love research, hunting for information, digging for the truth/numbers/quote/etc., but I also know and enjoy online marketing (email marketing, blogging, SEO, analytics, etc.).

So now I’m a small business. As defined by the US Small Business Administration website, that means I have less than 500 employees and my revenues are $7M or less. Hmm, yep, that’s me. That also means there are tons of small businesses out there, doesn’t it? Anyway, I’m one of them now. And if you want to be one, too, then I recommend having a few quality reference books about running a small business on your shelf and easily reachable – you’ll find them invaluable as you begin your journey.

Evaluating Research Sources - A Basic Overview

Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

Dow Jones, Hoover’s and Dialog.

Social media, newspapers and magazines.

Telephone, coffee shop and checkout counter at department store.

These are just a few examples of where we get information. Some of what we hear or see is white noise, not relevant to our daily lives and definitely not relevant to a client.

Then again, some of what we hear, see and find is very relevant – and that is when it is important that we know how to evaluate the source of the information to determine credibility and reliability. Really, now, if you think about it, do you want to pass on incorrect information? More importantly, what if your name is attached to the information as the one having found it and passed it on as true?

Is Wikipedia a Reliable Source?

This question was posed as part of a contributor report on Allvoices.com and my answer, quite honestly, is No.

This description is a direct quote from the FAQ page of the Wikipedia Foundation:

“Wikipedia is the world’s largest and most popular encyclopedia. It’s online, free to use, and free of advertising. Wikipedia contains more than 14 million volunteer-authored articles in over 250 languages, and is visited by more than 330 million people every month, making it the number five most-popular site in the world. It is a collaborative creation that has been added and edited by millions of people during the past eight years: anyone can edit it, at any time. Wikipedia is the largest collection of shared knowledge in human history, and the people who support it are united by their love of learning, their intellectual curiosity, and their awareness that we know much more together, than any of us does alone.”