Team Avega Tech Talks

Top 5 ways to prevent social media overload.

2012-02-21T08:57:00.000-08:00

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Using social media is a pretty common strategy for promoting a business, but it can sometimes lead to seriously exhaustive conditions – both for you, and your audience. Fight social media fatigue with these five tips:

1. Create a plan.
Instead of getting sucked into the blogging, tweeting, commenting, Facebooking, doing a zillion things at once vortex, create a basic plan to keep your social media under control. Choose only a few tactics and write down daily and weekly actions that will keep things moving forward.

2. Track your time.
Use a time tracking tool like Toggl to see how long you spend using social media. By observing exactly where and how long you spend your time, you’ll be able to better manage your day and adjust your social media efforts based on your success. Not getting much response from LinkedIn or Foursquare? Check them weekly instead of every five seconds.

3. Save it for a rainy day.
Sometimes you’ll run out of things to talk about. To get you through these times, try to collect bits and pieces of information that inspire or motivate you. Bookmark content that you can later talk about on your blog. Create a Twitter list or RSS feed of your favourite resources. Stay in touch with individuals who inspire you and talk with them regularly.

4. Chill out dude.
Your social network can live without you from time to time. Take breaks from the internet. Relax and save some energy for interacting with real, live humans. This will give your listeners a break too. Seth Godin once said, “Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn’t free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, a desensitization to all information.”

5. Delay your reaction time.
The internet is a land of instant gratification. It’s tempting to reply to every tweet, email, comment and photo tag the minute you receive it, but you should resist or risk spontaneous social media combustion. Take your time, filter, prioritize and carry on. Batch your social media tasks into chunks rather than letting them interrupt you all day long.

How do you manage social media stress? Let us know in the comments.
Photo by Helga Weber on Flickr.

5 resolutions all small businesses should make

2012-02-13T08:46:00.000-08:00

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The New Year is well under way, but have you made the right moves so far? Here are some effective strategies to help you make more money this year. Are you ready to make some changes?

1. Define your goals: Any self-help guru worth his salt will tell you that the more specific and measurable your goals are, the more likely you are to succeed. It’s a little bit like having a map– it helps you find the quickest and most efficient route to your destination. That way, you spend less time wandering down dead ends and are primed to recognize opportunities that will get you to your target faster.

Spelling it out as in, “I would like to make $X per month in sales” or “I would like 8 out of 10 consults to become regular clients” will get you far better results than something vague like “I want to grow my business”. Make sure your goals are concrete and that it’s easy to tell when you reach them.

2. Break big challenges into baby steps: How many times have you abandoned a resolution because it seemed too huge to accomplish? David Allen, one of the world’s most famous productivity experts recommends that you break each task, no matter how daunting, into tiny manageable chunks and list them in order of priority. In fact, if you struggle with productivity issues, do yourself a huge favour and purchase his book, “Getting Things Done”. It takes a while to absorb the concepts, but it really will help you get things done!

3. Fix the leaks: Almost every small business owner will be able to identify one or two key areas where his brand needs fixing. It might be sloppy customer service or a defective product. It might be deadline issues or failure to deliver on promises made by the company’s ad campaign. Pick two of these issues and FIX THEM. What ever it takes.

4. Be a smart marketer: There’s no point developing the most amazing product or service in the world if no one knows it’s available! You may not want to hear it, but your marketing strategy is as important as quality control or pricing. If you aren’t already taking advantage of social media, you’re missing out on a huge small business opportunity. That said, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that getting on Facebook or starting a blog is going to suddenly fill your coffers. Social media forces businesses to be more transparent, more accountable and more nimble. These are all good things – if you’re willing to do the work.

5. Look for hidden treasures: Chances are, there’s some aspect of your business that is lying dormant, just waiting for you to tap into it. For example, if you’re a successful photographer, you could probably make some serious cash teaching workshops to newbies in the field. If you’re a hair salon, perhaps you should hold “members only” events where you teach your clients how to do easy but sophisticated styles or apply mineral makeup. The better you know your ideal client the easier it will be to identify ways to build a loyal community around your brand.

Now it’s your turn. Have you tried putting any of these resolutions into practice? Did you get good results?

More Important Than a Business Plan: What Every Company Must Do.

2012-02-09T05:56:00.000-08:00

by Andy Buyting

What is the number one most important thing that people need to be successful in business? What is it that gives some businesses the ‘It-Factor’, and not others?

It is a paradigm shift on the way business owners think of their business.

If you are thinking of starting a business, just launching your company, or already in operation, I strongly encourage you to think about this idea. I want you to think about how you look at your business.
How would you describe the business you’re in? How would you describe the product or service you offer?
If you answered; “That’s easy, I’m in the pizza business”, I would argue that you should be in the dining experience business.

If you answered; “I’m in the toy business”, again I would argue that you should be in the memorable shopping business.

By making this paradigm shift, you will take a different approach to most aspects of your operations. Let me give you an example;

Because you are now in the dining experience business, decisions about menu changes, food presentation, pricing, customer service, etc. all become so much easier to answer now that you have clear focus on the business you’re in. So instead of looking at new dining ware for the restaurant and thinking only about the cost and if the old ones really need replacing, you’ll instead have a different approach. You’ll instead look at how the new dining ware will enhance the customer’s dining experience. Will the enhancement of the dining experience warrant the cost of the new dining ware? Will we receive an ROI (return on investment) into our customer’s dining experience that is worth the investment?

By looking at your business through this new paradigm, you will receive the best ROI on your time. Work on the customer experience, instead of looking at the bolts and nuts of the decision, and you’ll grow your business well into the future.

This is why a paradigm shift is the number one most important thing you can do for your business, even more important than a detailed business plan!

Why SIP Trunking needs to be on your radar

2012-02-07T08:36:00.000-08:00

American Businesses are a crystal ball of what technology trends are on the horizon for Canada

Although Canada has been trailing the U.S. when it comes to adopting SIP Trunking, a shift is now taking place. Thanks to its cost savings and measurable improvements to business productivity, SIP Trunking is now catching the eyes of IT decision makers here.

For business looking for greater efficiency in communications - and the inevitable business transformation that follows - SIP trunking is worth investigating.

SMEs can now join in
SIP Trunking (session initiation protocol), is a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) that uses a data network or Internet connection to connect business telephone systems to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). And with the recent introduction of SIP trunking over Internet service, small and mid-sized businesses can now take advantage of high quality IP voice with SIP Trunking, previously limited to larger enterprises with an MPLS network.

"Voice communication is at the heart of many businesses, but it has not changed at the same pace as Internet-based communication" explains Bruce McKay, marketing manager with Allstream. "Web-based communications such as email, instant messaging and web conferencing have increased the pace of business. Now, SIP trunking enables businesses to apply the benefit from their IP networking investments to voice applications."

Exploding in U.S.
SIP Trunking has had a presence in Canada for about six years, but there is little data on its growth in the marketplace. In the U.S. however, numbers show the uptake of SIP Trunking is exploding. Studies compiled by Infonetics Research in 2010 delivered some impressive results for the U.S. and internationally:

* SIP Trunking revenue grew by 143% in 2010 in the U.S.
* Adoption of SIP Trunking services grew 220% around the world in 2010
* 75% of Fortune 100 companies use SIP Trunking

Canada is poised for similar dynamic growth, making 2012 the year for businesses of all sizes to investigate what SIP Trunking can do for them.

Reduce costs
There are several "value drivers" that propel businesses towards SIP Trunking. One of the key drivers is cost reduction. Fundamentally, SIP Trunking means businesses can stop subscribing to multiple voice circuits, routing that traffic on their data network instead - resulting in significant savings on long distance and hardware costs. For instance, using SIP Trunking eliminates the need for every location to have a PBX (private branch exchange, or private telephone network). As well, businesses can control costs by buying only the bandwidth they need and sharing it between voice and data as required.

Enhance productivity
Another driver is improved productivity, which is a corollary of reduced costs. Operating one network, rather than two or more, makes network management more efficient. Further efficiency comes from maintaining less hardware (fewer PBXs). It is also easier to scale up or down with SIP Trunking. For instance, you only need one network when you add a new site.

Improve flexibility
Perhaps the biggest benefit of SIP Trunking is that it substantially improves business flexibility. Because SIP Trunking is not tied to specific locations, it allows businesses to maintain a "virtual presence." For example, if you want to launch a marketing campaign in a remote location, you can use local phone numbers even if you do not have an office or telephone lines there. Also, when adding an office in a new location, you can activate telephone numbers for that region before you open the site. It's a cost-effective way to build a presence in a new location before you are up and running.

Strengthen reliability
SIP Trunking also allows organizations to centralize business continuity and disaster recovery. For instance, if the power goes down in one office, calls can be re-routed to another site without disrupting business. And, because SIP Trunking vastly reduces the need to have hardware at all locations, phone service is more reliable as potential points of failure are eliminated.

Increase ROI
Finally, SIP Trunking enhances return on existing investments. When businesses that have invested significant resources into IP networking technology adopt SIP Trunking, they are able to run voice over the same networks, bolstering the return and accelerating the payback on those investments.

As this evidence suggests, and as the growth in the U.S. and internationally attests, SIP Trunking reduces cost, aids in the expansion of business communications technologies, and solidifies ROI - clear indicators of a technology that transforms business performance.

Want to know more? Call us. We keep our customers current on technology.

Top 5 reasons why you should become a business owner

2012-02-06T16:30:00.000-08:00

by Leanne Schmidt

There are literally thousands of benefits to becoming a business owner, freelancer, or self-employed individual. If you’re reading this blog, maybe you’ve already taken the plunge, or are perhaps flirting with the idea of “going out on your own”. Yes there are a few downsides, but the positives FAR outweigh the negatives.

Five reasons why you should become a business owner:

1. Job security.
In today’s economy, corporate employees have never been more fearful of losing their job. Becoming a business owner places job security directly in your own hands, as opposed to some fat cat up at the top. As a business owner, the harder you work, the more job security you’ll have. Period.

2. Flexible hours.
Being your own boss means creating a schedule that fits your personality. If you hate getting up early, sleep in and make up for it later in the day. Take an extra long lunch to do a hot yoga class. Schedule your tasks around family, holidays, dog walking, your kid’s hockey practice, whatever you like! Make no mistake, you’ll probably work more hours than you would at a “regular job”, but the flexibility means your life will suffer less.

3. Do what you love.
As a business owner, you call the shots. Without a manager telling you what to do, you’ll be able to go after the type of work you love doing. You’ll also be able to outsource tasks that frustrate or annoy you.

4. Work from home.
In addition to saving you all kinds of overhead, working from your basement, garage, or even your couch is known to be a source of great happiness for business people. With no commute, no ugly work outfits, no awkward work relationships and plenty of tax breaks, working from home is all kinds of awesome.

5. Control your destiny.
Admittedly, being in charge is not for everyone. Some people thrive on following orders and leaving stress and risk to their bosses. But for those who have drive, ambition, and a vision for making a change, being your own boss means more control over the amount of success and freedom you’ll experience in life.

What do you love about being your own boss? Share it with us in the comments!

Image by Mike “Dakinewavamon” Kline on Flickr.

Top 5 secrets to starting your own small business.

2012-02-01T08:27:00.000-08:00

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Have you ever wished you had the guts to start your own small business? Ever dreamed of doing what you do best, but instead of working for “the man” you could be your own boss? Call all of the shots?

Here are five secrets to starting your own small business:

1. Having nowhere to run.
Many people start their own small business because they have nowhere else to work! During the recession, many people (like me) who lost their jobs were literally forced into becoming their own boss. Especially with online and freelance style careers such as computer programming, graphic design, writing, consulting, legal and engineering. With no rental space costs, little overhead and the comforts of working from home, becoming self-employed was an obvious choice for people with nowhere to run.

2. Profitable hobbies.
Are you passionate about something like, gardening, vegan baked goods or 3D video games? If your hobby is the only thing you think about, dream about, and spend your time and money on, maybe you could turn it into a small business idea. Many business owners spend big bucks marketing their products, but the secret to getting noticed is to be a bit obsessed with what you do. Customers notice genuine passion and are quick to spread the word about your products or services.

3. Ignoring is bliss.
Not ignorance (lack of information), but ignoring: refusing to take notice of or acknowledging the fears and risks you are about to take. YES, it’s scary starting up your own business. YES, there are significant financial risks. YES your family might think you’re crazy, and will have to adjust. But ignoring these fears means you won’t let them bring you down. I can’t count the number of times I almost “quit” my own business. Nearly threw in the towel and started hunting for a “real” job. I have learned to ignore my fears, carefully manage finances, and journey forward with confidence and drive to succeed. Without drive, your just stuck in neutral. Or reverse….

4. Research, research, research.
A secret to starting up, is to know everything there is to know about your small business. Who is your competition? What do they charge? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Is there a hole in this particular market in your city? Can you offer your skills globally? What can you do to differentiate yourself? How much money do you need to get started? And so on.

5. Get by with a little help from your friends.
Networking is such a blah word, I prefer, “chilling with like-minded people”. To get your small business up and running, connect with as many small business people as possible. Go to a Meetup. Join your city’s chamber of commerce. Talk to anyone and everyone who will listen. Swap small-business battle stories, find out how other people got started and make some new friends in the process. “Chilling with like-minded people” will encourage you to make it happen.

What’s your secret to being your own boss? Please share your story in the comments.

Allstream adds nearly 300 fiber-fed buildings to network in Q4 2011

2012-01-30T08:16:00.000-08:00

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MTS Allstream (Toronto: MBT.TO) continued to make good on its aggressive fiber buildout throughout 2011 and into 2012 as a way to attract more business customers.

In 2011, the service provider added 299 buildings to its network, including 75 in Q4, bringing its total number of on-net fiber-fed buildings to 2,338 as of the end of December.

This aggressive buildout has paid off as the service provider reported that it signed 46 new service contracts that are buying services delivered on its network.

Among some of the customers that signed onto MTS Allstream's network include Ad knowledge, Caltech Surveys, TEOPS Canada Corporation, dys architecture, Trispec Communications, Heathbridge Capital Management, Vivonet Canada, IBI Group, Voyer Marketing & Associés and World Trade Group (North America).

While it has not announced its Q4 2011 earnings yet, converged IP services were a major seller for MTS Allstream in 2011. During Q3 2011, converged IP revenues rose 9.8 percent to CAD 59.4 million (USD 58.3 million), a figure that makes up almost 30 percent of Allstream's total revenue mix.

Allstream's IP fibre network expansion program continues to generate strong IP sales momentum throughout the fourth quarter

TORONTO, ON, January 25, 2012 - MTS Allstream today said that its focus on expanding its IP fibre network into targeted markets across Canada continued to generate strong new sales wins with 46 new IP contracts signed in the fourth quarter of 2011.

"Our sales progress speaks to the continued popularity of IP-based services in the business telecommunications market in Canada," said Dean Prevost, President, Allstream. "We look forward to transitioning into the New Year with the same momentum."

In support of its objectives of winning high-margin on-net business and driving growth in IP services, Allstream is expanding its IP fibre access into buildings across Canada. Allstream has connected 299 buildings since the beginning of 2011, including 75 in the fourth quarter, bringing Allstream's total number of fibre-fed building's to 2,388 as of December 31, 2011.

Some of the customers that signed contracts to connect to Allstream's 30,000 kilometre IP fibre network in the fourth quarter of 2011 include Ad knowledge, Caltech Surveys, TEOPS Canada Corporation, dys architecture, Trispec Communications, Heathbridge Capital Management, Vivonet Canada, IBI Group, Voyer Marketing & Associés and World Trade Group (North America).

Ditching CFLs and replacing them with LED lights in your office

2012-01-27T08:57:00.000-08:00

(Photo by AZAdam)

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Alone for most of the day in my home office, I am pretty lucky to get a decent amount of sunlight through my window during these summer months. My office plants are grateful for the sun too. But, like many small business owners, I sometimes work into the night and need a little unnatural light to help me out.

Like every environmentally conscious person, I only have CFL lights installed around my apartment. CFLs are the curly “environmentally friendly” light bulbs that have become more and more popular over the last couple years.

I had the good fortune of recently connecting with Geeta Nadkarni, a journalist in Montreal who is also a member of the Professional Writers Association of Canada (PWAC).

Talking on the phone with her, somehow the subject of CFLs came up. She very passionately gave me her well-researched spiel and left me to do a little of my own research. That research included first watching the news clip she made for her column Be Green on CBC Montreal.

Basically, the gist of Geeta’s argument is that these lights are not environmentally friendly, and they certainly aren’t good for our health. “There is mercury in these bulbs that requires very delicate handling,” she told me. “There are so many steps to be taken when you dispose of CFLs, and most people don’t realize that.”
Health-wise, what is of greatest concern to Geeta, is the “dirty electricity” that they disperse into our offices/homes. These lights can cause interference with the electrical fields of our bodies and can cause burns on our skin if we are sitting too close.

If you have CFLs in your office, Geeta’s advice is to bring them to a recycling centre (don’t just throw them out!) Replace them with incandescent light bulbs (though the government is set to ban these in 2012.) Or, even better, she says, LED lights.

LED lights are very energy efficient, last a very long time, and unlike CFLs, they are virtually unbreakable.
“We are, with LEDs now, where we were with CFLs five years ago,” she says.
It’s a simple case of supply and demand. If we track down LED lights for home and office use then in a matter of time they will be more readily available.

Want to get some LED lights for your small business? Here’s a start at where to find them.
National LED Direct
Senso Lighting
IKEA

Top 5 TED Talks for Small Business People

2012-01-25T08:44:00.000-08:00

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Since 1984, TED has been hosting what is arguably the most inspiring video content the internet has to offer. If you’re in small business, switch on a TEDTalk while you’re brushing your teeth in the morning – you’ll surely have a different perspective throughout your day.

To celebrate the recent TEDxManitoba event, here are the top five TEDTalks for small business people:

1. Eve Ensler on security
Eve Ensler asks, “Why has the focus on security made us feel so much more insecure?” Being obsessed with security hinders us from new experiences, fully understanding who we are, and opening up our mind. Although the people she talks about have suffered greatly, her words have bearing on the small business person or entrepreneur; “They have broken out of the existing frame…their own personal security is not their end goal.”

2. Jeff Bezos: What matters more than your talents
In a Princeton University graduation address, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com makes the case that our character is reflected not in the gifts we’re endowed with at birth, but by the choices we make over the course of a lifetime. His entrepreneurial story will inspire and encourage you as he asks, “Will you follow dogma? Or will you be original?”

3. Joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows
Now here’s a guy thinking like a true entrepreneur. After a 10-year fascination with crows and their intelligent behaviour, Joshua Klein talks about how he invented a crow vending machine, and what it could mean for the future of mutually beneficial systems between humans and perceived “pests”.

4. Sir Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity
This talk is good for a chuckle and will also help you better understand your creative self. Were your passions nourished as a child? Or did you have to break free of stigmas to become the small businessperson you are today?

5. Richard St. John’s 8 secrets of success
After seven years and 500 interviews with a variety of TED folk, Richard St. John reveals to us what really leads to success. (Hint, it’s the difference between being a workaholic and a workafolic.)

Top 5 ways to win more customers.

2012-01-23T11:50:00.000-08:00

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It’s pretty simple: more customers equals more cash, more business growth, and that warm, fuzzy feeling you’re doing something worth doing. Here are five business tips for winning more customers:

1. Always outdo yourself.
Why deliver exactly what you promised when you can over-deliver? I’m not saying you should put your neck on the line, or spend a heap of extra cash, but it’s the little things that people tend to remember. Be like the local restaurant who throws a free Ziploc bag of gummy bears into every takeout sandwich container.

2. Don’t be shy, ask for referrals.
If you sell someone a product or service, follow up to make sure they’re fully satisfied, and if they are, ask if they’d consider referring you! There is no harm in asking, and referrals can be a huge source of new business for you.

3. Solve problems.
One of the main reasons why people spend money is to solve a problem they’re having. For example, the problem of a broken computer network, a grumbly stomach, or a pair of cold feet in need of some new winter boots. By solving some sort of problem, (perhaps in a unique or memorable way) you’ll make life more enjoyable for your clients or customers.

4. Be different.
The marketplace is cluttered. There are thousands, if not millions of choices when it comes to purchasing a product or service. Should I buy that new book at Chapters? Online at Amazon.ca? Directly from the publisher? Through my Kindle? Figure out a way to stand out in the pack and serve your target audience in a way that suits their lifestyle.

5. Do a freebie.
If you’re just starting out your business, it can be difficult to make a name for yourself. You likely don’t have much (or any) experience under your belt. Consider doing a freebie for your favourite local charity to beef up your portfolio and create some buzz.

Have a tip for growing your business? Share it in the comments!

Case Study: Solium Capital enjoys substantial ROI with Allstream’s IP Trunking solution

2012-01-19T12:37:00.000-08:00

"Reduced long distance expenses by $10,000 to $12,000/month"

Allstream was the only Canadian provider offering the complete solution Solium needed, although it could have looked to AT&T, who provides its US services. It chose Allstream. “We were paying a lot for voice services and long distance, and we knew a consolidated voice/data solution was the right way to go,” says Solium IT Director Simeon Ventura, “but our current provider simply didn’t have the combination of technology and services we needed. Allstream had the answers and did a great job. The implementation was focused and smooth and the support team was incredible.” With the Allstream IP trunking solution up and running, Solium now has voice/data convergence between Toronto, Montreal and the main hub in Calgary. It also has digital trunk extensions connecting Vancouver and Edmonton to enable four-digit in-company calling. With over 300 call centre agents in three locations, plus ongoing employee usage, Solium has reduced long distance expenses, simplified system deployment and quickly realized a significant ROI.

