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Just off the wire

Voco will let you talk like 'anyone'.

Blot Links

How does your LinkedIn photo score?

'Experts' reckon it only takes one-tenth of a second for someone to draw conclusions about you based on your photo.

So if you're an active LinkedIn user it makes sense to make sure your LinkedIn photo doesn't scare potential contacts away.

That's where the Snappr Photo Analyzer can help.

This tool will look at your LinkedIn photo and give you a score out of 100 and some critical feedback.

If you're the least bit sensitive, you should probably avoid it, as it will tell you if your smile, jawline, squinch is good, okay or bad!

I scored 66/100. Quite good you might think. Unfortunately the subject matter scored low. Almost all the points could be attributed to the technical qualities of the photograph taken by expert snapper Ronnie Baxter.

Just goes to show - a professional photograph can make up for a lot of bad stuff.

Score your photo …

Fix those broken links

If you have a website that gets updated regularly and have had it for a while, you'll almost certainly get some broken links.

Broken links are hyperlinks to pages that no longer exist or have been moved.

You want to minimise this kind of thing as much as possible because it sends a message to your visitors that you don't look after your site, and it can annoy them to the extent that they will leave and look elsewhere.

So, how do you find out where your broken links are?

There are numerous tools you can use, including Google Analytics, but the one we generally use because of its simplicity is Dr Link Check.

Try it out …

Apps go to Facebook?

In the last 12 months there have been quite a few articles about how usage of smartphone apps is reducing.

A new report from Gartner says app usage has shrunk by 3% and social media usage by 2% year on year.

What they think will happen is that native apps will migrate to messaging platforms - so an app would be a sort of module within the platform.

This is the way things have gone in China, with the WeChat messaging platform absolutely dominant. Apps just plug into its infrastructure.

The obvious parallel platform in the West would be Facebook, and of course they have been making moves in that direction.

Welcome to the post-app era?

Read more …