Meet Passpack.com. It allows us to store every one of our passwords and other login details for quick reference. Employees of our company can access the secure database whenever they need to access clients’ login information. Passpack offers extra security with its complex login algorithm. Users must take several steps before they can log in, which reduces the risk of outsiders accessing confidential information by guessing your username/password combination.

Once we get into Passpack, we can easily find our passwords by using tags, filtering through predefined options, or paging through passwords in alphabetical order. Each entry contains identifying information such as a name, password, username and URL of the page the login information is for. Users can set how they want to share their passwords, making it possible for us to share some passwords between employees and others exclusively with administrators. The interface also allows us to safely share passwords with our clients by generating a secure PIN code they use when they attempt to view their password.

The security features of Passpack give us confidence that our customers data is secure. For example it has a password generator to help us create stronger passwords. It scrambles fields so passwords are hidden when visitors are in the office. And Passpack also contains anti-phishing messages, offline backup of password data, two-factor authentication and disposable logins for use on public computers or when traveling. It prevents people from stealing our passwords with key-loggers, as it has an on-screen keyboard for password entry. Our administrators can manage permissions, revoke shared passwords, control who shares and edits passwords, and add or delete users.

We save a lot of time with Passpack, as it allows us to log in to more than 25,000 websites with just one click. It also makes it possible for us to collaborate and share information easily with secure messaging and other protected collaboration tools. The price is just right, as Passpack costs as little as $1.50 per month for web workers and no more than $40 per month for businesses that need to manage 10,000 passwords and 1,000 shared groups.

As kids we were asked that question countless times, and would most likely answer with a “sky-is-the-limit-shoot-for-the-moon” career description. I always wanted to be a professional athlete or President of the United States, describing my dream career as “pitching for the Minnesota Twins in Game 7 of the World Series, then being elected to the highest office in the land, where I would have the power to end all wars, FOREVER!”

I am a Social Media Marketer who just happens to blog. I spent over 20 years working in a large corporation, carving out my niche as an early adopter of new technologies, including it’s first ever social media marketing presence.

The exploration into our Digital Social Marketing was an uphill climb, a marathon not a sprint. Showing our business leaders facts, market research, and success stories eventually turned hesitations into approval. In upcoming posts, I promise to share with you many examples of effective blog and social media platforms to  use in your presentations to business leaders.

As recent as 2008, there were very few job descriptions with the words “Social Media” included. Today there are hundreds!  Career sites now post thousands of jobs titled with Social Media, including:

• Marketer
• Strategist
• Blog Writer
• eMarketer
• Public Relations
• Manager
• eLearning
• Project Coordinator
• Digital Analytics
• SEO.

As corporations continue to ramp-up their acceptance of social media as a viable means to deploy their brand, the jobs will be there.  This requires that high-level decision makers, with business acumens focused on ROI, profit numbers and public relations, evolve right along with the technology.

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One thing that every corporate or business blog has in common is a start-up period. During this time it is important to realize the personality of your blog is yet to be determined. Think of your blog as a newborn child. The genetics, infrastructure & design, will in place. The environment it was born into will eventually impact its personality (tone) of your platform as it matures.

There is always a sufficient amount of parental attention, and well-intended suggestions from relatives during the first months. This might lead to some uncomfortable moments.

You may have multiple authors who contribute to your site, each with a unique writing style. You might have corporate stakeholders vying to influence the blog’s messaging. Some might push for loud marketing & soft promotion, others will ask for protective brand press releases.

It takes a village to raise a blog. Eventually, you will learn how to deal with the corporate culture, filter through all the advice & input from the in-laws, and see your blog grow.

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My first recommendation to anyone with intentions for creating a blog, is to start slow and build up. Launching a site with all the bells and whistles on day one doesn’t happen. You have to start somewhere and build.

Blogs are supposed to be dynamic. They need to be updated frequently, building momentum like a freight train working up to full speed. Inevitably, all blog hubs with social media platforms will begin with incomplete components of design, content and infrastructure.

