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Tech Tools for Administrative Professionals

16 May

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Once a year, on Administrative Professionals Day, we honor the people in our organization who fight on the front lines.  You know who they are.  They are the ones who answer the phones, book the appointments, organize the information, greet the clients, support the boss, coordinate all the moving pieces and basically hold everything together.  Without their diligence, loyalty, skills and efficiency,  we would all be rendered useless and ineffective.

If you missed the official celebration last month of Administrative Professionals Day, don’t worry.  It’s never too late to honor the ones who help us.  In fact, every day should be Administrative Professionals Day.  Make the time and show your appreciation.  And don’t forget to schedule next year’s special day: 4/25/12.  Put that event on your calendar yourself. (More info: http://www.iaap-hq.org/events/apw)

Now take a moment and rethink your assumptions about your company’s operations.  How can you add more efficiency to your administrative layer?  How can technology help your team do what they do even better?  Can a new process or procedure boost efficiencies and help make your organization even more competitive?

Later this month I have the pleasure of speaking to the Hawaii Chapter of the International Association of Administrative Professionals (http://www.iaap-hawaiichapter.org/).  The topic of my presentation will focus on how to harness new technology to make the office faster, better, cheaper.  Here are some ideas you may want to consider:

Get an intelligent phone system.

I tell my team,  “Every phone call is worth $10,000.  Learn to love the sound of that phone ringing.”  But that’s easy for me to say.  I’m not the one answering it all day long!  Fortunately, there are a bunch of inexpensive tech tools to help make phone-based communications smarter and more effective.

If you’re still using conventional phone systems, ask your internet service provider about “voice over internet protocol” (VoIP).  It’s just a fancy name for computer-based phone systems.  VoIP will save you money and will offer lots of neat features.  Be sure to take a look at Google Voice (https://www.google.com/voice).  Google Voice will translate voicemail into email and send it directly to your inbox.

Also checkout RingCentral (http://www.ringcentral.com/).  We’ve had good success with RingCentral,  which enables us to seamlessly route calls easily between our service centers, home offices, and our SuperGeeks in the field.

Decentralize the accounting.

I remember the days when the bookkeeper had to come onsite to do her magic and all paperwork had to be ferried back and forth to one central location.  And it wasn’t that long ago.

If you’re still doing your finances the old fashioned way, i.e. from a dedicated workstation, consider web-based accounting solutions.  Quickbooks Online (http://quickbooksonline.intuit.com/) is a winner.  Freshbooks (http://www.freshbooks.com/) is also worthy candidate.  Both come with their own ecosystem of partners.  This gives you the ability to integrate additional providers so you can achieve a nicely customized solution for your company’s operations.  You will like how web-based models offer more automation and more flexibility, like pushing accounting features directly into the hands of your front line staff,  saving you both time and money.

Put the forms online.

There are lot of things your clients can do online from your website.  In fact, they prefer the convenience of completing forms, scheduling appointments, requesting information, etc via the internet.  One of my favorite tools is Wufoo (http://wufoo.com/).  Their motto is: We make forms fast + easy + fun.  And it’s true.

Think of the paperwork in your operational cycle.  Brainstorm what kids of things can be collected and disseminated online.  One advantage of online forms is databasing.  By capturing data digitally and sending it to the right buckets, you can drill into that data more easily and leverage it more effectively.  That’s good business.

Capture receipts on the go.

Expense reporting is vital.  It’s also labor intensive.  Shoeboxed (http://www.shoeboxed.com/) is a neat online service that helps you keep track of your receipts.  Like the other solutions mentioned above, Shoebox integrates with various service providers, including Freshbooks.  Again, the more integration, the better.

Organize your contacts.

Customer relationship management, called CRM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management) is the glue of your day-to-day business.  Just like the old Rolodex gave us power and authority to get things done,  managing your contacts wisely will help you build networks and close sales.

