If you are active on social media sites, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, etc, for you, it’s probably a way of life. We usually go on these sites because our friends and family members are on them – and we think nothing more of it. But that’s the difference between us and researchers (psychologists fall into this group as well).

There are researchers who like to dig into human behavior and their interaction with technology and social media. Some of the outcome of the research tells us what we already know, while others have weird findings that wil definitely raise an eyebrow or two. But trust us, none of these researchers are aiming for the Ig Nobel prize.

Lets take a look at what science is saying about you and your social networks.

Recommended Reading: What Your Favorite Social Network Sites Say About You

Photo-taking = eating Disorder

If you haven’t already heard, dwelling in food photography has been deemed a sign of mental illness. I’m not really sure about that but they sure look funny. Dr Valerie Taylor who published a study about food fetish spoke about this phenomenon in the Canadian Obesity Summit in Vancouver earlier this year saying that it could be a sign of an eating disorder or weight disorders.

(Image Source: wongfu)

To be fair, she also said that not everyone who does it has a problem with food, which is a good thing because the phenomenon is so widespread that some restaurants have started banning photography of their food in their establishments.

Why? Well, because some photographers are coming in with gorillapods and flashes and disturbing everyone else who is just there to eat the food, not make a documentary out of it.

Online-Offline Connections

A study from Brigham Young University was based on the responses of 491 respondents and concluded that teenagers who connect with their parents in social media networks like Facebook and Twitter have a better connection with them offline. They are also less likely to be depressed or behave aggressively.

However the same cannot be said of marital relationships. Among the culprit that could lead to a breakup or divorce among excessive Facebook users are "partner surveillance" and jealousy stemming from a partner keeping in touch with their ex.

A finding that will offer some reprieve is that relationships that are less than 3 years long more easily affected by these influences while those in a longer relationship have higher immunity against these influences. When faced with a possibility of drama in your love life, the researcher’s advice is: cut back on usage.

Read Also: Get Off The Internet: A Challenge To Reconnect With Yourself

Love Yourself, Love Your Social Network

We’re quite sure that there is a healthy dose of narcissism (the art of loving yourself quite a bit) required to be active users of social media but did you know that there is a study which can put that down to a science? "Facebook is a mirror and Twitter is a megaphone," says this University of Michigan study that explores how these tools encourage narcissism at rather personal levels.

Among their findings, in young adults in college, if you love yourself more, you’d prefer Twitter. "Young people may overealuate the importance of their own opinions," said Elliot Panek, one of the researchers. Basically, if you have an opinion you want to find an audience for, Twitter is the tool for you.

Middle-aged adults are found to prefer posting on Facebook instead as it is a matter of forming and presenting an portfolio of their life choices – and molding it to a version their social circles would approve of. The study however could not find if you are narcissistic first before using social media, or if you only become narcissistic after using social media.

Read Also: 20 Things Savvy Facebookers Should Know (By Now)

The Harmful Side Of Facebook

Larry Rosen, PhD, Professor of Psychology at California State University an expert on the link between psychology and technology opines that teenagers who are on Facebook more show ‘narcissistic tendencies’. They are also more prone to depression, lower grades, psychological disorders and future health problems if they are on Facebook too much.

On the flip side, teens also learn how to show "virtual empathy" to online friends and (somewhat) how to socialize from behind the screen. Rosen also emphasized on direct communciation between parent and child rather than stalking them online or leaving it to apps and software to watch over them online. Here’s Rosen talking more on how you need to set limits and boundaries instead of having a digital detox.

Read Also: Are You Addicted? 7 Telltale Signs Of Facebook Addiction

Of Self-Esteem, Facebook and Photos

Using the Implicit Association Test, Catalina Toma of University of Wisconsin, Madison found that a quick 5-minute check of Facebook profiles can significantly boost the self-esteem of users. The test asks respondents to associate positive and negative adjectives with the words me, my, I and myself. The more positive associations, the higher the respondent’s self esteem. Users are found to have more self-esteem after a quick check of their own profiles.

(Image Source: Mia Fischer)

To add to that, photos are the biggest drive for one’s self esteem. "A photo can very powerfully provoke immediate social comparison, and that can trigger feelings of inferiority. You don’t envy a news story," says Hanna Krasnova of Humboldt University Berlin. In other words, your self-esteem is more easily affected by what you see on Instagram. Check out the post for what more the team has to say.

Conclusion

Social media definitely has an impact on how we view ourselves and the people around us. It is a tool that we associate with at a personal level, so personal that the things you do on social networks like Facebook could get you mixed up with individuals with criminal intent. Perhaps this is why researchers and psychologists are so eager to study how we interact with other human beings behind the anonymity of a screen.

Let us know if you agree with what some of these scientists are saying. Are they on to something or are they overthinking our harmless connection with social media?

