Broadside: Taking Aim at the Social Revolution

Lately I am getting more and more people following me on Twitter, who, I discover when looking to see who they are, have protected their page. We cannot follow you back without more work on our part: asking your permission to let us in. While I am flattered to be followed, this controlling one’s privacy brought to mind a recent business discussion as to why people keep their social networking connections private.

In that conversation, most people in the room favored public access. Everyone agreed that getting the most contacts is not conducive to good business -- or even to selling a product or service. It is certainly less tedious to be able to directly ask someone to network than to ask me to connect you -- and the back and forth that should entail if you are practicing good business networking habits.

If you do ask me for a connection, I do take the time to see who you are, what you do, and whether my making a connection that may get a negative response from the person I am connecting. I would not want to forward a bogus or "just collecting names" request. I would usually take the time to ask the 3rd party if they would like to make the connection. All this does take time. Sometimes it is worth it. Sometimes, as recently happened to me, the requestor had the wrong person. I did not forward the request.

And I do spend a lot more time looking at a connection request when lists are private. You can tell if you have opted for public or private by looking at your preferences.

I suspect most of us don't take a second look at our preferences once we get past the initial setup. This is not, imo, a good practice. Updating your personal information on your social sites at least yearly makes you a more valuable business contact. It has the added advantage, especially to those of us early adapters or those who are a bit timid about all that the socnet age has to offer, of allowing you to correct what may have been an unintentional consequence. You may not have understood what public and private meant when first registering, or you may want to be public, now that you’ve become comfortable with the Internet and the 21st century way of talking.

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Email comes in 2 flavors: POP and IMAP.

Post Office Protocal (POP), which is less efficient, has its place. If you are the only one working on your computer, if you do not need to share your work and communications, if you have limited storage space on your email server, and/or you have a slow Internet connection, POP may be your best choice.

On the other hand, if you are want to be efficient and manage your time well, Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is the better choice. IMAP lets you access your email, including previously read email, from many electronic devices and from wherever you are in the world. IMAP provides two-way communication between your mail server and your electronic devices, saving you from duplicating messages, storing them in various places, and generally improving your filing and management systems, saving you time.

Unlike POP, IMAP easily synchronizes messages from different computers, automatically mirrors file folders created on the server or computer, and even stores your sent messages on the server (if you elect to do this). Mail programs that support IMAP even can move messages between folders on the server; between the server and a local mail folder; and even between different IMAP mailboxes on different servers.

IMAP makes handling email simpler and efficient.

While POP can be set to store messages on the server and save emails sent from the server. It is good practice to store messages for a few days at least, just in case some are deleted from your computer hard drive. IMAP will store messages on your hard drive with the proper settings and folders. The one disadvantage to IMAP is the amount of storage space your ISP provides. While you can always rent more storage space, it is a good idea to monitor this.

IMAP makes deleting messages safer. When a message is marked for deletion, it disappears from the inbox or folder, but it is still on the server -- and can easily be undeleted if needed. This is especially useful when sharing emails. One person reads and deletes a message, but another can still read it and retrieve it.

Emails are permanently deleted with a purge command. For more on how email works, read How Stuff Works article on email.

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Often I visit web sites that seem to be out of date. I have a friend who is downsizing her business location, so I took a quick look at the site to see if it reflected the new status. It did now, which is excellent. As the old saying goes, “on the Internet, no one knows you are a dog.”*

I did notice that the site has a copyright date of 2008. I know this site has been live since at least 1999. It is a static site, so no way to tell if content is current. If I did not know this site and the owner, I might well assume, correctly, the site is not up to date. When was the last time you gave your site a basic checkup? And are you moving your business from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and beyond? It is critical in this social web era, especially as we move from the semantic web to the streaming web, to update your online presence. Here are 5 things to consider upgrading.

1.     Site logs. Check these regularly (at least monthly). Using Google Analytics makes this simple, although your web hosting company should provide some site logging tools. If they don’t, switch! Your logs will help direct your aim at the people who are visiting your site. You can design landing pages that give them what they are looking to find. You can use the logs to see from where they are coming, then use that information to get more interactive on your end.

2.    Change the content. If you have not updated your site’s content in the past year, your site is losing touch with the changing web. Fresh and relevant content is where it’s at with Web 2.0.