There are many providers in the CRM marketspace.  Ultimately, you will want one that integrates well with your accounting solution.  Batchbook (http://www.batchblue.com/) does everything a traditional CRM offers, as well as social media integration.  This means you can view and curate each contact’s blog posts, tweets, photos and more.

Don’t call or email.  Chat.

Everyone knows Skype (http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/home) is perfect for long distance calling.  But did you know Skype is great for live chatting, too?  We use Skype chat to message real-time between our service centers and our global software development teams.  It even supports group chatting, so we can have several geeks participating in the same live chat.

In the business world, communication needs to be fast and frictionless.  In fact, the sooner you get to the truth, whether it’s a client’s order or a staffing issue, for example, the more competitive your organization will become.  Skype is a winner.  It’s much better than Yahoo, Hotmail and Google chats.  And it’s free!

Manage projects online.

I wish there were some way to automate the whole project management process.  It’s amazing how quickly customer satisfaction rates can drop when updates are late and milestones are missed.

We use Basecamp (http://basecamphq.com/) to manage software development projects.  We can setup milestones, store related files online, create reminders and even invite clients into some or all of the project management process so everyone is participating and well-informed.

Similar solutions include goplan (http://www.goplanapp.com/) and huddle (http://www.huddle.com/).  All offer 30-day free trials.

Make your event a success.

Eventbrite (http://www.eventbrite.com/) is a very useful tool for organizing company events.  The events could be anything, ranging from a seminar for your propsects to an employee appreciation BBQ for your team members.  With Eventbrite, you can publish the event online, push invites via email and social media to boost registration, track response rates, generate name tags, create check-in lists, and collect money online.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I think you can leverage Eventbrite to run a bootstrapped version Groupon or LivingSocial.  You can imagine you have a hot product and a good contact list and you use Eventbrite to push out timely specials, treating each deal as a kind of event.  Sounds promising.  Let me test it.  Will have more for you in my column next month…

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On-page SEO (search engine optimization)

14 Feb

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How to SEO Your Business

Ready for some news that’s both surprising and yet not-so-surprising? Nearly 70 percent of adults in the United States “rarely or never” use the phone book.

That’s according to a recent study by Harris Interactive.

Instead of the phone book, people are turning increasingly to the Internet to find a product or service. Judging from the stacks of unopened yellow pages, most people probably will nod and agree with the overall trend.

But, what does this mean for businesses, many of which still advertise in the old-fashioned phone book?

Well, it means your company is advertising in the wrong place. And it means your competitor is probably grabbing your market share.

It wasn’t that long ago when yellow page advertising was one of those necessary evils. Like most other business, if you wanted your phone to ring, you had to pay to play. And it wasn’t cheap.

Now, all that’s changed and we business owners — regardless of whether we like it or not — must be willing to change, too. The fact is your prospects are more likely to be sitting in front of a computer screen, tablet PC or a smart phone, using Google, Yelp and Bing. They want immediate results. And they’re not willing to spend a lot of time and energy searching for it.

This means your company must develop its online footprint and ensure that your potential clients can indeed find you easily online. The easy solution is click-thru advertising.

The smarter approach, though, is to optimize your web identities, like your website and social media profiles, for higher organic rankings. In the geek world, we call it SEO, or search engine optimization.

SEO can be segregated into two parts: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Both are important.

On-page SEO refers to the things you can do to ensure that your website is properly recognized by the search engines. Search engines regularly send bots (software) to scour the Internet and catalog what they find. You want your website to “sing” your targeted keywords while making it easy for the bots to “read” your website.

If you’re an attorney practicing employment law, you may want your website’s content to include relevant keyword phrases like: labor attorney Hawaii, labor attorney Honolulu, labor law Hawaii, labor law Honolulu, employment lawyer Hawaii, etc.

At the same time, you need to make sure your website is coded in a way to facilitate the search engines’ abilities to understand your website’s actual content.

It gets a bit technical here. But your rankings will improve if you take the time to do it right.

