My Essential Mac OS Tools

Better Touch Tool 

Better touch tool gives Mac users the only feature I missed from Windows; the 'snap' windows feature. It also gives you ridiculous control over the touch pad on the Macbook, allowing for gestures for just about anything you can think of. My favourite of these is the 'swipe from corner to centre and back' madness, which when you've mastered it, makes you feel as bad ass as Tom Cruise in Minority Report. Link

ClipMenu

I'm not sure how I ever worked without ClipMenu. It's a super simple clipboard tool that remembers your clipboards history, then lets you paste stuff back straight from the menu bar. It totally eliminates the need for pasting stuff into a notes app for later use, and is perfect for quickly clipping bits that you need to keep for later. It's a tool that is vital for people in repetitive copy-pasta jobs. You can also export the clipboard history.

Memory Clean

Memory clean does what it says on the tin, it's a tool to free up your RAM when needed. It also shows how much free ram you have available so you know when to clean. I never really use this on my MBP with 8 gig of ram, but the Mac Mini I use only has 4 GB and this comes in handy; especially considering how much RAM the Chrome browser seems to use up!

Evernote

I know I bang on about Evernote a lot, but it has so many great features. The Mac version gives you a little icon in the top menu bar, which you can click and type a note straight into (you'll want to add a badass keyboard shortcut for that) but the best feature about this is that you can drag files right into the little icon to upload them, perfect for when you need to take a file out with you last minute. And if you pay for Evernote Premium, the sync is ridiculously fast.

iStat Pro

iStat Pro is actually free, regardless of the 'pro' handle. It is a dashboard widget that displays loads of information about your computers performance, including core temperatures, battery health, cpu usage, and a few more geeky bits.

Best Places to Get Coffee & Work in East Finchley

I like to get out of the house on weekends and do work somewhere I can get a good Coffee and free wifi. These are my favourites in the little place I live called East Finchley.

Campbell & Syme

Campbell & Syme win it for me mainly due to their incredible coffee. The place is run by two friendly chaps who really know their stuff when it comes to quality coffee, so you know you're always going to get a decent single source cup. The wifi is fast and they don't seem to mind you staying for a few hours.

The Phoenix Cinema

The Phoenix  is a really great place to chill for hours on end, due to the fact that it's usually empty except right before a film starts. The selection of herbal teas here is awesome, and they only cost £1.30. Only drawback is that it doesn't open until 11am, so no early morning working. 

Dan & Decarlo 

This place is in a decent location and has the best opening times, 7am - 7pm, and there's almost always a table. The coffee here isn't brilliant, but it's the cheapest and you get a massive cup for the price. Grab the wifi password because the 'free' BtOpenzone wifi sucks.

Interview Tips for Securing a Role in Social Media

After I graduated I began searching for many inbound marketing jobs, and  secured an excellent role within a position focused heavily on social media in which I’ll be running campaigns and also managing accounts. It took me a lot of time and effort to get the role I really wanted, so I thought I’d share some tips for recent graduates on getting a job in social media marketing, as I’ve been to plenty of interviews and know the types of questions to expect.

Be able to describe accounts you’ve managed

Having really clear and detailed examples of accounts or campaigns you’ve managed is very important. Most interviewers will ask you about this, and it’s particularly useful if you can describe things like:

• Challenges you encountered whilst managing campaigns
• How you overcame these challenges
• What you learnt from the experiences
• What you enjoyed the most
• Something you changed for the better

Most of all, it is important that you describe even negative situations in a positive way, and be able to demonstrate how you can take these experiences and bring positive learning from them to the new role in a way which will benefit the organisation. I found that interviewers didn’t mind that some of the campaigns I’d dealt with weren’t huge, it was more important to focus on what I’d learnt from them, no matter the size.

Have solid examples of campaigns you admire

As well as personal examples of things that work, also think about case studies from some campaigns you admire. What were the best practices you saw from the campaigns? What can you take away from the campaigns and apply elsewhere? Why were they so successful? All these points will help in showing that you have an understanding of social media and when it is beneficial for an organisation. It may be best to use an example that isn’t related to your personal experience; for example if you worked on a B2B campaign previously, you could choose an example that was B2C, to broaden your knowledge.

