Here they are:

Tinu Abayomi Paul

Leveraged Promotion, a website promotion company. Their specialty is bringing companies with an existing offline presence the local, national or international exposure they need to increase profitability, leveraging the cost-effective tools available on the web. You can reach her at http://AskTinu.com.

Her last project was a contribution to Rok Hrastnik’s comprehensive guide to RSS, “Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS”. You can find more of her daily tips on RSS, Blogs, Google tools, and more, at her main blog, Free Traffic Tips.

Jared Goralnick
Jared Goralnick’s passion is to help businesses save time through more efficient usage of technology. In 2002, he founded SET Consulting, a productivity training, development, and design firm, which he continues to manage.  Some of SET’s clients include the FBI, NIST, CRS, NTT Communications, and HP.  In 2008, Jared launched AwayFind, a web service that addresses the problem of email overload.

In addition to a building a passionate online following of users, AwayFind received international attention in NPR, The Guardian, and blogs large and small.  In 2009, he started Bootstrap Maryland, a community organization focused on building lean technology businesses in the greater Washington DC region.  You can find Jared blogging online at Technotheory.com or speaking about workplace productivity and communication around the globe.

Susan Gunelius
Susan Gunelius is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a full service marketing communications provider offering copywriting, business communications, blog, book and article writing, and marketing and branding consulting services. She brings with her over 15 years of experience working in the marketing field for some of the largest corporations in the world (including divisions of AT&T, HSBC, Household International and more).

Susan is a published author with three books available in book stores and online (Harry Potter: The Story of a Global Business Phenomenon through Palgrave Macmillan, Kick-Ass Copywriting in 10 Easy Steps through Entrepreneur Press, and Google Blogger for Dummies through Wiley). Her fourth book, Building Brand Value the Playboy Way, will hit book stores (through Palgrave Macmillan) in Fall 2009.

Susan frequently writes about marketing for various publications. She is a featured columnist on Entrepreneur.com where she writes about marketing communications, and you can find some of her marketing-related articles on websites such as WomenEntrepreneur.com, MSNBC.com, FoxBusiness.com, BusinessWeek.com, WashingtonPost.com, TheStreet.com, SmartMoney.com, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Small Business, and more.

Susan is also an active blogger authoring the KeySplash Creative Conversations blog about branding, marketing and advertising for her company, KeySplash Creative, Inc., as well as one of the leading blogs for women working in the field of business, WomenOnBusiness.com. She is a contributing author at Corporate-Eye.com where she writes about corporate branding, and she writes about small business marketing for Cox Communications’ Kudzu.com Business Success Center where she authors the Everyday Marketing blog. Additionally, she is the Guide to Web Logs for About.com (a New York Times company).

Becky Carroll
Becky is founder of Customers Rock!, a consultancy focused on engaging customers through conversation, social media, and WOW customer experiences. Becky’s clients have included companies such as EA, HP, Fujitsu, and Ford in addition to numerous small businesses and non-profits. She is the author of the business blog Customers Rock!  and teaches the class “Marketing via New Media” at UCSD. Becky is a regular personality on the nationally-syndicated Big Biz Talk Radio show, a contributing author on the recently-released Age of Conversation business books, and a sought-after speaker on social media and customer loyalty.

Previously, Becky served as Director of Social Media for Brickfish and as a Senior Consultant with Peppers and Rogers Group. She also worked at HP for 14 years, including her role as Director of Marketing, UK.

Anita Campbell
Anita Campbell has been an entrepreneur at heart her entire life. A lawyer by training, she has a wide range of interests, as reflected in her varied background in banking, information technology, human resources, marketing and eCommerce.

Today she is the CEO of her own business, Small Business Trends LLC, a media and information company. In that role she closely follows trends in the small business market and trends in technology.

Before starting her entrepreneurial journey she held various executive positions in the corporate world. Most recently she was a senior executive with Bell & Howell Company, including serving as CEO of a technology subsidiary of Bell & Howell.