Below is a list of some of the things you should address. Give the list to your web head and get a fixed-price quote for what it will cost. Larger sites having more pages will obviously take longer and thus be more expensive. In general, market pricing typically will range from $500 to $1,500 per website for on-page SEO, depending on the scope of work.

Here is a quick guide towards good on-page SEO (source: www.seoco.co.uk):

• Internal linking: Make sure that all of your web pages can be indexed by search engines, and make sure that they all have at least one link from somewhere on your site.

• Unique content: Make sure that you have unique content on every page. Simply bold and underline your target keywords present in the content. A word of warning: Do not overdo it. You don’t need to bold and underline all target keywords present in the content, only a few.

• Page title: Your page title tags and description tags should describe the content of your different web pages. The page title tags should be less than 68 characters and the description tags more detailed but less than 148 characters.

• Meta tags: Make sure that your meta tags are arranged correctly. Meta description should be used to describe the site and Meta keyword should be used as a list of words that inform viewers about the main focus of the page.

• H tags: Make sure you label the different headers on your web pages using H tags.

• SEO-friendly URL: Make sure that your web page URLs are SEO friendly; use mod rewrite for Linux and Apache hosting or use IIS redirect for Windows. Ideally, make it so that the URLs describe your content.

• Complete links: Make sure that the links within your site are complete.

• Right image names: Make sure that you use descriptive URLs for your images.

• Alt tag: Make sure that you label all of your images with descriptive alt attributes.

• Meaningful anchor text: Make sure that you make good use of anchor text links within your content — if you have a page about blue widgets, use the phrase blue widgets in the text that links to it.

• Unique website: Make sure that there is only one version of your site.

• Unique homepage: Make sure that there is only one version of your homepage.

• W3C validation: Make sure that your code is valid; in some instances bad code can lead to search engines not being able to properly read a page. Use the W3C validator to check your markup.

I know. The above list is full of geek-speak. But your web head should know what to do.

Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing Services

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Resolutions for the New Year

21 Dec

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“The sea will grant each man new hope, as sleep brings dreams of home.” – Christopher Columbus

Technology is like that for me. It’s my ocean. It pulls me closer to new horizons and at the same time eventually delivers me back where I began – kind of like something out of T.S. Elliot’s famous poem “The Waste Land.”

The metaphor works for just about anything. For in the end, we realize the only way to truly learn about life (or technology) is through constant exploration.

And so, as we wrap up this calendar year and look towards the next, with bellies full of hope and renewed enthusiasm, we should list our resolutions for self improvement. Here are my suggestions:

Get the next generation iPad. It’s due the first quarter of next year. You don’t have to like the iPad, but as a business person you do have to understand it. Consider the purchase small investment in your education. After you’ve played with the ‘natural interface’ for a while, install an app called Flipboard (flipboard.com) and play with a variety of content sources. The iPad and its competitors herald a new era in hardware and software. Now is the time to thoroughly grasp why the iPad is so popular and to figure out how your business can take advantage it.

Join the South By Southwest (sxsw.com) interactive conference in Austin, March 11-15. This yearly event brings the best and the brightest together for one long weekend of seminars, speeches, panel discussions and schmoozing. Think of it as Spring Break for nerds. Everyone is welcome. I highly recommend it. You will learn a lot about what’s happening in social media, e-commerce, search engine marketing, user experience and how your business can leverage those trends to boost profits. Let me know if you’re interested. We should go as an informal hui and serve as the geeky ambassadors from Hawaii.

Start using Plancast.com. As you might have guessed from the name, Plancast helps you plan what you intend to do. But equally importantly, it helps you meet the right people. Are you trying to break into a new market or industry? Want to deepen your network? Plancast is perfect for business. You can follow thought leaders and see which work-related seminars, conferences and events they are planning to attend and then map your own schedule accordingly. You can also see who else in your field is attending and make arrangements beforehand to meet. Plancast is free.

