In The Solution Space

Archive for the ‘10 Free Tips for 2010’ Category

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.

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.

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.”