Facebook’s “other” messages

The most common inbox to overlook is your “other” inbox in Facebook messages.  People use the Facebook message system quite a lot, but if you get a message from someone that isn’t a “friend”, it lands in the other box.  I’ve been known to miss messages in there from time to time, and many people don’t even know that the other box exists.

Pull up your Facebook messages, and you should see a small “other” link near the top.  It’s likely mostly spam, but there can be legit messages to be found from time to time.

Twitter Mentions

I think businesses are worst about this than personal users, but many people ignore their Twitter “@ replies” and only look at their main stream.  I did a test a few years ago where I sent messages on Twitter to 20 local car dealers that all promoted their Twitter account on their home page, and asked them each a simple question.  Only two of them bothered to reply!

I’m guessing that it wasn’t intentional, but that they simply didn’t look for them.  While tools like Hootsuite can make it easy to manage that stuff, you can always just click the “connect” tab at the top of Twitter to see what has been sent in your direction.

You probably have others

While those are two of the biggest places that people forget about messages, you likely have more depending on where you’re active (Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc).  Be sure to keep an eye on all of your inboxes from time to time; you never know when the message you receive will be an important one!

The post Don’t forget your “other” inboxes appeared first on Green Mellen Media.

Sprout Organic Foods needed a fun and attractive packaging design for the new Toddler Snack Chews. The company came to GreenMellen with an established brand and needed a design that reflected their strong brand image. The project deliverable was eight different flavor designs that you can now find on shelves of Publix, Walmart and more!

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At GreenMellen we all work to keep our inboxes as close to zero as possible, so we can respond quickly to new issues and have a clear view of what’s going on with everything.  We don’t always get to zero, but it’s rare for any of us to end the day with more than a few emails still in the inbox.

Where does it go?

It starts with having a place to put everything.  If you’ve read David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done“, he simply calls it a “trusted system”.  You need to have a place to put tasks and information so that you can get them out of your inbox.  In our case we use Evernote for jotting down info, and Asana for managing tasks, but there are many great options for both.

Merlin Mann, who we’ll discuss shortly, works to turn emails into “dead husks” as quickly as possible.  Get the information out of it that you need (calendar date, photo for a website, etc) and then get rid of the message.

Archive them

Cleaning out your inbox doesn’t necessary mean you need to delete everything.  While you certainly and (and should!) delete a ton of the emails that you get, you can hang onto as many as you’d like as long as you get them out of your inbox (and therefore out of your mind).

In the two accounts shown on the right (both at zero in the screenshot, though not always that clean) I have a total of 174,412 messages archived in the “all mail” sections, and another 2,461 that I’ve deleted in the past month.  People get scared that inbox zero means they need to throw everything away, but there is no problem keeping emails for reference if they’re tucked away properly.

Send & Archive

Just over four years ago Google released a small add-on for Gmail called “Send & Archive” that I raved about.  I argued back then that the one little button could save you nearly 24 hours per year!  The vast majority of my 174,412 archive emails have been sent there using the “send & archive” — that is literally hundreds of hours that I’ve been able to save and put toward other tasks (writing blog entries, working on client projects, playing with my kids — whatever I want to do).

Forget the folders

I’ve never really set up many labels (folders) in Gmail, but at my previous job with used Outlook (shudder!) and I had a huge fancy list of them.  In the video at the end of this article Merlin will discuss why that’s bad, but it’s similar to the “send & archive” above.  If you can save just a few seconds per email, it can add up really fast.

In my case, I created a new folder each year called “archive2013″ and put all of my inbound email (that was worth keeping) in there.  I would have done a single “archive” folder, but Outlook has issues with folders that get too large, so splitting them by year helped.  Instead of wasting time trying to decide which folder to put a particular email into, I simply tossed it in the archive folder and moved on.  It’s not as fast as Gmail’s “send & archive”, but certainly saved me a lot of time.

