OSI Fun

Holiday Drinks! Enjoy.
Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year!
Alex, Chaz and Scott

Blue Screen
1 jigger (1 1/2 ounces) vodka
1 pony (1 ounce) blue Curaçao
1/3 cup lemonade
In a long-stemmed glass filled with ice cubes, stir together vodka, Curaçao, and lemonade.

Net Surfer
1 oz Cognac
1 oz Bourbon
1 oz Vodka
1 oz Peach liqueur (Crème de peche)
1 oz Orange juice
1/2 oz Lemon juice
1 dash Strawberry syrup
Mix and shake well and pour in a cocktail glass.

Disaster Recovery
2 shots Espresso
1 1/2 scoop Vanilla ice-cream
1 tsp Sugar
3 oz Bailey's Irish cream
3 oz Tia Maria
2 scoops Ice cubes
Combine Vanilla Ice-Cream, Sugar, Ice, and Espresso in a blender and blend until smooth. Add Bailey's Irish Cream and Tia Maria.  Stir and pour into coffee mug and serve.

Be sure your target audience uses the Internet and reads blogs. Blog reading is more common than you think.

Be sure your blog is of interest to your target audience. This is less common than you may think.

Create compelling content that directly supports your businesses mission, products or services. A blog on recent movie releases will not likely bring new clients to a general contractor (Unles it’s a movie about general contractors). Content must be relevant.

Blogs draw interest from all areas of the world. If you are interested in attracting customers in a specific geographical area, blogs will be less efficient for you.

Blogs must be must be kept updated.  At the very least weekly, otherwise it is much more difficult to establish a recurring readership.

Lessons Katrina Taught Us
Disaster Recovery for IT and Communications 

If you are a typical business, your communication systems rely on your computer network and your telephone service. Your business processes and productivity rely on one or more database or programs running on that network.  Your personal safety and the safety of your staff rely on ready telephone access to emergency services such as police, fire or ambulance.
 
Although you cannot predict how your business and the services you depend on will be affected in a natural disaster, you can plan for likely scenarios. These plans will reduce the vulnerability of your business, protect your assets and your ability to function, provide peace of mind and get you up and running faster in the event of a disaster.

As a point of reference and to help define a plan, let’s review Katrina’s impact on telecommunication and emergency services:

Emergency Services
Despite widespread infrastructure destruction, most emergency personnel in the field could communicate with their HQ dispatchers via wireless devices because their communication systems and towers were designed to survive high wind, various amounts of flooding and localized power failure. However, inter-agency communication generally failed because the wiring that linked the agencies to one another (telephone lines, DSL and T1 lines) had failed.

Cellular Phones
Katrina destroyed most of the cell phone towers and the transceivers mounted on them. Katrina also flooded the network of backup generators positioned to provide emergency communication power.  Phone communication centers are typically inside utilitarian cement buildings and, unless flooded, these fared well.

Since New Orleans is a metropolitan area, there was a high density of transceivers mounted on cell towers and rooftops. Because of their sheer number and their locations, some transceivers survived. In addition, local cellular providers (who were prepared with disaster plans) rolled out emergency trucks with mobile cellular transceivers to fill some of the gaps in cellular service. In the end, cellular service was available in some areas but not all. Even with cellular service, the networks were overwhelmed and getting a call through was difficult. Importantly, text messaging, which requires very little bandwidth and is stored by transceivers and forwarded when space becomes available, was more successful.

Internet Access
Like cellular transceivers, major Internet hubs are typically located inside utilitarian cement buildings. For the most part, these were unaffected.  Similarly, end users in non-flooded areas linked to the Internet with underground cables (typical of metropolitan areas) were unaffected.

However, most pole-mounted outdoor cabling and equipment that carries the signal to end users was wiped out.  To further complicate matters, BellSouth had to shut down some operational parts of its network to protect it from the shorts in the affected areas.

Lessons Learned
•	Those with disaster plans (such as cellular providers and emergency services) were able to function and provide core services.
•	Those with disaster-proof or disaster-resistant systems and infrastructure (underground cable providers) maintained integrity.
•	Text messaging emerged as the most efficient and reliable way to use your cell pone and communicate in the affected areas.

OSI can help you define the right disaster recovery plan for your business. We have the knowledge and the capability to create a cost effective plan that fits your needs.  If you have any questions, please call Chaz Popovich at 631-348-4300 x 208.

Email your (IT) questions here. If your question is chosen we’ll send you a fabulous prize (and it is not always something that we have lying around the office)!

Dear Tech Reporter:
Why are people telling me that I should use Blogs to drive my business? Is this true? And what exactly is a blog, anyway?
Signed,
To blog or not to blog?
A blog (used to be called a “web log” way back around 2001) is an Internet site that hosts articles in chronological order.  Often, but not always, readers can post feedback and other responses, thus creating an online forum or discussion. Blogs can be about any subject and can be written in any style including editorial, diary, fiction, non-fiction and even as a rant. Some blogs use video or sound files as their initial post.
 
Blogs grow in popularity by word of mouth. More specifically, they grow by readers forwarding links to others in an email. If a reader discovers and interesting or useful blog, they will very often forward the link to friends and colleagues. As awareness and participation grows so will the popularity of your blog.
 
Blogs can positively impact your business in several ways. These include improved search engine ranking, buzz marketing and informal market research.

Search engine ranking
The more interesting and popular your blog becomes, the more other websites will link to it. More and more websites are including links (most often on a reciprocal basis) to other sites and similarly, most blogs include links to other interesting or related sites. When users search for terms using Google or Yahoo, the results are ranked by a complex system of weights and measures. This ranking takes into consideration how many other websites link to your site. The more inbound links you have, the higher you will be ranked in the search results. The basic premise is that a site with 100 people linked to it, is more interesting then a site with 10 or no links to it. Other search engine ranking criteria includes the amount of text on the site and the frequency of the search term. All in all, a blog can improve your search ranking (i.e. help you appear higher on the results list of a search on a major search engine). This will help to drive traffic to your site and therefore, help drive your business.
 
Buzz Marketing
In the strictest sense of the word, buzz marketing is the practice of creating talk around a product, service or brand. Essentially, buzz marketing is a newer spin on an older vital marketing technique called word of mouth. Buzz marketing is about starting conversations. Thanks in part to the increased fragmentation of our culture, conventional mass marketing has lost its luster and its effectiveness. Buzz marketing came about as a way to overcome the barriers fragmented target markets, media over exposure and cynicism amongst consumers. Early buzz marketing firms engaged tens of thousands of volunteer agents to go out and spread the word about products they found compelling.

Blogs can help you to create a “buzz” for your products, services and brands by increasing site traffic and awareness in the marketplace. Blogs give you the opportunity to start the conversation with your target market. This in turn draws prospects to your website and into your sales funnel.

Informal Market Research
Companies can create blogs or monitor existing blogs that discuss specific products and brands to monitor feedback and opinions. You can also use your blog to field new concepts for products and services and get immediate feedback. This provides companies with informal market research and opinions that can be both insightful and useful.

Additionally, blogs can help your business by keeping your business in the forefront of consumer’s minds and bypositioning your business as a leader and your staff as subject matter experts. If you are really lucky, people may even talk about you at cocktail parties.