In The Solution Space

Build For Scale

No business owner wants to spend more than they have to on technology. However, when creating technology strategies, it is not enough to understand what is needed today. You need to understand what is going to be needed 2 to 5 years in the future. Is your business going to be 20% to 50% larger or maybe even double its size in your 5-year plan? If so, then your technology needs to match your business strategy. Translated, technology investments today should be able to grow with your business without future substantial investment.

Are you currently implementing a system that you are not sure will scale? This is a key question that requires an answer. By not having a well-aligned strategy, you certainly run the risk of needing to make substantial future investments to upgrade, replace or re-implement your current solutions.

Outsourcing and Managed Services – Focus on your core business

Unless you are a technology business, your business is selling products and services and not running datacenter operations for email, accounting, HR and other applications.  Outsourcing companies that offer specialized hosting services for these types of applications and more have come a long way in the last 5 years. They offer 24 hour/7 days a week/365 days a year support, disaster recovery services, backup and restoration services. Additionally, depending on the managed service hosting business, they can add specific application and database support and maintenance. When these services are offered, they are historically available at a cost that is materially lower than if your business was to hire internal staff to perform these services.

The devil is in the details, and in this case, in the master service agreements, statements of work and service level agreements. You need to be comfortable with the contract terms, response times and refunds in the case of service outages and other terms that can affect the economic benefits of these services. However, beyond contract concerns, these service providers generally provide a level of service that your business would be benefit from without a large resource investment.

Do you have experiences, good or bad, with outsourcing some of your IT operations?  Have you outsourced your email or other hosting services?  What were the key business drivers for you?  Cost? Speed to Market?  I would enjoy hearing from you.

Google is sometimes more an art than a science.  That is because Google keeps it’s science of how sites get ranked to themselves and leaves the rest of us to figure it out.  Ever try and copy a DaVinci?  Not easy because we mere mortals don’t have the requisite insight and tools that DaVinci has.  But we have the output and then we can make assumptions about how something was created.  This is determined by trial and error and listening to the advice of those who have already done the research.

So, based upon my experience, here are the ways that a company can easily improve their site rankings on Google, for free.  No money needed and these are things that any site administrator can do right now.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Your website has content, words and phrases that describe your business, your services, your products.  The real question, is that content contributing to getting found on the web.  You also have to know how customers perceive your business.  What is their language?  Does it match yours?  It’s these key questions that are the heart of SEO.  It is the identification of those key words and phrases that customers (and potential customers) might find you.

Once you identify those, incorporate them into your website content, into your webpage meta tagging and any pay-per-click advertising that you might use.   It does you absolutely no good to have a key phrase as “exceptional Chicago consulting” when customers are doing Google searches with the phrase “experienced Chicago foodservice consultant.”  The likelihood of getting found is slim to none.

Social Networking

Whether or not you think that Facebook and Twitter are fads, the fact is that there are millions of people in all demographics who are interacting on these sites.  And those that are using these services are your current or potential customers.  These relationships are important but do not replace the personal contact.  These are offshoots that help you keep relevant and also let your customers find each other in very meaningful ways.  Here is the best part – these services are FREE.  It costs nothing to start a page on Facebook or Twitter.  The needed element is your determination to keep in touch with your fans by providing periodic content or tweets to let them know what you are up to.

Blogging is another strategy in the social networking tool kit.  There are many free services available (wordpress.org, blogger.com) where for no cost you can get a blog page, you can personalize it to your needs and start writing.  People can comment on your posts and get the conversation going.  What is your ROI?  Insight, loyalty, customer funneling to your business all for a very low cost.

Update Content

In conjunction with your SEO strategy, be aware that Google values pages that are frequently updated.  Google keeps track when a page was last updated and actually will lower the relevance rankings of a page if it is considered “stale.”  Once a month, you should take an objective look at your site and update the pages, especially your home page!  This is the front door to your business and you should think of it like your actual front door.  If you keep your physical presence fresh, you need to keep your virtual presence fresh too.

