Open up your mind and say, ahh...

It’s so easy to get distracted. Sometimes, we even build metrics to help us get distracted. Yes, we can really gauge lots of things that don’t need measurement. Or, if we don’t even care about that, we can just run around doing lots of things that don’t need doing. Distractions are practically a coin of the realm these days. We can get an inbox full of distractions every day. It’s amazing how un-helpful the universe can be when it comes to doing what needs doing.

It’s up to us to focus on the core.

What’s the Core?

The core is obviously different for everyone. Your business isn’t the same as my business. And realistically, there are anywhere from 3-5 cores, but rarely any more. The core is what matters most to the continued existence of your business.

Simplest cores: new customers, flow of product/service, support for existing customers. Those are three cores. If you’re a consultant, for instance, or if you sell ice cream, those are the three things that are core to your business: getting new customers, providing them with the product they want, and supporting any needs or issues that come up in the delivery of that product or service.

We can talk about just how complex these cores are. Think about that middle one: flow of product/service. That’s a lot of moving parts, depending on what you offer. But, it’s important to keep the very simple view in our heads when we talk about how to improve everything.

Simply, by focusing on the core, we will grow the rest of our business and we will have time and place for our nuances.

Focus on the Core

If you want to have meaningful metrics, put down three measures that match to the cores of your business.

New Customers: 17
Flow of Product: 90 sold (or 97% capacity, or whatever you want to measure)
Support: 7 (down from 11)

If you had a little spreadsheet that asked you for three core metrics every day, and if everyone in the company was held accountable to things that served those metrics (if there’s more than you at the business), wouldn’t things be a lot more obvious?

Yes, this is simplified. If you’re a PR manager at BMW, you probably have a very different set of cores that don’t relate at all to the baseline of the business. They’re much more abstract. They might be “# of clippings counted” or something equally vague and not clearly tied to the larger mission. But even then, knowing what your cores are for your specific branch of your business matter.

It’s a lot easier with small businesses. If you run the home of the best hamburgers in Milwaukee, you probably know these cores and they can be a lot simpler.

What are YOUR Cores?

If you had to write down 3-5 baseline core essential measurements that would tell anyone how you were doing, what would you share? What matters most to your business? How does this match with your current measurements?

Guest post by Laura Fitton (@pistachio), founder, OneForty.com

Back in 2009 when @oneforty was a mere gleam in my eye and Twitter for Business was barely understood, our friend and advisor Brian Solis teamed up with @Jess3 to map the newly-exploding Twitterverse.

Their 2011 Twitterverse organizes the chaos by function. IF you have time to search through the complex graphic, look up the items, try to discern which tools are right for your business… getting tired yet?

That just got a lot easier.

Introducing the Twitterverse Console. Click any app to see if it’s right for your business. Know immediately who else uses it, how well it works, tips on getting the most from it and examples of how it’s being used.

Steal this map!

Grab the Console and post it ANYWHERE for handy reference – your intranet, your site, your blog. Share it with readers, send it to your clients. Download the .html code right now, or click the Get for Your Site button on the console anytime.

Storage and backup service MiMedia has added the ability to link to backed-up photos, music and videos from 16 different social networks. At the same time, it lets you send photos directly to Facebook from their backup location in the cloud. I had a chance to try out the new features, and here’s my review.

I’ve realized over the past couple of months I’ve been testing MiMedia that this is more than a mere automated backup service, saving a copy of all of my important files every night. It also lets me access my backed up data and play music, view photos and use it from where it sits in the cloud.

MiMedia has an unusual approach to getting your files from home to cloud, first mailing you a hard drive on which you put all the files you’d like backed up (unfortunately, it’s PC-only for now). After an easy transfer routine of about 25GB of my most important files, I simply placed MiMedia’s hard drive back into its postage-paid packing case and returned it to the company. A few days later, I went to my portal on the MiMedia site, and there were my files, backed up in the cloud with no lengthy transfer necessary. That would’ve taken a long time even with relatively fast broadband service.

Once the files resided on my portal on MiMedia’s servers, I noticed how easy it was to view photos and listen to music I had stored there. MiMedia it doesn’t break digital rights management (DRM), so you won’t have much luck with protected content, but for MP3s, the web-based music player works beautifully. It wasn’t as good for viewing videos, many of which were so large it was hard to view them in a practical amount of time.

So what’s new about it? The latest innovation has a “Share” button that lets you select an item and then share it directly to your Facebook account. It’s a simple matter of logging into Facebook from the MiMedia portal, giving MiMedia the necessary permissions, and then sending your photos directly from the cloud onto a new or existing Facebook album. You can’t do that with video yet, but MiMedia says that’s on the way. (Update: The company says that feature is now implemented.)

For other social media services, MiMedia lets you connect to them and share a link. For example, if you’d like to share photos on Twitter, select a photo or album, and MiMedia helpfully inserts a link into a tweet for you, linking visitors to a slideshow inside your MiMedia portal. It’s efficient — I like the way there’s no need to transfer photos anywhere else after you’ve already placed them on your backup drive.

The company has set up 16 different social media sites for sharing: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, Friendfeed, Mixx, Delicious, Bebo, AOL Lifestream, Blogger, Yahoo Buzz, and MySpace.

With these refinements, MiMedia moves closer to an ideal cloud-based media viewing and backup space. Make it Mac-friendly and give it Dropbox-like undelete and versioning features, and it’ll be practical for a lot more users. For now, the service is a good value for $5 per month for 25GB of storage, $10 for 100GB, $20 for 250GB and $35 a month for 500GB.

Is there a smaller, cheaper version of the iPhone on the way? Rumors abound, but now the Wall Street Journal has found “people familiar with the matter” who have actually laid hands and eyes upon it:

“One of the people, who saw a prototype of a new iPhone several months ago, said the new device is intended to be sold alongside the current line of iPhones and would be about half the size of the iPhone 4. The phone, one of its codenames is N97, would be available to mobile carriers at about half the price of Apple’s main line of iPhones, the person said.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple’s also considering making its MobileMe online storage service free, allowing users to store their data in the cloud rather than on a small device such as an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. This move could facilitate a smaller iPhone, which could store most of its data elsewhere rather than within its tiny confines.

When will we see such a tiny iPhone, reportedly one-third smaller than its bigger brother, and costing $200 with no contract? The WSJ sources are saying this summer, which is right in line with the usual time new iPhones are unveiled.