Safety Consulting Corner

Say Cheese

If you are tired of using the same boring clipart in your presentations, check out  IStockPhoto (www.istockphoto.com). As the name implies, these are mostly photos and not clip art but the photos are great and will add a professional look to your materials. Most stock photographs are quite expensive but at Istock, you will usually only pay $1 per photo. There are almosy 1.5 million photos available so you are sure to find one that meets your needs. Just enter in your search terms and you will get pages that match your description. At IStock, you buy credits with a charge card and then use your credits to be able to download the photos that you need. It's very easy and will make your training materials more interesting and effective. Give IStock a try!

Help Me Help Desk

Unless you work for a large consulting firm, you probably don't have an IT department or someone easily accessible to answer your computer questions and address your problems. Although many of the most serious problems must usually be dealt with by an expert, many other computer related questions and minor problems can be fixed by visiting the Smart Computing website (www.smartcomputing.com). You will have to subscribe to Smart Computing magazine to get access to many of the areas but this is a bargain at under $30. SmartComputing Magazine, and all of the documents you get access to as a subscriber, are well worth the $29 a year for the subscription.  I have found this website to be much faster in helping me to solve problems than the help desks that I try to avoid calling since that experience is usually very frustrating and can take hours. In the consulting world, time is money - visit SmartComputing.com and save time (so you can get back to making money:)

Squidwhat?

Publicity is very important for any safety consultant and today we will talk about one web-based tool for helping you to get additional publicity. Squidoo works on the concept that we can all act as a “lens” for everyone else on various topics. Everyone who creates a “lens” on Squidoo is called a lensmaster. I think of each lens as being very similar to a “Body of Knowledge” in that area. For example, for the sake of this article, I created a lens called Safety Consultants and here I list many useful resources for other safety consultants including websites, recommended books, eBay items that may be of interest and a small area for me to provide helpful lists. (A lot of this information will be included in the ASSE Body of Knowledge which has been a Practice Specialties’ project for several years).  How can you benefit? You can set up a lens on Squidoo (it’s free) on your area of expertise. For example, if you specialize on school safety, you could create a lens called school safety. The resources you include would of course link to your articles and website. When someone searches for “school safety”, you will also be more likely to get ranked higher in the search results. You can also use Squidoo to find out helpful information. If you want to learn more about marketing, just search on that term and you will be shown many different lenses on that topic. As consultants, we need to take advantage of as many publicity opportunities as possible. Squidoo is an easy (and free) way to get started.

People are Talking!

Now I don’t think that anyone with a computer has not heard of Google but unless you have played around with the “more” button near the Google banner, you may be missing out on what Google can do for you. One of my favorite extras is Google Alerts. You can set up a Google Alert for anything. For example, a Google Alert on “OSHA” would deliver a list of all new mentions of OSHA on the web and in the news (including hyperlinks) to your email once a day. You can set up alerts on your clients to stay on top of what is happening in their industries or even on yourself. If you were quoted in the press or even if minutes from an organization were posted and you were mentioned in the minutes, that will show up in an alert. If you have a fairly uncommon name like me, you will not get many alerts if you set this up and even with my name, I still occasionally get alerts for others named  “Linda Tapp” but it is a great (and free) way to stay on top of any media coverage you may be getting. Google also has tons of great stuff that you can access by clicking on the “more” button under the main search area. If you click on “labs” you will see various options in the beta stage. For example, Google is testing a new Google Web Page option which lets you quickly and easily create a web page which is also hosted by Google for free. I recently set up a Google webpage for a one day seminar I am holding and I was able to complete it during the length of an Eagles Game (too bad they lost!) It is not the most beautiful thing I ever saw but it is pretty good. You can check it out at www.newsafetytraining.com. If you visit and happen to click on the "Register" button, you will see that it goes to a pretty cool registration site. This is not part of Google, nor free, but it is a bargain and really easy to use. I will talk about that site, www.whoscoming.com, in a future post. For so, go set up your Google Alert and see who is talking about you!

Just the "Fax" Ma'am

Is the fax machine dead? Many people think so. Do you remember the days of endless faxes coming through, tying up the phone line, and printing on horrible paper that eventually faded? I remember in my first job post-graduation that I would often be looking under tables for curled up fax pages that may have come through and gotten lost when they spit out of the fax machine. What a mess!

Although fax machines have improved so much, many people, including myself, still do not like them. Every year, I get less than 3 requests from clients or vendors to fax me something. With the capabilities of email, there just isn't much need for one - at least in my business. So, what do I use? Efax. (www.efax.com) There are several services like this out there but since I use eFax, that is what I will talk about.

With efax, you simply visit the website and sign up for a FREE efax number. This looks like any other phone number although unless you pay extra, it will most likely have an area code that is not the same as yours. I personally do not care, especially since I need to give out the number so infrequently, but if it is important for you to have a local number, you can pay extra and get that.

When someone sends you a fax with your efax number, it goes directly to your email inbox. You will also need to download an efax reader when you sign up for your efax number but it's not a big deal. You can then easily file the faxes you receive online.

So what to do when you need to send a fax? Many people can send faxes right from their computer. If you have something not in your computer that you need to fax, you can always scan it and add it as an attachment to an email. As a last resort, you can always run out to your local Staples or shipping store and pay to fax the few pages. Even though it will cost you a few dollars, maybe a few times a year, it will be cheaper than dealing with a traditional fax machine. Happy faxing!

Widgets and Blidgets

  I must admit, I usually think I am just a little behind the curve when it comes to new technology and "weblife" but I was just working on another one of my blogs and saw something new - the chance to make a "blidget". What the heck is a blidget? First you have to understand what a "widget" is - a widget is a small little extra that you see on the sides (usually) of blogs. For example, the little daily cartoon you see on this blog is a widget. These are free and there are thousands to choose from. Well a blidget is a little box (see the orange box in this post) that you can use to give access to a blog (get it? blog + widget = blidget) If you click on the blidget shown here, you should get to my Safety Podcasts Blog.

I sometimes think that these very smart techie types must sit around at night thinking up ways to combine really new web words into even more web words to keep us over 40 somethings (maybe even younger) guessing at their meanings. Maybe I should create a new word of the day calendar where instead of words like insidious and ostentatious, the words of the day are blogosphere, Squidoo, streaming and of course...blidget.

Training Trick

A short time ago, I was putting together an 8-hour presentation and I wanted to include a short video that I had seen on CNN.com. After a little research, I found that a product called "SnagIt" could do the trick. If you are familiar with SnagIt, please forgive my excitement. If not, read on and I am sure you will want to check it out.

SnagIt is available from TechSmith at www.techsmith.com. You can download a fully functional trial version for 30 days or buy the full license for less than $40. When you see what this software can do, you will think it's a bargain.

SnagIt lets you capture any website window, object in the window such as text or a photo, or the entire web page (with a really cool automatic scrolling feature). You can also "capture" screen videos with or without audio (and really, everything you see on screen). Once you capture it, a work area pops up where you can edit your image - erase parts, highlight items, crop photos or even add special effects. Once you have exactly what you want, you can send the output to a file, to an email, an instant message or even directly to Word or a PowerPoint presentation. Very cool.

I have to admit, in the past, I have had to print out certain images or web pages and scan them so that I have a jpeg file to insert into a presentation or proposal. This is SO much easier!

I am probably not doing this software justice with my description so check it out yourself at www.techsmith.com.