As freelancers, one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves is ‘what do my clients really want?‘ In order to find out, you have to first know who your clients are. The Ideal Client Profile, or ICP, is a tool used by many professional service providers and entrepreneurs to figure out just that.

It’s a convenient way to zoom in on exactly the type of client you want to serve as a creative business owner. In this article, I’m going to show you the steps to creating one for your own range of clients, so that you can better understand and provide value services to them.

Recommended Reading: Freelancers: How To Work Better With Your Clients

Used properly, the ICP can be so effective that your clients will think you can read minds.

What An ICP Is

Though it goes by various names in the business and marketing sphere – some business owners even have their own proprietary versions, complete with personalized data and questionnaires – the basic premise of the Ideal Client Profile is the same all around.

Using detailed information on the general habits and needs of your target market, you can create a single, ideal ‘person’ that you can use as a model for your marketing efforts. Forget trying to cater to hundreds or even dozens of different clients – with the ICP you can have a finely tuned ‘average’ that the majority of your clients will conform to, making it far easier to get inside their heads.

Gathering Data

Just like a novelist creating a character for a book, a freelancer creating an Ideal Client Profile must first have some basic information about human psychology and behavior to use as a reference. However, unlike a novelist, you can’t simply make things up or tweak the facts using your creative license (well, you could, but it wouldn’t be terribly useful in your business).

The easiest way to get accurate data on what type of clients you want to go after is to just ask them. Interviewing potential, current, and past clients allows you to find out what they hope for, fear, and desire most in their businesses. It’s something you should be doing anyway, in order to keep up to date on what clients are actually looking for.

What You Should Be Asking

Just like the main character in a story, your client has a motivation and an overall set of goals. Do they want more sales? Probably, but what else do they want? Do they want the respect of their peers? How about the trust of their customers?

What gets them out of bed in the morning? What keeps them up at night? What are the three biggest challenges they’re facing in their business right now? All of these questions and those like them will help you form the basis of your ICP.

Read Also: Collecting Comprehensive Creative Brief From Your Client

Get Clear On The Basics

Before we go in-depth, however, we first need to establish who exactly your ideal client is as an individual. Start at the very beginning and build your perfect client from the ground up. First, what is this client’s name? Don’t laugh. Giving this ‘person’ a name goes a long way in allowing you to connect with them and take their needs seriously.

With a name, the Ideal Client becomes a real human being, rather than just an abstract concept. So go ahead and name them, and also give them a gender. The gender should reflect the majority of your client base, but if it happens to be split down the middle, just pick one at random.

Read Also: Why Designing Without A Design Brief Is Like Playing Charades

Dig, Dig and Dig

Next, how old is this person? Where do they live? What kind of business do they own, and how much revenue does it generate? What kind of lifestyle do they have? Do they attend lots of industry conferences and other events? How often do they travel? Are they satisfied with how much time they spend at the office versus with their family?

It’s important to be super specific when answering these questions. Like the exercise implies, you’re averaging your data and consolidating it into one person and one person only.

Again, Be Specific

Don’t give answers like ‘so-and-so works in the manufacturing industry and his business earns around 8 figures in revenue.’ What, specifically, do they produce and how much do they sell it for? Put down a real figure (even if it’s just an estimate) for how much money they make.

Don’t forget currency – even something as simple as converting US dollars to Euros can become a powerful marketing tool when used correctly.

Don’t Fear The Niche

Once you’ve answered as many of the basic questions as would be appropriate for your business, it’s time to go further into your ideal client’s mind. Ask yourself everything you could possibly know about a client that will help both of you have the best experience possible.

Remember, this is the perfect client we’re building, so don’t forget your own needs as a freelancer. Sick of clients who never know what they want? What information could you have about your client that would eliminate that problem? Or maybe you keep getting clients who throw scope creep at you like ninja stars.

Avoiding bad clients

In a perfect world, how could you turn this bad habit around? Answer those questions and add them to your client’s profile. Maybe you realize through your research that only clients who have been in business for a certain number of years are the ones who give you the most trouble. Or perhaps your best clients all graduated from a certain university.

The possibilities for data points are only limited by your imagination.

Read Also: 7 Signs It’s Time To Let Your Client Go

And Finally We Have…

As you travel deeper inside your ideal client’s head, you’re going to start zeroing in on a particular niche that may be far more specific than you’re used to serving.

Say you typically serve clients in the tech startup space. By knowing the exact revenue of your client’s business and the exact products they offer their customers, it may turn out that you need to adjust your niche from ‘tech startups’ to ‘a productivity software company in Silicon Valley that earns $6.2 million annually and that has received at least one round of VC funding.’

Before you balk at how ultra-specific that is, remember that you’re compiling this ideal client from data you mined from your existing clients. If this is your perfect client, don’t second guess it – go after them!