Kill the lists

Despite my huge number of emails, I really work hard to keep the flow as light as possible.  In particular, I use the “unsubscribe” button quite a lot on newsletters.  If the newsletter doesn’t have an unsubscribe button (which is a pretty shady tactic), I simply “mark as spam” and move on.

Use mobile

While I hate typing emails on my phone, and rarely do it, is’s a phenomenal device for keeping the inbox in a manageable state while I’m out of the office.  If I get 20 emails while I’m out, delete 10 of them, archive 3 of them and reply to 2 of them, that means I come back home with an inbox of 5 instead of an inbox of 20.  It’s beautiful!

Set up filters

Most email clients allow you to set up automated “filters” to move certain messages to specific folders.  While you know I don’t like folders, I do keep a few around for filtering reasons.  My favorite is my “social” folder, where all social notifications land.  A few times a day I’ll peek in there to see what’s going on, and it helps keep my inbox tidy by pushing all of that stuff immediately to the folder instead of my inbox.

Have a party

Randi Zuckerberg (sister of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg) recently posted an article on LinkedIn with some of her tips to getting to inbox zero.  Most are similar to what I’ve shown above, but a unique one is an “inbox cleaning party”.  Get together with friends and work through those overblown inboxes together.

Merlin Mann – Inbox Zero

Though it’s nearly six years old at this point, the “inbox zero” talk that Merlin Mann gave at Google back in 2007 remains my favorite video for tips and techniques for managing your inbox.  It’s nearly an hour long, but well worth your time.  Find an evening, skip a TV show, and watch this instead.

Like I’ve said, we’re certainly not perfect.  Things pile up and can get out of control at time, but if you have the right systems and techniques in place then getting back to zero feels much less daunting.

How is your inbox looking right now?

The post Getting to inbox zero appeared first on Green Mellen Media.

You can read that full list, but for the most part it hasn’t changed:

• Evernote: Still our favorite note-taking app, though Google Keep is pretty slick on Android.
• WordPress: Not one we use often, but very handy at times.
• Flipboard: A great way to stay updated on news, and it’ll pull in most of your social feeds as well.
• Facebook: They have a solid mobile app, though I use Flipboard for most of my Facebooking.
• Twitter: It’s not optimized for Android tablets, but still works quite well.
• Google+: This app has seen some great improvements in the past few months and is very easy to use.
• Asana: They now have an official Android app, so this one is even better than it was before.

What’s new?

Beyond those, there are a few new ones I’m enjoying:

Google Keep (Android only): I mentioned this one above, as it’s great for quick notes.  Evernote is still where I put notes for long-term storage, but I use this as a quick notepad during the day.  Here are more of my thoughts on Keep.

Falcon Pro (Android only): This is another Twitter app and it’s quite impressive (with great tablet support).

Hangouts (Android and iOS): Google just released this app, which combines the Google+ “hangouts” feature with the older Google Talk text chats.  It’s a slick app, and finally gives iOS users a way to easily chat on the go.  Here are more of my thoughts on the new Hangouts app.

Mint (Android, iPhone and iPad): A great way to track your money on the go, and it looks great on the Nexus 10.

Google Chrome (Android and iOS): It comes pre-installed on some Android devices, but you should download it if it’s not on yours.  Not only is faster than other browsers, but the syncing between it and Chrome on your main computer is quite handy.

What other apps are essential for you on your mobile device?

The post My favorite mobile apps right now appeared first on Green Mellen Media.

Here’s what’s new:

New stream layout

Google has changed the main stream from a single-column to a multi-column layout, similar to how it has looked on tablets in recent months.  The new look is great!

Improved Hashtags

Google+ has had support for hashtags for a while, but now they’re taking it further.  According to DigitalTrends:

2013 may be the year of the hashtag. Facebook is reportedly working on supporting hashtags, and both Instagram and Flickr now recognize the feature. Google+ also supports hashtags, but is tweaking how they are fed into its service. Hashtags will be a core part of the app for content discovery purposes, since Google will show you similar posts with the same hashtag if you click on the tag, but Google+ will go a step further and tag posts automatically by scanning your post and figuring out what you’re talking about. So if you’re talking about Michael Jordan but don’t tag him, this new feature be able to read your post and do the dirty work for you so that your post can be included in other similar conversations happening within the network.

