Mac Geek with an MBA
Archive for February, 2012
My First Social Media Club of Dallas Meeting
12 months ago
by realmac
in Uncategorized
I recently attended a meeting of the Social Media Club of Dallas, the guest speaker was Christopher Kopenec of Chili’s Grill & Bar. Chris is a great speaker and really connected with the audience.
Chili’s has done some amazing things with social media and integrating it into their business model. With over 1400 stores you can be a challenge to keep all of them on the same track. The current strategy integrates social media into every aspect of the customer experience.
One area mentioned was the Klout Score, a measure of influence based on one’s ability to drive action. The club score holds data from social networks in order to assess true reach (number people being influenced), amplification (who responds or shares the information) and network impact (how often do people you influence share and respond to your content). I assessed my own score and as of February 27 it was a 46. I aim to get this number up much higher in the near future, stay tuned… ?
On Facebook Chili’s has over 1.6 million fans, clocking over 1.4 million check-ins, both figures are quite impressive!
Another interesting tool that was mentioned was Wildfire, a tool that helps measure the performance of Facebook and twitter pages, track the competition and assess who the leaders are in social media.
The major common theme of this presentation was engagement. Anyone can create an account on a social network, but many companies don’t invest the time or the effort to get their followers to contribute their own thoughts in different areas.
While there are a number of brand engagement platforms available, one specifically highlighted is Fancorps. More and more companies are relying on word-of-mouth marketing and peer recommendations to drive their business. Just think of how many buying decisions or influence through Amazon.com reviews.
Creating positive sentiment has also been key to Chili’s success. Having a high number of active fans relative to total fans shows that people are paying attention to the content being generated. This indirectly helps business by keeping your company’s name in people’s minds and letting people know that someone is paying attention.
Using the right voice for specific social networks is another highlight. Hashtags for example make sense on twitter but not so much on Facebook. The same with like this buttons and QR codes.
Public relations is an area many companies can benefit from improving. There are times when people whose critical comments, and inevitable result when you’re dealing with a large company. Overall people just want their voice to be heard and may not ask for anything in return. Even when they do ask for something, by maintaining the customer relationship, the long-term payout is worth it.
Overall I enjoyed this meeting and I hope to attend another in the near future.
ReKindling My Relationship with Books
0
After years of being Apple-centric, I’ve ventured off into the outside world and bought a Kindle. Not the Fire, or the Touch, just the plain old Kindle.
At 79.99 and under 6 ounces, the Kindle 4 is a major game changer in the industry. It can store 1.25 GB worth of books and a single charge can last 3 weeks to a month on standby mode. It’s as thin as a pencil too.
The packaging is far more Green than Apple products I’ve used, they’ve passed on the cost savings to the consumer and other a few instructions on a cardboard cutout, there is no manual.
The readability of the e-ink screen is incredible. Text is crisp, high contrast, a matte finish display for great readability in sunlight. Even if I do get an iPad 3/4, this is the device I can see myself tossing around and taking with me almost anywhere. My only complaint is that the screen isn’t backlit. This is a non-issue for me most of the time.
Formats supported include Kindle (AZW), TXT, PDF, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively; HTML, DOC, DOCX, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion. There are plenty of converters available should you have a book that isn’t in one of these formats.
In my mind the Kindle 4 is *the device* for people who don’t like carrying books around, flipping through pages or simply want something lighter and cooler. If you want to read books on the go on the cheap, I don’t know of any more elegant option.
To MacBook Air or not MacBook Air that is the question
0First a little bit of background. I’ve been using Apple laptops for the past 9 years. Overall they have served my needs remarkably well, with the exception of the 1st iBook/500 I had which was ungodly slow. My current system is a 17 inch MacBook Pro with a 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, a 500 GB 5400 RPM hard drive and an upgrade to 8 GB of memory (which I installed almost a year ago and March).
When I got the system, I was thinking that I could have a computer serve all my entertainment needs and didn’t actually have television or DVR in my room. Flash forward a few years, now I have and find the experience much more pleasurable than watching video on a computer screen.
I also discovered that having a 17 inch laptop is not all it’s cracked up to be, especially if you actually use it in your lap or plan to carry it around with you. Mine is bulky, somewhat heavy at 6.6 pounds and tends to get rather warm when I have the Nvidia GeForce 9600 graphics chip enabled, something I tend to do for higher performance.
Though the 800 pound gorilla in the room is performance, my hard drive it is definitely on the slow side, taking 30 bounces of GarageBand before I can open the program. Even with the extra RAM, I really notice a difference in programs that are constantly writing to the disk.