Company
With more than 1,600 clients and 1 million participants in over 80 countries, Solium Capital is the world’s largest independent provider of stock plan administration software and services.

Challenge
Looking to save money, improve services and boost organizational efficiencies, Solium wanted to implement an IP trunking solution between its main offices.

Outcomes

Reduced long distance expenses by $10,000 to $12,000/month
Created a direct link between Canadian and US call centres for reliable failover capacity
Improved customer confidence and service with network reliability
Improve scalability of IT and network environments

Case Study can be found here: http://media.allstream.com/documents/case-study-solium-capital.pdf

Top 5 tricks to beat the business winter blues.

2012-01-17T09:08:00.000-08:00

by Leanne Schmidt

Winter can be just awful. (Especially in Winnipeg. Brrrr!) It’s either too cold for customers to leave their house and visit your store, the roads are too icy for you to go in to the office, or you’re simply trapped under a foot of snow and unable to get things done.

Here are five business tips to get you through the weary winter months:

1. Put on a promotion.
With the holidays behind us, your customer’s wallet is likely a bit slim this time of year. To keep momentum going at your business, try organizing a promotion or sale. This will keep people interested, and if not spending money, at least thinking about spending money at your business.

2. Get some exercise.
Science proves that winter can make a person really S.A.D. While weird ionized-air treatments can help battle this, nothing beats depression like a bit of good ole fashioned exercise. Hop on a stationary bike, do some squats, jump rope, or if you’ve got a gym membership, make a serious effort to actually use it.

3. Plan a getaway.
What better way to beat the blues than to forget winter even exists! Planning a holiday to a warmer climate can be pricey, so check Hotwire, iTravel2000, WestJet deals or Air Canada’s special offers page for the best deals. If you absolutely can’t afford a holiday, try to plan what they call a “stay-cation”. Take a few days off work and enjoy the comforts of your home and local attractions.

4. Crank on the lights.
Fancy scientists say that light is the key to fighting off winter blues. Turn on more lights, buy one of these, or just go for a walk when the sun peeks out. You could even (gasp) jump in a tanning bed once a month. Remember the dangers of tanning, but hey, if you live where it’s pitch black for 15 hours a day, a bit of tanning might not be so bad.

5. Snuggle up.
Staying warm is a crucial part of surviving a long Canadian winter. The cold can impair body functions, reduce pain receptors, give you frost bite, and who can forget those icy hands and toes? A good rule of thumb when getting dressed is to always wear precisely one layer more than you think you’ll need. Cover your head, your feet, drink plenty of tea and forget about fashion. Fashion won’t get you anywhere when it’s -40 C.

Have a business winter story to share? Don’t be shy. Tell us in the comments!

Top 5 Small Business Reasons Why iPhone Defeats Blackberry

2012-01-11T08:55:00.000-08:00

by Leanne Schmidt

And now for the age-old debate: which smart phone is better – iPhone or Blackberry? While there are many pros and cons for each device, iPhone has a clear advantage when it comes to small business.

Why iPhone dominates over Blackberry for small business:

Options. Simply put, the Blackberry app store sucks. At the time this article was written, there were just 9,386 Blackberry apps to choose from, and over 2,000 of those “apps” were background themes. BORING. There are over 200,000 iPhone apps, many of which are free. You do the math.
Apps help you work better. The reason for having a smart phone for small business is so it will help you work smarter. The iPhone app store offers thousands of productivity, networking, and research apps that will help kick-start your small business. Some worth mentioning are: Things, Salesforce Mobile, LinkedIn, The New York Times, TweetDeck, and Seth Godin. Also, most major banks offer mobile banking apps to make paying vendors and transferring funds a cinch.
Apps help you play better. The small business lifestyle can be stressful and even overwhelming. Thankfully, there are thousands of apps out there to help you blow off a little steam. Some favourites are Naturespace for relaxation, Hipstamatic for photography, Video Edit to stitch together video memories, Dinner Spinner, Kijiji, Talking Carl, and games like Tetris, The Sims, Sudoku, or iShoot.
It can host your own small business. Building and selling iPhone apps has made it possible for tech nerds around the globe to make passive income. Apple has essentially created a platform for ideas to come to life and see profit through exposure to a gigantic audience. No matter what your profession, as a small business person, you should respect the iPhone out of sheer principle.
Impress your clients. OK, so this sounds really superficial, but admit it, iPhones just look sexier. They exude a certain, Je ne sais quoi. Like a great pair of shoes or a Spanish accent. Blackberry’s design is more like a pair of sneakers – good enough to wear all the time, but won’t get you into the fancy restaurants and night clubs.

What’s your opinion? Please share your story in the comments.

Top 5 reasons why coworking is better than working from home.

2012-01-09T09:35:00.000-08:00

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For those who aren’t familiar, coworking is a new style of work where individuals share a large office environment but aren’t employed by a single organization. It’s like a sanctuary for entrepreneurs who hate the trappings of big-business but dearly miss the collaboration and buzz of the office itself. Working from home has countless benefits, but after a few years it can start to drive you bonkers. So if you’re an entrepreneur, freelancer, or have a business with a few employees, relocating from your garage/basement/couch into a coworking space presents all kinds of positive opportunities and benefits.

Here are the top five reasons why coworking is better than working from home:

1. You’re surrounded by like-minded people.
Inspiration comes from many different places. From our dreams, our mentors, research and books. But nothing quite beats being surrounded by people who believe in the potential and power of small business. People who are bursting with ideas and energy. It’s catchy, and will keep you motivated.

2. You’ll have access to a greater skills pool.
Yes, you’re brilliant, but not at everything. In a coworking environment, it’s easy to find people with unique skills who are looking to work on larger, more complex projects. Web designers, developers, strategists, writers and social media experts can connect and collaborate in a coworking space without the commitment of working for a big company.

3. You’ll have access to a larger space, without all the risks.
With typically low monthly fees and drop-in rates, running your small business out of a a coworking space means you’ll have access to a larger, centrally-located office without the risk of purchasing a space or signing a scary lease.

4. You’ll impress your clients and customers.
While your home office might be swanky and clean, nothing says professional like an office complete with boardrooms, fancy presentation equipment, and a secretary who answers the phone. Instead of meeting at Starbucks with your clients and customers, you can invite them to your bustling hive filled with creative professionals.

5. Your productivity will soar.
Running a small business from your couch can be awesome. There’s no commute, no noise, no need to get out of your pyjamas – but then again, there’s nobody watching either. When you’re surrounded by people in an office, it’s human nature to quit procrastinating and keep up with the pace. You’ll also be more productive in a coworking space because of the friendly collaborative environment. If you get stuck, there’s always someone who will offer a quick tip or fact to push you in the right direction.

Apps to Keep Children Happy

2012-01-03T08:56:00.000-08:00

Source
WITH Christmas upon us and New Year’s just around the bend, many families are contending with long road trips and crowded flights. All those hours in the car and at the airport are bound to bring out tantrums in toddlers, squabbles among siblings and the familiar “I’m bored” from tweens.

To help stave off meltdowns and keep the children entertained, I asked a range of experts, from professional toy-reviewers to travel-savvy mothers, for the best apps for iPads and iPhones. As a parent who is prone to guilt attacks when my own daughter spends too much time in front of a screen, no matter what its size, my aim was to find that sweet spot that falls somewhere between the ruthless thrill of hurling birds at pigs and the rigor of dividing fractions. I’ve also thrown in some unplugged options. Below are top picks organized by age.

Ages 1 to 4
Elmo Loves ABCs, for iPad, $4.99. (Now on sale for $1.99.)

Frequent encouragement by Sesame Street’s favorite red fur ball keeps children engaged exploring the alphabet. Why it’s a travel hit: Elmo’s shrill voice may drive you — and seatmates — nuts if your child doesn’t wear headphones (in which case, it’s better for car trips than plane rides). But with loads of songs, more than 80 video clips, 75 coloring pages and interactive games about letters, this app pays for itself in entertainment value, said Jamie Pearson, co-publisher of BestKidsApps.com. Plus, the fact that your children are learning the alphabet reduces the guilt when they won’t put it down.

Memory Train, for iPad and iPhone, $1.99.
Focus and concentration are rewarded in this memory game that doles out badges and peanuts to children who help Spacey the Elephant recall colors, shapes, numbers and other objects spotted from the train.
Why it’s a travel hit: It’s engaging and fun. And because the app is visually based, it can still be played with the sound turned off for young children without headphones on long flights.

Desk to Go, $17.99.
This art supply bag unfolds to form a sturdy surface for coloring, drawing and writing, whether in the car, plane or delayed at the gate.
Why it’ s a travel hit: “Everything is self-contained so there are no missing pieces,” said Keri Dempsey, a founder of ebeanstalk.com, which sells learning toys online, chosen by experts in clinical psychology, education, physical therapy and more. And its compact size won’t add bulk to carry-on bags.

My Playhome, for iPad and iPhone, $2.99.
In this virtual dollhouse, characters do everything from frying an egg to brushing their teeth to changing the CD in the stereo.
Why it’s a travel hit: Open-ended play. “There are no scores or power ups,” which means there’s no stress involved, said Ms. Pearson of BestKidsApps.com, which ranked My Playhome among the top for 2011.

Ages 5 to 8
Highlights Hidden Pictures, for iPad and iPhone, $1.99.
This app is a modern take on the Highlights magazine puzzles you played in your dentist’s waiting room. Hundreds of objects hidden in eight illustrations turn from black and white to color when found. A scrollable row of objects in each puzzle can be turned off or on to make the game more challenging.
Why it’s a travel hit: Hunting for the hidden pictures requires focus, which translates into quiet for long stretches.

Zingo to Go! $15.99.
In this fast-paced twist on Bingo, pictures and words are used instead of the traditional letter/number grid. Children try to match the images and words on game tiles to the corresponding stoplights on their game boards. Because the first with a completed traffic light wins by shouting “Zingo!” this game is better suited to car rides than plane trips, where all the excitement might disturb other passengers.
Why it’s a travel hit: Self-contained pieces mean you don’t have to worry about missing parts. Children learn picture recognition and build memory skills. Also, “parents will actually enjoy playing it too,” said Brian Gordon, a founder of ebeanstalk.com.

Stack the States, for iPad and iPhone, 99 cents.
Players are rewarded with cute cartoon characters of the 50 states by answering questions correctly that they pile in stacks to win.
Why it’s a hit: It actually makes geography fun. Perhaps that’s why it was on the list of every app expert I spoke with.

Tales2Go, for iPad and iPhone, free for 30 days, then $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year.
More than 1,600 audio books for your phone include “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” and classics like “Black Beauty” and “Clifford, the Big Red Dog.” While most tales will appeal to children age 5 to 8, younger and older, listeners are likely to find some irresistible stories here, too.
Best for cars or planes with Wi-Fi since only one story or chapter (up to an hour and 20 minutes long) can be stored for use without service.

Why it’s a travel hit: Good storytelling not only fosters listening skills and imaginations, “it allows for a little bit of downtime,” said Ingrid Simone, senior editor for apps, at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group that helps children and parents navigate media and technology. Besides, she added, “On a long road trip, there’s only so much singing, playing and gaming everyone has energy to do.”

Ages 9 to 12
Weird but True, for iPad and iPhone, $1.99.
More than 300 wacky factoids from National Geographic Kids include revelations like girls have more taste buds than boys and gorillas burp when they’re happy. Users can rate the level of “weirdness” for each and share favorites with friends via e-mail.
Why it’s a hit: “It’s just the right amount of quirky and gross,” said Liz Gumbinner, publisher of Coolmomtech.com.

U.S.A. License Plate Game, $19.99.
This game board with a map of the United States helps keep track of license plates when playing the classic spotting game on long road trips.
Why it’s a hit: Children learn the names and locations of all 50 states by plotting them on the map and flipping the license plates on the board. Added appeal: it’s not electronic.

Casey’s Contraptions HD, for iPad, $2.99
Players create Rube Goldberg-like machines with objects, from slingshots to balloons, to solve puzzles and recover Casey’s toys. There is also an optional social network, Game Center, where children can share solutions.
Why it’s a hit: The physics-based play “gets kids thinking outside the box,” said Heather Leister, who reviews apps on her blog, theiphonemom.com.

Scribblenauts Remix, for iPad and iPhone, $2.99. (Now on sale for 99 cents.)
In this new version of the Warner Brothers cartoon game that built a following on the Nintendo DS platform, players spell out any word to bring that object to life (like a shy, frost-breathing, robotic hippopotamus) and help Maxwell acquire the Starite. Why it’s a hit: “Scribblenauts stretches the imaginations (and vocabulary) of kids and parents alike,” said Ms. Simone of Common Sense Media, which included Scribblenauts Remix in its list of Best Road Trip Apps.

7 Small Business Tips to Make 2012 a Huge Success

2011-12-29T05:59:00.000-08:00

Source
No one could argue that our world isn’t changing fast—and I don’t mean just technology-wise. Consumers aren’t spending like they once did, manufacturing and shipping costs are fluctuating wildly, and the age of the environment is slowly (finally) being ushered in. On top of that, the Internet has finally really changed the way people shop and buy – not to mention the way we entrepreneurs market our businesses.

If you don’t change your business, and your marketing, to keep up with changing times you can easily become another failure statistic.

Think about it…five years ago MySpace was all the rage. Since then its usage has dropped dramatically, you hardly ever hear about it anymore. You never run into a business owner giving MySpace any time or thought now.

So to help you thumb your nose at all the dire economic news and make 2012 your best ever, here’s my list of 7 things you can do to make it happen.

1) Make a list of what worked and didn’t work in 2011.

Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, right? So take a step back and look at where you’ve been. For those initiatives that didn’t work, consider why. Was it the right timing, the right offer, the right target market? Could you have done more marketing? Better marketing?

2) Create a marketing plan.

Yeah, I know. You know you need one but who has the time – or know how – to put one together, right? That’s why I advocate writing a 2-page marketing plan. On the first page, list where you are now (gross and net income, numbers of new and repeat clients or customers, amount you currently work and earn, etc.). Then set goals for where you’d like to be in a year for each of those.

On page two, choose three marketing strategies you’re going to use to achieve those goals (public speaking, email marketing, direct mail, etc.). Include an actual to-do list of steps you need to take to implement each one, as well as due dates for each step.

3) Look to external partners.

Great businesses aren’t built by sitting alone in an office. Any entrepreneur can find someone else to interview, refer clients to, or trade promos to each other’s lists. So seek strategic partnerships and Joint Ventures. And develop a support network of at least one other entrepreneur who’s headed in your same direction you can go to for advice – or hire an experienced coach or consultant. That way you don’t waste a lot of time and money reinventing the wheel.

4) Focus on helping, not selling.

If your business is solely about making money, you’re likely to run into big problems trying to grow. Instead, think about your customer’s wants, needs, problems and goals, and how you can help them. Help them achieve their goals, and you’ll automatically achieve your own.

5) Update your Website.

The Web is one of the least expensive and most effective places to market your business. But with all the competition out there, you can’t just throw up a basic Website and expect it to do much for you. Your site needs to be planned out and built to be an effective salesperson that connects with your ideal client – not just an online brochure that’s all about you and what you do.

6) Stop doing everything yourself.

As an entrepreneur, if you want something done the reality is you probably shouldn’t be doing it yourself. Focus your time and energy on the things you’re best at, and that grow your business and make money. Leave the rest to a team of skilled Virtual Assistants.

7) Have a life.

It’s wonderful if you’re passionate about what you do. But all work and no play makes anyone unhappy and eventually burned out. And if you’re married or in a relationship I’d be willing to bet it’s making two (or more) people unhappy. Do something you love outside of work, get some exercise every day, and make time for friends and family. You’ll be more successful, and happier!

5 Local Online Marketing Tips

2011-12-27T06:06:00.000-08:00

As a small business owner or local organization, you’re well aware that the Internet is a fantastic place to promote your group as well as manage your brand. It’s true that the web is a great place to reach potential customers as well as manage current clients. However, do you know what it takes to leverage yourself locally using the Internet?

The web is a giant network connecting people worldwide but what if you want to just be known in your region or city as the very best? With the increase usage of mobile devices and access to internet on the go, local search marketing is obviously more important.

Here is list of the top five local online marketing tips:

Local Community
Prepare your website to be friendlier to your local community. First, make sure you have your local, physical address on your website. This allows people to see that you are a local company as well as identifies your location for search engines. You will want your address on every single page of your site. This can be done in the header, footer or sidebar of the design. If this becomes too distracting, make sure at the very least that your physical address is in the “Contact Us” or “About Us” tab of your site. This section is essential for any business in order to help people better connect with you.

Get Listed
Just like a phone book several years ago, you’ll want to make sure that your company is listed in local, online directories. By doing this, search engines will pick up on your location and the fact that you are listed in many places. To do this, start by searching local directories in your area. Likely, they will have an online form to submit your business. If not, try to find an email address and contact the web administrator and see if they’d be willing to add your listings. Most online listings are free or extremely inexpensive.

Ask for Reviews
Typically local directories, or national directories with a local focus such as Yelp.com, will encourage customers to review your business. Whenever you serve a customer, let them know that you’d love for them to go online and write a review. Remember to look at each listing’s terms of service to make sure you are not violating the rules by incentivizing only positive reviews.

Link Local
Get local with your search engine optimization strategies. If you aren’t already, you should be looking at search engine optimization tactics either in-house or through a reputable SEO company. Make sure that the keywords you are targeting have your location in them. By adding a localized keyword or phrase to your SEO efforts, you let customers know where you are. Likewise, you’ll want to put these keywords in both the title tags and meta tags of your page. Additionally, make certain that you build up your Google Places and other search engine profiles to include your address. This will help tag you in search engine maps.

Geo-Target
Finally, think locally when targeting online advertisements. You may want to add geo-targeting to your advertisements or use pay per click for local search terms. Facebook ads will also allow you to geographically target your advertisements.

Thinking locally when it comes to your online marketing strategy will help improve sales of your products or services. This is because more and more people are trying to shop locally and more people than ever trust local businesses to help solve their problems. Does your business currently do online marketing? Are you interested in expanding your online presence through local search engine optimization?

Allstream's IP sales continue to generate momentum as year-end approaches

2011-12-23T05:58:00.000-08:00

TORONTO, Dec. 22, 2011 /CNW/ - Allstream continues to make strong progress executing its Internet Protocol (IP) strategy with significant sales in the mid-market, particularly with its suite of IP connectivity products and services. Allstream's strong progress in the IP market is in keeping with the company's focus on IP sales and the accelerated expansion of its fibre network in major urban centres across Canada.

Some of the customers that recently signed contracts to take advantage of Allstream's suite of IP connectivity services include Total Energy Services Inc., Airports Council International, PetroBakken Energy, MacKay LLP, Prestige Telecom, Avigilon, Advanced Energy and Concord Steel Centre.
"As the year comes to a close, we are pleased that our strong IP sales continue to generate momentum, which reflects the success of our strategy of focusing on mid-market on-net sales," said Dean Prevost, President of Allstream.

About Allstream
Allstream is a Canadian leader in IP communications and the only national provider that works exclusively with business customers of all sizes. For more information on Allstream services and solutions, please visit www.allstream.com.

Allstream is a division of MTS Allstream Inc. ("MTS Allstream"), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Manitoba Telecom Services Inc. As one of Canada's leading national communication solutions companies, MTS Allstream provides innovative communications for the way Canadians want to live and work today. The Company has more than 100 years of experience, with 5,500 employees across Canada dedicated to a mission of delivering true value as seen through the eyes of our customers. MTS Allstream has nearly two million total customer connections spanning business customers across Canada and residential consumers throughout the province of Manitoba. The Company's extensive national broadband and fibre optic network spans almost 30,000 kilometres. Manitoba Telecom Services Inc.'s common shares are listed on Toronto Stock Exchange (trading symbol: MBT). Customers, stakeholders and investors who want to learn more about MTS Allstream are encouraged to visit: www.mtsallstream.com.

Forward-looking Statements Disclaimer
This news release includes forward-looking statements and information (collectively, the "statements") about our corporate direction, business opportunities, operations, financial objectives, planned activities, future financial results and performance that are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. As a consequence, actual results in the future may differ materially from any conclusion, forecast, anticipation or projection in such forward-looking statements. Examples of statements that constitute forward-looking information may be identified by words such as "believe", "expect", "project", "should", "anticipate", "could", "target", "forecast", "intend", "plan", "outlook", "see", "set", "pending", and other similar terms.

Factors that could cause anticipated opportunities and actual results to differ materially include, but are not limited to, matters identified in the "Risks and Uncertainties" section and elsewhere in our most recent annual MD&A and any subsequent quarterly MD&As, as well as our most recent Annual Information Form, all of which are available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

Please note that forward-looking statements reflect our expectations as at the date hereof. We disclaim any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise except as required by law.

Chief Technology Advocate's Crystal Ball of the Top 10 of 2012

2011-12-21T09:22:00.000-08:00

by Stephen W. Lawson, On-Line Editor & Chief Technology Advocate FOX GROUP

Note from Editor in Chief - We decided to put both our thoughts forward to our readers, even though they differ.

10. RIM comeback... NOT

Or ‘Good Enough’ can always kill the best technology, given the opportunity, and RIM gave all of the competition plenty of opportunity, on a silver platter, with gravy.

