Leadership is not the same as management.

Employees respect, trust and follow good leaders, not bad managers. Leaders are examples to rank and file employees and inspire team members to embrace the organization instead of just showing up every day and completing individual tasks.

They are mentors and by example lead others to work harder, faster, better and more productively.

Leadership doesn’t magically descend on managers as soon as they are promoted.

It takes a lot of hard work, respect for team members, trust and even humility.

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By Tammy Shaw

Amazon, Jeff Bazos’ e-commerce, logistics, payment processing, cloud storage, and media empire, is set to take on Google and Facebook by storm in a highly profitable arena – online advertising, rivaling Facebook and Google for a healthy share of the online advertising marketplace.

And Amazon’s aggressive stance translates into the mega-company emerging as up-and-coming competitor to traditional digital ad leaders Google and Facebook.

Most of Amazon’s yearly revenue comes from e-commerce. However, approximately 11 percent of the company’s total revenue comes from Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing arm, a venture that makes up half of the retail giant’s operating income, the company’s income minus its operating expenses.

[Read more…] about Amazon’s aggressive digital advertising a rival to Google and Facebook

Chrome pushes websites to HTTPS in July

By Tamera Shaw

On Feb. 8, the Chromium blog announced that Google’s Chrome web browser will mark non-HTTPS web sites as not secure beginning July 2018 to coincide with the release of Chrome 68.

Previously, Google offered search engine ranking boosts if sites migrated to the certificate in an effort to standardize encryption on web sites. According to the Chromium announcement, “For the past several years, we’ve moved toward a more secure web by strongly advocating that sites adopt HTTPS encryption. And within the last year, we’ve also helped users understand that HTTP sites are not secure by gradually marking a larger subset of HTTP pages as ‘not secure.’”

Chrome 68’s release means non-encrypted HTTP sites will be flagged in the URL address bar.

HTTPS is a more secure version of HTTP, the protocol that moves data between browsers and web sites. The additional “S” indicates to users the data being sent is encrypted.

Typically used for online transactions like banking, credit card fields and submission forms,

Google wants to push all sites toward encryption.

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9 Reasons why spending on SEO will be your wisest investment of the year

It’s that time of year again. Companies everywhere are having intense meetings and heated debates about the best ways to spend limited budget dollars for the next fiscal period. If your company is in the midst of such discussions (or soon will be), don’t forget about SEO. Spending on SEO strategies and implementation could be your smartest investment of the year.

Today, customers are more likely to find you online. In fact, studies show that prospects go through more than half of the sales cycle before ever contacting your company representatives. If they don’t like what they find (or can’t find you at all) they will quickly move on to your competition. That makes the SEO function critical and a great value for the money. The top 9 reasons are listed below.

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We live in a digital world, one where your presence on social media is a major factor in finding and connecting with your customers. This is a point of pain for many business owners, especially those who haven’t grown up in the generation of Twitter and Instagram. It can be a challenge, trying to portray something meaningful about your products or services in 140 characters or less, so it’s not surprising when business owners miss the mark.

If you’re struggling to get a handle on social media marketing (SMM), the good news is you’re not alone. Here are some common mistakes that business owners make in attempting to curate a social media presence:

[Read more…] about What Do Businesses Get Wrong With Social Media?

In some ways, science fiction of the past expected too much of the future. By 2017, we were expected to have flying cars, a robot in every home, or a shopping center on Mars. But we’ve still come a long way in the past 50 years. Who then could have predicted devices for the masses small enough to fit in your pocket yet containing the function of a computer, camera, and phone all at once? Who could have known that by the early 21st century, we would be able to instantly communicate with friends and family across the globe? And, now once again, we’ve discovered something to help us move one step closer to the future: Amy.

[Read more…] about Artificial Intelligence is Taking Over…Your Scheduling Needs