XYRM Innovation: 06/26/14

Twitter Tries Retweet With More Room for Comments

retweet with comment

Have you ever wanted to comment on a retweet? You can, of course, but only if the tweet is short enough.

On the Web, your only option is to copy the tweet you want to comment on. (It needs to be much shorter than 140 characters to even do this.) You then open a new tweet box and paste the tweet in it.

Next you add the letters “RT” in caps before the retweet, and then the author’s Twitter handle. (This is why you need so many extra characters!) Finally — if you can fit it in — you add your comment in just a few characters at the beginning and hit “tweet.”

There’s a more automated way to do it from a mobile app called “Quote Tweet.” But it’s not available on the Web version of Twitter yet. (See more details from Twitter on the retweet process in the Twitter Help Center.)

But more recently, apparent experiments on a new retweet with comment feature promise to do more.

The new feature, which initially appeared in a couple of tweets by Carolyn Penner (shown below), who serves as Twitter’s chief of communications, seem to allow for a longer comment above a full retweet.

retweet with comment

Twitter has yet to even acknowledge this retweet with comment feature, and it doesn’t actually seem to give you any more characters to play with in your tweet reports Mashable. Instead, it seems to embed the retweet as an image, and then gives you a little under 140 characters to comment just above it.

A couple of other select Twitter users seem to have been given the new feature to play with as well. But it has since vanished from the posts where it was first spotted, though Mashable managed to get a few screen captures first.

The new post experiments seemed to also be from a mobile device, so there’s no telling whether there’s a Web version in the works.

Of course, Twitter is being as tight lipped as ever simply referring all media inquiries to its famous post on Twitter experiments back in 2013.

So right now, we have no idea whether the new retweet with comment feature is something Twitter is planning to roll out soon or at all. But it certainly would change the conversation.

Images: Twitter Photo via Shutterstock, Mashable

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Microsoft Exchange Down for Nine Hours

microsoft exchange down

For all their benefits in making small businesses more cost efficient and competitive, there are, of course, negatives to cloud services too. When a cloud service is interrupted for any reason, those relying on the service are without recourse until it is up and running again.

That’s what apparently happened to an undetermined number of Microsoft Exchange customers this week.

The email, calendar and contacts collaboration service is marketed by itself starting as low as $4 per month. But it is also marketed as part of Microsoft’s Office 365 package along with SharePoint, Lync, Yammer and other related products.

No matter how customers had come to use the service, however, there was real frustration on the Office 365 Twitter feed. The outage seemed to stretch on for hour after hour.

@Office365 4 hours downtime is more than a delay.

— Briana Huether (@BriHuether) June 24, 2014

Meanwhile, some customers indicated it was more than just Microsoft Exchange that had experienced difficulties during the week:

@Office365 It is not just delays … cannot even connect! Lync 8 hours yesterday, Exchange today over 3 hours … Black Eye

— James Mitchener (@MITBusiness) June 24, 2014

After almost nine hours, David Zhang, part of Microsoft’s support team was able to report on the Office 365 community:

“On Tuesday, June 24, 2014, at approximately 1:11 PM UTC, engineers received reports of an issue in which some customers were unable to access the Exchange Online service. Investigation determined that a portion of the networking infrastructure entered into a degraded state. Engineers made configuration changes on the affected capacity to remediate end-user impact. The issue was successfully fixed on Tuesday, June 24, 2014, at 9:50 PM UTC.”

But many customers seemed more concerned with the apparent poor communications from the company during what seems to have been a very lengthy systems problem, reports PC World.

We’ll ignore the obvious lessons in customer service here. The point is that as small businesses rely more and more on cloud services, they need to plan as much as possible for such eventualities.

One solution is to have a backup plan for communications or other cloud services should a failure occur.

There is little doubt that other service providers will use incidents such as this to target Microsoft’s cloud customers as well, and this brings up another point.

As choices in cloud service continue to abound, it’s important to continue to re-evaluate the one that is right for your business.

Microsoft Photo via Shutterstock

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Liber8Me Teaches Lessons From a Veteran Entrepreneur

liber8me

Laura Humphreys may have started her career as a secretary in an ad agency. But to date she has started three successful businesses and sold two.

Her latest venture, Liber8Me attempts to help others learn from her experience and visualize their businesses in a whole new way.

WHAT PRODUCT OR SERVICE DO YOU OFFER?

The company provides entrepreneurs with a wide range of tools and products. But all have one thing in common. They are designed to set the entrepreneur free. The company’s mentoring programs, online programs, books, workbooks and study groups all have a single theme. It’s the idea that a business should be an asset that sets you free – not a job that weighs you down.

WHAT IS YOUR BUSINESS KNOWN FOR?

One thing and one thing alone sets Liber8Me apart, says Humphreys. That is the company’s emphasis on a backwards working approach to business creation and growth.

Start with a view of how you want your business to look once it’s fully developed and ready to sell. Then plan backwards, establishing a set of milestones that will bring you to that point.

HOW DID THE BUSINESS GET STARTED?

As we’ve explained earlier, Humphreys had started and sold two other successful businesses before this. The first was an advertising agency which eventually grew to a revenue of $15 million in billings that she would eventually sell to the Ogilvy Group.

The second was a highly successful pet care company eventually employing a staff of 150. She would eventually sell this business to a competitor.

Humphreys’ successes made her want to share her experience and her personal blueprint for building a business with others. As a result, Liber8Me was born.

HAVE YOU EVER ALMOST GONE OUT OF BUSINESS?

Well, not with her new venture, Humphreys says. But she admits to some bumps and scrapes while building her previous two businesses and, in both cases, these resulted in great lessons she passes on to entrepreneurs today.

Four years into her first company, Humphreys almost suffered a nervous breakdown. The trouble was her inability to step back and let her staff do what they were trained to do. Humphreys took a month off and let her staff step up. It’s a lesson she carries with her.

In her second business, a tragic incident involving the death of a dog in one of her employees’ care created bad publicity for her company as she was preparing her business to sell. Bringing in a skilled PR firm to handle the media proved the answer and again, Humphreys learned valuable lessons about how to handle things when they are at their worst.

WHAT WAS YOUR BIGGEST WIN?

Humphreys says her biggest win has been the publication of her book Liber8 Your Business: The Revolutionary Planning Technique That Will Set Every Small Business Owner Free. The book has won a gold medal at the Independent Publisher Book Awards and, of course, here at the Small Business Book Awards, where it received more votes than any other title.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH AN EXTRA $10,000?

Humphreys says she has a dream for Liber8U, an online university campus where small business owners could come together to study and learn from entrepreneurs all around the world. Humphreys says any extra money right now would be put towards beginning the development on that project.

FUN TIDBIT

Humphreys explains:

“We hold ‘muffin and mentor’ sessions every Friday morning where we invite successful entrepreneurs to join us and share their stories, for use in our materials. These can be local entrepreneurs who meet in person – and we provide the muffin, or from around the world on Skype – where sadly we can only share a virtual muffin!”

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Find out more about the Small Biz Spotlight program.

Image: TVNZ screenshot

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