Ask questions, get answers and learn what you need to know at Quora.com. Social Q&A sites are nothing new. If you haven’t yet had a chance, check out LinkedIn Answers. I like LinkedIn Answers because I can help people and because in the process those people may eventually become my clients. Lately, though, I’ve been playing more with Quora. It’s a bit more social and a lot more fun. Create your Quora account during your lunch break today. It’s free and just takes a minute to get going. Follow topics and people relevant to your industry and start interacting with others. Use Quora to position your company as a leader in your field and start turning those prospects into leads.

Share your presentations using SlideRocket.com and SlideShare.net. The beauty of the internet is you can easily sell your product or service to anyone, anywhere and do it with relatively little start-up capital. Both SlideRocket and SlideShare are excellent tools to pitch clients globally. One solid presentation, coupled with strong distribution, could really boost your company’s sales. Both solutions will let you add analytics so you can you can measure your presentation’s effectiveness. You can even embed lead forms inside the presentation so viewers can easily contact you.

Access your files wherever you are with DropBox.com. It wasn’t that long ago when we stored all our files on our local hard drives or the office server and accessed those files while at work. Now, we find our working environments far more decentralized. We want to get to those files at all hours of the day, regardless of where we may be. DropBox is a terrific tool for making sure you have immediate access to the files you need. DropBox will automatically distribute and update the important stuff across all of your devices. Need the same set of files to be on your iPhone, your home computer, your office computer and your laptop while on the road? No problem. DropBox will do exactly that. And it will make sure its the most recent version of those files.

Use Evernote.com as a business tool. Evernote’s goal is to be your online brain. I use a Moleskin for quick notes, phone numbers, passwords and messages. But I use Evernote for everything else, including shopping lists, reading lists and daily action items. It’s great for capturing content on the fly and then referencing it later. But Evernote is also good for work. For example, you can snap a photo of a printed doc, store it in Evernote, and then review it during the commute home. Using its character recognition capability, you can use your cellphone to take pics of things like of business cards and expense receipts, and then file them accordingly. Evernote works across all your devices, from your cell phone to workstation, and syncs all your data so you get what you want, when you want it.

Curiosity is the key to knowledge and knowledge is the key to success. This is especially true in business, where trends and the changes in trends can bring great opportunity. The tech world is moving at warp speed. What worked 5 years ago for your business may not offer as much value today. To stay competitive, we must be competitive. That means we must maximize our exposure to new things. And given the significant return on investment it offers, harnessing the power of new technology should be one of our top priorities. Just jump into the sea. You can figure out how to swim along the way.

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Bruce Lee and Social Media

14 Dec

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Remember that scene in Enter the Dragon, where Bruce Lee is trying to teach one of his students about focus?  Bruce Lee points a finger and says to his disciple,” It’s like a finger pointing away to the moon…”

The student makes the mistake of looking at the finger.  Bruce Lee suddenly swats him on the head and admonishes, “Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”

You can watch the famous scene here: http://bit.ly/9tx34G

I think social media is like that.  We’ve been staring so much at the finger, we’ve forgotten that we’re supposed to be getting stuff done.  Well, the party’s over.  It’s time to get over the shock and awe of social media and start using it for work.   Yes, social media is the greatest thing since sliced bread.  My point is let’s stop looking at the bread and start making some sandwiches.

One company here in Hawaii is being very smart about it.  They have some pretty interesting plans for social media and have asked us to develop a winning solution.

The challenge?  They have 10 locations across the Hawaiian islands and about 100 employees.  Like all companies, they need to ensure everyone is plugged in and happy.  That means corporate needs an effective way to keep all employees well informed of what’s happening inside the company.  Yes, email works.  So does texting or even faxing.  But all that seems so old school now.

The solution?  Social media. Imagine a password-protected space on the internet,  where employees could login and get company news.  Imagine a place where each employee can create his/her profile, post pictures, a brief description about themselves, and maybe something about their hobbies and interests.  Imagine the ability to create groups around organizational functions.   Maybe there’s a marketing group, an accounting group, and an IT group.  There could even be groups for extracurricular activities, like community service projects and company volleyball after work.  Imagine calendars, chats, training videos and blog posts.  Imagine frictionless ways to send messages and share content and to push those messages to the desktop and to smart phones.  Imagine a living, breathing, media-rich communication platform inside the company, allowing employees to share ideas and mentor each other in real-time, while working both on the business and in the business.