A respected speaker and emerging trends resource, Ms. Campbell’s expertise has been noted or her opinion quoted in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, Inc Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, CIO Magazine, Entrepreneur Radio, BusinessTVChannel.com, Cleveland Plain Dealer, San Francisco Chronicle, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Akron Beacon Journal, Boston Globe, CRM Buyer, and countless trade publications, websites, podcasts and more.

Christopher Carfi
Christopher Carfi is an entrepreneur and CEO of Cerado, Inc. Cerado was founded in 2002 to provide software and services that enable businesses, organizations and associations to better connect and understand their customer and member communities. His blog, The Social Customer Manifesto, is a “Top 25″ marketing blog, and has won numerous other awards including “Top CRM Blog” in 2005 and 2007. He is also an active contributor to the ProjectVRM, based at the Berkman Center at Harvard University, which focuses on improving customer-vendor relationships and is creating tools to equip individuals with tools of both independence and engagement.

Prior to co-founding Cerado, Chris was a product marketing executive at Extricity, a provider of B2B integration services. He also spent nearly a decade at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) as a manager at Andersen’s Center for Strategic Technology in Palo Alto, California.   He serves on the Network Solutions’ Social Web Advisory Board.

Chris grew up in Chicago, holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from Northwestern University, and currently lives in the Bay Area with his family.

Looking forward to their input

We are looking forward to having each one of these incredible people provide their insight and opinion to continue improving and bringing you the best online experience.

Wordcamp Logo (credit:Technosailor)

This past Saturday I had the opportunity to visit where I went for my undergraduate degree at the University of Baltimore to attend Wordcamp Mid-Atlantic. It was put on by Aaron Brazell AKA Technosailor who is well known in the wordpress community and in on his previous lives was Director of Technology for B5 Media which was at the time the largest blog network running on Wordpress. He has some serious street cred in the Wordpress community and currently has a consulting practice working with some great firms implementing Wordpress as part of their strategy.

Aaron Brazell (photo by Shashi Bellamkonda)

Opening Remarks

He kicked the morning off with a thank you to sponsors and an introduction to the event as well as integrating in some great Ignite Baltimore presentations to keep things lively and not just Wordpress lectures. Mario Armstrong gave his personal branding presentation to start and we jumped into the first keynote of the day from Anil Dash of Six Apart.  Read on…

Keynote from Anil Dash

Anil Dash (photo by Shashi Bellamkonda)

After Aaron completed his opening remarks Anil Dash, co-founder of Six Apart (yes, that Six Apart) gave the first keynote of the day. He released some earth shattering news – Moveable Type solutions for Wordpress. WOW. That was some serious breaking news and an exclusive for attendees. Our very own Social Media Swami broke the news with a video interview. From Shashi’s previous post:

“The audience at Word Camp Mid-Atlantic drew a deep breath as Anil Dash, one of the co-founders of Six Apart a rival blogging platform delivered the keynote address. During the keynote he made a very sensational announcement. The screen lit up with a URL http://www.sixapart.com/wordpress which is like Microsoft having a place for Apple software on their website.

What Anil announced was that Six Apart is introducing plug-ins that word press and other blogging platform users can use TypePad AntiSpam, Six Apart Media, TypePad Connect, Blogs.com.

They are open source and FREE.

The other unconventional part of this announcement is that Six Apart decided to use a very grassroots Word Press event to make this sensational announcement instead of calling the New York Times, Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal. I took the opportunity to catch up with Anil Dash and interviewed him for this blog.”

You can see the video interview HERE.

Sessions Geeky and Not So Geeky

Wordcamp Audience (photo: Jimmy Gardner)

The rest of the day was composed of sessions that went from the design side to the programming side of Wordpress. One of my favorites was the advanced session on the “Thesis” theme that has become so popular. It really opened up the hood for people wondering how this theme is different and more powerful that simple skins.

Jared Goralnick, TechnoTheory, (not to be confused with Technosailor) gave a left of center presentation called “Being a Balanced Blogger”

All of the sessions were great in their own way wrapping up with Dan Zarrella expanding Wordpress functionality with “Twitter, Friendfeed and Social Tools”.