I tried. I really tried to keep the faith with a Canadian company that did good with world leading technology for so many years. The recent announcement of having to delay the roll-out of new company-saving products to the last quarter of 2012 may as well have been a Company-for-Sale notice.

It is all about the Apps, and the application developers will be running for the hills now. Even if RIM was able to deliver on the promised delivery date of 1st quarter 2012, it may very well have been too late anyway, but at least they would have had a fighting chance. No more.

History is full of the best tech of the day losing their business to tech that was cheaper AND good enough. The two best examples of that would be Beta losing to VHS and Token Ring losing to Ethernet. It was inevitable for RIM to lose market-share to upstart competition over the natural course of events. But, the speed and sheer magnitude of the loss now, can only be described as one of the worst examples of a market leaders failure to adapt to market conditions, ever.

I'm sure business schools will be touting RIM as the poster-boy of how to drop from owning the market to hoping someone sees enough residue value to buy you out before you have to dismember yourself.

At their self-imposed $1 salary level now, RIM top executives need to be told they’re not worth it. Bad leadership is bad leadership, at any price, and needs to be replaced.

2012 will not be kind to RIM. What a disappointment.

9. Cloud Hybrid

The announcement of Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard partnering to sell cloud services that combine public and private clouds puts the stamp of credibility on this solution and heralds a booming market for 2012.

Service providers will jumping all over this new approach to cloud business models for service consumption.

We at FOX GROUP are enjoying the benefits now of Cloud based managed services mixed with our own, I expect 2012 to be a banner year for Cloud Hybrid based business.

8. Touch Screen

Dell's Inspiron and HP TouchSmart are good examples of the new All-In-One desktops based on TouchScreen tech. They come with lots of RAM, large hard drive, a Blu-ray disc player, webcam, microphone and a quality touchscreen for less than $2,000 U.S. I think 2012 is the year monitors will have to have TouchScreen tech to be purchased. Look for great deals on non-TouchScreen monitors while manufacturers do their best to offload them from stock.

7. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

How to manage all of the devices employees are using, mobile and desktop, has become a serious problem for most organizations. I believe Virtual Desktop Infrastructure goes a long way to solve this issue without penalizing users with poor performing solutions.

Citrix and VMware of mature VDI solutions that provide 4 types of virtual desktops: dedicated, pooled, shared, and streamed.

Dedicated desktops are stateful virtual machines assigned to specific users, allowing them to customize and preserve their personal settings from session to session.

Pooled desktops -- dynamically created from a golden image when users log on, then destroyed when users log off -- are suitable for call centers or sales centers where users perform the same standard tasks and no personal user information is retained.

Shared virtual desktops, also known as session virtualization, are nothing other than Remote Desktop Services (or Terminal Services) sessions.

And lastly, streamed desktops -- where client systems boot from server-based desktop images over the LAN -- combine the management benefits of VDI with the performance benefits of client-side execution.

Both XenDesktop and View also support "offline mode" -- a form of desktop virtualization that doesn't require a connection to the VDI server farm. Offline mode allows users to download the virtual desktop to their laptop and run it locally.

Whenever the user is connected to the corporate network, any changes IT makes to the master image are pushed out to the local virtual machine. Depending on the personalization policy, any changes users make to their desktop are synchronized back to the data center.

I believe hosted variations of VDI will take off in 2012.

6. Collaboration/Video Conferencing

We are finding that the business use of desktop Video conferencing and hosted collaboration tools have sky-rocketed over the last 6 months. This technology has finally hit the mainstream consumer and business marketplace hard, and we find that once quality, easy to use, collaboration tools are experienced, users can't get enough of it.

The increase of quality (read understanding) of communications with these tools tend to speed up add-hock and scheduled meetings to the point that it becomes incredibly frustrating to 'make do' with just text or voice.

The ROI is a no brainer, especially for the increasingly mobile/virtual way business is done these days.

Collaboration/Video Conferencing should be a key part of any company's Attract and Retain policy going forward in 2012.

Editor in Chief Comments - We are using various collaboration tools 2-3 hours per day internally and with our clients, and are finding substantial business benefits.

5. 4. 3. 2. 1. Apple Apple Apple Apple Apple

Or... It's all about the APPs!

Apple has taken a thought-leadership, then market-leadership, role in whatever market they decide is ready for them, with market disruptive levels of success. Look at the amazing changes Apple brought to the music industry alone through iTunes... incredible.

I don't believe that level of success will end with the sad demise of Steve Jobs. The culture and organization of APPLE will continue to surprise and benefit the world for many years to come.

The iPad with its Video Calling feature is changing consumer expectations to the point where companies HAVE to start incorporating Video Conferencing in the workplace. What Apple is doing now with Voice Control will have the same disruptive effect in the consumer market then move into the business market.

Apple has re-started the movement of good ideas being accepted first in the consumer space, then moving into the workplace, pushed by employees. Look at the pilots of American Airlines getting the ok to use their iPads in the cockpit, even while taking off and landing. Why wasn't this as good an idea before iPads? The APPs stupid!!!

I believe that the existing time delay between consumer and business adoption will be close to being eliminated in 2012, and this really is just the beginning of technology products finally making a real difference in how we work and communicate.

As always, we welcome your thoughts, feedback and suggestions. Stephen Lawson | 905.473.3369 x 1002

How to Increase Social Sharing to Generate More Leads

2011-12-19T09:16:00.000-08:00

Why do you e-mail articles to friends? Or "like" a link on Facebook? Or retweet a post on Twitter?
Content that triggers an emotional response is more likely to be shared, according to a recent University of Pennsylvania study of the most e-mailed New York Times articles. What's more, "surprising" stories (like one about free-range chickens hanging out on the streets of New York) were also more likely to be passed along.
But the most-shared articles are those that go beyond surprise to actual awe--or what the researchers defined as an "emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than self." In other words, people share the stuff that ignites a little spark in them.

So what does that mean for you and your business? Why should you care about a kindergarten concept like sharing?

Because a clear way to generate and nurture leads is to create content: a blog and maybe an e-book and a Twitter stream and so on. But it's pointless (and lonely!) to write a blog that gets no visitors and zero comments--and, consequently, affords no traction for your lead-gen efforts.

Websites that facilitate sharing generate seven times more mentions online than those that don't (see below). So how do you grease the sharing skids? How do you get folks to share your stuff online? Here are some ideas.

Twitter Buttons = Sevenfold Sharing
Websites that display Twitter sharing buttons are linked to on Twitter nearly seven times more often than sites that do not display tweet buttons. Among the 10,000 largest websites, those that feature Twitter share buttons are, on average, mentioned in 27 tweets that contain a link back to the site, whereas those not featuring tweet buttons are mentioned, on average, in only four tweets that contain a link back to the site.

Average Number of Mentions Per Site

Ask yourself: "Would I share this?"
It seems like a simple measure, doesn't it? To judge anything you produce--even a Facebook wall post or a simple tweet--on the criterion of whether you yourself would like, share or retweet it to your own network. And if you were to share it--would your network in turn share it? Because, ultimately, your goal is to reach not just your network--but your network's network.

As my friend Scott Stratton says, people don't spread meh. In other words, people don't spread mediocrity. People spread great stuff. People spread stuff that inspires them to care. If you sell something that's not inherently interesting--like routers or lawn rakes--you might feel at a disadvantage here. But you shouldn't. See the next bullet point.

Take a stand.
Despite what you might have been taught in finishing school, having an opinion and expressing it in no uncertain terms is what will inspire others at an emotional level. So take a stand about something; become a linchpin for discussion around the topic.

Part of the reason people share content is that it offers validation to those who share it: In another study the Times conducted with Latitude Research on the psychology of sharing, researchers found that 68 percent of respondents who share do so to give others a better sense of who the sharer is and what she or he cares about. Let your readers know where you are coming from, or how you feel about a topic. In other words, give them something to react to.

How does someone who sells rakes do that? Well, maybe you have a point of view around the green aspect of lawn care--subtly underscoring the old-school, humble lawn rake as an alternative to those stinky, noisy leaf blowers. The bottom line is that even if you sell something that doesn't inspire emotion, you can nonetheless connect it to something meaningful in people's lives, and so foster a perspective or an attitude

Make sharing as effortless as possible.
It seems like a no-brainer to add social sharing icons for the top social media--Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and maybe Google+--to any content you publish online. (And by "social sharing icons" I mean those big icons you see around the web that count the number of Facebook or Twitter shares in real time and act as a sharing mechanism, so that sharing content becomes as easy as clicking.)

But if it's so stupid-easy, why don't most sites do it? Only half of the largest 10,000 websites (or 53.6 percent) have at least one social link or plug-in installed, according to a recent study by SEO firm BrightEdge Technologies.

Adoption Rate of Social Links/Plug-ins on Homepages of Top Sites
Facebook and Twitter dominate the social real estate on the homepages of top sites: 50.3 percent of the largest 10,000 sites on the web display Facebook links or plug-ins, up from 49.5 percent one month earlier, while 42.5 percent include Twitter links, up from 42.4 percent.

Some 8.1 percent of websites already have Google+ share buttons, while only 4 percent display share buttons for LinkedIn.

Pasting those buttons prominently onto your online content encourages sharing by making it easy, and it adds an element of social proof--validation--to whatever it is you're producing (Sixty-seven people shared this? It must be good!). You can use a catchall service like AddThis and ShareThis or blog plug-ins like Sociable to offer readers a kitchen sink of options, which is a tidy way to handle sharing. And, as new social networks emerge, the service will add those new platforms to the mix, so you won't have to.

That said, I'm a proponent of offering only the buttons readers will actually use to share your content, especially since the visual call to action of individual buttons is usually more compelling--and less confusing. (Sharing services of the most popular social networks, like Twitter and Facebook, will have buttons and code that you can grab and install on your own blog or site.)

By the way, don't forget to embed sharing options on everything you produce--not just your blog. I'm talking about stand-alone content like e-books and white papers, as well as landing pages, graphics or infographics, customer success stories or case studies and more. Which brings us to …

Create wings.
Create at least some winged content that can soar across the social web. Create things people want to share and that they'll find useful, helpful or just plain fun: branded e-books, white papers, audio or video downloads, infographics, PowerPoint slide decks, research charts, tools or photos. Create things they'll want to pass around or embed on their own blogs or sites.

For example, I like the way Dr. David Reath, a Knoxville, Tenn., plastic surgeon, created an e-book called A Girlfriend's Guide to Breast Augmentation. It's helpful and (for the right person) informative, whether you intend to visit Dr. Reath or not. He offers it as a free download from his site and encourages readers to pass it around to friends--even the title encourages that. On his blog, he writes, "Whether you end up choosing Dr. David Reath in Knoxville, another board-certified plastic surgeon or decide a breast augmentation isn't for you, we think the pages in this guide will be super helpful."

When you upload any video, audio or photograph to the web, be sure your settings allow the sharing of that content. Licensing from Creative Commons allows you to clearly set the terms for what others can and cannot do with your content, in addition to sharing it. (For instance, will you allow others to use your material for corporate brochures, with attribution?)

Indianapolis-based branding and design firm Brainstorm suggests that you might consider tastefully embedding a logo or other watermark in the corner of your photos and encourage other content creators to use them in their own digital work.

Adoption of Social Homepages of Top Websites
Nearly 54 percent of the largest 10,000 websites now display social sharing links or buttons for one or more of the four major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linked- In) on their homepages. That level is up from 52.8 percent one month earlier.

Source: BrightEdge Research, SocialShare Analysis, Sept. 2011

This article was originally published in the December 2011 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: The Importance of Sharing.

Top 5 reasons why your business should use email marketing.

2011-12-15T08:27:00.000-08:00

Email newsletters and promotions can help convert subscribers into customers! So reach out and talk to your beloved clients, customers, and all of those people interested enough to share their email address with you.

Five reasons why you should be sending email newsletters or promotions:

1. They’re effective.
Statistics show that people tend to respond to messages contained within an email. According to Forrester Research, 89% of retailers cited email marketing as their most successful marketing tactic overall. That beats out print ads, television, direct mail, door knocking and whatever else you’ve got up your sleeve.

2. Email is popular.
Think people hardly use email nowadays because of Facebook, Twitter and video chat? Email is still king. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 89% of users surveyed send or read emails. That’s the highest percentage reported in the study.

3. Email helps people remember you.
Many psychologists say that repetition is the key to remembering something. With infrequent email newsletters and promotions, people will be reminded your business indeed exists, and might have something interesting to say. Your prospective customers will gradually commit your company name and logo to memory.

4. Email helps you stay in touch.
Email is a friendly yet unobtrusive way to stay in touch with a large group of people, promote your products and services, push traffic to your website or blog, highlight your recent work – basically whatever suits your business marketing objectives.

5. Email is free (pretty much).
Aside from the time it takes you to write the thing, an email newsletter or promotion is free if not extremely affordable. For beautifully designed HTML emails, Mailchimp is a great option for free designs, free storeage of up to 1,000 subscribers and 6,000 emails sent per month (for free!) If you need more space, the prices are also very affordable.

by Leanne Schmidt

Retailers Find Holiday Spirit Through Social Media

2011-12-13T07:57:00.000-08:00

by David Fisch

The holiday shopping season is in full swing, and once again, we find ourselves scrambling to figure out what to buy our friends and family. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone but I still have plenty of shopping to do. My wife started dropping subtle hints about a month ago, but I’m still not confident that what I end up getting her will be what she really wants. And this isn’t a new pattern of ours. Every holiday season when we exchange gifts, she thanks me, she smiles at me, she hugs me, and then she inevitably returns everything.

For Santa, it’s easy. He’s the guy with all the lists. For the rest of us, it’s really just a guessing game, which makes holiday shopping hard and frustrating at times. Retailers feel this frustration the most, since they only want to stock the shelves with items we will buy.

It used to be that we’d have to know exactly what we were looking for when we went online to search for something. Now, our shopping experiences can be powered by friends thanks to new social technologies. This fundamental shift from the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of friends presents tremendous opportunity for retailers during the holidays.

In fact, design flash sales site Fab.com found that more than 50% of its sales from Black Friday through Cyber Monday came from people who joined via social sources, with half of that coming from people who joined the site through Facebook. Outdoor goods retailer Giantnerd discovered that during the shopping weekend Facebook traffic produced an average order value 300% higher than its site average. I believe that sites that personalize every point of the shopping experience and that make the shopping experience about each individual will continue to see momentum, not just during this holiday season but beyond.
With plenty of shopping left to be done, here’s the advice I’m giving to retailers this holiday season:

Personalization drives engagement. The Web is no longer anonymous, which means online shopping no longer needs to be either. People log onto the Web using their real identity, so we think they should receive customized recommendations on retail sites. For example, when I visit handmade goods site Etsy.com, I’m asked if I’m shopping for a friend. By clicking “Get Gift Recommendations” and allowing Etsy to access my likes and interests, as well as those my friends have shared, I instantly receive unique suggestions. My friend who likes U2 on Facebook might also like the laser-etched Bono coasters surfaced by this Facebook integration.
Let your customers tell you what they want, when they know. Walmart has added a social feature to its own site that enables people to vote on the hottest Christmas toys, with real-time tallying. When customers ‘Like’ a toy on walmart.com, they generate a story that shows up in their friends’ Facebook News Feeds. This allows Walmart to better understand the demand for different products and stock inventory accordingly. This integration also generates traffic back to Walmart.com.
Make it easy for customers to purchase gifts together. Holidays with the family can be stressful. And trying to coordinate with siblings on a gift for Dad is never easy; checks are ‘lost’ in the mail, someone forgets to sign the card, etc. eBay launched Group Gifts to combat this. On eBay.com, people can select a Facebook friend to purchase a gift for and then invite other Facebook friends to chip in. Custom notes are compiled into one card, and it’s easy to see how close your group is to fully funding the gift. Discussions about the gift also take place in the message thread. eBay has seen positive returns, with about 65% of the people who started a Group Gift coming back to the site on a daily basis.
Virality is word of mouth at scale. This month is the make or break period for retailers. From Black Friday to Small Business Saturday to Cyber Monday to Green Tuesday to all of the last-minute shopping opportunities, retailers have to maximize every bit of the holiday shopping season. Commerce companies have made great strides to create lasting connections with their fans through social channels, tapping into a vast mall of connected, potential shoppers seeking great deals and cool products. Quidsi.com launched a holiday promotion called Battle of the Brands, where brand items from Soap.com and Diapers.com went head-to-head in a competition for consumer votes. The winning products were discounted by 30% from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. People could choose to share the Battle with their friends on Facebook, creating word of mouth at scale. We expect to see other retailers continuing to offer Facebook-exclusive discounts for last minute shoppers.

People have always shopped with their friends; now they expect it online. We believe the companies who think differently about social will find success this holiday season and well into the New Year.

Entrepreneurs - 5 Time-Saving Business Tips

2011-12-06T07:25:00.000-08:00

By Joshua Black

If you are an entrepreneur and you are looking to start a new business venture, then this article is for you. There are many business activities that can take you away from your critical activities of keeping the business alive. Read on to find out ways to deal with these time-sucking activities.

If you are an entrepreneur, you need to be marketing your business and closing sales of your product. Without sales and promotion you have no business. Only after you have worked on those 2 things each day, should you even attempt to do the other things. Here are 5 places that you can get some of your time back:

1. Email- instead of sitting in front of the computer with the email open, close it and only answer your emails 2x per day maximum. One time in the morning and one time in the early evening is all you need to answer most questions promptly.

2. Phones and PDAs- turn them off when you are selling. We have become trained like Pavlov's dog to pick up the phone or return a text message immediately. In your voicemail message just note that you will only return calls at 10 am and 2pm. Any call received after 2pm will get returned that next day, or something to the effect.

3. Have you customers make appointments with you. Don't just let people call you with questions any time they feel like it. Create an appointment system, where people that need to get in touch with you can have a certain block of time.

4. Pay people to do the busy work. Are you spending hours on your web site, when a freelancer could build it for you for just a few dollars? Are you answering your own phones? Are you filling out piles of paperwork and collecting regulatory information? These are all things that you can pay freelancers to do. Again, if you are spending all of your time filling out forms and making pretty pictures for the next catalog, then you are not selling. Delegate those tasks.

5. Dedicate at least one hour per day to "thinking" about your business. This may seem like a lot at first, and you can start with just 15 minutes, but you need some time alone to think about how you are going to grow the business and what new products you are going to develop to offer your customers.

Allstream selects Ciena for national broadband network

2011-11-30T18:47:00.000-08:00

Allstream, a communication solutions company in Canada, has selected Ciena for deploying Ciena's coherent optical technology in the operator's 100G-capable national broadband network.

The augmented network ensures Allstream can provide heightened network resiliency and performance with its scalable, high-bandwidth national network.

The enhanced national broadband network allows Allstream to deliver enhanced managed wavelength services to customers in high-capacity transaction environments such as data centers, financial institutions, and government services.

"Demand for our high-capacity coherent DWDM solutions is growing exponentially as communications solutions providers around the globe seek to differentiate their application and service offerings to remain competitive," Chad Whalen, vice president and general manager, North America field organization at Ciena.

Leveraging Ciena's 6500 Packet-Optical Platform equipped with WaveLogic coherent optical processors, Allstream significantly increased its network capacity and resiliency throughout Canada to deliver bandwidth-intensive applications, such as IP-based collaboration tools, multimedia and social networking, advanced Internet services, remote data storage and videoconferencing.

Allstream is utilizing leading-edge network management software solutions from Ciena to ensure optimal network performance.

"Our customers are asking for higher speed wavelength services to facilitate data center connectivity, storage replication, cloud services and other bandwidth-intensive applications and services. By using Ciena's coherent optical technology, we're able to cost-effectively provide the performance and resiliency our customers demand to ensure their critical applications have the scale and capacity needed for their day-to-day business activities," said Mike Strople, chief technology officer at MTS Allstream.

By Telecomlead.com Team
editor@telecomlead.com

Top 5 things that stunt business growth.

2011-11-29T08:10:00.000-08:00

by Leanne Schmidt

We’ve all done it. Overexerting ourselves so much that instead of moving forward, we’re actually being held back. Here are the top five things that can stunt business growth.

1. Trying to do everything.
There’s only so much business pizzaz to go around. Think about the time you’re pouring into clients, customers, work, your family, and yourself. Decide who deserves the lion’s share of your attention by thinking about how much fulfillment you get out of each relationship. This might sound selfish, but this exercise will actually help you to prioritize your time and invest your attention in the things that matter most.

2. Trying to make everyone happy.
Trying to make everyone happy leads to becoming so “middle of the road” that we turn into an opinionless person who doesn’t stand for anyone or anything. OK, so that might sound extreme, but if you aren’t ticking off at least one person, who’s side are you on? Make yourself happy first, and stick to your guns when it comes to pleasing others.

3. Trying to be perfect the first time around.
Being a perfectionist is both a blessing and a curse. A curse because it’s easy to get lost in perfectionism and never actually ship anything. Running a business isn’t brain surgery. If you fail the first time round, nobody dies. Instead of obsessing about being perfect, think of running your business as a more fluid process: research, test, measure, fine tune, repeat.

4. Getting bogged down.
When there are literally 45 things on today’s to do list, it’s easy to get bogged down and spin your tires in the muck. Take a tip from agile software development processes and break down all of your tasks into small bite sized pieces. Make them as small as humanly possible, write each one down in a task management tool, and tackle them one at a time.

