Thursday, December 22, 2011

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Our mailbox rental is cheaper than PO box

Our mailbox rental is a greater alternative to the regular PO box rental. A lot of the times, post office boxes only receive letters. If you have parcels sent to PO boxes, they usually charge you for storage and the size of it. With our service, we’re able to receive parcels of any size (as long as they fit through our doors) and letters without cost. You don’t have to wait in line to pick up your oversized packages or letters.

And then there are always the unexpected customs and duty fees. Parcels with any customs or duty fees are always left uncertain at PO boxes – will they be received or paid for?  Overweight packages are not received by PO boxes either. Not to worry, we pay for this when it arrives and invoice you. This way, you are not losing any business or any important shipments that end up costing you more money.

With our packages, you have the option of having your mail forwarded to you at a very low cost. For longer sign up terms, you receive a higher discount.

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Why we're better than a PO box (tag: PO box vancouver, mailbox rental vancouver, mail forwarding)

Here at The Network Hub, we provide a wide range of services that cater to small business and entrepreneurs; from phone answering service to temporary and short-term office space to meeting room rentals. One of our most popular services is our mailbox rental.


With our mailbox rental, you are given a real street address, not a PO box. This means you can use your new business address to register and incorporate. And we’ll let you know once your official documents have arrived through our email notifications. Unlike a postal box rental, we let you know what has been received and who it is from, so you can save yourself a trip if you are checking for mail – you know exactly what you have in your mailbox.


When you publish the address on your business cards and website, clients are able to see that your business is in a commercial downtown location, not a residential area or post office. These days, everyone is using Google street view to see where you are. So, you can show them a downtown office. 


Our mailbox rental includes reception service between 9am and 5pm on weekdays. When your potential clients or current clients come in to speak to you, they are greeted by a receptionist at our office. They’ll see offices, a meeting room and waiting area. We let you know who came in and email you with their message. Since we are actually an office, you are able to book out our meeting room to meet your clients, or rent a workstation to finish your work.

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Thursday, March 24, 2011

What The Network Hub looked like in 2006…

Let’s turn back the clock a few years… in 2006 my partners and I were all in university.  John and I were both attending SFU and Jay was attending UBC. School wasn’t the only thing on our mind, we were also juggling clients from our web company – building databases and designing network infrastructure between classes was normal since we’ve been doing it since high school. Between coding/designing/managing/school we were desperate to connect with other people who can understand our struggles and can celebrate our successes with us.

The three of us had a vision to make a space that is a fraternity house for people who work for themselves but not by themselves. We scraped together all our savings, took on extra projects and worked part-time jobs on top of school work to make The Network Hub happen because there was no IFs or BUTs, it HAS to be done.  Whether it was coming to the space after school to help the contractor in order to speed up construction or staying late to paint or sleeping on the floor because we were too exhausted to go home because school was about to start again, we did whatever it took to get the job done.

This is how it all began… the before pictures and then the in-progress pictures!

343687702 0a026400a8 b 2 What The Network Hub looked like in 2006…

343687706 3feac5e722 b What The Network Hub looked like in 2006…

343687698 09f870d0cc b What The Network Hub looked like in 2006…

WHAT WE LOOK LIKE TODAY!

about 1024x755 What The Network Hub looked like in 2006…

4651681363 b656a97fd5 b What The Network Hub looked like in 2006…Picture by talented Jeremy Lim for Freelance Camp 2010

4651679037 ae74c7df7d b What The Network Hub looked like in 2006…Picture by talented Jeremy Lim for Freelance Camp 2010

4655030232 2158f5bc9c b What The Network Hub looked like in 2006…


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Thursday, March 3, 2011

So you got high Klout score… so what

imagesCAH2YXH3 150x150 So you got high Klout score... so whatWith the emergence of social media “experts” popping everywhere and some are aggressively flaunting their Klout scores to intimidate their potential clients and friends, I feel the need to do a breakdown of how this works.

Here is a little bit of a preamble, I appreciate Klout and I have advised some of my friends to use Klout as one of MANY  tools out there to analyze how they are doing on Twitter.  It is a good tool if you genuinely are interested in authentic engagement but Klout isn’t perfect, nothing is.  If you really want to, you can game Klout to get a high score.