• Design: No matter how many goals, objectives, or strategies your site may have, they can’t all be presented in the first public view of your site.
• Content: No matter how much wisdom or experience you wish to share with your readers, it can’t all be included in one blog post.
• Infrastructure: No matter how many social networks you built for extending your reach with your messages of wisdom, they won’t all have a legion of followers during start-up.

Oh, by the way, this is good news because:

• No student can earn an “A” for a course just by showing up to class on the first day
• Rome wasn’t built in a day.
• There would be no Cowboys if there weren’t any horses to ride.

A blog has to walk before it can run, and must crawl before it walks.  Be patient, and take your first steps into social media & blogging sooner rather than later.

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Another popular resource for website designs as well as blog designs is the popular Template Monster where themes come with a download fee and are generally better quality if that’s important to you. My personal favorite would have to be Elegant Themes. For a small membership fee of just $19.95 you’ll have access to over 35 professionally designed themes. When I say professionally design I really mean professionally designed. The themes are simply stunning, well coded, well documented, and even come with a Photoshop file so you can make any design changes your heart desires.

For even more themes there’s always Google or the place called Woo Themes featuring a number of different themes that come with a small fee. What most people do is buy or download a theme, and then hire a blog consulting company to personalize that theme matching their specific needs. This method saves them quite a bit of money comparing to hiring a blog design company to design one from scratch.

WordPress was released in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and it is being used by over 200 million websites and blogs wordwide. The company behind WordPress is Automattic. The software is open source – which means it is completely free, and you’re welcome to use it or modify however you want. If something happens to Automattic as a company, and they stop working on WordPress — the large WordPress community will take over, so you don’t have to worry about the longevity of the application and its existence 5 years from now. WordPress is easy to use, it’s lightweight, it is packed with some of the most amazing features you could find in a blog platform. There are over 7,500 free plugins that extend the functionality of WordPress, and over 1,100 themes (designs).

Movable Type was released in 2001 by the company called Six Apart. It is not an open source project like WordPress (although they do have an open source version, it’s not as feature-rich as the paid version). A couple of years ago Movable Type was the most recommended blog platform, and the platform of choice by many businesses and corporations. However, since Movable Type is not free for business-use, I’ve seen companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on licensing alone, and some go with WordPress for that reason alone. In other words licensing can be the deal breaker when choosing between Movable Type and WordPress. There are not as many plugins and themes comparing to WordPress. Software updates don’t come out as often, and many claim that it feels bloated and slow when working with or publishing your blog.

During the past 2 years I’ve seen a huge growth of WordPress (see chart below), many large corporations like TIME, Inc. switched from Movable Type to WordPress — which could either be because of the on-going licensing fees and the economy we are in, or the growing list of WordPress features. We’ve also seen the changes at Movable Type where they let go of some of their key people, then VP Anil Dash leaving the company a couple of months ago, and some other bitter things that I’m not going to discuss in this post.

Earlier in 2009 we converted our company site from Movable Type to WordPress, and helped many of our clients make the switch as well. As you might have guessed, our personal preference and recommendation is WordPress, however I will say it again — it all comes down to your specific needs, budget, and the situation you are in. If you are not sure on the platform you should be using — just shoot us an email and we’ll make a recommendation based on your scenario.

We’re excited to announce a new name in blog consulting — namely, BlogConsulting.com. We’re adopting the new name to better reflect who we are: your partner of choice for understanding how to get the most out of your blog.

What does this mean for you? It doesn’t change the way we do business, or what you can expect from us. You can still access our site at FirmDot.com, in addition to BlogConsulting.com. Our invoices and other communications now read BlogConsulting.com, but you can continue to pay us the same way you always have. We’re working on a new Web site to introduce the name, along with a suite of new services to better serve our customers, and we’ll notify you when it is available.

We appreciate your business, and we look forward to providing you with even better service as BlogConsulting.com.

Next day I’m flying to Los Angeles to check on our new data center, and to make sure things are running smooth.