5. Feeding your fears.
Made famous by Seth Godin’s book, Linchpin, your brain’s amygdala, located deep within your temporal lobe, is where your brain regulates fear. Fear of failure, fear of death, fear of tarantulas! As one of the most ancient of our brain’s systems, Godin points out that sometimes our amygdala needs to shut up. The days of cavemen are behind us and there is no wooly mammoth out to eat our children. Irrational fears will hold us back, and our job is to figure out how to quiet them and ignore them.

How do you overcome the hurdles at your business? Please share your tips with us in the comments.

Tips: Teleconferencing and VideoConferencing

2011-11-24T09:00:00.000-08:00

Teleconferencing tips

Say no to multitasking:
As tempting as it is to check e-mail or have side conversations during long or boring conference calls, it pays to stay focused on the call. If you have to constantly ask people to repeat their points or ask for clarification, it soon becomes apparent you’re not listening. Besides, you could miss important information, says Mr. King. “It doesn’t matter how good you are at multitasking; it’s very difficult to respond to an e-mail and really hear the message that’s being presented,” he says.
Don’t interrupt:
One of the best ways to kill a conversation via teleconferencing? Have people talking over other people. Instead, pause before speaking then announce yourself. For example, say “This is Rob…” That’s enough to let everyone know who you are, and give them the cue that it’s your turn to speak.
Mute it:
The mute button is there for a reason. Use it. No one wants to hear you munching through lunch, walking the dog, talking to your kids or, well, breathing. If you don’t know how to turn the mute button on (or off), ask the call’s moderator via e-mail before the call begins. Alternatively, a good host will explain how to use mute at the beginning of the meeting.

Video conferencing tips

Move away from the camera:
That is, unless you want your face to fill the entire screen. And who can resist a massive nose that comes courtesy of the computer’s fisheye lens? Instead of sitting where you typically type, move back about a half-metre to frame your face, neck and shoulders. Using your laptop to make the call? Again, sit back and use a few books to bring the computer up higher on the table. “Otherwise, I get a great view – straight up your nose,” says Mr. Ferguson.
Think studio:
It’s hard to present a professional image if your background is cluttered and messy. So clean up. Even if you only have five minutes to straighten the area directly behind you, that’s usually fine, says Mr. Ferguson. Good lighting and sound are also important. An inexpensive IKEA lamp located behind your computer is perfect for lighting you up. Meanwhile, a headset gives superior sound quality.
But don’t get too fancy:
Just ask Edward Mana, a technologist for Technology On Demand, Inc., in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. About 18 months ago, he was sitting in on a video conference with a group of people including the host, who seemed to be in a computer data centre. That is, until the camera moved only to reveal a wooden door in the corner. When Mr. Mana mentioned it, the man became flustered. “Apparently the ‘data centre’ was really a backdrop he’d purchased. He was actually in the spare bedroom of his house!” Mr. Mana explains.
Take a practice run:
New to Skype, Nefsis, iVisit or any of the other video conferencing technologies out there? Before the meeting, jump online and check out their websites. Most have how-to videos and information that are easy to follow. Even if you know the technology inside out, always do a quick trial run about 30 minutes before the meeting start-time to be sure everything is in order.

Eight rules to keep small businesses afloat

2011-11-22T11:10:00.000-08:00

By Ryan Starr

Poor cash-flow management can sink a company fast. Entrepreneur Mark Cahsens understands and respects this fundamental fact.

To avoid cash crunches, Cahsens, owner of Great Circle Works, an Oakville-based manufacturer of toys and sporting goods, negotiates favourable terms with local suppliers so that he pays them only once he’s been paid by his clients.

“I encourage my suppliers to extend terms (up to 120 days in some cases), so, effectively, I’m receiving money from my customers before I have to pay my suppliers,” he says.

Cahsens is able to keep sufficient working capital on hand to run the business, and he can avoid having to turn to the bank for help, probably a wise move in these turbulent times.

In 2007, Great Circle Works generated less than $50,000 in revenues. This year, Cahsens says, the company is approaching $4 million in revenues.

That kind of growth would have been impossible had the company’s cash-flow been out of whack.
“If I wasn’t able to choreograph cash-flow properly,” says Cahsens, “I still wouldn’t be far from where I was in that first year.”

Cash-flow can make or break a venture. “It’s the number-one challenge small businesses have,” says Alec Morley, senior vice-president of small business banking at TD Canada Trust. “Poor cash-flow management totally can and does sink companies.”

Even if sales are booming, inadequate cash-flow can still bring a business down. “People equate top-line revenue growth with long-term sustainability and profitability,” Morley says. “And it’s not always the case.”
“It’s cruel in a way,” he adds. “It’s the fastest-growing companies that often run into the most trouble.”
The owner must lay out boatloads of cash to feed the growth, he explains, but is too busy running the business to go and raise more money.

How can small business owners avoid running out of cash?

We asked several experts for tips and advice.

1. Plan ahead. At the beginning of the year, forecast what the next 12 months will look like for your business; the cash inflows and outflows you expect.
“At the end of every month, go back and keep this updated,” says Andrew Patricio, a small business advisor with BizLaunch, a company that trains entrepreneurs. “You’ve got to monitor it on an ongoing basis.”

2. Make better deals. Negotiate favourable payment terms with suppliers and customers. Cahsens arranges longer payment terms with his suppliers; he also gives customers incentives to pay faster.
“Occasionally, we’ll offer a discount if they pay sooner,” he says. “Usually a few percentage points.”

3. Mind your money. To help ensure prompt payment, send invoices promptly. And monitor your receivable accounts every day to check that customers are paying on time.

4. Ditch deadbeats. “If someone doesn’t pay you regularly, you can’t do business with people like that,” says Patricio. “The only reason people pay late is either because they’re going out of business or they’re not happy with the service you’re offering.”

Either way, it’s a problem that needs addressing.

5. Get help. If you’re lousy at accounting, hire a bookkeeper to come in on a semi-regular basis to manage your invoices and monitor your cash-flow. “An accounts payable-receivable clerk with a good piece of software is a wonderful thing,” Morley says.

6. Borrow early! If you think you’ll need to borrow money from the bank to keep your cash flowing, do so before you’re desperate, Patricio recommends. “That’s the wrong time to look for money,” he says. “When the business is doing well, you should go get a line of credit, or increase the limit on a credit card, so that when you do need that money you’ve got it available.”

7. Inspect inventory. Small business owners need to be sure they’re being efficient with their inventory, particularly in this shaky economy. Don’t have too much, Patricio says, because that ties up cash. But you don’t want to have too little either. These days, just-in-time shipping can help ensure you don’t have excess stock just sitting there.

8. Reduce overhead. Examine fixed expenses and cut costs to free up cash. Negotiate a better deal on rent, phone and Internet, insurance and accounting services. And reconsider splashing for lavish new digs for your company.

“Often people who are dreaming big will over-spend on their office space,” says Morley. “They want to look impressive, but more often than not, it’s a misallocation of their limited capital.”

How Apple's Siri Could Destroy Local SEO

2011-11-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

How Apple's Siri Could Destroy Local SEO

BY AJ Kumar

Have you met Siri yet? If not, it's worth taking the time to learn more about the iPhone 4S's digital ambassador, as she could represent the future direction of local search engine optimization.
On the surface, Siri -- the voice recognition app that allows iPhone users to control their cell phones verbally -- seems like a cool party trick, sending text messages from your spoken instructions, checking the weather and setting up calendar reminders. But does this added functionality really mean the end of traditional local SEO as some experts are predicting?
In some ways, yes. The real impact of Siri isn't just that she acts like a personal assistant. The potentially huge ramifications for local SEO come from the depth of information Siri is able to access and the range of actions she can perform.

For example, Siri can call you a cab after a night on the town by automatically processing information about local cab companies in response to the query, "Call me a cab." Automating the search process means you never look up "cab companies in your area" in the search engines, avoiding the traditional search engine results pages and pay-per-click advertisements entirely, therefore limiting their importance and influence.

Related: Ways to Build Online Traffic and Boost SEO
Little is known about how exactly Siri collects and processes information, although it's reasonable to assume that the program is drawing on well-cultivated public data sources, including Google Places, Yelp and similar sites. If Siri is eventually able to pull information from third party apps -- as many predict she will be -- she could effectively eliminate traffic to some traditional websites. As an example, automatically checking people in to Facebook places eliminates the need to visit those places' websites.

And when you take into consideration that the iPhone 4S has become the company's best-selling iPhone in just a few short weeks, due in large part to the innovative Siri technology, local business owners should take note of this trend and invest time in optimizing their sites for mobile discovery.
Here's what you need to do to make your business website as accessible as possible to Siri and related voice recognition tools:

Optimize your website for mobile. This isn't new advice, as the rules for mobile SEO -- and the idea of local SEO in general -- have been around for years. But as some sources estimate that 30 percent of all searches could include a local component by 2015, it's more important than ever to make local SEO a priority for your business.

Related: How Will Google+ Affect SEO?

In addition to thinking about how consumers access your website while on the go, consider whether or not Siri can access important information about your business as well. Here's what you need to do:

Add a mobile site template. Having users land on a mobile version of your website will make them much happier, and it isn't difficult to do, as mobile-ready themes already exist for publishing platforms including Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal.
Enhance your local SEO. Prominently feature your physical address, local phone number and operating hours on the home page of your site for maximum local SEO benefits.
Remove data obstructions. Yes, Flash graphics and Javascript are already "no-no's" when it comes to mobile optimization, but also consider how easily Siri can access the information on your site. Burying pertinent information in PDFs and sub-pages could put your site at a disadvantage.

Enhance your digital presence. It's no longer enough to simply set up profiles on Facebook and Twitter and call it a day. Instead, establish a profile on any of the following directories and review sites and encourage customers to rate your business there for maximum exposure.

• Google Places
• Yahoo Local
• Bing Local
• Yelp
• Grubhub
• Open Table
• Urbanspoon

• Foursquare
• Savings.com
• Retailmenot
• Judy's Book
• Citysearch
• Superpages
• Yellow Pages

To determine which of these options are the best fit for your business, do a quick search to see which business sites in your geographic area and industry are ranking well in Google and create profiles on whichever of the following sites they're using.

Implement microdata. If you're savvy in the ways of SEO or have an IT manager who is you'll want to consider adding "schema tags" to your website. Schema tags allow your site to incorporate relevant microdata -- local business, address, telephone and open hours, for example -- that could help Siri and the search engines process important information about your site more quickly.

Related: Apple's iPhone 4S Announcement Disappoints
While Siri on her own doesn't necessarily spell the end of local SEO it's worth taking note of the popularity this mobile data management system has gained in a relatively short period of time. As Siri evolves and other operating systems adopt similar technology, the businesses that benefit most will be those that best understand how their customers interact in a mobile environment and optimize their sites to engage them.

Everyone’s Doing It: Blogs and Your Business

2011-11-14T08:26:00.000-08:00

Blogs and news about blogs are becoming more and more prevalent in today’s well-connected society. Bloggers can be anyone from a kid to a corporation. The topics blogs cover can be virtually anything, from child rearing to what is new in your company, or any topic in between.

So what exactly are blogs and why do they matter to your business? Blogs, a term that has been shortened from the term “web logs,” are online postings that resemble journal entries, updates, and essays. While there are no solid statistics available to indicate how many blogs there currently are on the Web, it can be said that blogs are quickly becoming a communication tool used by hundreds of millions of people on the Internet. Blogs fall into the category of social networking tools, which are becoming ubiquitous on the Web.

The growing popularity of blogs make them appealing to businesses. Many companies are beginning to develop blogs that facilitate and support corporate communication, information, marketing, and customer service efforts. Blogs enable companies to share their knowledge and expertise about their products and services, build web traffic, and connect with existing and potential customers. Using blogs, companies can:

Attract Customers
Using blogs, companies can attract the attention of customers and potential customers. By developing creative, engaging, and interesting blogs companies can share information about their products and services, new developments, innovations, and anything else interesting that might be happening. Because blogs are current, customers and potential customers can get access to the most up-to-date information available. Having access to this information can make customers feel as though they have the inside scoop and are an immediate part of the company. This inside access can turn into a buzz on the Web if customers spread information that they have learned; this can generate additional interest in the company, as well as potential sales.

Serve Customers
Blogs are designed to facilitate conversation and engage users. They are useful communication tools for companies, especially in relation to customer service. Customers can access company blogs to look for answers to questions they might have, serving themselves. In addition, customers might write on a company blog, with a question or comment about a product or service. The company can then either respond with a post that answers the question or engages the customer in a conversation. Having these types of engaging, ongoing interactions with a company can help customers develop a feeling of investment in and satisfaction with the company, increasing the potential of them returning to the company in the future.

Blogs have the potential to enable companies to reach their customers and potential customers in creative, new ways. From regular company updates to being able to access specific product information, blogs enable companies to share information, as well as receive feedback from customers. Involving customers in these types of personal interactions can help to support customers’ images of companies, increase customer satisfaction, and lead to sales.

If you are considering developing a business blog, do consider that blogs need to be updated regularly to be of use to your customers. They can be more time consuming than traditional corporate websites to maintain. However, development and implementation can be done online without the need for developers or IT support to execute the process. Blogs are generally inexpensive to develop and maintain, and have the potential to reach far and wide.

Blogs can be excellent sales tools, very useful for customer service, and engaging for customers and you to use. Their potential is great; to make sure you make the most of it, you need to update regularly and listen to your customers’ feedback and needs.

10 Tips to Building a Great Small Business Team

2011-11-09T07:31:00.000-08:00

Source

It’s not always easy being the boss, but if you have a team of employees around you who are motivated to work to their full potential, you are in a great position to achieve success. Being a great employer does not always have to be about the size of the pay cheque or the number of perks you offer, the smaller things like creating a positive environment and paying attention to your employees’ needs can make all the difference.

Here are our top 10 tips to remember when looking to make the most of your workforce:

1. Hire Only When You Have a Reason

Once your business starts to gain momentum it is tempting to start hiring immediately; but do you have enough business to pay for a new employee? Do you have enough work to give them? Make sure you base your decision to expand your workforce on whether you really require the support.

2. Hire the Right People

Don’t rush into employing people just to fill a role. It’s important in a small business that the employees fit with the company and with each other. Determine the type of work you need the new person to do, they type of employee that person needs to be and how they will be able to enhance your business.

3. Hire Who You can Afford

If a potential employee is looking for the type of salary and benefits you can’t afford, don’t hire them. If you bring on someone who is not going to be satisfied with the position or salary, they will only stay around long enough to find the job they really want. It’s in the best interest of your business to take your time and find someone who will stay long term.

4. Build a Relationship with Your Employees

One of the many hats that you will wear as a small business owner is that of the human resources manager. From the day you hire an employee, you are responsible for getting to know them, their needs and their career goals. Building this relationship will encourage loyalty and motivation to help building your company with you.

5. Maintain a Balance

As well as your relationship with your employees, it is important to understand the relationships they have with each other. Learn about the rapport between each of your employees and how you need to balance each of their personalities and needs when working together.

6. Create a Positive Atmosphere

Your employees look to you for leadership. Being passionate and excited about your business is contagious. By cultivating this positive atmosphere amongst your employees, you will reap the rewards of a motivated and dedicated workforce.

7. Invest in Your Employees

As your business grows it is important help your employees grow their careers along with the business. Making this investment will not only make your employees feel valued, but will also encourage their own investment in your company.

8. Get your Employees Invested in the Business

Other than you, the people who know your business best of all are your employees. With different perspectives, experience and education they can bring new ideas and insights to help with business growth. Encouraging them make suggestions to the business, and then implementing those suggestions can help develop loyalty and offer job satisfaction.

9. Be the Boss Your Employees Need You to Be

It is important that as the leader of your business you take responsibility for your employees, think proactively about your business and motivate them with the vision you have for success, no matter the challenges your face.

10. Consult your Network

Your peers, suppliers, contacts and clients will all have an opinion about how you should expand and develop your team of employees. So ask them. Sometimes that outside opinion can be the key to realising the skill set or the type of person you need to take your business to success.

Entrepreneurs, get out of your basements

2011-11-07T12:31:00.000-08:00

BY: Sean Stanleigh

Living above a pizza joint doesn't cut it

In a profile by The London Free Press, the founder of Echidna Solutions Corp., Andrew McClenaghan, argues tech entrepreneurs need to get out of their basements to spur the growth of their businesses.

"There is no risk, there are zero dollars" with a home-based venture, he says.
In 2002, after graduating from the University of Waterloo, Mr. McClenaghan spent eight months on a project for a Toronto-based web company while while living in an apartment above a pizza joint in London, Ont. After a few more contracts, he moved into a duplex, which the Free Press dubbed a "version of the geek's basement."

Repeat calls from businesses started to come in, and Mr. McClenaghan says he realized it was time to move into a proper space. "I was looking for a big change. The duplex was not real. It was too sheltered, like a half attempt."

Experts love to tell entrepreneurs to get out of their comfort zones. Mr. McClenaghan is a poster boy for having actually done it. He found what he says was the only building in London's core selling for under $200,000, he bought it in 2008, he did a lot of the renovation work himself, and three years later he has outgrown the space and is already moving into a new one.

"It gave us credibility that we were not going to disappear tomorrow, which is part of the problem with this industry. If it takes zero dollars to start, it takes zero dollars to close."
Echidna has a staff of 14, and Mr. McClenaghan is aiming for 30.

Emulating the work of a number of small and mid-sized cities across Canada, London's city council has "approved the idea of creating a hub and incubator in the core that would house small technology micro-businesses in a heritage building," the Free Press reports.

It's a positive step, a nice bridge between the basement and a full-scale separate location, which can be expensive and intimidating for a micro business.

Economy devastates small businesses in Greece
Small shops, in many ways the lifeblood of the Greek economy, which relies on domestic demand, are shuttering by the day, the Economic Times reports. The heightened speculation that Greece might have to return to the drachma has given new impetus to the flood of money leaving Greek banks, destined to be deposited outside the country, stashed away in a house or car, and most certainly not spent. The Times leads with a jewelry shop owner named Tasos from a working-class Athens neighborhood who has not had a sale in more than three months, and who can no longer afford to pay his electricity bills. The effect on his small business, which he says may have to close, has been devastating. His customer owe him 14,000 euros and those he actually still sees are looking to pawn family heirlooms.

Take necessary steps to prevent poaching
A team of startup employees "must possess a more entrepreneurial spirit as they are not always large in size or have big budgets to fall back on," Morgan Norman, founder and CEO of WorkSimple, writes in a guest post for Mashable. There are a ton of work-related benefits, he says, including the opportunity to dive into a variety of business functions, and there's usually a lot of feedback and flexibility. The downside can include a lack of job security and less financial compensation. So, Mr. Norman asks, how can small businesses prevent their employees from getting poached?

Train them so that they don't feel lost and get fed-up quickly
Work as a team on identifying and prioritizing individual goals.
Individuals are expected to be self-starters, so help them improve and learn from mistakes.
 Provide employees with the resources to better their professional reputation.

Seven Entrepreneurial Lessons Learned on the Serengeti

2011-11-04T06:25:00.000-07:00

By: Jon Gelberg

A recent safari in the Serengeti was supposed to get my mind off of work. I figured that being thousands of miles away from the office, with no connectivity or even a phone, I would be able to completely detach myself from any thoughts relating to business.

Instead, as I was watching wildebeests, lion, elephants and zebras in their natural habitat, I couldn’t help but be struck by how much of their behavior reflects the competitive nature of an entrepreneurial business.

I know this probably sounds crazy, but hear me out.
Watching these animals fighting for survival, I was struck by how they were able to not just survive, but thrive by using many of the same tactics that are used by successful businesses. Whether it was watching lions stalking their prey, zebras and wildebeests co-existing to each other’s benefit, or even watching a vulture patiently waiting for a zebra to die, there were strategies in place that would work for almost any business in the world.

Let me give you a few examples:

1. Strong and Decisive Leadership Is Essential to Success
In virtually every species I observed, leadership was in the hands (hooves, paws?) of an alpha male or group of alpha males.

This kind of leadership resulted in efficient and orderly behaviors that benefited the group as a whole. When it was time to move to new territory, when it was time to rest, when it was time to eat were all determined by the alpha male. The rewards of leadership? The alpha was always the first to eat recently killed prey and, of course, the first to mate.

While I am not advocating this kind of autocratic leadership in business, I saw compelling evidence of how strong, decisive leadership can work to the benefit of the whole team. Forgive the pun, but there’s a reason why CEOs get the lion’s share of the profits.

2. When Opportunity Presents Itself, Jump In
I had a chance to see a zebra that had survived a lion attack, but just barely. As it bled from a wound on its left rear quarters, a vulture dropped in and crouched on the ground, barely 10 feet from the zebra. The vulture waited patiently for the zebra to die, just sitting and staring. I didn’t see the end of this drama, but I have the distinct feeling that the vulture did not go home hungry.

While I’m not saying that entrepreneurs should be vultures, they should be ready to pounce on opportunities when they arise. Keep your eyes open, stay on top of your competition, and jump right in when you see a weakness to exploit.

3. Don’t Be Too Proud to Take the Leftovers From the Big Boys
Hyenas are often portrayed as one of the lowest forms of animals. They tend to follow prides of lions (at a safe distance) and get their sustenance by waiting for the scraps left behind after the lions are finished with the animals they kill.

There are dozens of other scavengers in the wild who rely on the scraps left behind by the animals higher up on the food chain.

As an entrepreneur, being a “scavenger” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This is especially true when you are a service provider. You are going to have much larger competitors in your market, and they are going to get the bulk of the work from the largest clients. It’s a fact of life.

That doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of opportunities presented when the big boys are satisfied. Big competitors often don’t want to be bothered by smaller projects, and big clients always have smaller jobs they’ll give to smaller companies.

Entrepreneurs should see this as a chance to get your foot in the door. Take on the small project for the big client, do great work and you’ll find that the smaller projects will soon become bigger projects.

4. Find Ways to Survive in Difficult Times
Difficult times are built in to the life cycle on the Serengeti. Every year there is a dry season which tests the survival instincts of every species. Difficult times make for hard choices. Lions have been known to eat their own young. Elephants will cover many miles in a day just to find a drink of water. Weak members of the herd who can’t keep up are left behind to die.

No matter what business you are in, there will be difficult times. But even in the most difficult times, great entrepreneurs find ways to stay ahead. It may mean cutting down on overhead. It may mean being more creative with marketing and advertising budgets. It may just mean outworking the competition. Those who learn to adjust and adapt find ways to keep going.

Just as many animals fail to survive dry spells, so do many businesses. For the resident wildlife of the Serengeti, survival is a matter of life and death. Entrepreneurs who succeed in difficult times survive because of a “life and death” mentality.

5. Don’t Let Anything Get in Your Way
A common site on the Serengeti is acres of trees that are snapped in half or simply knocked over. Perplexed by this sight, I asked our Masai guide what the reason was.

“You’ll see soon enough,” was his cryptic response.

True to his word, he led us to a bend in the road where we could glimpse a herd of elephants coming in our direction. Because this was the tail end of the dry season, the elephants were in hot pursuit of water.
Nothing, I would soon see, would get in their way. Much larger than any elephants I had ever seen in a zoo, the males simply barreled through the trees, snapping them as if they were twigs. It was an awesome sight, but one that reminded me of the determination I had seen from many of the entrepreneurs I have known or worked with over the years. To get where you want to be, there are times you just have to push forward, having the confidence to knocking away obstacles as opposed to delicately sidestepping them.

6. Forge Mutually Beneficial Partnerships
One thing you learn about animals in the wild is that many species have natural partners. These partnerships (symbiotic relationships) work to the benefit of both species, playing a key role in their survival.
Any time you see a herd of zebras in the Serengeti, you are sure to find wildebeests close by. Why? The two groups work perfectly together. Both get their nutrition from grasses, but get it in very different ways. Zebras feed on tall grass, while the wildebeests eat short. The zebras clear away the tall grass for the wildebeests, which then munch on the shorter grass left behind.

Similarly, there are birds that get their sustenance by eating ticks found on larger, grazing animals. The larger animals are happy to be rid of the nuisance of the ticks, while the birds are happy for the meal.
As any entrepreneur knows, there will always be times when you need to rely on outside expertise to advance your business goals. While nature has chosen the “business partners” for the zebras, entrepreneurs have to be smart in choosing the service providers and consultants that work with their businesses. A great partner can be worth their weight in gold. A lousy one can damage or even destroy your business.

7. Cut the Deadwood
This may sound harsh, but nature can be harsh, and business can be harsh.
On the seventh morning of the safari, I had a chance to witness a large pond teeming with hippopotamus and another pond with just two hippos basking in a corner. Our Masai guide explained that the large pond was filled with a handful of alpha males and dozens of females, while the other pond was populated by two “loser males.”

The loser males had proved unable to protect the group and offered little in the way of getting food or procreating. As a result, they were forcibly banished.

Most every business, at one time or another, will have a few “losers” on staff. They don’t contribute, are usually unhappy, and are bad for the overall morale and performance of the company. While firing employees is one of the hardest things for an entrepreneur to do, failing to remove a bad employee is bad business.

Survival Skills

Survival in the Serengeti is a daily battle. Animals fight for sustenance, for power and for their very lives. In the wild, merely living to face another day is a victory.

In business, of course, survival has a very different meaning. But the tactics for surviving in the Serengeti can provide real lessons for those of us trying to keep our businesses not only afloat, but thriving.

Job Description for Accidental Entrepreneurs

2011-11-02T07:50:00.000-07:00

By: Jeff Cornwall

With the continued weak economy and little hope of recovery anytime soon, we can expect to see even more "accidental entrepreneurs" emerge. These are unemployed people whose best hope of generating income is to become self-employed or to start a business.

Ami Kassar is a typical accidental entrepreneur. Kassar had spent a decade in senior management with a large, national credit card company based in Philadelphia. When the recession hit in 2008, he suddenly found himself unemployed. His employer did not survive the recession-induced shakeout in the financial industry.

Finding a new job that was similar to his old one did not look very promising, so Kassar decided to launch a business. He started Multifunding, which helps small businesses find debt financing.

Like most entrepreneurs, Kassar faced challenges in the startup of his venture. However, many of his missteps can be traced back to habits and expectations that came directly from his years of working in a corporate setting.

So let me offer a brief job description of an entrepreneur to help those of you who, like Kassar, are facing a career transition:

1. Do everything. The temptation when you start a business is to continue to concentrate on what you did well in the corporate world and bring others in to take care of the rest. However, to build a successful business you need to learn every aspect of your business and perform every job. You need to know the business inside and out, from top to bottom.

2. Become a financial wizard. Set up a sound record-keeping system. Be your own bookkeeper for as long as you can. Just as you need to know every aspect of the operation of the business, you also need to know the numbers. The best way to do this is to make the financial aspects of the business a major part of your job.

3. Minimize overhead. The temptation is to surround yourself with the comforts you had in the corporate world -- a nice desk, a new car, a big office, support staff, and the newest and best gadgets. However, paying for all that overhead is what stands in the way of your bringing home a paycheck. So start lean, bootstrap whenever possible and make operating frugally a part of the culture of your business as it grows.

4. Watch your cash flow. As the old saying goes, "The leading cause of business failure is running out of cash." Learn the rhythm of your cash flow. Watch every expense like a hawk. Treat every dollar as iff it might be your last.

5. Schedule balance. Startups quickly become all-consuming. They can take up every waking moment if you let them. Build time in your life for those things that really matter -- your family and your friends.

Fortunately, Ami Kassar is an accidental entrepreneur who is making a successful transition out of a corporate career. Multifunding is now growing and doing well.

To be successful, accidental entrepreneurs have to develop new work habits and an understanding of what the job of an entrepreneur is really all about.

TEDtalks: Tony Robbins: Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better

2011-10-31T09:00:00.000-07:00

Tony Robbins discusses the "invisible forces" that make us do what we do

Small Business News: The Entrepreneur in Review

2011-10-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

By Small Business News

No matter who you are or what you do, small business owners and entrepreneurs are the same in our book. Some may grow their ventures from small businesses to large ones. Some may seek venture or angel funding while others bootstrap or rely on the funds of family and friends. Some may stay small lean and mean or “mom and pop” operations forever. All are part of the risk taking, innovative bunch who really keep the economy pumping day to day. Sometimes we like to step back. To really have a look at the entrepreneur in his/her environment. What makes you tick and what forces are impacting you today. Have we missed any important trends below? Please leave us a comment.

Trends

Multitasking a myth? Though it may be one of the holy grails of modern professionalism a recent study suggests trying to do two things or even more at once is just plain crazy. Can you get more than one thing done in a day? Sure, but you may have to take them one at a time. A note to you entrepreneurs out there who love to try and multitask. You’ll get more done if you approach projects one by one. Smart About Things

Taxes

Great tax tips for the small business entrepreneur. The end of the year is coming and with it the end of your current fiscal year. You’ll have a few months to get your papers in order, of course, at least here in the U.S. But the decisions you make between now and December 31 will pretty much determine how those taxes must be prepared. Here are 23 simple tips that will have your business ending the year on the best possible note. Simplicity Mastered

The difference between a tax credit and a tax deduction. And speaking of the end of the tax year and your small business, here is a post that looks at the differences between two kinds of tax ideas, the deduction and the credit. Understanding the differences between these and their proper uses can be an important part of an entrepreneur’s or self-employed person’s financial education. Personal Dividends

Self-development

How being tapped out can affect your business. Be aware that, when the strain is getting to you, it can hurt your small business too. Don’t make the mistake of believing the two aren’t connected. Follow business coach Ellen St. George Godfrey as she leads you through the impact stress can have on you and your business…and some solutions to get both of you back on track again. Ability Success Growth

Customer Service

How customer service can make your business memorable. Isn’t it interesting how great customer service can create memorable branding as well? The companies mentioned in this post are amongst the most recognizable worldwide including Amazon and Starbucks. But how much of this is marketing and how much of this is just treating the customer right? What can your small business learn as a result. Free From Broke

SEO

Online marketing of the future. A substantial amount of marketing for many small businesses now and in the future will increasingly be online. To this end, knowing the direction that online marketing is headed, particularly Search Engine Optimization, is an important part of most any entrepreneur’s eduction. Here is a look at the changing landscape. Creative Development

Online Video

Can online video generate sales? Massive ones, thank you. In fact,one example of an education video (created for free) to educate viewers about the importance of investing in silver worked so well, the company that launched the campaign eventually ran out of stock. Online video marketing need not be expensive but can be hugely effective. Are you using online video today? Catalyst Marketers

Mobile

In mobile as in social media, don’t push your brand. Mobile, like social media, is about creating a presence and establishing value. But if it gets to be too much about just plastering your brand on yet another medium (as with TV, billboards, radio etc.) it’s just not likely to work out that well, experts say. So what is the best way to use mobile marketing to benefit your brand? The Lunch Pail

Marketing

Creating a ruthless marketing strategy. No, it’s never about being ruthless in the way you market to prospects or the way you treat your customers. Creating a ruthless marketing strategy means being ruthless in cutting out marketing activities that don’t achieve your central marketing goals. Why make the cuts? Because these activities may take time and resources away from activities that are much more effective in reaching your marketing goals. M4B Marketing

Think marketing isn’t an important part of your business mix? The best marketing is still a great product or service and great customer service as we’ve said before. But it turns out that’s still marketing and, as an entrepreneur, you had better be ready and able to do it. Spreading the word about your great product or service is a huge part of what successful businesses do. What plans do you have for sharing your awesomeness with the world? MyWifeQuitHerJob.com

The Must Have Leadership Skill

2011-10-25T07:06:00.000-07:00

Daniel Goleman

"We hired a new CEO, but had to let him go after just seven months," the chairman of an East Coast think tank complained to me recently. "His resume looked spectacular, he did splendidly in all the interviews. But within a week or two we were hearing pushback from the staff. They were telling us, 'You hired a first-rate economist with zero social intelligence.' He was pure command and control."

The think tank's work centers on interlocking networks of relationships with the board, staff, donors, and a wide variety of academics and policy experts. The CEO urgently needed to manage those relationships, but lacked the interpersonal skills that organizations increasingly need in their leaders. A CEO who fails to navigate those relationships artfully, the think tank's board saw, could torpedo the organization.

Why does social intelligence emerge as the make-or-break leadership skill set? For one, leadership is the art of accomplishing goals through other people.

As I've written with my colleague Richard Boyatzis, technical skills and self-mastery alone allow you to be an outstanding individual contributor. But to lead, you need an additional interpersonal skill set: you've got to listen, communicate, persuade, collaborate.

That was brought home to me yet again reading "Making Yourself Indispensable," by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, and Scott E. Edinger, which makes the strong point that a leader's competencies are synergistic. The more different competencies a leader displays at strength, the greater her business results.

But there's another critically important rule-of-thumb: some competencies matter more than others, particularly at the higher levels of leadership. For C-level executives, for example, technical expertise matters far less than the art of influence: you can hire people with great technical skills, but then you've got to motivate, guide and inspire them.

While Zenger, Folkman, and Edinger make a strong empirical case that competencies matter, it overlooks a crucial point: some competencies matter more than others. Specifically, there are threshold competencies, the abilities every leader needs to some degree, and then there are distinguishing competencies, the abilities you find only in the stars.

You can be the most brilliant innovator, problem-solver or strategic thinker, but if you can't inspire and motivate, build relationships or communicate powerfully, those talents will get you nowhere. What Zenger and colleagues call the "interpersonal skills" — and what I call social intelligence — are the secret sauce in top-performing leadership.

Lacking social intelligence, no other combination of competences is likely to get much traction. Along with whatever other strengths they may have, the must-have is social intelligence.

So how do you spot this skill set? An executive with a long track record of satisfactory hires told me how his organization assessed social intelligence in a prospect during the round of interviews, group sessions, meals, and parties that candidates there routinely went through.

"We'd watch carefully to see if she talks to everyone at the party or a dinner, not just the people who might be helpful to her," he said. One of the social intelligence indicators: during a getting-to-know you conversation, does the candidate ask about the other person or engage in a self-centered monologue? At the same time, does she talk about herself in a natural way? At the end of the conversation, you should feel you know the person, not just the social self she tries to project.

I wouldn't use such subjective measures alone — you're better off to combine them with best practices on hiring without firing. But don't ignore your gut.

Keeping Your Small Business Ahead of the Curve

2011-10-24T09:23:00.000-07:00

By Small Business News

Keeping your small business ahead of the curve in a competitive economy is no easy task. It requires a lot of attention to detail, for example, carefully examining your small business and looking for any areas where efficiency or productivity can be improved. There are lots of ways to stay competitive. Read our roundup for tips and other important news for your small business.

Operations

How to stay ahead of the curve and be successful. To truly stay ahead of the curve, you must do better and be more thorough than everybody else. This usually means putting in more worthwhile effort than your competitors. To accomplish this, you must set your own standards, ones that surpass the norm, find the need that isn’t being met and pursue it, do things better than everybody else and go the extra mile. Finally, do the new and unexpected and do it well. Following these suggestions will help you dominate the field. Open Forum

Why content marketing is still king. Surveys show that content marketing now surpasses all other types of marketing. Content marketing has gained popularity due to its ability to economically bring in meaningful leads in a controlled environment. Entrepreneur

Strategy

Take a close look at your website. Is it designed around one product or service or is it designed to attract customers who will take a look at you and want to be associated with you over a long period of time? The problem with the former is that you will have to find new customers all the time. Instead, help your customers look at how using your product or service will help them expand their business. Small Business Brief

10 secrets of successful leaders. The author quotes Eleanor Roosevelt, “A good leader inspires people to have confidence in the leader, a great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves.” You have a great idea for a new product. You develope it, set up your small business, line up your financing, market your product and started selling. But how will your organization operate? How will you lead and develop your employees? The article discusses ten ideas gathered from successful leaders that you should consider. Entrepreneur

Management

Who really pays the bill for unemployment insurance? The money is paid out by the state but businesses pay the bill. The bill is based on your employment record. The more lay-offs or firing “without cause” incidents you have, the higher the cost of insurance will be. While poor economic conditions that result in lay-offs are certainly a large contributing factor, your interviewing and hiring policies and their effectiveness also play a large role. Poor hiring practices that result in your having to let people go because they don’t work out still entitles them to unemployment compensation, and you pay the bill. While you may not be able to control the economy, you can and should work on having effective interviewing and hiring practices. You’re the Boss

Five Rules for Building Strong Connections. The importance of good networking can not be overstated for the entrepreneur starting his new venture. It is vital that he/she start building a network no later than when he starts building his product. The entrepreneur must make a list of what has to be done to develop the network and what type of people he will need to execute this plan. In the early stages of both product development and network development, use available resources as guidelines. For the best use of your time, be sure you are building your network with people who both you can help and who can help you. Finally, try to network with people who know, trust, and like you. Only then will your network be useful. Entrepreneur

Finance

Ditching debt. Here are seven small business owners who have chosen to operate their businesses debt free. They show us how being beholden to no one fits in with their entrepreneurial spirit. It certainly appears to be a way of keeping stress at a lower level, but it does limit the speed at which you can expand. CNNMoney

Four common startup money mistakes. Good financial management is imperative when starting a new business. One area in which new startups fail is in having an accurate estimate of their startup costs. Most people underestimate. Another mistake is the failure to establish a marketing budget. Every new business is different and the marketing plan and budget must be tailored to the business. Still, another area where new businesses fall short is in choosing the type of organizational structure that will maximize their tax savings. Finally, the new business owner usually spends too much money on nonessentials. Even if they have a loan to start their business, they must keep their overhead low and resist frivolous spending on nonessentials. Entrepreneur

Trends

Why the recovery eludes small business. There is no question that many businesses suffered and had to lay people off during this recession. The question is why the percentage of people losing their jobs was greater among small businesses. The tightening of available credit and the sectors of the economy most affected certainly hurt small businesses more than larger companies. Many small business owners used home equity loans for their companies and when the housing market collapsed, the value of their homes and subsequently their available credit disappeared. Larger companies were more involved in exporting and research and development which were less affected by the recession. Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Small retailers cross their fingers for holiday sales. Small retailers are afraid that another holiday season where deep discounting is required to promote sales will be difficult to survive. They do not have the bulk purchasing power or the cash reserves that the large retailers have and which is necessary to weather these difficult economic times. WSJ

Is Social Media putting you at risk?

2011-10-19T09:33:00.000-07:00

by Mark Glucki

I use social media everyday, at work and at home. I use it when I get up and have coffee, heading to working, going to meetings, in meetings, at lunch, on the way home, while running, while riding my bike, while watching tv, while sleeping, you get the picture. So am I actually at risk? I personally don’t think so. It’s all in how you approach it, and by learning best practices to avoid attacks and using the tools we have at the office to mitigate those risks, I think we’re in a pretty safe zone. But we always have to keep on top of what’s going on out there, and be one step ahead.

Here’s an article from the Mindshift newsletter that talks about risks associated with social media. Do you use social media in business and what do you think about the risks?

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCT 13, 2011:

Social Media is quickly taking hold as a valuable corporate communication tool, and at the same time it is introducing new security risks that most organizations are unaware of. Is Social Media putting your organization in danger?

Every day we hear more about the risks of malware, internet attacks and zero day threats — the gap between the launch of an application and identifying its vulnerabilities. Social Media has widened the field from which security threats can be launched. According to a 2011 Information Week survey, 76% of IT and security professionals believe their company is more vulnerable to attacks today than one year ago, because now there are more ways to attack a corporate network.

“Hackers, or ‘hacktivists,’ can use Social Media to try to figure out as much about a target as they can, and we as a society have been very generous in telling people where we are, what we are doing and so on,” explains Rick Hayes, senior principal consultant, Dell SecureWorks, which partners with Allstream to provide Managed Security Services.

A recent study by Amplitude Inc., commissioned by VanDyke Software, surveyed network administrators’ greatest concerns about employee use of Social Media. The responses show the scope of potential threats: viruses, data leaks and intrusion were each cited by 19% of respondents, while carelessness and malware were each mentioned by 9%, and privacy risk by 6%.

While some businesses have taken a strict approach and banned employee use of Social Media, others don’t want to forgo the advantages of these tools, such as enhanced collaboration among employees and greater job satisfaction. It’s a challenge to determine what is best for an organization.

Minimize the risk

“In terms of protection from threats from Social Media, one way for businesses to minimize their risk is to simply not allow it, but if they do allow it then they need to have well-defined corporate policies in place and ensure that their employees are well-versed on their Social Media code of conduct,” says Craig Deveau, senior product manager for Managed Security Services at Allstream.

If in the end an organization chooses to allow Social Media use by employees, then the critical issues are in identifying potential threats and managing them. Failure to do so can be costly.

“In certain cases, if confidential information inadvertently becomes public it can be very harmful to a business, such as impacting company share prices or providing sensitive information to competitors,” Deveau notes.
In fact, the average organizational cost of a data breach in the U.S. in 2010 was $7.2 million, according to a study conducted by the Ponemon Institute.

On the other end of the spectrum from organizations that ban Social Media are those that treat them like an “online cocktail party,” according to Focus, a network of leading business and technology experts. Organizations that treat Social Media in a casual manner leave themselves exposed, as though they were in a “loud glass house: a place with endless visibility and each occupant talking through a highly amplified bullhorn,” says the Focus article. Endless visibility can translate into endless vulnerability.

Identify the issues

Ultimately, when using Social Media, people can be left exposed and potentially vulnerable, as can their organizations. Some of the key risks include:

Mobile applications: It is dangerous to assume that the apps employees download are risk-free. “Mobile devices are one of the biggest issues now,” says Hayes. “You can get malware on your phone, and remember, your phone is just like a mini computer.” The risk of using mobile devices such as tablets and smart phones to engage in Social Media activity is that employees can do so outside corporate firewalls. IT/security departments have limited ability to control this usage unless they are able to extend their network security to include them. To demonstrate the scope of the threat, according to security vendor McAfee, the number of pieces of mobile malware grew by 46% in 2010.
Weak or no policy: Failure to have a strict Social Media policy stating goals, rules and restrictions can place an organization at risk.
Employees: Staffers are a potential source of vulnerability, and their intent needn’t be malicious. A seemingly innocent comment, once circulated, cannot be controlled. Add to that the threat posed by unhappy employees.

The growing use of Social Media has increased the scope of threats to organizations, many of which don’t understand the extent of their vulnerability. “There isn’t anybody who doesn’t have to worry about it,” Hayes warns of the dangers posed by Social Media. “Saying your company is not vulnerable is incredibly myopic.”
Once these threats are recognized as genuine, key defensive strategies include thorough staff training, strict policies, and, depending on the size of the organization, designating trained people to oversee the Social Media environment.

Top 5 reasons your business needs a charity now.

2011-10-17T07:03:00.000-07:00

by Leanne Schmidt

Like most humans, business type people are looking for a sense of purpose. A way to make a difference and create positive change in the world. Unfortunately we aren’t all doctors. Take a lesson from Oprah, and use your talents to benefit the less fortunate. It doesn’t matter if you’re a web developer, cupcake baker or an international box factory, charitable work is something you can get involved in right now.