The Game Plan

Focus your energy on becoming as attractive as possible to this client. Infiltrate their network and amaze them with your newfound ‘psychic’ abilities. Call on the knowledge you’ve gained from your ideal client profile to establish yourself as the go-to person to solve their unique problems.

If you’ve done your job correctly, word will spread, and you’ll soon find yourself with more ‘perfect’ clients than you ever thought possible. Think you can use an Ideal Client Profile to help you better serve your clients?

In what ways can you analyze your clients’ data and feedback to help you establish that perfect client for your freelancing business?

According to BuiltWith.com, WordPress is the most popular publishing platform with more than 8 million website using it as their Content Management System (CMS). In addition, Google Trends shows the increasing popularity of WordPress cross over the other CMS, such as Joomla and Drupal.

Some reasons that makes WordPress that immensely popular are it is easy to use, it is in very active development, it has great community support, many plugins with great functionality, beautiful themes, and one particular feature that makes it a powerful CMS is the ability to create multiple websites with one WordPress installation.

Originally, this WordPress Multisite was developed separately from the main WordPress. Then, the project has been merged since WordPress 3.0. So, if you are using WordPress 3.0 (and above), you are able to enable this feature and start creating multiple blogs. In this post, we will show you how to develop WordPress Multisite with MAMP, before bringing it online.

Make sure you have installed MAMP in your OSX. Otherwise, follow this instruction before proceeding this post.

Step 1: Setting-up Virtual Host

We will first setup Virtual Host so that we can host the website with a custom hostname or domain name, instead of using the default http://localhost:8888/. To do so, we will need to edit two files, the hosts file and the apache config file, httpd.conf.

Step 1.1: Adding a Hostname

Frist, we will add a hostname for local development in the hosts file. The hosts file is a plain text file to map the hostnames or domain names to their associated IP Address. When we try accessing a hostname (or a domain name) through the browser, the Operating System (OS) will first look-up the hosts file for the corresponding name and its IP address. If it is not available within the file, the OS will then look-up the DNS.

Recommended Reading: Domain Names & Hostnames

So, let’s open the Terminal and run the following command to open the hosts file.

 sudo nano /etc/hosts 

Then, add a hostname along with the IP Address. In this, I name it as domain.local, as follows.

127.0.0.1 domain.local

This is only an example, you can name the hostname to be something like domain.loc or domain.com. Change the name, as you want it.

Furthermore, If we host the sites using sub-directories adding the above line will be sufficient. However, since we are going to use sub-domain for hosting the sites, we need to add one line to specify a sub-domain, like so.

127.0.0.1 domain.local 127.0.0.1 sub.domain.local 

Press Control + O and hit Enter to apply the changes within the hosts file. Then, press Control + X to exit.

Step 1.2: Directing the domain names

Next, we will direct the hostname to the directories where we will install the WordPress. To do so, we need to edit the Apache HTTP Configuration, which is located in Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf.

For your convenient run the following command through the Terminal to open it in TextEdit.

 open -a TextEdit /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf 

In the httpd.conf file, add the following line to specify the directory where the hostnames, which we have just added, should refer to it. In my case, I will install my WordPress at /Users/thoriq/Sites/wordpress.

 <VirtualHost *> DocumentRoot "/Users/thoriq/Sites/wordpress" ServerName domain.local ServerAlias domain.local *domain.local </VirtualHost> 

Afterwards, Restart the server.

Step 2: Installing WordPress

Installing WordPress is as easy as pie. There is the documentation and a lot of posts that shows you how to install WordPress locally with MAMP. For your convenient, here are a few links to visit.

• Installing WordPress Locally on Your Mac With MAMP — WordPress.org
• WordPress for Mac: How to Install Locally with MAMP [Tutorial] — WPMU.org
• If you prefer video over text-based tutorial, then this is one for you: Install WordPress locally using MAMP — Youtube

Make sure that you have downloaded the latest WordPress version, which currently is 3.5.1, and place it under the directory that is specified in the DocumentRoot in httpd.conf file. So, you are able to access it through the domain name, as shown below.

Step 3: Enable Multisite

The Multisite feature is not activated by default, but we can enable it easily. First, let’s open the WordPress config.php.

Then, add the following line.

 define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true); 

Login to your WordPress backend, and you should now find Network Setup under the Tools menu.

As mentioned, we will host our site with sub-domain. In the Network Setup setting page, check the Sub-domains option, and optionally you can name your network websites as well. Then, click on the Install button.

WordPress will generate some configuration lines to add in wp-config.php and .htaccess. The generated output will be slightly different than the one shown below, but the instruction remains the same.