Interested?  You can do the same for your business.  Here’s what you need to know.

Something like Facebook would be perfect.  It has the features you need.  The only problem is employees need sufficient distance between work and play.  The last thing anyone wants is the boss poking around all those private status updates.  So using Facebook is – at least for the time being – not going to work.

Fortunately, there are two off-the-shelf solutions that will do everything need:  SocialCast.com and SocialText. I have been playing with both and a like them very much.  There are hosted options and solutions for doing everything yourself in-house.  Costs range from $1-5 per user per month, depending on how many features you want.  Start up costs are nominal.

My biggest concern, though, with SocialCast.com and SocialText.com is on-going cost.  They can really add up over time.  So if you want to use social media but don’t want to subscribe to a service,  take a look at existing  blogging solutions and simply customize them for your company’s needs.  Most will do exactly what you need them to do, including profiles, groups, video, text/email notifications, etc.  You can even password protect your hui.  Consider these platforms:  Posterous.com, Tumblr.com, LiveJournal.com, WordPress.org and Blogger.com.  Each can be easily customized and password protected.  You can even put your solution behind your website, where only authorized users can have access.

Now, when choosing a solution, make sure it offers genuine utility for your employees.  In other words, if you opt for a sexy solution with all the bells and whistles, it may just be overwhelming for everyone and ultimately lead to poor adoption rates.  Engineering is good.  But over engineering is bad.

To get everyone on board, it’s best to keep it simple and let the solution grow organically.  In the end, the solution must work well for most of the people on your team.  And for those employees who are reluctant to do anything new, this may be the perfect opportunity to offer much appreciated staff training and development.

Lastly, be sure to harness the decentralizing aspect of social media.  Give your employees the freedom to access the platform and supply updates anytime, anywhere.  To get the biggest bang, be willing to cede some control.  As I’ve discovered in my business, one idea from the least likely person on your team could be worth a million dollars.

Let me know if I can help with anything.

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Use the Internet to Build Your Business

3 Nov

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Some companies just get it.  And it’s no surprise they continue to thrive – even when the economy is poor.  Professional Image, a Honolulu-based printing and copying business, is one of those companies.   Let me explain why.

Last year Professional Image merged with New Tech Imaging. It was the perfect time to redesign their website.  But instead of creating another brochure online, they asked themselves a super relevant question, “How can the Internet help us do what we do even better?”  In other words, how can the website be used to take orders, facilitate payments, build relationships, and even offer new products and services?

Of course, the new site had to look good.  After all, they have a million dollar brand;  they need a million dollar website. It must exude confidence, competency and professionalism.  It needs to be fresh, upbeat and contemporary.  Take a look:  ProImageHawaii.com

But Professional Image didn’t let aesthetics drive the redesign.  Most business owners want the sexiest, flashiest site on the block.  This is a mistake.  Unless you’re in the design business, your site’s graphic design sense is only one part of the equation.

To avoid falling into the graphic design trap, Professional Image did what every company should do when overhauling their site: They first determined the site’s purpose and then let the design follow function.  If you think about it, a pretty site is pretty, but a useful site actually gets work done.

Making a site that works, though, entails more than just focusing on function.  A site must get recognized by the search engine crawlers.  It’s got to be engineered to get noticed.  This requires optimizing the site, both on-page SEO and off-page SEO.  If you Google “copying services Honolulu”, ProImageHawaii.com ranks number one.

But a successful website is more than just high organic rankings.  If you show me a website with high rankings on search engines, I am impressed. But show me a website that consistently sends you business and I am in love!  Traffic is good.  But high conversion rates (converting prospects into sales) are even better.