Jimmy Gardner captured some of the presentations which are already on Slideshare:

• Brad Williams – Advanced Thesis Techniques and Tricks
• Brandon Savage – Wordpress Caching

Closing Keynote from Mark Jaquith on “State of Wordpress”

Mark Jaquith (photo by Dawn Casey)

Mark Jaquith, who I first met at Gnomedex 2007 when I was writing for B5 Media, is a great guy and a sharp developer. I think he gets annoyed when I tell him that he looks like Corin Nemec (Stargate SG-1, Parker Lewis Can’t Lose) but wouldn’t you want to be told you look like TV/Movie star? I digress, but his presentation was a nice wrap up of the day and he talked about the improvements to Wordpress 2.7, the epic FAIL of Wordpress 1.5 and what is coming up in Wordpress 2.8.

All I can say is that I am excited about detailed theme and widget control.

You can see the whole thing in Slideshare:

Mark Jaquith – State of the Word

It was a great event and Aaron along with support from Jimmy Gardner was a huge success. I see this to be even bigger next year.

Other coverage of the announcement and Word Camp Mid-Atlantic:
Leena Rao, Tech Crunch
Doug Coleman on ReadWriteWeb.com
Jimmy Gardner EastCoastBlogging.com
Joe Corbett Isteconnects.com
Mike Paetzold wptutorial.com
Ted Mann on TurkeyMonkey.com

Those two words probably conjure up memories of when you come home from a vacation or a long weekend away from work on Monday morning only to see something like this:

Your mailbox has 2,424 messages in it…
 - 1,216 are actually spam
 - 764 are you being cc’d because people needed to do a CYA with you
 - 236 are jokes or photos that are annoying and that you never read
 - 152 are newletters from trade publications that you will eventually get to
 - 56 ARE THE EMAILS YOU REALLY NEEDED TO READ WHILE YOU WERE AWAY

You then proceed to go through everything with a trigger finger on the delete button. But you start to wonder…”What if those 56 emails could have gotten to me in a timely manner?”.

Enter AwayFind.

You might have read the book, The Four-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. The premise it to outsource the things that others could do for you cheaper, thus maximizing the value of your time and letting you live life now. AwayFind aims to cut down your time in checking e-mails and the amount of e-mails flowing to your inbox. The goal is to get you to deal with e-mails twice a day.

This might seem impossible at first, and you know that people will get an immediate “Out of Office” auto-reply message allowing you to get to most things later. However, when a message is of utmost importance, people can click on the AwayFind link (www.awayfind.com/username) that directs them to a Web form, which can send you an e-mail or SMS alert. The service is currently offered in Free or Premium plans. (SEE BELOW FOR MORE DETAILS)

You can, of course, edit this message to include other details like when you plan on checking email, whether you’re on vacation, or the phone number to someone else who’s available to help.

The only downside right now is that it lacks integration with email itself. This unfortunately makes people with urgent matters repeat their email. I know this is something that Jared Goralnick, creator of AwayFind and President of SET Consulting, are working on for a future release. 

Right now, it is in beta it just came out of beta this week and the AwayFind service comes in two variations: a basic, free service and a professional version for $5/month. 4.95 until Friday and then 6.95 thereafter…or 34.95/ year until Friday or 49.95 thereafter. Most people will need the professional version, but the free service only offers 5 text messages per month offers unlimited SMS. So sign up today and give it a try.�

Steve: Let’s start out with the basic concept of productivity. Do you think technology has helped us or just increased our ability to handle more?
Jared: When I started SET (software efficiency training) Consulting in 2002 it was with the hope of getting people more productive with technology, so they could better enjoy their work and leave their offices a little earlier. But most people are as concerned with how much they work as they are with the results. That is, they feel the need to work at least eight hours, regardless.
So, technology does help us to accomplish more, and certainly offers conveniences. But, in and of itself, I don’t think it’s led us to work less or be any happier.