Be able to describe how you use tools and analytics

Being organised and analysing the work you do on social media campaigns is a real strong point in the eyes of an employer. Data is so important as it directly relates to KPI’s (and therefore ROI) for an organisation.

I won't go into detail about social media and ROI - that’s a subject for another article, but I will say that different organisations will have different KPI’s in mind for their social efforts. Some will focus on gaining followers, some on the conversations etc; and they want to know how these measurable's have an affect on things like sales or visits to websites. This means it must be clear how you used analytics or tools in previous campaigns to measure KPI’s, and how that impacted directly on the organisation.

Even if your tools for measurement were as simple as an Excel spreadsheet - if it worked well for you and you stayed on top of your workload and produced results, then brag about it.

Have knowledge of many networks

This is such a simple point which can be overlooked easily. I found one thing that always impressed employers was my ability to describe why Google+ is so great. It is a great skill if you can look past just Facebook and Twitter and describe why other networks might be worth using and why. For example why is Pinterest so popular with e-commerce or fashion? How do Vine & Instagram provide more human ways of interacting with audiences? Showing that you can be creative with different networks is a really strong skill.

Have predictions for future trends

Employers want to see that you are interested and active in the industry you are trying to break into, and one of the easiest ways to demonstrate this is by following predictions for future trends in social media marketing. The fact that you can show the initiative to be able to follow industry trends will convince the interviewer that you can respond to change and are adaptable. Combine this point with examples of previous campaigns and show how invaluable your knowledge will be to the organisation.

I hope these points are useful, please comment if you feel I've missed anything really obvious out and I'll add it in. I'm also always willing to help out, so get in touch on Twitter @willkennard or on Google+.

4 Months on With The Samsung Series 3 Chromebook

I’ve had my Chromebook (Samsung Series 3) for over 4 months now, so I thought I’d do a very quick review of the device now that I’ve lived with it properly. Just to make it clear, this is a review of this specific device and not Chrome OS in general, which I think is a superb operating system and way of working.

I have to say straight off that the Samsung Series 3 could not possibly replace my Macbook for work uses, so if you’re thinking of getting this as a main device, I wouldn’t recommend it. Of course I don’t expect a laptop that costs just over 200 quid to be some sort of media powerhouse, but at the same time, there’s no way you can rely on it in meetings, and you can’t install a lot of applications that the majority of workplaces use.

A few main problems I have with the device is trying to play video files (avi, mp4 etc) and Youtube clips; they just end up stuttering like crazy. Also when trying to use Google Music (a service I usually love); as soon as another tab is opened the music stutters. There are several known fixes for these problems, but I’ve tried them all and even a system reboot and still no luck. These are two things that just make the device seem slow and the operating system feel almost incomplete. Using the HDMI port is extremely temperamental too, and it seems to just decide when it wants to work properly, even when using the same TV. However, I know that Google will only improve the OS on this particular device over time, and I’ve no doubt that these problems will be sorted. Let’s hope so.

Now there are plenty of good things too. The device is super light and portable which makes it really good for just chucking in your bag and taking with you without the bulk of a normal laptop. I’d honestly say this is the best part about the device, coupled with the excellent battery life. I absolutely love the keyboard; it just feels amazing to type on. Which brings me to my next point of the device being great for writing. Google Docs and drive do naturally work wonderfully on it, so these in factor with the size and keyboard make it a good choice for writers on the move (yes Google Docs works offline fine).

Overall I’d recommend the Series 3 Chromebook for people looking for a content creation device to complement a home PC. It’s good for a days use on one charge, and very portable, but it doesn’t have the media power of slightly more expensive Windows devices.

Another note: get a case for it! It scratches

really

easily. 

Google Keep Initial Impressions

So Keep is official and launched. It looks really great, I love the idea of quickly colouring your notes, and the interface is much cleaner than Evernote or even Wunderlist, and certainly a hell of a lot cooler than Scratchpad. In fact, the browser based interface https://drive.google.com/keep/ just looks amazing. Simple, immediately understandable and very fast.