Linking

Another key criteria of relevance that Google uses is linking.   It is good practice to have your website pages linked to each other but how many links are coming to your site?  You should try to have your partners and clients sites link to your site.  In Google’s eyes, if sites are linking to you, there must be something valuable about that.  You already have the relationship so you need to leverage it to help drive your business’ visibility to the search engines.  Additionally, if you have a blog, Facebook or Twitter page, make sure you have a link of your website on those pages to your site.

These tips are part of the free whitepaper “10 Technology Initiatives For 2010 To Grow Your Business and Increase Your Profits”.  Get your copy today, no obligation by visiting our website and going to FREE IDEAS.

I always get asked, “Craig, what do you recommend for [fill in the blank for an application, tool, website]?”  After being in the business for 20+ years, I have seen a lot of princes and frogs.  I really enjoy sharing sites, tools and applications that I have come across and thought were really interesting or ones that I actually use and love.  Here they are in no particular order.

Email & Collaboration

Google Apps and Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite.  These are great for the small to medium sized business who doesn’t need or want to own their messaging and collaboration infrastructure.  Both of these services are backed by robust hosting, high availability, excellent security and really good functionality. Downsides?  Google plays better to a wider browser set than does Microsoft and support for Google is mostly web based versus live people at Microsoft.  Microsoft has a very robust partner network for design, implementation and support.

Customer Relationship Management

salesforce.com.  These guys invented the Software as a Service space for CRM and they continue to innovate.  They offer different editions that fit any budget.  Microsoft and other players offer their solution but they are in the taillights of the clear leader in my opinion.

Accounting/Invoicing/Project Tracking

I have recently discovered FreshBooks.com, a totally online hosted solution that is easy to setup, affordable and has functionality at its heart.  Imagine tracking your expenses, time sheets, generating an invoice and have that invoice delivered electronically to your client, all with the push of one button.  Additionally, you can give your clients online access to their invoices through the system.  This is some really good software on a hosted platform.  No software to install=easy.

Website Management / Content Management

If you are looking for solid software to get your site up and running quickly, using WordPress blogging software as a content management system is an excellent (and free!) choice.  You might spend some additional time getting all the right plugins in place for your site (contact forms, search engine optimization and others) but this is one flexible platform that is easy to use and update.  ALSO, if you want/need a more customized theme for your site, Artisteer is an easy to use graphical design application that will create your WordPress theme and template pages in no time.  In fact, that is how this blog and my website (www.solutionspacetechnologies.com) was designed.

Hope that this helps answer some questions about available technologies for the small business owner and operator.  However, if you want some additional strategy or expert advice to your particular business problem, please contact me at Solution Space Technologies.  As we say, get out of the “problem space” and into the “solution space”.

It’s enough to make anyone crazy.  Social media “gurus” shouting as loud as they can about using twitter, facebook, blogs to attract new customers and keep existing customers.  A recent conversation I had with a retailer summarized the problem best.  They were trying to do all these new things but were not clear about how this was going to increase their core business.

I asked a few questions.  Do you have a customer database containing purchase history? Answer, yes.  Great.  Next question, Do you have email addresses for those customers?  Answer, not all of them but many of them.  Great.  Last question, do you send targeted offers to them via email?  Answer, no but we do send them email marketing messages.

So I gave them this suggestion.  Turn Data Into Information.  If you know what they have bought, build separate email marketing lists under the following criteria:

• Customers who haven’t bought anything for over 6-12 months.  Create an offer to encourage them to return to your store.
• Customers who have bought a lot of items and you want to reward them for their purchases.
• Customers who consistently buy from you over a longer period of time.  Create an offer to reward their loyalty.
• Customers who bought a high ticket item and you want to reward them.  Create an event with similar customers and create a strong brand affinity.
• Look for customers who buy a particular item, and create an offer to buy related items or accessories

The fact is, there is a lot of data in a retailer’s Point of Sale systems and too often it is not turned into information that is actionable.  My earlier rant about social networks is not that they are unnecessary, but they are a tactic to building customer loyalty and there is a lot of low hanging fruit in your “information orchard” that is ready to be harvested into increased sales and profits.