Steve: How long have you been working in the technology space? What motivated you to start SET Consulting?
Jared: I’ve been in technology since my first HTML support job at a startup in ’95. I worked in web or Windows development at four other startups, half of which are still in existence, and I spent three years in development with the Federal Trade Commission.

While working at the FTC I realized that even the most technical users weren’t particularly adept with the seemingly basic Microsoft products like Word, Excel, and Outlook. I saw this both walking-through the office, and in some training sessions I held. After some more investigation, I considered that there was a market in helping people who used these tools 6+ hours per day. I had always been the kid who shared the little “computer tricks” with friends; it turned out that law firms, government agencies, and small businesses needed those tricks even more.

Steve: What is your philosophy on using technology to become more productive?
Jared: Productivity should never be an end in itself. If you focus just on how long things take, then you can become a cog in a machine. But if you can better apply your time to skip past the minutiae, then you can be more creative and add greater value to everything you touch—in other words, a little thought about productivity can help people to use technology as a vehicle rather than an obstacle to getting stuff done.

Steve: You are definitely someone who has been inspired by productivity thought leaders. Who do you find are most effective and why?
Jared: I’ve learned and been inspired by people like Tim Ferriss and Marc Orchant. Tim has really helped people to see their 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s completely differently: as the time we should really be enjoying ourselves. Marc Orchant was a personal role model who exemplified just how much the tools can accomplish, and where to draw the line between tools and education. So many others have offered their ideas and inspiration, and I was an early adopter of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, as you might guess.

He taught me that whatever we do for personal organization, we need to rely on a system and get stuff out of our head, or we’ll never be able to focus and things will always slip through the cracks.

Steve: Switching gears a bit, I would like to talk about your exciting new project, AwayFind. This summer you launched it in a small beta and have grown it since then. What is the basic principle of AwayFind?
Jared: The principle that underlies AwayFind is that one needs to check their email less often if they want to focus on the task at hand, or escape from their work. AwayFind makes this possible by giving people the confidence that they can be reached with time-sensitive messages when they’re not checking their email.

Steve: How was it motivated by the “4-Hour Work Week”?
Jared: Tim stressed the value of an auto-responder to assist in people’s email workflow. I really liked the idea, but didn’t want people to have to call me when they needed me sooner. So I decided to create a similar solution with AwayFind—rather than providing my phone number, I placed a web link in my auto responder that could SMS me or delegate the problem when something urgent arose.

Steve: What are some lessons good or bad you have learned from a software product like this?
Jared: The slogan for SET Consulting used to be, “Technology does not create productive people. We do” – it stressed that how people use technology drives their productivity, not the software itself. Similarly, AwayFind on its own won’t make people more productive—they still have to check their email less often. In building AwayFind I’ve learned how to draw the line between what technology can accomplish and what I have to offer or teach people in order to change their behavior. I’m still learning.

Steve: How much does it cost and how does one signup for the beta?
Jared: AwayFind is “Freemium”—most features are totally free, but some additional branding, security, and routing features will be purchasable for a few dollars per month (still working out the exact price, but it’ll be in the $5-10/range and offer 30-day trials.)

The first 25 who click over to www.awayfind.com from this page will get an invitation code within an hour.

Steve: As we close the interview I would like to leave our mostly overworked small business owners who are our loyal readers a bit of productivity advice. What are the top 5 things a small business owner can do to get more productive?
Jared:
Gosh, that’s a tough question. Most of it comes down to guarding your time and minimizing interruptions:
1. Turn off all email notifications: on your smartphone, in your email program, etc.
2. Don’t multitask: do one thing and do it well.
3. Learn lots of keyboard shortcuts instead of just mouse-clicking things. It’ll take a few weeks to master them, but 2 seconds saved 1,000 times per day will add up
4. If there’s something you really want to accomplish but continue to have trouble with, tie an external commitment to it—for instance, tell your friends you’re doing it, set a deadline that costs money that relies upon it, make a plan with a co-worker/spouse/friend to work on it one day/weekend, etc
5. Sign up for www.awayfind.com and stop checking your email 100 times per day!