Rui Nunes's thoughts and ideas

I'm the Country Manager of MediaResponse™ Group, responsible for developing our major online marketing brands to evolve at the Portuguese Market.

My primary goal with this blog is to be of value to you with my experience and insights as well to be open to your questions and different approaches. Feel free to ask me anything! ;-)

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2011 (24)
2010 (63)
2009 (48)
2008 (28)
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Is digital overpass the real life?

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Funny how this goes. A few years ago, let's say 2. I was the only one geek enough in my home to be almost every time at a laptop or on my iPhone, making the data flow.
Today, I'm at my couch with the laptop on my knees, but my wife is at the living room with hers and my daughter is at her room with a computer as well. Amazing! This keeps me thinking: Is real life becoming more and more digital?

Well... I don't like the idea. So I'm going to disconnect right away and try to recuperate them as well. 

Let's Work!

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Do you see all this mess above? It's a photo of my 18th month year old baby girl having a blast on our living room. Just playing without care about the fuss and mess around her. She has 18 months old. She doesn't know what mess, confusion or cleaning up means.
And that's ok.

And seeing this photo I need to say, this is the time of her life. And mine! 

Seeing this photo also reminds me to think on the real important stuff.
The news and feedbacks reminds us that there's a crisis breathing on our necks. That the unemployment rates are raising like a firecracker, ready to explode. It's expected a 21% unemployment rate in Spain until final 2010, just next to me. It's huge.
In Portugal (my home country) things are not so desperate, but still the perspectives are not good.

But seeing this picture above teaches me a lesson given by my baby girl. Focus on what's important. In her case is playing and being happy. In my case, is working on what I enjoy doing and being happy as well. 
My solution for 2010 and 2011 years is basic and simple. Let's Work! Let's work like never before. We need to work more and better than ever, for the same money. If we do this, we can live through this crisis and expect the deserved reward as soon as things get better. 

And my migration to Mac is greater than ever. Now, Exchange services better on Mail.app than Entourage!

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These few days, my company corporate e-mail services have changed their Exchange Services Provider and the new one doesn't have Mac Support. They don't work with Macs and don't have special configurations for Macintosh.
This could demand my re-migraton to Microsoft eco-system all over again, right?
Actually, NO!

Why? Because, the problem was not about Exchange configurations. It was the Microsoft Entourage configurations necessities that didn't worked with what our provider has given us.
So, what did I to solve this thing? I've opened my Mail.app which I already used for personal e-mail accounts and create my business account on the fly.
It was not complex, it even asked few data than the Outlook for Windows version. And it worked perfectly. Now I have my e-mails being handled more effectively by Mail.app, my Contacts synced with AddressBook.app and my Appointments all sync with iCal.app.
It's tremendous, even better and easily work with Exchange Server in a Snow Leopard environment.

Now, I don't use Entourage anymore, reason why I had bought Office for Mac before (they didn't sold it in separately in my country). So, when I need to upgrade or whatever, I just pass to iWork from Mac and that's it.

Microsoft shouldn't be worried. I'm just a single user. Just one person. They still have the OS and Software leadership... don't they?

ATTENTION: The trademarks, logos and other mentions to corporate or other, are propriety of their respective owners. Their mentions were for descriptive example and I can remove them if asked by the respective owners.

This is a great post from Ola Rynge

See the entire post right here: blog.brand-yourself.com

Why I’m Passionate About Passion

January 13, 2010 by Ola Rynge
Filed under: Brand-Yourself.com, Careers, Personal Branding.

Ola RyngeOla Rynge is an entrepreneur with a passion for the personal development side of personal branding (covered in this blog) as well as the application of personal branding and social media for entrepreneurs and small businesses (covered in The Rynge Blog).

His company, The Rynge Group specializes in market oriented small business and idea development, including social media strategies and implementations.
Follow Ola on Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook.

Brand-Yourself.com is a platform to diagnose, manage and monitor your online reputation for career success. See how our tools can help you build a remarkable web presence for your career and life. -->


via blog.brand-yourself.com

I'm an entrepreneur by nature, and Ola Rynge's words have a reflect on me. Thanks Ola!

