Archive for August 2009
Internet Usage vs. Performance
The Internet has become a vital part of business. As a precautionary measure, businesses have restricted access or blocked entire sites to employees because they are distractions. Unfortunately, some of the sites that are blocked are vital to today’s business operations.
Many companies still block sites such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter from employees because of the invitation to get side tracked from work. However, blocking these sites in today’s business world is also behind the times. Professionals need access to these sites as well. They are a means of modern business communications.
Back in the early days when bandwidth was limited, network administrators capped what sites and services could be accessed so that the connection would not be burdened by employees doing unnecessary tasks. However, now some of those limitations are actually prohibiting employees from doing necessary work.
Although it was always stated that bandwidth was limited and setting limits had to be done, there was always the underling reason of keeping employees on task. However, with new social media and online portals, it has become harder to lock out sites that were once forbidden.
Young employees just getting out of school depend on these services as they depend on their legs for walking. Therefore, not having access to these tools is an impediment to their working. So, the question becomes in the workplace, “What is more important, performance or Internet usage?”
When I was going for my Masters in Business Administration, my professor used to make reference to the need to look at a person’s performance as opposed to the amount of time they spent at the job. The same principle pertains to how we must look at the Internet and all of its tools.
We have to remember that the Internet has become a huge tool for doing business. It allows us to gain access to information that at one time would have taken days of research to accumulate. Therefore, do we bite off our noses to spite our faces to keep people in line or do we begin to learn how to trust and evaluate on a different level than before?
Importance of Comaraderie
Camaraderie or the fostering of relationships among colleagues is critical to an organization. Not only is it needed internally, but externally as well for marketing reasons.
It was once said that “No man is an island.” That statement is so true. Part of being human is interacting with other people, talking to and getting to know them personally. That small bit of interaction with others helps solidify relationships between people. If people don’t get to interact with each other, camaraderie is lost and the potential connections are missed.
Camaraderie is not just something that is among friends which starts in school. It is the key ingredient to making connections with people in business. Small businesses thrive on it because the number of people working in the organization is small. As the organization grows, the concept should be kept alive and fostered by management, but often it fails thus causing the organization to fall apart.
A new generation of businesses is being born with the advancement of Web 2.0 technologies, but that doesn’t mean that online relationships are going to replace old fashioned face to face relationships. It is actually now more important to do the face-to-face so that we continue to develop our social skills which have gotten lax. So, we need to come reinvent old fashioned ways of fostering camaraderie with customers, employees and contractors.
Getting repeat customers could also be a result of comraderie. The person making the sales contacts should make an effort to get to know potential clients and do what is necessary to gel with them. If a strong connection is made, a repeat customer for life is made.
It is also important to establish relationships with existing customers through simple gatherings somewhere on a scheduled basis. For example, I know of a small business located in Celebration, Florida called Owner’s Locker where the founder meets members for a glass of wine at the France pavilion in Epcot Center. Not only does this allow the owner, John, to get to know his customers, but also allows him to get direct feedback. It’s also a means of promoting the business itself.
One of the newest things that can be done is to setup a private social networking site and combine that with some sort of social event, such as a happy hour. This combination not only puts a face to a name, but we also get to really know a person outside of the online relationship.
Once we’ve established these connections, these connections with others will help build an organization from the inside out and the outside in. These relationships will be a form of public relations, in a sense, for the organization. This reputation will allow the organization to grow in leaps and bounds. But…without putting the effort into building the camaraderie, the potentials will be lost entirely and people will be driven away, customers, employees and anyone else that works in conjunction with the organization.
So, one of the biggest goals that can be set for an organization is to establish a sense of comraderie with all constituents, internal and external. You will be glad it was done because it will pay back in multitudes at the end.
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Tags: Comraderie, social networking, work environment, workplace behavior | 
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Twitter: A No Brainer for Main Street?
by: Hugh Macken
If you’ve heard of Twitter, but haven’t seen a need for your business to take it very seriously, allow me to urge you to give it a second, more careful, look.
But before you dive in blindly, allow me to introduce you to a global technology phenomenon that individuals and small businesses, probably just like yours, are already embracing in surprising numbers.
The reason?
They recognize that marketing and communications, like everything else in business these days, has evolved. Dramatically.
And micro-blogging platforms like Twitter are central to that evolution.
So meet Twitter, not a person, but a free social and professional networking platform that allows individuals and companies (“Tweeters”) to send 140-character messages, (“Tweets”) to anyone who cares to receive them (“Followers”) multiple times a day.
There is good reason why that probably sounds like the most clever waste of valuable time that one could possibly conceive. The reason is that it can be a complete waste of time.
But only if you fail to realize that the twitter.com website itself makes a terrible first impression and is not terribly useful on its own.
However, used with the right third-party applications, like TweetDeck.com (which is free), your Twitter account can be one of the best marketing investments you can make.
But don’t just take my word for it. Leading analysts are beginning to take note.