Here are the top 5 reasons why your business needs a charity:

1. Helping people in need. (Duh.)
This reason is a no-brainer. Donate some of your business’s money, time, knowledge, skills, products, or services to benefit the less fortunate. I’m willing to bet there will be a charity out there who can use your business to leverage their charitable work. For example, you could use your marketing skills to help solicit donations for a local homeless shelter. Or you could donate cash to a charity selected by your employee of the month.

2. Finding a sense of purpose.
Every day we are bombarded with advertising. Grabs for our attention and money. After awhile it clouds and even poisons our brains! To balance the consumeristic vibes and find a sense of purpose in this world, donate some of your spare time or money to a local charity. Shelters and soup kitchens often call out for specific items each week such as toothbrushes, coffee or potatoes. An idea: send out a tweet to your network calling out for these items, drive around picking up donations and drop them off at the shelter. Feels good doesn’t it?

3. Meeting new people.
With charity work, you’re bound to meet new and interesting people. Like-minded folks who care about the community as much as you do. I’ve met a few wonderful friends through volunteer gigs, and even a new client. But Seth Godin explains the benefit of charity better than I ever could: “Being part of the community is worth more than [your donation] costs.”

4. Tax benefits.
Certain types of donations qualify for a charitable tax credit. The Canada Revenue Agency lists a few examples of donations that do usually qualify for charitable tax credits including:

money
securities
ecologically sensitive land
certified cultural property
capital property
personal-use property (such as prints, etchings, drawings, paintings, sculptures, jewellery, rare folios, rare manuscripts, rare books, stamps, and coins)
inventory (such as art, antiques, rare books).

According to the CRA, the following do not usually qualify for charitable tax credits:

contributions of services, such as time, skills, effort
certain admission fees to events or to programs (e.g., fees for daycare or nursery school facilities)
the purchase price of a lottery ticket or other chance to win a prize, even though the lottery proceeds benefit one or more charities
the payment of tuition fees (exceptions exist)

Learn more about charitable tax credits, how to help victims of a disaster, and how to avoid donation fraud and scams here.

5. Cause marketing.
While this shouldn’t really be the reason for getting involved, your business will often get recognized for donating to a charity. This could be a link on the charity donor webpage, a mention at the AGM, or simply a word of mouth reference. By getting involved in charity work, your business will inevitably end up looking good. Learn more about this by reading the “Top 10 Cause Marketing Campaigns of 2010”.

What kind of charity work is your business doing? What have you learned? Please share your stories in the comments.

Data backup: The cloud knows all and rescues all

2011-10-09T08:14:00.000-07:00

LEAH McLAREN

One night last week I awoke to the sound of shattering glass. It was 2 a.m. and I was alone in my apartment, a ground-floor flat in a quiet London neighbourhood. Without stopping to think, I found myself charging out of bed to meet my intruder in a T-shirt. “No, no, no, you don’t!” I howled, along with various other obscenities unprintable here. I did not pause to grab my phone or the cricket bat I keep by my bed precisely in case of such situations.

I had something more important than physical safety on my mind. Stupidly, recklessly, I’d left my laptop on my desk near the window and forgotten to close all the blinds. My laptop contains every single non-essential physical element that matters to me in the world: My photos, my music, my office records, contracts and contacts; all my work for the past 10 years, including two novels, three screenplays and countless pieces of journalism in infinite drafts and stages of research. My laptop is how I talk on the phone and watch movies and book flights and figure out directions from here to there. It’s just a thing, of course, but it’s the thing that makes a transient, freelance writer’s life like mine possible.

But by the time I made it to my office, all that was left of the thief was a half-drawn window blind swaying over a puddle of broken glass. On my desk where the computer once sat was a huge heap of potting soil, the contents of an outdoor herb planter that had been used to smash the window. A pile of dirt where all my interior life used to be.

I called the police, the window repairman and my landlord, all of whom were kind enough to turn up in the middle of night. I dealt with the necessary crap, giving the cops a full report and offering the forensics detective a cup of tea, but all I could think of was my laptop, lost forever in the underworld of second-hand electronics. “Is there a pawn shop around here I should check?” I asked the policewoman. She looked at me liked I’d just asked her to hail me a horse-drawn carriage, then suggested I check Gumtree (a Craigslist-like service). “But don’t worry,” she added, “they probably have wiped your hard-drive clean by now anyway.”
Eventually everyone left and I locked the window gates and went back to bed. Lying there wide awake I suddenly remembered the automatic back-up service my friend Jon had convinced me to sign up for a couple of months back. Everything on my computer would now be “in the cloud,” he’d explained. At the time I wasn’t even sure what he meant, but he seemed so emphatic that I couldn’t refuse. I paid my $50 and signed up – what could it hurt? – and promptly forgot all about it.

The next day I bought a new laptop (thank you, insurance people) and Googled the cloud thingy. And lo – there was my life, all backed up in its weird digital brain. My music, my family vacation pics, the third draft of my second novel. I broke down and cried with relief.

My techie friends (like Jon) were unimpressed by this story. “Everyone’s working in the cloud now,” they said, “you’d be crazy not to.”

My non-techie friends, when they heard the story of the break-in, gasped and said, “Did you have an external hard-drive?”

And then this week, Apple launched iCloud, a service that stores all your data, syncs it up with various devices and is free to all users. “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to being just a device,” Steve Jobs said in one of his famous keynotes speeches at the Worldwide Developers Conference this week. “We’re going to move the digital hub, the centre of your digital life, in the cloud.”

Apple described the iCloud on its website as a service that is integrated with apps and “stores all your content and wirelessly pushes it to all your devices.” In essence, it’s Big Brother, the National Archives, your family photo album and God combined in one.

From where I stand today (day four of file restoration) the cloud is a small miracle. But it’s also creepy. It means that, instead of storing things on your computer’s brain, you store them in the ether. This, in turn, means that the ether – the Big Brother eye – has constant access to read and record what’s in your computer. It is the next great step – if not the logical conclusion – in the digital era’s invasion of personal privacy. But it is also admittance of the great Buddhist truth: That attachment to material objects is hopeless. It is death. Like notebooks and external hard drives and books and CDs and photo albums, the quill pen and my laptop. Dead, gone, stolen.

But the ideas, the thoughts, the stories, continue and are stored, first in the culture – think of T.S. Eliot’s intertexuality, Northrop Frye’s Great Code – and now, quite literally, in the cloud.
The truth of course, is that I’d really like my stuff back. I gave the police my serial number and I’ll take a look on Gumtree. In the meantime (which will probably be forever and ever) I’m perfectly content to live in the cloud.

The Power of Team Work

2011-10-04T11:34:00.000-07:00

by Maggie Craddock

Few people realize that a group can accomplish what an individual alone cannot do — even when it comes to individual advancement. If you want the next promotion, you have to elbow that hardworking colleague next to you out of the way, right? Wrong. Here's a true story that shows you why.
It started when I sat across from three courteous, poised, but frustrated female investment bankers over a decade ago.

"We need a coach," said the young banker named Cindy (names have been changed), while her colleagues Leslie and Amy nodded in agreement.

"It's not just the three of us," Leslie added. "The three of us are the selection committee. There are fifteen of us who want coaching, and our job is to pick a coach that can work with the whole group."

As it turned out, all fifteen members of the group had been passed over for promotion within the last year. Amy said, "We don't want to litigate, and we don't want to change firms. We like each other, and we like working here. However, we don't want to be overlooked anymore. If someone can tell us what it takes to get ahead, we're ready to do it."

These fifteen women become my first coaching group. Over a decade later, I'm still reflecting on what this group of talented bankers taught me about power, trust, and teamwork.

The first step in our coaching was establishing each member's personal power style. Through exploring the four core power styles of the Pleaser, the Charmer, the Commander, and the Inspirer, each member of this group learned how to play to her strengths and minimize her blind spots on the job.

But they took it a step further. When looking for people who have the potential to make it to the C-suite, many seasoned business leaders have told me that they look for people who are able to move beyond an understanding of how to be personally powerful, and embrace the ability to support others. The key to embodying this quality on the job this isn't just thinking about how to motivate or advance others. It's about experiencing situations with them that foster a spirit of trust.

In order to do this, the participants started to role-play their habitual responses to challenges ranging from satisfying a demanding boss to managing a troublesome subordinate in front of the group. These women would often sit back and watch as other group members volunteered to act out how people with a different power style might respond to the same situation. It was fascinating to watch how insightful a group could be as they pondered each other's career challenge together. Each woman was given a new perspective and approach to consider that might not have occurred to her without the team's input. What's more, as the group members developed a sense of each other personally as well as professionally, their collective intuition for giving each other advice on how to approach tricky situations evolved at an amazing pace.

Over our six months together, as they celebrated their victories and supported each other when they faced setbacks, it's not surprising that the participants became increasing committed to supporting each other at a human level. As this group developed a bond of trust through learning to appreciate the value of each other's power styles, they began to embody a team spirit that went beyond collaboration. Their genuine commitment to bringing out the best in each other began to cause each of them, as individuals, to exude type of confidence and professional tone that supported their professional advancement.

And the results spoke for themselves. After the first four women from the coaching group got promoted, the company's Chairman gave me some news that had stunned him after meeting them for lunch. "These women completely disarmed me," he said. "While they thanked me for my support, they spent most of the lunch letting me know how talented the remaining women from their group were that hadn't been promoted yet. I can't even fault them for lack of killer instinct because they took no prisoners when they asked me what they could do with me to make sure that each woman's manager understood the value she was bringing to the organization."

Fostering a spirit of trust is critical for drawing out the best in any group. Discovering one another's power styles and how they interact in various situations can be a learning experience for everyone — and it's the first step in becoming a powerful peer mentor for growth.

Retailers slash prices on RIM’s PlayBook tablet

2011-09-26T13:28:00.000-07:00

omar el akkad

Research In Motion's PlayBook has just gotten a lot cheaper.

Retailers from Wal-Mart to Best Buy have begun slashing prices on RIM's (22.340.361.64%) first tablet computer, which has suffered from disappointing sales since its release in April.

Numerous online and retail stores are putting lower-priced PlayBooks on their shelves this week. At Best Buy's Canadian website, the tablets are on sale for $100 off (The three flavours of PlayBook, which differ only in the amount of on-board memory, normally start at about $500). In other stores, such as some American Wal-Mart locations, that discount also comes with another $100 in the form of a gift card or mail-in rebate.

In a quarterly earnings call earlier this month, RIM's co-CEOs indicated such price drops were coming, after PlayBook sales came in well below analyst expectations – for the last quarter, analysts predicted RIM would sell about 500,000 units, but the actual number was just 200,000.

In an e-mail to The Globe and Mail, a RIM spokeswoman said that, technically, the PlayBook hasn't undergone a price drop.

“The official retail price of BlackBerry PlayBook has not changed. However, as mentioned on the Q2 earnings call on Sept. 15th, we have a number promotional plans in place for the fall with our retail partners that are intended to drive sell-through and increased adoption of the BlackBerry PlayBook,” the spokeswoman said.

It remains to be seen whether the lower-priced PlayBook gets consumers interested in the device again. So far, no tablet has managed to steal much of the consumer market share from Apple's iPad, which is estimated to account for about seven of every 10 tablets sold in North America.

TED Talks: Terry Moore on how to tie your shoes

2011-09-26T10:56:00.000-07:00

All these years we have been tying shoes and teaching others to tie shoes - it's been the inefficient way of securing our laces. Just goes to show that just because we've always done something one way, that there isn't a better way if we shift our thinking!

Eight Ways to Communicate Your Strategy More Effectively

2011-09-06T05:09:00.000-07:00

By: Georgia Everse

A frustrated CEO recently shared with me that her employees had lost their edge. They were internally focused, their speed-to-market was down, and they couldn't find a good balance between serving customers well while making healthy margins. The result was slow progress against the company strategy and an inability to profitably deliver on the value proposition. She had attempted to motivate employees and be clear about the strategy, but she was falling short and was looking for answers on what to do next. The solution in many cases is to overhaul internal communications strategies in order to convince employees of the authenticity, importance, and relevance of their company's purpose and strategic goals. Here are just a few communications approaches that will help you effectively reach your employees and encourage behaviors that advance your strategy and improve your results.

1. Keep the message simple, but deep in meaning.

Most organizations have a deeper meaning as to why they exist. This tends to influence strategy, decision-making and behaviors at executive levels, but often isn't well articulated for employees. What you call it doesn't matter, your purpose, your why, your core belief, your center. What does matter is that you establish its relevance with employees in a way that makes them care more about the company and about the job they do. It should be at the core of all of your communications, a simple and inspiring message that is easy to relate to and understand. Strategy-specific messages linked to your purpose become tools to help employees connect their day-to-day efforts with the aspiration of the company.

2. Build behavior based on market and customer insights

For employees to fully understand how your strategy is different and better than the competition they need to be in touch with market realities. The challenge is in how to effectively convey those realities so that your people can act on them. By building internal campaigns based on market and customer insights, you bring your strategy to life for your employees through this important lens. Package your content so that it can be shared broadly with all departments in your organization, but in a hands-on way. Expose managers first then provide them with easy-to-implement formats for bringing their teams together, with toolkits that include all the materials they'll need. The purpose is to encourage their teams to develop department-specific responses, and to generate new ideas and new behaviors based on what they've learned.

3. Use the discipline of a framework.

Not all messages are created equal. They need to be prioritized and sequenced based on their purpose. I suggest using an Inspire/Educate/Reinforce framework to map and deliver messages on an annual basis.

Inspire. Messages that inspire are particularly important when you are sharing a significant accomplishment or introducing a new initiative that relates to your strategy. The content should demonstrate progress against goals, showcase benefits to customers, and be presented in a way that gets attention and signals importance. The medium is less important than the impression that you want to leave with employees about the company. Whether you're looking to build optimism, change focus, instill curiosity, or prepare them for future decisions, you'll have more impact if you stir some emotion and create a lasting memory.

Educate. Once you've energized your team with inspiring messages, your explanations of the company's strategic decisions and your plans for implementing them should carry more weight. To educate your teams most effectively on the validity of your strategy and their role in successful execution, make sure you provide job-specific tools with detailed data that they can customize and apply in their day-to-day responsibilities. It is most important for these messages to be delivered through dialogues rather than monologues, in smaller group sessions where employees can build to their own conclusions and feel ownership in how to implement.

Reinforce. It isn't enough to explain the connection between your company's purpose and its strategy — and between that strategy and its execution — once. You'll need to repeat the message in order to increase understanding, instill belief and lead to true change overtime. These reinforcing messages need to come in a variety of tactics, channels, and experiences and I've highlighted some approaches below. Ultimately, they serve to immerse employees in important content and give them the knowledge to confidently connect to the strategy. You'll also want to integrate these messages with your training and your human resource initiatives to connect them with employee development & performance metrics. Recognize and reward individuals and teams who come up with smart solutions and positive change.

4. Think broader than the typical CEO-delivered message. And don't disappear.

Often corporate communications has a strictly top-down approach. I've found that dialogue at the grassroots is just as important, if not more so. Employees are more likely to believe what leaders say when they hear similar arguments from their peers, and conversations can be more persuasive and engaging than one-way presentations. Designate a team of employees to serve as ambassadors responsible for delivering important messages at all levels. Rotate this group annually to get more people involved in being able to represent the strategy inside the company. And when the message comes from leadership, make sure it's from your most visible, well-regarded leaders. Another mistake is the "big launch event and disappear" approach. Instead, integrate regular communications into employee's daily routines through detailed planning against the messages mapped in your Inspire/Educate/Reinforce framework.

5. Put on your "real person" hat.

And take off your "corporate person/executive" hat. The fact is, not many people are deeply inspired by the pieces of communication that their companies put out. Much of it ignores one of the most important truths of communication — and especially communication in the early 21st century: be real. "Corporate speak" comes off hollow and lacking in meaning. Authentic messages from you will help employees see the challenges and opportunities as you see them and understand and care about the direction in which you're trying to take the company.

6. Tell a story.

Facts and figures won't be remembered. Stories and experiences will. Use storytelling as much as possible to bring humanity to the company and to help employees understand the relevance of your strategy and real-life examples of progress and shortfalls against it. Ask employees to share stories as well, and use these as the foundation for dialogues that foster greater understanding of the behaviors that you want to encourage and enhance versus those that pose risks. Collectively these stories and conversations will be a strong influence on positive culture-building behavior that relates to your core purpose and strategic goals.

7. Use 21st-century media and be unexpected.

The delivery mechanism is as important and makes as much of a statement as the content itself. Most corporate communications have not been seriously dusted off in a while, and the fact is, the way people communicate has changed tremendously in the past five years. Consider the roles of social media, networking, blogs, and games to get the word out in ways that your employees are used to engaging in. Where your message shows up also says a lot. Aim to catch people somewhere that they would least expect it. Is it in the restroom? The stairwell? On their mobile phone?

8. Make the necessary investment.

Most executives recognize how important their employee audience is. They are the largest expense to the company. They often communicate directly with your customers. They single-handedly control most perceptions that consumers have about the brand. So if this is a given, why are we so reluctant to fund internal communication campaigns? I suggest asking this question: What am I willing to invest per employee to help them internalize our strategy and based on that understanding, determine what they need to do to create a differentiated market experience for our customers? Do the math and set your hoped-for ROI high whether it is financial performance or positive shifts in behavior and culture. If you choose not to invest be certain of the risk. If you don't win over employees first, you certainly won't succeed in winning with customers, as they ultimately hold that relationship in their hands.

Where Are Your Future Leaders?

2011-08-31T06:48:00.000-07:00

According to a survey by OI Partners, a leading global career transition and executive coaching firm:

54% of companies in the survey said they do not have enough qualified successors now working for them to succeed their executives and managers

Only 32% of companies report currently having enough management successors in place

4% of companies are not sure whether they have enough future leaders already in their organizationsSOURCE: OI Partners Survey (2009)

Leading Views: Four Ways to Change

2011-08-25T06:43:00.000-07:00

We know what to do to make people happy at work says Brian Tracy. The problem is that we either forget to do those things that make people happy, neglect to do them because we are distracted by other things, refuse to do them because we don’t understand their importance, or, worst of all, do things that actually make people unhappy and then justify our behavior with self-righteous excuses and rationalizations.

To make people feel really happy about themselves, you don’t have to change your entire personality or become a completely different person, you simply have to treat them exactly the way you would like to be treated, over and over again, until it becomes a series of automatic and easy behaviors for you.

There are only four ways that you can change anything about yourself, your life, your work, or your relationships with others:

You can do more of certain things. What should you be doing more of to build a positive, upbeat, happy work environment?
You could do less of other things. What should you be doing less of if you want people to feel wonderful about themselves every day?
You could start doing something that you are not doing today. What things should you start doing that would cause people to feel happier about themselves and their work?
You could stop certain behaviors altogether. What are the things that you are doing on a regular basis that you should discontinue?

If you are not sure about any of the answers to these questions, sit down with your staff, as individuals or in a group setting, and have the courage and honesty to ask them these questions:

• What would you like me to do more of in the days and weeks ahead?
• What would you like me to do less of?
• What would you like me to start doing that I am not doing today?
• What would you like me to stop doing altogether?

Adapted from Full Engagement! Inspire, Motivate, and Bring Out the Best in Your People by Brian Tracy

5 Impediments to Turnaround and Growth

2011-08-17T06:38:00.000-07:00

5 Impediments to Turnaround and Growth

Mark Fuast believes that we need to adopt an attitude of “growth regardless of current success.” In the very practical Growth or Bust, he asks, “How much untapped potential lies within your business?”

In his experience as a growth and turnaround consultant, Faust has found that improving sales and profits has little to do with sales training, consulting, or other quick fixes. We already know what to do. “Fostering new growth is more about innovation than marketing angles, sales productivity, or skills; growth is more about a culture of continuous improvement than marketing blitz; growth is more about possibility-thinking than fear-fostering quotas.”

Growth or Bust shows leaders how to create a growth revolution. And it starts at the top. The first person to turnaround is you. “There is no virtue in leadership as important to accelerated growth and turnaround as that of humility.” He lists five impediments to turnaround and growth that any leader should look at:

1. Pride. Unhealthy levels of pride contribute to a leader’s failure to give credit to others, an unwillingness to listen to others, an inability to share emotional ownership of ideas or company success, and prevent a leader from admitting that they may be a contributor to any problem.

2. Abusive Relationships. Inappropriate relationships an abusive behavior intended to demean or control others creates a ripple effect throughout the company.

3. Gossiping. Repeating any report that is not positive about others to those who have no responsibility in the matter is poison. Even when a bad report is 100% factual, it is still gossip.

4. Greed. Unfair pay and entitlement at the top often becomes obvious to the employees and growth is constrained as a result.

5. Any of the Five Dysfunctions in the Principle of Authority:

Lack of a clear authority structure. Especially in partnerships, when the chain of command is not clearly defined, chaos, dysfunction, and frustration will ultimately ensue.
Lack of respect for the chain of command. A proper lack of respect for the chain of command creates conflict. At the same time, it shouldn’t inhibit open communication.
The inability to communicate up the ladder without fear of retribution with legitimate appeals and a clear appeal process. Without it, bitterness and resentment will quickly grow.
The lack of checks and balances. A titular leader with no checks and balances is bound to get into situations in which the lack thereof will stagnate growth in the team. Being a top leader requires you to constantly check your actions. Even if you feel your integrity is flawless, you’re subordinates might think otherwise.
Megalomania and rebellion. A autonomous leader that is not willing to submit to anyone or anything will eventually endanger the existence of the organization. As a leader, you must show that you are truly willing to submit to some higher authority on at least some issues.