Results above are mine, drive is running at 1.5Gigabit, below are from a MacBook Air. A disk on a 6Gb SATA that reads 5x faster, affecting so many different aspects of my computing experience. Very compelling.
I would like to upgrade to solid-state technology, but am not entirely sure how much I’m sold for the capacity I want. I’m looking at a 256 GB unit from Crucial that runs about $339 USD. I’m also at a point in my life where I want to do the financially responsible thing and spending that much for a computer upgrade seems a little bit on the excessive side. Specifically with the CPU already being generation old and the graphics card about 2 generations old and incapable of being upgraded. On the reverse side, I could use his hard drive and another system and sell it with the original when the time comes.
Crucial M4 CT256M4SSD2 2.5″ 256GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
Two other factors that process on my mind are Intel’s microprocessor roadmap and soon to come updates to the MacBook model line. There’s nothing worse than having buyer’s remorse right after buying a tech gadget because something else has eclipsed it. Of course there’ll always be something bigger faster or otherwise more enticing, it’s the nature of the beast.
Newer laptops will have 4K video acceleration built into the chipset (It sounds good in theory, but am not sure in practice with US high speed bandwidth already straining with current 1080P video), higher resolution ‘Retina’ displays, and as far as Macs go possibly a departure from the current unibody design. Some of the changes are over a year away and others even if they are available will command a high price premium. Either of which would not affect my decision very heavily. Shit happens, get a grip. 
Does it make financial sense to switch from my current system to one of the smaller screen but higher overall perceived performance?
When I purchased the 17 inch MacBook Pro in summer of 2009, I paid approximately $2200 for it, not including the memory upgrade, a Speck case, an inexpensive SATA enclosure and PCI express card. Today February 2012 on eBay a system with similar specs will sell for approximately $1300, excluding shipping charges and eBay / PayPal fees. Between educational/corporate discounts and shopping I can get a MacBook Air 13 Core i5, 4gb, 256gb flash and Intel HD Graphics for 1498 with a $50 restaurant.com gift card and 2.5% cashback from FatWallet. I’m also pretty sure there would be no state sales tax for me.
Thoughts welcome. I’ve had way too many laptops over the years. This one will probably last me a year or two before I sell it and get something else. Also Macs hold their value pretty well. Probably more so on the low end than the high end percentage-wise. $150-200 for a new machine isn’t that much.
I did own a MacBook Air about 4 years ago, but sold it because its performance did not live up to my expectations. It had an 80 GB 4200 RPM hard drive, 2 GB of RAM 1.6 GHz core 2 Duo processor and a really paltry GMA X3100 graphics card. The fans would rev up into high gear whenever I would look at a video on YouTube. Other than that the machine was super quiet and felt like I wasn’t even using a computer.
Carrying 6.6lb around vs 2.96 is a pretty big difference. It may not sound like it, but when balancing the machine on your palm, or on your back there is a perceivable difference immediately. I’m still not sure what I want to do yet. Waiting and seeing does have its merits sometimes. A hardware refresh would also make it a much easier decision. I could also keep the drive I have now, pull out my SuperDrive and throw the SSD in my laptop and have two drives. Decisions…
There is always the possibility I’ll never be satisfied with my choice. So maybe it’s easier to accept there will always be something I don’t like and just hold onto my hw as long as it still makes sense.
Just to recap…
MacBook Pro 17:
Pros: 8gb ram, 500gb hard drive, room to put two hard drives if I want, beautiful display, will not lose any money if I upgrade the drive (can put it in another machine a year from now if I upgrade), high resolution 1080p display, great battery life.
Cons: Not very portable / heavy, slower SATA controller technology, system gets extremely hot when GeForce 9600m activated, hard to keep in lap because of bulk, Core 2 Duo lacks HyperThreading and uses much more power than i5/i7.
MacBook Air:
Pros: Super super fast SSD technology, lightweight, fits in any kind of bag, runs very cool, whisper quiet.
Cons: Even though it’s a new system, not much of a gaming machine, somewhat dated 2008 design. Four years have passed… Makes me wonder what’s next, Ivy Bridge is just around the corner. Screen resolution only 1440 x 900. Fine for 720p but scales down for 1080p.
Update: I opted to stay with my 17″ MacBook Pro, upgraded to a 128gb Crucial m4 from Micro Center for $180 and put my 5400 rpm drive in the optical bay slot using a cheapo kit from Amazon. So far satisfying until Haswell comes along.