None other than The Nielsen Company’s Michelle McGiboney recently opined, Twitter “…offers a variety of ways for marketers to reach their customers, and it’s a tool that businesses will have to learn how to utilize to their best advantage.”
Ms. McGiboney is right on target. Sadly, though, some small businesses have already written off Twitter as a transient fad unworthy of their time, thus never learning how to use it to their company’s advantage.
But its rising popularity among all age groups is, I believe, likely to entice skeptics to at least give it a try. Many are already doing exactly that.
Data recently released by internet analytics firm Compete.com, claims unique visitors to Twitter increased a whopping 1043%, year-over-year, from 1,725,977 users in May of 2008 to 19,728,619 in May of 2009.”
That’s a bit of a spike to say the least, and a spike whose source may surprise you. While it is true that the 18-25 year old segment has signed on in large numbers, according to Compete, their usage intensity pales in comparison to Twitters’ most loyal age group of – are you ready? – 35-49 year-olds who, incidentally, also comprised roughly 40% of the site’s audience as of February of this year.
Although not every age group has embraced Twitter with equal enthusiasm, Twitter’s broad penetration within the US has been impressive, with many staking their place on the global stage for conversation that Twitter provides. From President Obama in the White House (whose Twitter username is @barackobama) to Christa’s Bistro & Deli (@christasat126), closer to your house, chances are someone you may least expect is already tweeting away on Twitter.
The prospect of a large and diverse US audience is ideal for big business and government, but for small businesses on Main Street looking to find customers, usually the right audience is every bit as important as a large one. Being a small business itself of only about fifty employees, I suspect Twitter is keenly aware of this. So are savvy small business owners who have already found clever ways to nail the hyper-local dimension of the network.
One well-known example is CoffeeGroundz Café (@coffeegroundz) a small coffee House in Houston Their website, coffeegroundz.net, is worth checking out. They claim to be one of the first companies to have taken a to-go order using Twitter. Now clients not only place orders for pick-up, some customers at the café actually place orders from the comfort of their seat in the café. CoffeeGroundz’s Operations Manager J.R. Cohen, has also successfully hosted charity Tweetups (social gatherings promoted via Twitter) to raise money for worthy causes.
Another case study comes by way of Namecheap (@namecheap), an internet company that claims to rely heavily on word of mouth marketing, a strategy similar, at least in that respect, to many businesses on Main Street. Namecheap marketing specialist, Michelle Greer, has used trivia contests every hour on the hour (she used the free app from TweetLater.com to schedule the tweets) with the first replies winning a one-year domain registration. As a result of a dramatic increase in Twitter followers, Namecheap’s traffic increased by 30% when they ran a promotion in earlier this year. Growing and engaging a solid Twitter following has become so central to their sales growth that they were willing to shell out more than $15,000 worth of prizes during their most recent trivia contest, which ended yesterday.
There are countless other examples like these where small businesses needing to find new ways connect with their customers in an ailing economy discovered Twitter was just what the doctor ordered.
To be sure, Twitter is not a panacea to cure all that ails Main Street, but for the price it is definitely worth giving a fair shot.
Before you do, though, recall what I alluded to above and what Time magazine writer Steven Johnson wryly observes as well: Twitter “makes a terrible first impression…[but] it turns out to have unsuspected depth.”
New York native Hugh Macken is an internet and social media analyst with Marshfield, WI-based VMR Communications, LLC. He welcomes your comments at hugh@i.am or on Twitter at @hughmacken
Posted in Internet Marketing, Social Media | Tags: hugh macken, micro-blogging, tweetdeck, Twitter, vmr communications | 1 Comment »
New Features of Joomla! 1.6 CMS
Joomla!, the open source CMS (content management system) has made great progress in its development since its early versions which were a cousin of Mambo. The developers of Joomla have been very busy building a new version of the CMS which will greatly improve the operations of the previous versions.
In the current version, 1.5, the menu system was overhauled for easier use. The multiple different menus that delineated certain related tasks were combined into one logical place and the installation of extensions was made easier. For those of us who go under the hood, the coding from version 1.0 to 1.5 also changed.
Now, bigger changes will be coming to version 1.6 which is now in the Alpha stage of development. One of the changes will be in extensions management which will greatly improve how we work and update extensions currently installed in the system. However, two of the greatest changes are to the content structure, the ACL (Access Control List) and the content management structure.
In the previous versions of Joomla!, users could only be designated as to how much they could edit content or change the physical structure of the CMS. Now, with the updated ACL, different users will be able to be given permissions to edit and publish certain pages, a big development step which other CMS sytems already use.
The second major change is in the structure of organization of content. In previous versions, there were two layers, sections and categories. One would create different sections and within those sections would create various categories, but you could not create anything lower than the first layer of categories. Now, with the proposed new structure, sub-categories will be allowed to greatly break down the content articles.
These advancements from my perspective will open up great possibilities for the system to not only the small business owner, but also larger organizations such as schools which need individualized editing for classwork. There are many other possibilities which will open up with a little bit of creativity.