Thanks to the Leading Blog for this article

Information Overload and What You Can Do About It

2011-08-08T06:31:00.000-07:00

Knowledge workers think for a living to varying extents, depending on the job and situation, but there is little time for thought and reflection in the course of a typical day. Instead, information—often in the form of e-mail messages, reports, news, Web sites, RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, instant messages, text messages, Twitter, and video conferencing walls—bombards and dulls our senses.

Consider this: A 30-second interruption can result in as much as 5 minutes of recovery time. In total, interruptions plus recovery time consume as much as 28% of the knowledge worker’s day.

The volume of information we have today “throttles productivity, reduces our capability to absorb and learn, puts our physical and mental health at risk, and interferes with personal and business relationships.” Jonathan Spira, CEO of Basex, a research firm focusing on issues companies face in the knowledge economy, explains in Overload! why we are in the state we are in and what steps we can begin to take to better manage it.

Even as dry as information tends to be, this is an absorbing book. Spira claims that the changes in how we use and view information that will happen over the next 50 years will not only reshape the globe but turn it inside out. Today, information overload costs the U.S. economy a minimum of $900 billion per year in lowered employee productivity and reduced innovation.

To manage successfully in the knowledge economy, we must recognize key differences in how knowledge workers work. Their tasks can be categorized into six overarching tasks: searching, creating content (sometimes re-creating), thought and reflection, sharing knowledge, and networking. Interestingly, a 2010 Basex study found that of these tasks, knowledge workers only spend only 5% of the day engaged in thought and reflection. The one task that is essential for all the rest we spend so little time performing. We must allow [require] workers more time for thought and reflection if they are to be more productive, efficient, and effective.

Too much information without reflection can stall our productivity. It affects our ability to manage thoughts and ideas, contemplate and even to reason and think. We develop a state of what has been termed, continuous partial attention; to give only partial attention continuously. Science writer Steven Johnson described it this way:

It usually involves skimming the surface of the incoming data, picking out the relevant details, and moving on to the next stream. You’re paying attention, but only partially. That lets you cast a wider net, but it also runs the risk of keeping you from really studying the fish.

Researcher Linda Stone adds this:

It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment….It is an always on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always on high alert when we pay continuous partial attention.

Although there are tens of thousands of things we could do says Spiria, he offers ten tips that, when observed, will help lower information overload for everyone:

Don’t email someone, and then two seconds later follow up with an Instant Message or phone call.
Don’t combine multiple themes or requests in a single email.
Make sure the subject of your email clearly reflects both the topic and urgency of the missive.
Read your email before sending to make sure it is comprehensible to others.
Don’t overburden people with unnecessary e-mail, especially one-word replies such as “Thanks!” or “Great!” and only use “reply to all” only when absolutely necessary.
Don’t get impatient when there’s no immediate response to your message.
Keep your status up-to-date and visible to others so they know whether you’re busy or away.
Recognize that the intended recipient of your communications isn’t a mind reader, and therefore I will supply the necessary details in your messages so nothing is left to the imagination.
Recognize that typed words can be misleading in both tone and intent, so strive for simplicity and clarity in your communication.
Because you understand the complexity and severity of information overload, do everything you can to facilitate the transfer and sharing of knowledge.

Find more tips at the book's companion website: OverloadStories.com
Thanks to Leading Blog for this article!

The One Thing That Makes Collaboration Work

2011-08-03T07:09:00.000-07:00

by Larry Prusak written for the Harvard Business Review

If I had to pick the one thing to get right about any collaborative effort, I would choose trust. Yes, trust. More than incentives, technology, roles, missions, or structures, it is trust that makes collaboration really work. There can be collaboration without it, but it won't be very productive or sustainable in the long run.

You might rush to agree, but first consider that what a leader needs to do to generate trust in an organization:

1. Promote trustworthy people
2. Work with your own employees
3. Publicize the costs of distrust
4. Give people a reason beyond their pay to come to work
5. Reduce pay inequality

The first is the most important: it's the strongest signal by far you can send employees about the values you actually live by (rather than those you just talk about). And it looks like a no-brainer. Who doesn't promote trustworthy people?
Yet trustworthiness is pretty low on the scale of reasons for promotion in most firms. To pick just a few attributes (in no particular order), it ranks far behind sales records, skills, hard work, intense focus on one's advancement, the right background and social connections, acumen at office politics. Do you think Dick Fuld was really trusted at Lehman Brothers or Chuck Prince at Citicorp?

That second one looks simple enough, too. But it becomes more complicated when I suggest that by "your own employees" I mean not just your direct reports but people further down the hierarchy, and when I say "work with" I mean closely, physically, and socially. What I'm really talking about is a judgment about time priorities, which is far from simple.

As to toting up costs for number 3, that is fairly simple. Distrust raises transaction costs higher than they might otherwise be, causing real dollar-and-cents losses. Without trust, a company needs a plethora of lawyers, managers, and accountants watching and recording and negotiating. The absence of trust dampens the natural ease of human activities. Without trust, it's spectacularly difﬁcult for collaboration to ﬂourish, even between peers and within practices. But while the costs may be clear, the day-to-day effects of absent trust aren't obvious, and making them explicit takes effort.

And once we get down to numbers 4 and 5, we're talking about obvious commitment and some risk. What I mean by giving people a reason to come to work beyond their pay is embodying your strategic vision in a common narrative that everyone can believe in. This may be a bit of an oblique way to establish trust but it works. I have seen such narratives cut through all sorts of distrust at Novartis, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation, the United Nations, even the CIA. Not all the time, admittedly, but it does work. And once we start talking about reducing pay disparities, we've moved to ground that is neither simple nor straightforward. Still, it's hard to establish trust between people supposedly working for a common good when one party is paid 400 times more than the other.

At this point, building trust begins to look like the serious commitment it is, and so perhaps it's surprising that before the last decade or so you would have struggled to ﬁnd the word trust in any management (or even in any social science) text, except as a bromide like "Trust your workers."

Although we all deal with trust issues every day, it was like a ﬁsh never noticing the water it swims in.
But not now. I personally own 12 books on the subject written within the past decade or so, and there are many, many others. Why have the fish finally woken up?

I'd say there are three major reasons — and only one has to do with the increase in anxiety brought on by the meltdown on Wall Street and the broader divisiveness in our political and social discourse. When so much is unprecedented, forecasting becomes obviously unreliable, and we end up depending more on the people we really trust when deciding whom to follow, to listen to, to take advice from, to confide in, to collaborate with. Added to this is the convergence of two longer-standing trends. First is the demise of the social contract between workers and management ("I will faithfully execute your orders, and you will faithfully continue to employ me"), as lifetime employment gives way to more increasingly short-term relationships. Second, the rise of virtual global teams has generated a lot of heat around the notion that a manager's physical presence is unnecessary. But establishing trust among far-flung colleagues is deeply problematic. We remain animals, after all, and we need to see, hear, maybe even sniff, a person to really trust him. Organizationally speaking, when we want more than mere compliance on a collaborative endeavor, there is no substitute for being there.

Trust tends to be asymmetric and once broken is hard to repair. This is as true for nations as it is in organizations. I remember being at a large conference a few years ago and talking to a professor from a former Yugoslav republic. He was telling me how much he hated the people from another such republic because of their betrayal of his people in ...1358! You can ﬁnd such accounts throughout the world: just think for a moment of the Middle East, Ireland, South Africa.

However, now and then good sense breaks out and allows trust and collaboration to begin. Trust (like distrust) is contagious. It is carried socially and can flourish when enough people in a given population display their trustworthiness. This seems to have happened in Northern Ireland and Colombia. It is surely worth trying in an organization that suffers from a lack of trust in its management.

Trust is the new gold. Equally valuable, but for too many companies and too many leaders not nearly so obviously worth the effort.

Startups Shouldn’t Kill You

2011-07-27T06:50:00.000-07:00

By: http://adii.me/

Everyone is working to hard. I include myself in that statement: I work too hard most of the time. Heck, in my average week I make compromises with regards to my health, my home life, my marriage and all of my friendships. All for the sake of working harder.

But what’s the rush? What’s chasing me / pushing me to work this damn hard?

While reading “Why Working So Hard Might Be Doing Your Startup More Harm Than Good” last night, I was reminded of a conversation I had with a friend during a visit to San Francisco last year. It went something like this:

Friend: So do you guys also pull crazy all-nighters and massive hack sessions, with minimal to no sleep, over at WooThemes?
Me: Nope. Why would we do that?
Friend: That’s the way startups work. You hustle all the time to get your stuff out quicker.
Me: Nah, that doesn’t really make sense to us. We prefer doing things in our own way, at our own pace. That way our jobs generate the most happiness.
Friend: *confused look*

I know that GaryVee has made the term “hustle” massively popular and every startup founder / business owner / entrepreneur is supposed to hustle their faces off. I understand that: I’ve worked incredibly hard along with my cofounders and the rest of the WooTeam to get to where we are today.

Nothing happens without hard work & a fierce commitment to chasing one’s dreams & goals.

The thing is I’m not an entrepreneur and neither did I cofound a company to hustle my face off all the time. Entrepreneurship & owning my own business is about so much more than just hustling all the time:

Loving my job;
Financial security & freedom; and importantly
Flexibility to allow me to spend more time with family / friends.

I’m not saying that it’s impossible to be happy when you’re simply hustling all the time. For some entrepreneurs that’s fine and if you are happy with all those compromises that it eventually leads to, then who am I to fault you? I do however believe that the constant hustle that is being associated with startups by default these days, has created a distorted view of what it means to start your own business, being your own business and having some fun.

Your startup really shouldn’t kill you. If anything it should be an enabler for you to be happier, healthier and work less (at minimum do the work your most passionate about).
I’ve not stopped working very hard, because I’m ambitious and I love my job. I am however trying to get a much better balance between my work & personal life. Ultimately this freedom is one of the main reasons I ever wanted to be an entrepreneur. Not to hustle my face off.

http://adii.me/2011/06/startups-shouldnt-kill-you/

Moving your business: Planning your Telecom move

2011-07-21T07:35:00.000-07:00

Planning to Move in the near future? Put your Telecom Requirements in your Plan

Is your business in the midst or planning to move locations in the near future? If so, have you built your telecommunication requirements into your moving plans. Many organizations make the mistake of taking their telecom services for granted and assume that their services will be waiting for them at their new location. In fact moving plans and commitment dates are in place well before any consideration is made to placing orders the move existing voice, data or internet services. There is nothing worse to have staff sitting idle at a new site with out any means of communicating with the outside world.

Before you even you start your search for a new location, your telecom requirements should be included as part of your site selection criteria.

Is keeping your phone number critical to your business? Quite often even a move that is relatively short distance could mean that you will need to change your main number. Although there are solutions that may allow you to “forward” your old number, they do add extra costs and complexity.

You should also investigate the availability of services that you currently use, or may use in the future are actually available at your new site. Digital services such as DSL, Ethernet Internet, or digital voices services such as PRI, are not available everywhere. A distance of less than a mile could often make the difference between the service being available or not. Scrambling to replace a service that you had but can no longer get at your new site can often mean settling for more expensive alternatives.

Once a site selection has been made, and service availability has been determined, it is important to consider building facilities. In most cases businesses realize that their new space needs to have the proper cabling infra-structure and make advanced plans to wire accordingly. However has the cable with in the common areas such as risers, or conduit to the street been checked to see if they can accommodate your service requirements. Facility problems- such as full or missing entrance cables, are often only identified only when the telephone company shows up to deliver the service. Only at that point do they take action (and unfortunately added time) to upgrade facilities to handle your order. The cost of this new build is most often passed along to customer

Build in lead Time- The average lead time for local phone, internet and data services can range from 15 to 30 Business days from the time the telephone company verifies your order. Lead times for higher broadband services are taking up to 60 business days if a build is required. If you are asking your phone carrier to install sooner than the install date provided you may be faced with a sizeable “expedite fee of thousands of dollars” and still not have a guarantee that your requested date will be met. Unless you provide emergency services to the public, the phone companies tend not to be over sympathetic to the fact that your business could be severely hampered without their services.

Don’t assume that since your new location had tenants that services and facilities are their waiting for you and can be simply switched back on. Wires that were used to provide that service may still exist in the building, but the kilometers of wires or hardware that were used to connect the site back to a Telephone Central Office are quickly reallocated to other new subscribers.

In Summary, before committing on a new location, a check on your prospective location can identify what services are available and if phone numbers can remain unchanged. Once the selection has been made, although it may be beyond their published lead time, it is ideal to provide ideal to provide your service provider with six weeks lead time for the move. This provides the time needed to provision most services and provides a buffer to accommodate any last minute delivery issues.

Being proactive can certainly help avoid problems, unexpected surprises, lost productivity and higher operating cost.

Township of Esquimalt improves productivity, lowers costs with IP Telephony

2011-07-18T06:31:00.000-07:00

"Saved $20,000 in repair costs by migrating to IP telephony."

In addition to adopting Allstream's IP telephony solution, Esquimalt ensures peak performance with a telephony maintenance service contract.

Company
Esquimalt, British Columbia is home to Canada's naval presence on the west coast.

Challenge
With an aging infrastructure, Esquimalt was experiencing line failures, dropped calls and an inability to integrate communications across sites.

Outcomes

Saved $20,000 in repair costs by migrating to IP telephony
Inter-connecting sites led to $5,000 productivity saving/year
Enhanced emergency response and disaster recovery
Minimized system downtime with a service contract

Ten times bigger: could you do it?

2011-07-11T06:37:00.000-07:00

JOHN WARRILLOW

Entrepreneurs dream about it. Business schools write about it. Angel investors search for it, and venture capitalists drool over it.

It, in a word, is scale.

If your business has the potential to grow quickly, plan on becoming very popular.

“Scaling up” has become a cliché, and, as is the case with many overused phrases, its original meaning has become a little blurry.

For me, a business model that scales up has the potential to grow significantly without compromising the fundamental economics of the business.
If you want to know if your business has the potential to scale up, ask yourself if it could be 10 times the size it is now, and still maintain or grow its profit margin.
As you contemplate what it would take to be 10 times bigger, consider these basic ways to scale up a business:

Geographic scalability

Will your business concept work in another city?
For example, Mia and Jason Bauer started selling their $4 cupcakes on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 2003. Realizing there were other well-to-do communities of people who might like to splurge on a pink lemonade or chocolate sundae cupcake, they expanded geographically.

Today the Bauers operate more than 30 Crumbs Bake Shop outlets across the United States. and bake more than a million cupcakes a month.
Could you transplant your business to another city and have it work just as well?

Horizontal scalability

Do you have a brand that resonates with a specific audience? If so, you may have the raw material to scale up your business by selling more things to your existing customers.
For example, Richard Branson’s Virgin brand stands for giving customers an alternative to the fat, greedy or lazy incumbents taking advantage of them. Mr. Branson’s idea resonates with a certain psychographic, and he’s scaled up his concept to everything from train travel to mobile phones to credit cards.

What else could you sell to your most loyal customers?

Vertical scalability

If your existing infrastructure (staff, machinery, office space) could handle more customers without adding much to your variable costs, you have the ability to scale vertically.
For example, imagine a 200-room hotel that averages just 75 guests a night. It has the potential to scale up more than two times before it would have any significant infrastructure investments to make.
What would have to change in your company to handle 10 times the number of customers?

Cultural scalability

If your idea works in one culture, will it achieve the same success in other cultures?
For example, Charlemagne Mayot founded Paul Bakery in the city of Croix, France, in 1889. Given the French obsession with fresh bread (the French measure freshness in minutes, not days), it’s not surprising that Paul grew steadily over the last century and today is as ubiquitous in France as Starbucks is in the United States.

What’s more interesting is that the cultural appeal of fresh bread has scaled beyond France’s borders, and now Paul offers fresh French bread in 19 other countries, from Spain to the United Arab Emirates to Japan.

Would your idea cross cultural lines?

The beauty of having a scalable business is that you don’t actually have to do the hard work of scaling it up to attract the attention of outside investors or acquirers. The mere appearance of scalability can create a long line of people who want to buy all or some of your business.

Case Study: Green P saves money and enhances service with IP

2011-07-04T06:20:00.000-07:00

"Realized annual savings of $96,000 on voice services alone."

By transitioning to Allstream’s fully-managed MPLS network, Green P was able to converge its internet, voice and data traffic onto one integrated system that delivers guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) levels.

The Company
The Toronto Parking Authority (Green P) is an agency of the City of Toronto responsible for providing safe, attractive, self-sustaining, conveniently located and competitively priced off-street and on-street public parking. www.greenp.com

The Challenge

During the course of its growth, Green P had set up dedicated circuits for each of its voice, video, intercom and data services—driving up both network costs and management complexity.

Outcomes

Realized annual savings of $96,000 on voice services alone
Streamlined network management while improving visibility into network performance
Enhanced QoS by seamlessly prioritizing traffic across the network
Reduced administration with a fully managed solution
Strengthened business continuity by installing Allstream fibre between head office and Green P’s disaster recovery site

The Toronto Parking Authority (Green P) has grown considerably since its establishment in 1952, when it managed five parking lots with roughly 700 spaces. During the course of its growth, however, the organization accumulated a hodge-podge of dedicated circuits to control its disparate needs—from carbon monoxide detection and fire monitoring to running its intercom, video and telephone systems. Each of these circuits was managed by different vendors across roughly 30 of its locations, making network management and administration incredibly complex.

Happy Canada Day from Avega

2011-07-01T06:26:00.000-07:00

Wishing everyone an outstanding Canada Day!

from all of us at Avega

Weathering the Email Storm

2011-06-27T11:18:00.000-07:00

by Tyler Kurz

As a small business owner, time is a valuable commodity. How much of your time is being spent on administrative tasks instead of focusing on growing your business? One of the biggest time drains for any small business owner is email management. As more and more businesses adopted email as its primary means of communication, it was commonly understood that that your business was becoming more productive. I would argue that email is starting to make business owners and their employees less productive.

In my job role, I receive 100-150 new emails each day. That’s around 1 email every 3 minutes. If I responded to each email, keeping in mind it takes me on average 5 minutes to draft my reply, it would take me 12.5 hours each day to respond to everyone. As a small business owner, there would be no time left to deal with day-to-day operations, strategic planning, hiring and training, financial planning, building business relationships with suppliers, marketing, etc. Getting tied up managing your email is not an effective use of your valuable time.

The bad news is that email usage is continuing to grow and it doesn’t look like it will be slowing down anytime soon. The good news is that I have a few suggestions that you can immediately adopt to help you manage your time more effectively.

Use some free software tools to help manage your inbox for you. ClearContext and Xobni are both good tools that help you manage your email to increase your productivity. ClearContext helps instantly file and organize your emails, turns emails and appointments into tasks, and automatically reminds you to reply to important emails in a timely manner. Xobni allows you to search through your emails quickly, organize your contacts more effectively, view emails as a threaded conversation, and find attachments more effectively.
Use Microsoft Outlook rules. Conditional rules can be created to move messages to a particular folder depending on variables ranging from who sent the message, to a defined keyword within the message, to if you are in the “CC” field of the message. You can also create auto-replies, delay the delivery of messages, and redirect messages. The possibilities are endless.
Only answer emails 2-3 times per day. Schedule time into your calendar to check and reply to email once in the morning, once after lunch, and once at the end of the day. Stick to this schedule to ensure you are spending most of the day focusing on growing your business.

http://myownboss.ca/?p=917

Small Business Influencers Awards

2011-06-13T08:19:00.000-07:00

Enter by July 8, 2011

Produced by Small Business Trends and Smallbiztechnology.com and brought to you by Blackberry, the Small Business Influencers 2011 honors companies, organizations and people who have made a significant impact on the North American small business market. In phase I, you nominate influencers. In Phases 2 and 3, you and an all-star judging panel will vote for the top 100. It all culminates with honoring the Top 100 Small Business Influencers in mid-August 2011, with an awards event in New York City on September 13, 2011.

The Cloud Opportunity: Defining the Cloud

2011-06-02T04:35:00.000-07:00

Cloud computing is a phrase that is heard frequently in technology reporting and business discussion. Because it is a nascent and rapidly changing concept, if you tell five people what it means, you may get five answers.

A recent study, for example, noted more than 22 different definitions of cloud computing. A simple answer is that cloud computing is a term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. If you have used Google mail, or visited Youtube, for example, you have experienced cloud computing. What does this new technology mean to businesses and to service providers? What are the various forms that cloud computing takes, and what are its benefits?

WHAT IS CLOUD COMPUTING?

If you use Google Mail, store data online, use a multi-user chat platform, utilize VoIP services, download video on YouTube or subscribe to Facebook you already have experienced cloud service. Cloud computing is a term for any activities that involve delivering hosted services over the Internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories:
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
• Platform-as-a-Service (Paas)
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

The term cloud computing comes from the frequent use of the cloud symbol in flowcharts and diagrams to represent the Internet.

Cloud Computing has the following five attributes:

Multitenancy (Shared Resources)

Unlike previous computing models, which assumed dedicated resources, for example, computing facilities allocated to a single user or owner, cloud computing is based on a business model in which resources are shared, for example, multiple users use the same resource, at the network level, host level, and application level. Massive Scalability Although organizations might have hundreds or thousands of systems, cloud computing allows for scalability to tens of thousands of systems as well as scale bandwidth and storage space.