Add these lines in config.php

 define('MULTISITE', true); define('SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL', true); define('DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'domain.local'); define('PATH_CURRENT_SITE', '/'); define('SITE_ID_CURRENT_SITE', 1); define('BLOG_ID_CURRENT_SITE', 1); 

And add these lines in .htaccess

 RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L] # add a trailing slash to /wp-admin RewriteRule ^wp-admin$ wp-admin/ [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d RewriteRule ^ - [L] RewriteRule ^(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) $1 [L] RewriteRule ^(.*\.php)$ $1 [L] RewriteRule . index.php [L] 

Now, the Multisite feature has been fully enabled and configured.

Step 4: Creating Multiple Websites

We just need to create the websites. So, let’s login to the dashboard.

In the admin bar, go to My Sites > Network Admin > Sites menu. Then, click on the Add New to create the website using the sub-domain name that we have added in hosts file, like so.

Now, when we access the sub-domain we will get our newly created WordPress website.

That’s it; you can then create as many websites as you want, in the same way.

Plugins for Multisite

Additionally, you can install some plugins to power-up your website networks. Below are some of my recommendations.

• Jetpack
• Multisite Admin Bar Switcher
• Simple Multisite Sitemaps
• Network Shared Media
• Multisite Language Switcher
• Simple Multisite Login Log
• Multilingual Press
• Multisite Taxonomy Widget
• WordPress Multisite Domain Mapping

Once we added in the WordPress plugins directory, the plugins will be available in all the websites across the network.

Final Thought

The Multisite feature is an incredible addition in WordPress. By utilizing this feature, you are able to build blog or website networks like in Tutsplus.com and New York Times Blog directories. We can also create UGC (User Generated Content) website that is similar to Hubpages, Squidoo, Tumblr, and WordPress.com.

We hope that this guide is useful for and can help you get started with WordPress Multisite.

Online or remote meetings can be a huge pain to manage and most apps and services tailored to project management don’t have features tailored to online group meetings. Want to keep everyone on the same page? Check out Liveminutes.

Everyone has their favorite tool to work on, so from the get-go Liveminutes gives you a standardized workspace to keep everyone on the same page. Whether you want to go into conference mode, or just work on a document or on a sketch together, Liveminutes have it all. Let’s take a look.

Recommended Reading: Guide To Online Collaborations: Useful Tips, Tools & Apps

Getting Started

You have two options, sign up using Facebook or the traditional registration form using your email, password and your full name. Once signed up it will instantly direct you to an example workspace and meeting, which will then walk you through a step-by-step tour.

Workspaces

The interface and design of Liveminutes is well designed and organized. You will be greeted with a three-section interface with the workspace in the middle, a list of recent activities on the right and chat sidebar on the left. Until you add team members the chat sidebar will give you an invitation to extend to friends and colleagues via email.

You can create several workspaces depending on the pricing plan you are on. The free plan gives you 2 free workspaces to start off.

At the top of your workspace there are some handy tools you can use to manage your media:

• New Note: which opens a fully featured word document editor or upload a readymade note from Evernote
• Upload File: allows you to upload files from your computer
• New Sketch: allows you to simply sketch your ideas or examples with your team or clients (Note: not yet launched at the time of this writing)

You can work on the same document with fellow team mates. The editor also shows a log and graphically shows the edits (changes, additions) from each of the different users that have worked on the same document – what they have changed or added.

The app has support for Evernote syncing so you don’t have to start from scratch if you have a readymade document.

Communication

Besides conference calling, you and your team or users can easily and quickly chat back in forth using an instant messaging system placed conveniently on the left side of your workspace. Alternatively you can set up meetings with the team.

 

One of my favorite features that Liveminutes offers is the unique, easy to use, conference calling tool. To start or join a conference call with your team, users or clients, simply click the start audio button on the left menu and you will be presented by a conference calling popup.

Within the conference calling popup you have the option to have the Liveminutes app call a phone number, dial the Liveminutes phone number provided, join the call with Skype or simply join within the Chrome web browser.

Plans and Pricing

Liveminutes has some great affordable plans for users who want to move from the free plan (which starts you off on 2 workspaces) to premium options with their accounts. Registrations with .edu addresses get 10 free workspaces.

Advantages

• Organized and well designed user interface.
• Conference calling which supports physical phones, Skype, in-browser calling and dial-in calling via a phone.
• Organized and Feature filled workspaces.
• Connect your account with Facebook or Evernote. More account connections will be available soon i.e. Google Drive or Dropbox.
• Account activity to show all recent messages, posts, notes, files and more.
• Notifications for new updates to workspaces.

Disadvantages

• Currently, no official video calls through the browser. Unless you get a Skype plugin or use your desktop applications.
• No individual profiles users or team members.
• No customizable notifications.

Conclusion

Liveminutes is a great app, very organized and beautifully designed. It is so hard to find a good meetings webapp that is versatile, neat, feature packed and most importantly, affordable. So far the site says that it is free until October 1, 2013, so give it a test run, while the offer is still up.