Tons of new photo features

Google+ already featured fairly robust photo editing and sharing tools, but they’ve just added a lot more to that area.  Here’s a quick video to show off some of those new features:

Hangouts everywhere

Google+ Hangouts have long been one of the killer features of the service; a slick multi-user video chat with lots of extra features such as screen sharing and live streaming.  Now “Hangouts” have become a separate app that unifies Google Talk (the text chat app) with the video features of the Google+ Hangouts.  It’s a great app that is available for Chrome, iOS and Android.

You can read more about the new app and download it here, or watch the short video below for more info:

It’s quite a lot of improvements to an already solid service, so we’ll see if it can help take Google+ to the next level.

The post More solid enhancements to Google+ appeared first on Green Mellen Media.

Another important fact to keep in mind is that 96-99% of your fans never go back to your page again.  You can spent all the time you want making fancy widgets on there, but most users will never go back to your page to check them out.  Your only chance to reach them is via the news feed, so you need to make your content count.

The main keys to help your content reach a higher percentage of users is to:

1. Get feedback.  The more “likes” and comments you can get on a post, the more people Facebook will show it to
2. Keep it short and colorful.  Less text, more pictures.
3. Post often.  At least once a day if possible, if not a bit more.  Different times of day will attract different users, so experiment with it.

PostRocket recently created an excellent infographic that highlights some of the stats and techniques related to EdgeRank.  Check it out below, then get to work on reaching more users on Facebook!

The post EdgeRank: How Facebook decides what you see appeared first on Green Mellen Media.

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GA Food Service, a Nutrition Meal Provider, was in need of an identity refresh for the SunMeadow brand that provided an updated look while keeping the timeless image established over 40 years ago. In addition, the company needed a website to showcase the SunMeadow products and services offered to seniors and children, the military, emergency response and large event catering markets. GreenMellen was challenged with creating an informative site positioned to appeal to this diverse audience, as well as case workers and service personnel.  Our solution showcased the five major markets on the homepage while organizing all the SunMeadow menus into fine-tuned categories within the site.

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If you’re trying to decide which flavor of WordPress is right for your new project, I hope the video below is helpful for you!

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How does this affect you?

First, if you rely on those kinds of domain names to help keep you ranked high in the search engines, expect to lose some ground.  Google won’t necessarily penalize you for those names, but you’ll no longer get an added boost from them.

Second, don’t worry about keywords when buying a new domain name.  Find something short and memorable that is related to your business.  If it happens to have solid keywords in it that’s great, but don’t worry about trying to squeeze them in there.

Like many changes that Google makes, this is one that has been abused by spammers for years now and it’s really a smart move for Google to reduce the usefulness of URLs like this.  Google wants to find sites that have quality content to match the search queries, not sites that happen to have a domain name that matches.  At the end of the day, changes like this are good for users.

These changes started happening late in 2012, but it seems that Google is continuing to whittle away at the usefulness of exact match domains.  It’s always been wise to match sure that your various domain names (if you have more than one) canonicalize correctly to your main site.  For example if you go to GreenMellen.com, you’ll notice that our server automatically redirects you to www.greenmellenmedia.com — the proper domain name with the “www” in front. It can be a bit tricky to get it set up properly, but your hosting company should be able to start.  Here’s a brief tutorial if you’d like to dig into it yourself.

Purchasing a cute domain name for a special event or a postcard isn’t necessarily a bad idea (for us, maybe something like mariettawebsites.com), but always make sure it drives back to your primary domain name.

Just play nice

For most of us of this has been a quiet change.  If you just work hard and write good content, then watching Google wipe out spammers with updates like this is a great thing!

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