Massive Scalability

Although organizations might have hundreds or thousands of systems, cloud computing allows for scalability to tens of thousands of systems as well as scale bandwidth and storage space.

Elasticity

Users can rapidly increase and decrease their computing resources as needed and release resources for other uses when they are no longer required.

Pay as You Go

Users pay for only the resources they actually use and for only the time they require them.

Self-Provisioning of Resources

Users self-provision resources, such as additional systems (processing capability, software, storage) and network resources. One of the attributes of cloud computing is elasticity of resources. This cloud capability allows users to increase and decrease their computing resources as needed. The term cloud computing, however, has multiple definitions, because it is a nascent and rapidly changing concept. For example, a recent study noted that there are more than 22 different definitions of cloud computing.

TOP 10 RESEARCH FINDINGS ABOUT CLOUD COMPUTING

Let’s take a look at what customers/companies are looking to achieve with cloud computing:

1. According to a study conducted by Gartner in Q3/09, the acceptability and likelihood of enterprises beginning to plan or test cloud computing has increased three‐fold in the nine months since the previous survey was conducted. During the same period, companies reporting no plans to adopt cloud computing declined from 54% to 37%. The gap between those with plans and trials and those with no plans to adopt is shrinking dramatically.

2. Enterprises are moving to a hybrid approach; they report deploying a combination of cloud and internally owned or on-premises systems. Sixty-one percent of respondents indicated that they were using only internal IT systems. Today, that number has dropped to 41%. At the same time, globally, those using a combined approach increased to 54%, up from 33%. What is less clear is whether a hybrid model is a first step toward a pure cloud‐only model or if some applications will forever remain on‐premises (internally owned) because of security and control concerns.

3. According to research conducted by Gartner in Q3/09, software‐as‐a‐service seems a clear winner against other offerings. Companies are just now becoming more comfortable with cloud computing. They are already embracing the adoption of SaaS applications (one aspect of cloud computing). More than half of respondents report SaaS use, and in the United States, that number increases to 68%. More than 90% of respondents who currently use SaaS say their company’s experience with SaaS has been largely successful. Not surprisingly, more than 62% of participants report plans to increase SaaS use in the next year.

4. According to Forrester Research, of the enterprises responding, about one-quarter plan to spend or are spending on IaaS via an external service provider.

5. By a margin of 10%, companies of all sizes prefer to focus on external providers rather than implementing a cloud internally. This is surprising for two reasons: 1) it indicates that companies feel they have enough information to make a decision, given how early in the process cloud is; and 2) despite its infancy, most companies are not opting for the "safer" choice, which is creating an internal cloud.

6. Larger firms are more interested than smaller firms in leveraging external IaaS capabilities. This fact flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which says that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) will be the most eager adopters of cloud computing, because it will enable them to eliminate or reduce extensive internal IT investment and skills. This scenario is not a complete surprise: IaaS requires technical skills to successfully implement, skills that SMBs usually lack. It makes sense, however, that SMBs would adopt SaaS more adroitly than large enterprises. After all, by using SaaS applications, SMBs bypass all the technical complexity that accompanies managing servers, whether installed locally or remotely.

7. Interest in production application placement in external clouds is nearly as high as for applications in test/development. Again, the conventional wisdom is that companies will initially migrate test/development to clouds because test/development is often a pinch point in provisioning, requiring resources quickly and for indeterminate durations. This type of use profile meshes well with cloud computing characteristics but also sidesteps other issues associated with external clouds, such as security, data privacy, and SLA needs.

8. Studies suggest that more than half of organizations worry about a lack of cost control (57%) and more than a third (35%) fret over scalability. But the biggest concern of 63% of organizations is being locked into one vendor. These results show a need for more sophisticated tools to monitor and control cloud usage and the movement of applications from cloud to cloud.

9. The greatest concern among US CIOs is cost control (66%), followed closely by vendor lock-in (60%). UK CIOs also worry about vendor lock-in, with 65% ranking it as their number-one concern.

10. Vanson Bourne, an international research firm, surveyed more than 600 IT and business decision makers across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Singapore and found that the ability to scale resources up and down to manage fluctuating business demand is the most cited benefit influencing cloud adoption in the U.S. (30%) and in Singapore (42%). The top factor driving U.K. adoption is lower total cost of ownership (41%).

WHY LOOK AT CLOUD COMPUTING SERVICES?

Studies indicate that there is an increasing demand for cloud services and much of it is coming from business information and communications technology users.

Many large enterprises are concerned that the cost of ongoing maintenance is too high and are struggling to innovate. Smaller businesses simply cannot afford skilled staff as technology becomes more and more critical to their businesses, both in computing and communications. In the wake of the recent recession, many CIOs and IT decision makers have considered plucking low-hanging fruit such as hardware consolidation and standardization and also renegotiating software licensing agreements, which makes it increasingly difficult to find new avenues for operational savings.

Dave Baldwin, managing director of ICT Specialist Getronics, says: “With huge budget cuts across the board, public sector organizations need to utilize cloud-based services to cut costs and deliver efficiencies. By switching to a hosted desktop environment, department heads can make these savings through leaner and more flexible services, instead of relying on rigid and costly on-site IT.” Budgeting and finance are not the only reasons why cloud computing services are in demand. Other reasons include competition, cost pressures, and the demand for “anytime, anywhere, any device” services and applications that are forcing telecom service providers to consider alternative models for the delivery of IT services.

With a cloud computing services model, service providers can insert themselves into the value chain by redefining their roles beyond connectivity to include providing Web-based application delivery services. The following are five more reasons why service providers should capitalize on cloud computing for their business and for their customers:
 The value proposition
 Revenue
 IT independence
 Data center efficiency
 Service provider differentiation

The Value Proposition

Cloud computing has the potential to affect service providers' operating costs by reducing the hardware and software requirements of their current networks and platforms. Network architectures that build on optimization and consolidation are a key interest and increasingly, a requirement for all service providers. Cloud computing platforms enable enterprises to provision an infrastructure and add computing capacity on demand. This elasticity promotes rapid deployment of solutions and allows service providers to scale their infrastructure based on demand and, consequently, to improve time to market for new services.

IT Independence

With more employees scattered in global offices or telecommuting, Web-based services and applications are perfect for the rapidly changing enterprise workplace. Service providers can increase their revenue and market share and capitalize on Web-based application services by communicating and promoting the tangible business benefits to their customers. Mobile communication, accelerated developments in broadband networking, open source technologies, and Web 2.0 have made on-demand services more reliable and affordable. Using cloud-based services, businesses can store more data than on private computer systems, allowing them to save on the processing power and hard-disk space required for desktop software while giving them access to an unlimited number of applications. Additional benefits for businesses—and selling points for service providers—include lower costs, improved system performance, reduced software cost, instant software updates, data reliability, universal data access, and hardware/device independence.

Data Center Efficiency

With typical data center costs running to approximately 25 percent of total IT budgets, service providers are under pressure to find cost-efficient business solutions and models to operate their data centers. A cloud computing data center model enables rapid innovation, scalability, and supports of core enterprise functions, resulting in significant economies of scale. A cloud computing data center reduces the need for additional hardware, software and facilities; for server network storage; operating systems and middleware provisioning; and for dealing with security issues, all of which are costly and time-consuming functions.

A cloud computing platform also increases the utilization of servers, which can range from 20 percent to 70 percent, resulting in a decrease in required infrastructure. This hardware reduction translates to a dramatic drop in some associated operations expenditures: rack space, real estate, power, and cooling. And let's not forget the cost savings associated with continuity and data center longevity. The average life expectancy of a large data center is 12 years. With the cost of developing a data center at approximately $500 million, cloud computing becomes both a business and operational value.

CLOUD COMPUTING ADVANTAGES

Reduced Cost: Cloud technology is paid incrementally, saving organizations money. Increased Storage: Organizations can store more data than on private computer systems. Highly Automated: No longer do IT personnel need to worry about keeping software up to date. Flexibility: Cloud computing offers much more flexibility than past computing methods. More Mobility: Employees can access information wherever they are, rather than having to remain at their desks. Allows IT to Shift Focus: Organizations no longer have to worry about constant server updates and other computing issues; they are free to concentrate on innovation.

CLOUD COMPUTING ROADBLOCKS

Definition: If you ask four different people, you will get four different definitions of the cloud. This lack of agreement can be attributed to lack of standards or to the absence of a governing/regulating body. Security Concerns: Information security is a prime concern of organizations because their confidential data is being hosted on third-party data centers. Service Availability: Since the cloud-based model is not just confined to application delivery but also to the platform for computing services under the IaaS model, service availability becomes a concern.

Data Lock-In Concerns: In the case of cloud computing, most of the APIs are proprietary and lack standardization, which means applications for a particular cloud platform cannot be migrated toanother. Similarly, customers cannot easily extract their data or programs from a provider's site and run it on another site

CONCLUSION

With cloud computing the economic advantages are great: reduction of costs and increased productivity and the risks minimal, especially as new systems and checks are continuously being designed and instituted. The question is not if but when your business needs move to initiatives taking advantage of cloud computing trends

Thanks to ACG Research for this white paper

BCBG Canada Selects ALLSTREAM to provide National Business IP Connectivity

2011-05-02T13:36:00.000-07:00

TORONTO, April 19 /CNW/ - MTS Allstream Inc. announced today that it has signed a five-year contract to provide Business IP connectivity service to BCBG Max Azria Canada Inc. (hereinafter: "BCBG"), a leading designer, retailer and distributor of women's apparel and accessories.
BCBG will implement Allstream's Managed Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) service in its Canadian operations to improve business flexibility and streamline the flow of business-critical information for their 57 locations across the country. BCBG will also receive round-the-clock network management from Allstream, which will proactively monitor their network environment, mitigating network failures.

Dean Prevost, President of Allstream said, "BCBG is a dynamic and growing business, and I believe our MPLS service can play a key role in supporting that growth, connecting employees and stores, and improving the efficiency of their operations across Canada."
Allstream's Business IP combines the flexibility and intelligence of IP routing with the transport quality of a single high performance network, while MPLS technology simplifies and streamlines IP addressing to optimize data networks without the use of authentication, encryption or tunneling protocols. Together, this provides a secure mode of transport for a defined set of users including employees, partners or customers.

"By leveraging Allstream's strong and stable IP backbone, we're ensuring our stores have access to a secure and superior connectivity," said Luc Guay, President of BCBG Max Azria Canada Inc. "Allstream's commitment to building strong, innovative partnerships with its customers will best support our continued success as a leading fashion retailer."
For more information on Allstream services and solutions, visit http://www.allstream.com/.

About BCBGMAXAZRIA

Created in 1989, BCBGMAXAZRIA was named for the Parisian phrase "Bon Chic, Bon Genre," meaning "Good Style, Good Attitude." BCBGMAXAZRIA designs, develops, produces and markets complete collections of women's ready-to-wear and accessories, and select categories for men, each known for being at the forefront of creativity, quality and style. The Group is one of the worldwide leaders in ready-to-wear, encompassing a portfolio of 23 brands including BCBGMAXAZRIA, BCBGeneration, BCBGMAXAZRIA Runway, Max Azria, Max Azria Atelier, Hervé Léger Couture, BCBG Paris, among others, and a retail and wholesale network that include more than 5,200 points of sale throughout the world.

About Allstream

Allstream is Canada's all-business communications provider, focusing and delivering on the business customer's solutions. For more information on Allstream services and solutions, please visit http://www.allstream.com/.

Allstream is a division of MTS Allstream Inc. ("MTS Allstream"), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Manitoba Telecom Services Inc. As one of Canada's leading national communication solutions companies, MTS Allstream provides innovative communications for the way Canadians want to live and work today. The Company has more than 100 years of experience, with 5,500 employees across Canada dedicated to a mission of delivering true value as seen through the eyes of our customers. MTS Allstream has nearly two million total customer connections spanning business customers across Canada and residential consumers throughout the province of Manitoba. The Company's extensive national broadband and fibre optic network spans almost 30,000 kilometres. Manitoba Telecom Services Inc.'s common shares are listed on Toronto Stock Exchange (trading symbol: MBT).
Customers, stakeholders and investors who want to learn more about MTS Allstream are encouraged to visit: http://www.mtsallstream.com/.

Forward-looking Statements Disclaimer

This news release includes forward-looking statements and information (collectively, the "statements") about our corporate direction, business opportunities, operations, financial objectives, planned activities, future financial results and performance that are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. As a consequence, actual results in the future may differ materially from any conclusion, forecast, anticipation or projection in such forward-looking statements. Examples of statements that constitute forward-looking information may be identified by words such as "believe", "expect", "project", "should", "anticipate", "could", "target", "forecast", "intend", "plan", "outlook", "see", "set", "pending", and other similar terms.

Factors that could cause anticipated opportunities and actual results to differ materially include, but are not limited to, matters identified in the "Risks and Uncertainties" section and elsewhere in our most recent annual MD&A and any subsequent quarterly MD&As, as well as our most recent Annual Information Form, all of which are available on SEDAR at http://www.sedar.com/.
Please note that forward-looking statements reflect our expectations as at the date hereof. We disclaim any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise except as required by law.

5 resolutions all small businesses should make

2011-04-11T06:58:00.000-07:00

The Q2 is well under way, but have you made the right moves so far? Here are some effective strategies to help you make more money this year. Are you ready to make some changes?

1. Define your goals: Any self-help guru worth his salt will tell you that the more specific and measurable your goals are, the more likely you are to succeed. It’s a little bit like having a map– it helps you find the quickest and most efficient route to your destination. That way, you spend less time wandering down dead ends and are primed to recognize opportunities that will get you to your target faster.
Spelling it out as in, “I would like to make $X per month in sales” or “I would like 8 out of 10 consults to become regular clients” will get you far better results than something vague like “I want to grow my business”. Make sure your goals are concrete and that it’s easy to tell when you reach them.

2. Break big challenges into baby steps: How many times have you abandoned a resolution because it seemed too huge to accomplish? David Allen, one of the world’s most famous productivity experts recommends that you break each task, no matter how daunting, into tiny manageable chunks and list them in order of priority. In fact, if you struggle with productivity issues, do yourself a huge favour and purchase his book, “Getting Things Done”. It takes a while to absorb the concepts, but it really will help you get things done!

3. Fix the leaks: Almost every small business owner will be able to identify one or two key areas where his brand needs fixing. It might be sloppy customer service or a defective product. It might be deadline issues or failure to deliver on promises made by the company’s ad campaign. Pick two of these issues and FIX THEM. What ever it takes.

4. Be a smart marketer: There’s no point developing the most amazing product or service in the world if no one knows it’s available! You may not want to hear it, but your marketing strategy is as important as quality control or pricing. If you aren’t already taking advantage of social media, you’re missing out on a huge small business opportunity. That said, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that getting on Facebook or starting a blog is going to suddenly fill your coffers. Social media forces businesses to be more transparent, more accountable and more nimble. These are all good things – if you’re willing to do the work.

5. Look for hidden treasures: Chances are, there’s some aspect of your business that is lying dormant, just waiting for you to tap into it. For example, if you’re a successful photographer, you could probably make some serious cash teaching workshops to newbies in the field. If you’re a hair salon, perhaps you should hold “members only” events where you teach your clients how to do easy but sophisticated styles or apply mineral makeup. The better you know your ideal client the easier it will be to identify ways to build a loyal community around your brand.

Now it’s your turn. Have you tried putting any of these resolutions into practice? Did you get good results?

Thanks to by Geeta Nadkarni for the article!

The Smart List: 12 Shocking Ideas That Could Change the World

2011-04-01T06:26:00.000-07:00

Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous.

For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers with controversial, game-changing propositions. We found a prison reformer who wants to empty jails, an economist who thinks foreign aid hurts more than it helps, and a military theorist who believes the US should launch preemptive cyberattacks, right now. Then there's secretary of defense robert gates, who wants to win wars, not just prep for them. Risky? Sure. But this is no time to play it safe.

1. John Arquilla
Go on the Cyberoffensive

2. Thorkil Sonne
Recruit Autistics

3. Gregg Easterbrook
Embrace Human Cloning

4. Ralph Keeney
Cheat Death

5. Dambisa Moyo
Cut Off Aid to Africa

6. Nils Christie
Empty the Prisons

7. Stewart Brand
Save the Slums

8. Stefan Szymanski and Stephen Ross
Bust Up Big League Sports

9. Ludwig Minelli
Legalize Assisted Suicide

10. Jamie Heywood
Forget Medical Privacy

11. William Gurstelle
Take Smart Risks

12. Robert Gates
Overhaul the Pentagon

Illustration: Tucker & Bennett

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartlist

Ten ways small businesses attract new talent

2011-03-28T07:34:00.000-07:00

What kinds of benefits, options and perks do small business owners highlight when trying to lure top employees to their company? That's the question the American Express Small Business Monitor and Angus Reid Public Opinion sought to answer when they conducted an online survey among a randomly selected sample of 568 Canadian small business owners with two to 100 employees.

Rank Ways of attracting talent Percentage

1 Flexible work hours 70%

2 Independence 63%

3 Work from home options 41%

4 Career development opportunities 31%

5 Higher pay than offered by other small businesses 27%

6 Opportunities for advancement 27%

7 Dynamic business culture 25%

8 Profit-sharing 17%

9 Higher pay than offered by large businesses 13%

10 Comprehensive benefits 11%

— The survey was conducted from January 25 to February 2, 2011, and has a margin of error for the total sample is +/-4.0%, 19 times out of 20. The results have been statistically weighted according to the Statistics Canada Business Register’s most current business size and region statistics to ensure a representative sample of the entire population of small business owners in Canada

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/your-business/exit/the-top-tens/ten-ways-small-businesses-attract-new-talent/article1946089/

Top 10 cost concerns for small businesses

2011-03-24T07:49:00.000-07:00

The Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses has compiled a list of the top 10 financial burdens facing entrepreneurs in 2011.

Rank Concern Percentage

1 Fuel, energy costs 64%

2 Tax, regulatory costs 63%

3 Insurance costs 49%

4 Wage costs 47%

5 Bank account and processing fees 43%

6 Occupancy costs 23%

7 Product input costs 23%

8 Borrowing costs 22%

9 Capital equipment, technology costs 21%

10 Foreign currencies 11%

— The January 2011 findings are based on 967 responses, collected from a stratified random sample of CFIB members, to a controlled-access web survey. Findings are statistically accurate to +/- 3.2 per cent 19 times in 20.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/your-business/exit/the-top-tens/top-10-cost-concerns-for-small-businesses/article1924187/

Team Avega Tech Talks

Top 5 ways to prevent social media overload.

5 resolutions all small businesses should make

More Important Than a Business Plan: What Every Company Must Do.

Why SIP Trunking needs to be on your radar

Top 5 reasons why you should become a business owner

Top 5 secrets to starting your own small business.

Allstream adds nearly 300 fiber-fed buildings to network in Q4 2011

Allstream's IP fibre network expansion program continues to generate strong IP sales momentum throughout the fourth quarter

Ditching CFLs and replacing them with LED lights in your office

Top 5 TED Talks for Small Business People

Top 5 ways to win more customers.

Case Study: Solium Capital enjoys substantial ROI with Allstream’s IP Trunking solution

Top 5 tricks to beat the business winter blues.

Top 5 Small Business Reasons Why iPhone Defeats Blackberry

Top 5 reasons why coworking is better than working from home.

Apps to Keep Children Happy

7 Small Business Tips to Make 2012 a Huge Success

1) Make a list of what worked and didn’t work in 2011.

2) Create a marketing plan.

3) Look to external partners.

4) Focus on helping, not selling.

5) Update your Website.

6) Stop doing everything yourself.

7) Have a life.

5 Local Online Marketing Tips

Allstream's IP sales continue to generate momentum as year-end approaches

Chief Technology Advocate's Crystal Ball of the Top 10 of 2012

How to Increase Social Sharing to Generate More Leads

Top 5 reasons why your business should use email marketing.

Retailers Find Holiday Spirit Through Social Media

Entrepreneurs - 5 Time-Saving Business Tips

Allstream selects Ciena for national broadband network

Top 5 things that stunt business growth.

Tips: Teleconferencing and VideoConferencing

Say no to multitasking:

Don’t interrupt:

Mute it:

Move away from the camera:

Think studio:

But don’t get too fancy:

Take a practice run:

Eight rules to keep small businesses afloat

How Apple's Siri Could Destroy Local SEO

Everyone’s Doing It: Blogs and Your Business

10 Tips to Building a Great Small Business Team

1. Hire Only When You Have a Reason

2. Hire the Right People

3. Hire Who You can Afford

4. Build a Relationship with Your Employees

5. Maintain a Balance

6. Create a Positive Atmosphere

7. Invest in Your Employees

8. Get your Employees Invested in the Business

9. Be the Boss Your Employees Need You to Be

10. Consult your Network

Entrepreneurs, get out of your basements

Seven Entrepreneurial Lessons Learned on the Serengeti

Job Description for Accidental Entrepreneurs

TEDtalks: Tony Robbins: Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Small Business News: The Entrepreneur in Review

Trends

Taxes

Self-development

Customer Service

SEO

Online Video

Mobile

Marketing

The Must Have Leadership Skill

Keeping Your Small Business Ahead of the Curve

Operations

Strategy

Management

Finance

Trends

Is Social Media putting you at risk?

Top 5 reasons your business needs a charity now.

Data backup: The cloud knows all and rescues all

The Power of Team Work