3.    Web 2.0 interaction. Your business is no longer in control of its own products, much less its branding. Customers are now in charge. If you are not talking about why your product is of value to me, your customer, I am probably doing my purchasing elsewhere.

4.    Social or Wallflower? If you’ve joined social networks, great. If you are not participating, you are losing customers, the opportunity to control the buzz about your company or product, and track, at the least, your company’s name using Google Alerts or some other such tool. Twitter may seem to be too futuristic and up your daily noise level, but your business is reaping the rewards or not if you are just sitting against the wall.

5.    Unsolicited Email. If you are sending emails to customers and potential customers without permission, you may be in violation of federal law. The Can-Spam Act of 2003 has 4 main provisions. The most important for your customers is providing them a way to easily opt-out of your solicitations. If you don’t have a business system for handling this, and are still emailing from your personal copy of Outlook, Eudora, Gmail or Hotmail, you are probably not following the law. Time to purchase a proper email handling program such as Constant Contact.

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* http://www.unc.edu/depts/jomc/academics/dri/idog.html

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What do you use to take online payments? This is a question asked by our clients a lot.

Foregoing the discussions of planning (why, who, for what purpose, the cost and ROI, how to implement, when to upgrade, and most importantly, will your purchaser be comfortable with the system you select), I thought it might be time for a quick review of some of the most currently used payment systems.

Paypal

This is the first and most well-known. It has its detractors and supporters. Our advice is always to include Paypal, just because everyone knows it and feels safe with it. Why miss a sale because your purchaser is not familiar with your merchant bank? If you are selling a lot of low-cost items, the transaction fee at Paypal may be too high.

Spare Change
The first and largest micropayments solution for social networks users allowing buyers and sellers to make small payments. Similar services include Bee-Tokens and Tipjoy. Tipjoy differs a bit as it is one click and encourages your customers to share your content with their friends, through feeds to social networks like Twitter and FriendFeed, RSS feeds, and emails.

Twitpay
This is a micropayment service for microbloggers.

Generically, there are

Digital Cash - a form of electronic currency that functions similarly to a debit card.

Electronic Checks - as straightforward as it sounds: small business allows customers to pay for e-commerce purchases by accepting personal or business checks online.

Internet Cash - for those businesses whose customers traditionally pay cash. It’s great for gifts and to set spending limits for teens. Or to provide purchase opportunities for those without credit cards.

eCharge Phone - allows customers to bill purchases to their local phone bills.

Tradenable acts as an escrow agent between auction buyers and sellers. The buyer and seller set terms online. After both parties agree to the terms, and successful payment and receipt of goods is made, Tradenable then pays the seller. There is a method for returning goods, in addition.

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Steve Jobs and Bill Gates* weren’t the beginning of the “start your business in your garage” movement. In 1938, those fun guys, Dave Packard and William Hewlett, joined forces in a small house in what is now Silicon Valley, using the garage for the office. HP was born.

What does an entrepreneur do when the garage gets too small? Or you just want to get your car back where it belongs? Join an incubator.

Incubators accelerate the development of entrepreneurial companies through an array of business support, resources and services, developed or orchestrated by incubator management, and offered both in the incubator and through its network of contacts. The main goal is to produce successful firms that will leave the program financially viable and freestanding -- and who will give back to the community by creating jobs, revitalizing neighborhoods, and strengthening local and national economies.

It is not a simple thing to join an incubator. They come in all shapes and sizes, with various perks. And you can’t just walk in the door. You do need to apply -- the incubator, remember, is also a business. It is looking for businesses that will pay for themselves. Once in the door, you’ll find benefits including

•    working in a nurturing environment designed to help small businesses share experiences with each other and conduct business with one another thereby reducing the risk involved as start up
•    accessing facilities and equipment otherwise unavailable or unaffordable
•    discovering available financial and technical services and resources and learn how to utilize those services
•    finding mentors
•    paying for these benefits at a reduced or flexible rates

From Incubator to Mezzanine

When a business is ready to leave the incubator, the incubator will often assist in getting the business set up on the mezzanine level. This is an intermediate step before becoming a full-fledged business. At the mezzanine level stage of a company's development, venture capitalists (VC) are more likely to look at the company, prior to its going public, as there is a lower risk of loss than at the incubator stage.

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* Historically, Gates started in his dorm room, but who will ever be sure?

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