Does your team work together on presentations, RFP responses, budgeting or other documents?  Are all your team members in one location?  Do any of them work remotely?  Chances are this information is getting passed around in emails or the data resides on a file server.  While a team could function this way, many issues arise from this type of work style.  Version control, tracking multiple changes and version rollback or recovery are all issues that plague collaboration through email.  In fact, you cannot really say that true collaboration occurs through email.

If you need to have a more accessible process along with control over changes to these documents, then you need a collaboration solution.  If you want to have your remote employees, or partners, to participate in discussions, get announcements about a project, work on a document with your team, then collaboration is the answer.

Collaboration sites are easy to get started.  Microsoft, Google and many managed service providers offer their version of intranet sites.  These sites are modular in their approach and take little to no technology experience to implement.   However, it is risky to “just jump in” without some pre-planning.  This planning includes a solid understanding of your functional requirements, implementation timeline, change management, data migration and training.   Unsuccessful implementations of intranet sites (and there are many) make the assumption that “if they build it they will come.”  User adoption will be difficult when they are not sure when to use or how to use this important tool.  They will tend to continue to behave in the tried and true way.  Part of the change management is to both sell them on the idea of the intranet but also some tough love.  Saying “this is the way we are going to work together” is sometimes necessary.

Your successful intranet implementation will open up your world to new, efficient ways of working that do not tie you to your office.  Work remotely, when you want or need to, share ideas with everyone and have your discussions with your whole team.

I was talking to a colleague who was telling me about a 20-something slickster who is selling himself as a marketer and his pitch?  Social Media/Marketing/Networking…it’s all you need and hey, it’s free.  Really?

Last I checked, social networking is one of many tactics, a way to reach customers, have conversations, but it is not the marketing silver bullet.  They (FB, Twitter, et al) are tools to engage but you need the strategy first.  Right, Slick?  Where is the strategy?

So before you leap on that social media bandwagon without asking about the substance of the marketing, the measurability, and strategy, take a deep breath.  Don’t be pressured to re-act to the “hottest thing on earth” as we all know hot cools, and those approaches and tactics all need to strike the right balance to make your business grow.

Good: 10 Tech Tips for 2010 To Grow Your Business. Best: It’s Free! http://ow.ly/12t7i

Today I was reminded about how we as technologists are too quick to forget about celebrating when good things happen. As I launched my client’s new website the realization that these moments happen without much fanfare struck me.  These moments are the proverbial tree falling in the woods…is there a sound when they fall?  It’s a lousy analogy but I think you get the idea.

So I am celebrating.  I toast my client, Amanda Wurzbach of Total Dish Marketing, to having a site that she will realize much success with. I hope you check it out at www.totaldishmarketing.com

I see the great hoopla over the Apple tablet and, though deserved, seems to be over the top in relation to the thousand plus “silent” but important launches that happen everyday. So here is to those launches too.

Come to think of it, everyday is a day to celebrate.

A recent study by a digital agency asked the question, “Why are so many companies failing to leverage digital effectively to drive business results and innovation?”  They found that the problem for many is that they haven’t designed a digital blueprint that integrates business priorities, the capabilities of their IT infrastructure, the online strategies of their competitors, and their ability to finance it in a way that will move them forward.

Digital has evolved from being the domain of the kid down the hall who managed the Web site a decade ago into a means to drive change and reinvent business today. It’s time for this business inertia to stop. It’s time for digital blueprints to be part of every business’s initiatives.

A digital blueprint is a focused, strategic plan that aligns the business with a digital vision and clearly articulates how to create value for customers, channel partners, key internal constituencies, and the business’s brands. This plan should guide the business’s investment decisions and lay out how digital enables the business to implement innovative business ideas and immersive customer experiences. It should be driven by customer insights and a keen understanding of how the marketplace is evolving, and be grounded in business and operational realities to ensure it can be implemented.

Request the free whitepaper “10 Tech Initiatives for 2010 To Grow Your Business and Your Profits.”

Welcome to the blog site for Solution Space Technologies.  We want you to be informed as well as have an opportunity to have questions answered about technology solutions that can directly affect your business.  Besides talking to us directly, if you need some quick insite to a product, need to get some tips in selecting solutions for your company, this is your resource.

Stay tuned for some helpful information to make your business more profitable in 2010.