Take a look at the call-to-action items on ProImageHawaii.com.  One well-placed button could be worth millions of dollars.  Their site is carefully designed to generate leads and it works very well.  In fact, the sales team doesn’t have to spend as much time doing cold calls anymore.  The website is doing that for them 24/7.  As a result, they can focus on serving clients even better.

Running a successful business is more than just capturing sales. Operations are equally important.  Your website should reduce administrative costs, speed turnaround, and improve quality control.

To help clients submit orders, we added a file upload feature to their site.  Sounds like a minor thing, but remember this is a print shop. Those file sizes are sometimes 500MB or more.  You cannot easily email them.  Sure, you could ask the client to FTP them, or deliver the content on disk.  But why do that if it everything can be done from the website?  The whole point of technology is to make life simpler.  And the special file uploader provides this much wanted convenience.

One very exciting area of business for Professional Image is photo books.  This service allows families to create custom books for everything from childhood memories to family reunions.  To help them create books, we added a software wizard to the site.  Now, anyone at anytime can download the tools and get started with their creations.

We also added automation.  After the photo book is created, the shopping cart automatically calculates the cost of the photo books and sends those orders with the appropriate order numbers to the right printing centers.  We even customized the e-commerce module so Professional Image processes orders at lower merchant fees.  This means huge savings for them over time.

A big issue with any e-commerce site is a shopping cart abandonment.  It is exactly what it sounds like:  someone shops, adds items to their cart, and then at the final moment, decides – for whatever reason – not to go through with the purchase.  As you can imagine, this is a serious problem for any business.  To help understand what’s really going on, we added metrics their site.  We can now measure how many people come to the site, how many actually get started with the photo books, and how many leave the site before completing an order.  By studying these numbers and by tweaking the site accordingly, the business can test what works and eventually boost conversion rates.

Professional Image is exploring other smart ways of using technology:

  • They are creating an online video tutorial to help photo book users create their books.  Again, nothing fancy is required.  As we’ve seen with the success of YouTube, the video does not have to be Hollywood quality.  It just has to be useful and organic.  Video is very powerful.  Interesting fact:  Video messages enjoy a 3x higher retention rate than text and 5x more views than text.
  • Professional Image provides litigation support for law firms.  It’s good business for them.  The logical next step is to develop special offers for the legal community.  This can be easily accomplished using e-mail marketing tools like Aweber.com and ConstantContact.com.
  • Social media is the new rock and roll.  Every business must find ways to harness all that social horsepower.  For the photo book enthusiasts, social media offers a unique forum to exchange ideas and develop companionship based a shared interest in crafting.  Remember, a Facebook fan is more likely to spend more on your product or service, more likely to purchase from you more often (repeat sales), and more often to recommend your company to their family and friends.  It’s perfect.
  • Click-thru advertising works very well if you do it right.  Refrain from creating generic ads and sending your prospect to a generic home page.  Think laser.  Craft a specific ad targetting a well-defined demographic, and then send that prospect to a custom landing page, focusing on selling that particular product or service.  Again, test, measure, tweak, repeat.
  • Never underestimate the lowly e-newsletter.  Your clients want to hear from the owner.  They want to know what’s new and exciting in their industry.  They even want to get to know your new employee.  Make it fun, informal, relevant and a soft-sell.
  • Automate the feedback process.  Customers want to hear from you, but they also want YOU to hear from THEM.  They may have an issue or they may have a suggestion.  The sooner you get to the truth, the stronger your business will be.  Some of our best ideas at SuperGeeks actually came from our clients.  Galvanize them.  Use internet-based surveys to get the job done.

The upside of the economic malaise is we business owners are forced to re-think our business models.  With the advent of all things digital, it’s the perfect time to reexamine long-standing assumptions and re-tool your company around the internet.  Step outside the day-to-day noise of current operations and look for inspiration and best practices from unrelated industries.  I am confident you will find gold there.  As they say, we never want to miss a good crisis.

Want a custom website for your business?  Does your existing site need to be modernized?  Request a FREE quote for your project.

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