Here is how you game Klout:

1) Engage with people who have high Klout scores, people like @hummingbird604 @jason_baker @kempedmonds @vancitybuzz and ignore people with low Klout score

2) Ask controversial questions or ask for RTs, for example “What do you think about #charliesheen?” or “I love iPad 2, RT if you agree.”  BONUS: If you exploit trending topics and tag people, it increases your score even faster because it forces people to respond.  As an example, “What do you think about #charliesheen? @hummingbird604 @vancitybuzz @kempedmonds @jason_baker

3) Run contests on Twitter, pony up a few hundred bucks.  Heck even 50 bucks will get people excited.  “Win $50 bucks, just RT to enter”

4) Campaign people to follow you and make them feel guilty if they don’t.  BONUS: Once they follow you, you unfollow them because you score higher if you have more followers than followings

5) Tag everyone in your tweets so you get on their radar in order to achieve #4, for example “Nice to see you tonight @hummingbird604 @vancitybuzz @kempedmonds @jason_baker @more influencers”

You don’t have to add any particular value and still have high score because Klout relies on an algorithm that most definitely take into account of reach, amplification and network.  If your “network” are people with high score – well it thinks you are somewhat of a big deal.  Begging for RTs give you amplification because you are reaching other people’s network, it doesn’t take into account that you are paying for this reach with contests or because you applied social pressure by tagging people making them obligated to response. If you follow a few influencers, pressure them to follow you and engage in conversation with you then you achieve a high true reach score.

There are people like @hummingbird604 @vancitybuzz @kempedmonds @jason_baker who have achieved high Klout scores because they genuinely engage, they care and they provide value for their followers and you can tell from their interactions on Twitter.  Then there are those who game Klout to flaunt, intimidate and make other people feel inferior which is NOT the purpose of social media.

To them I say, “You can game Klout but you can’t game people”

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Tool Tuesdays: What time is the best time to tweet?

One of the big questions right now in social media is what time is the best time to tweet?  There are a few ideas out there.

Guy Kawasaki mentioned in his blog post, “Looking for Mr. Goodtweet:  How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter”

Tip 9: Repeat your tweets. Try this experiment: take your most interesting tweets (as measured by how many people retweet them, perhaps) and post them again three times, eight to twelve hours apart. I used to think that people would complain about repeating tweets, but I’ve never had a complaint. My theory is that the volume of tweets is so high and most people check in at about the same time every day, so people don’t notice repeat tweet

Read more: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/11/looking-for-m-1.html

Dan Zarrella, HubSpot’s social media scientist did some studies and found,

I noticed that retweet activity tended to peak around 4pm EST, suggesting that this might be the best time to tweet a blog post for maximum potential retweet reach.

 

When I looked at retweet activity over the days of the week, I saw that they peaked later in the work week, specifically on Friday.

Read more: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2010/12/06/whens-the-best-time-to-publish-blog-posts/

This all make sense but for social media to truly be social, I think the goal is to engage with my followers and a blanket approach is a good starting point but to really create a relationship, it has to be customized to my own followers.   That’s not to say I don’t tweet on Friday at 4pm EST and repeat the good tweets so more people can see it.  I believe in the Dan Zarrella’s science and Guy Kawasaki’s practical experience, I would never ignore hard evidence but I also want to make sure I understand MY own followers.  In comes, Timely which is aptly name for a service whose sole function is to schedule tweets for maximum impact.    It’s pretty simple when they break it down on their front page, so simple it provokes a DOH why didn’t I think of that and did that myself kind of reaction.  The magic is in the simplicity of Timely.

You add your tweets, it schedules to tweet out the tweets according to the time it thinks will produce the most impact – impact is defined as increase in retweets, mentions and followers.  The science of it is it analyzes your past 199 tweets and figure out the best time slot, it learns as your following grows.

timely Tool Tuesdays: What time is the best time to tweet?

Timely does absolutely produce results it promised – there is an increase in retweet, mention and retweet per tweet.  My only problem with Timely is, if it schedules consistently the same time I might miss out the opportunity to reach out to new followers to build relationships with people who operates outside of the time frame that yields the most impact.  I don’t solely rely on Timely, I use it to tweet quotes mostly.  I read and share all my links mostly live.   Even just figuring out what time is your most optimal times to tweet is very interesting, if it’s just for the sake of knowing but I believe in knowing what times to tweet also tell you a lot about the followers that engage you.

I hope you find Timely useful, if you have used Timely let me know your experience.  If you are going to start, pop back in at some point and let me know how it went.

Note: These are tools I have used for a substantial amount of time (> 2 wks) and have found useful for me, this is not a paid post and paid is defined as money, swags, free dinner, t-shirts, pens, free coffee, gift certificate… absolutely nothing!

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