Openess

Today I was at a meeting with someone that mentioned some things about himself. Things about who he was. That was interesting. We're not friendly, just acquaintance but this was brought by himself.
This caught me way off guard. Normally, people protect themselves through layers of coldness and privacy. This man just opened himself to us. Told us what he liked and didn't liked. Who he really was as a person.
This made me think about it. About me.

Would I be so sure of myself to do the same to complete strangers?
At first glance... no. I can talk to my closest friends and family about openness, but not with people I just know from work.

Today I'm officially launching a new project in Portugal

This gets me all excited. I love new projects and ventures!

Posterous to Blog

This is great. I'm very happy with Posterous as a tool to blog and spread to my social networks. Why? Because it's so very simple.
If you scan my previous articles before a week a go or later my posting articles were very irregular. Sometimes I posted twice on a day, sometimes it would pass more than a week or two. 
One reason is the lack of time, but more importantly, it's the action of sending an e-mail.

We're not distracted by fancy editing functions like on Wordpress or Blogspot. It's just plain content and we focus on it.
This makes me fast and regular, with hassle free.
Thank you, Posterous team.

The Danger of Being the Company Star

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I'm reading the news about the almost certain new Apple's netbook tablet as well as the possible lack of health of Steve Jobs and I can't stop wondering about how can a company's superstar be so directly influential.

Obviously, until today, Steve Jobs is the human face of Apple. Those few keynotes presented by Phillip Schiller was lacking the magic and the brilliant communication of their CEO. He's charismatic and has the status of a superstar in their medium.
So, is this good for the company?
It went very well for Apple so far, but these news about his health made some doubts about the company's future. The investors are trembling every time some news about it is brought up. And people forget the fact that Apple is more than one person. The products are made by several thousands excellent professionals.

Same thing occurred when Bill Gates went absent from Microsoft. And still is connected as Chairman.
When a company or a brand is completely connected to one charismatic and famous person, it can be very good when things go well, but this umbilical string can be very damaging when some misfortune occurs to that particular person. Imagine that instead of Jobs or Gates it was Bernie Madoff, or even more recently Tiger Woods. Their actions can be decisive for their businesses.

Imagine the responsibility. Imagine that Sir Richard Bronson of Virgin International went rogue. So, the question is... the benefits of having a star as a leading commander of a company are more valuable than the potential losses from their actions or misfortunes?

By the way: I enjoy not being a star. ;-)

Free Shipping

These two words were the most used on Internet to increase online purchasing. According to this AdAge article from Marc Brownstein, these game changing human behavior is totally up. Does that justifies the abnormal increase of online purchasing? Specialists are surprised, e-commerce marketers are banging their heads and trying to learn this new trend and how to cherish it for better results.
Cyber Monday Sales increased 13.7% in 2009. On a crisis year.

Shopping Online is a trend you need to grab on. Oh, and by the way, consider "free shipping" as a marketing trigger.

Twitter at Conferences? No, thank you...

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Remember when I wrote about the Upload 2.0 event? 
Remember what I said about having a twitter wall displaying to the entire crowd? And I was talking about a few hundred people. Imagine to thousands.

It's funny to read this Chris Pirillo article (I know it's an "old" article but I'm cleaning my inbox and I'm late with it) precisely about having twitter on a conference. I imagine they haven't exposed a twitter wall while the speakers were talking, but definitely the audience used the service massively. And unfortunately not very civilized.
Here's the thing: it's not because we use a web version, a "virtual" parallel world that manners and civilized rules should be broken. We are still John Carter, Melinda Smith and the Rui Nunes in both worlds. 
I guess to be behind a mobile device screen or behind a laptop while writing things on a negative way may seem secure, but it's not. It's still your name and brand the ones that are being burned. And the targets of your words are being hurt and prejudiced as well.

We need to behave. We need to be human. To care and make constructive criticism. Constructive... and caring about someone that actually done something even if they should improve some details next time. But they've DONE something. How many from any audience has done and provided to the community? The answer should be very few. Yet, people critic and yell on their twitter wall, for the smallest thing. 
So, once again, when we go to an event we should pay attention to the speakers. We need to respect the fact that they're there for some reason, and enjoy or not what they have to say. You can still twitt about it. But choosing CAREFULLY what to say and AFTER you listen to the speaker at that time.
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