But what first strikes me is that this product seems to be best for Google users only. I realise that Google will eventually release it everywhere (as they are planning to do with a lot of products i.e Google Now) but how long will it take them? People are so used to Evernote that it'll be hard to switch, which will be made much worse if the users of Evernote are on iOS devices or a phone with a version of Android lower than 4.0.

I would love to start using this app regularly, especially considering it runs so quickly on my Chromebook (compared to Evernote which is extremely sluggish) but I feel like it's another burden on my already fragmented

productivity apps.

Hopefully it'll get better and more compatible quickly. But for now, I'll stick with Evernote. I hope you're listening Google.

Google Keep

Why I love Google+

The past few weeks has seen me pretty much turn back into a Google fanboy again.

I strayed away from their products and services when I got my Macbook Pro and iPhone, as I was using the inbuilt email clients instead. But let’s face it, the native Apple mail can’t compete with Gmail, and the iPhone app looks

gorgeous

. With this I started using Google+ again, and joined some great communities.

These communities are essentially like every other forum/social network ‘group’, but with a few added features. However it’s not really the functionality of the groups that’s great; it’s the level of engagement. Ask a question on the Chromebooks group and there’s an answer in minutes. Drop into the Nexus group and see a bunch of geeky guys positing their awesome homescreen layouts, with a ton of comments to follow. There’s no spam, no (serious) trolling, no fake accounts, just a bunch of people with the same interests, genuinely engaging in interesting conversation.

I would say Google+ is the only social network available with this level of quality engagement. I use Twitter a lot, and still think it’s great, but the conversation isn't quite as complex due to the character limitations, and there are a ton of people who are just collecting followers and are totally disengaged. I only really use Facebook when I want to see fountains of shit spewing from my news feed, it’s a joke how bad it’s become.

So get on Google+, search for your interests on the ‘Communities’ section and start chatting, or even set up your own community.

Update: in one day, this post has 7 shares, over 20 comments and 54 +1's (and counting) from Google+. Twitter and Facebook have had no engagement.

My Initial Impressions of the Samsung Chromebook

I recently purchased a Samsung Series 3 Chromebook. The hype round the Pixel and the general love for the devices from the Chromebook G+ community encouraged me, and they're only £230. I've been using it for a week now, for work and play, so here are my initial impressions.

The screen is just lovely. I use a Macbook Pro most the time, so coming from that glossy display was strange at first; I was sort of thinking 'what the hell is this matte piece of crap??' when I turned the Chromebook on, but it's actually a much nicer viewing experience when using it in bright environments and for long periods of time.

The search button is glorious! Why don't all computers have this dedicated key? I don't miss caps lock at all (and you can alt + search for caps anyways).

It's ridiculously simple. Obviously I knew this before I bought it, but it isn't until you start using a Chromebook that your realise just how stripped down everything is. In a good way. This is certainly the future of computers, I know it would be much easier for most people to use, no messing around, just get on with what you have to do in the browser.

It takes ages to bring up the wifi login screens. Most the wifi networks I use outside of home need to launch a page in the browser first to login. My Mac, iPhone and Nexus devices just bring this up right after you connect. The Chromebook has, for me, taken up to a minute to load this - really annoying.

The touchpad is pretty naff. It scrolls really nicely with 2 fingers, but the accuracy of it is noticeably poor. 2 finger touch is right click though, a nice feature from Mac which works well.

The keyboard is just brilliant. It is seriously the nicest keyboard I've ever used. It feels a little cheap at first, but the sound it makes and the way the keys feel is just perfect. Maybe it has something to do with the layout or size, I'm not sure really, but it just seems like the only keyboard I ever want to type on ever again.

It's fast, really fast. Some apps are terrible compared to their native Windows and Mac versions (Evernote for instance) so you do get slowed down now and again, but in general it's lightning quick. 7 second boot? Yes please.

The sound is crazy loud for a device this size. It's actually louder than my Macbook Pro, although not as good quality.

That's it for now, I'll be posting a proper review once I've gotten some use out of it.