Internet provides powerful networking opportunities that allow users to effectively target their audience by logging on to social sites like LinkedIn, Digg and more . Take advantage of these tools by asserting your company's presence online and reaching more potential customers, business partners and employees.
Social-Media/Social-Bookmarking Sites
Share your favorite sites on the Web with potential clients and business partners by commenting on, uploading and ranking different newsworthy articles. You can also create a member profile that directs traffic back to your company's Web site.
Reddit: Upload stories and articles on reddit to drive traffic to your site or blog. Submit items often so that you'll gain a more loyal following and increase your presence on the site.
Digg : Digg has a huge following online because of its optimum usability. Visitors can submit and browse articles in categories like technology, business, entertainment, sports and more.
Del.icio.us: Social bookmark your way to better business with sites like del.icio.us, which invite users to organize and publicize interesting items through tagging and networking.
StumbleUpon: You'll open your online presence up to a whole new audience just by adding the StumbleUpon toolbar to your browser and "channel surf[ing] the Web. You'll "connect with friends and share your discoveries," as well as "meet people that have similar interests."
Technorati: If you want to increase your blog's readership, consider registering it with Technorati, a network of blogs and writers that lists top stories in categories like Business, Entertainment and Technology.
Ning: After hanging around the same social networks for a while, you may feel inspired to create your own, where you can bring together clients, vendors, customers and co-workers in a confidential, secure corner of the Web. Ning lets users design free social networks that they can share with anyone.
Squidoo: According to Squidoo, "everyone's an expert on something. Share your knowledge!" Share your industry's secrets by answering questions and designing a profile page to help other members.
Furl: Make Furl "your personal Web file" by bookmarking great sites and sharing them with other users by recommending links, commenting on articles and utilizing other fantastic features.
Tubearoo: This video network works like other social-bookmarking sites, except that it focuses on uploaded videos. Businesses can create and upload tutorials, commentaries and interviews with industry insiders to promote their own services.
WikiHow: Create a how-to guide or tutorial on wikiHow to share your company's services with the public for free.
YouTube: From the fashion industry to Capitol Hill, everyone has a video floating around on YouTube. Shoot a behind-the-scenes video from your company's latest commercial or event to give customers and clients an idea of what you do each day.
Ma.gnolia: Share your favorite sites with friends, colleagues and clients by organizing your bookmarks with Ma.gnolia. Clients will appreciate both your Internet-savviness and your ability to stay current and organized.
Professional-Networking Sites
Sign up with these online networking communities as a company or as an individual to take advantage of recruiting opportunities, cross-promotional events and more.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a popular networking site where alumni, business associates, recent graduates and other professionals connect online.
Ecademy: Ecademy prides itself on "connecting business people" through its online network, blog and message-board chats, as well as its premier BlackStar membership program, which awards exclusive benefits.
Focus: Focus is a business destination where business professionals can help each other with their purchase and other business decisions by accessing research and peer expertise. Most importantly, Focus provides open, quality information for all businesses that is freely available, easily accessible, and community powered.
YorZ: This networking site doubles as a job site. Members can post openings for free to attract quality candidates.
Xing: An account with networking site Xing can "open doors to thousands of companies." Use the professional contact manager to organize your new friends and colleagues, and take advantage of the Business Accelerator application to "find experts at the click of a button, market yourself in a professional context [and] open up new sales channels."
Facebook: Facebook is no longer just for college kids who want to post their party pics. Businesses vie for advertising opportunities, event promotion and more on this social-networking site.
Care2: Care2 isn't just a networking community for professionals: It's touted as "the global network for organizations and people who Care2 make a difference." If your business is making efforts to go green, let others know by becoming a presence on this site.
Gather: This networking community is made up of members who think. Browse categories concerning books, health, money, news and more to ignite discussions on politics, business and entertainment. This will help your company tap into its target audience and find out what they want.
MEETin.org: Once you've acquired a group of contacts in your city by networking on MEETin.org, organize an event so that you can meet face-to-face.
Tribe: Cities like Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, New York and Chicago have unique online communities on tribe. Users can search for favorite restaurants, events, clubs and more.
Ziggs: Ziggs is "organizing and connecting people in a professional way." Join groups and make contacts through your Ziggs account to increase your company's presence online and further your own personal career.
Plaxo: Join Plaxo to organize your contacts and stay updated with feeds from Digg, Amazon.com, del.icio.us and more.
NetParty: If you want to attract young professionals in cities like Boston, Dallas, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Orlando Fla., create an account with the networking site NetParty. You'll be able to connect with qualified, up-and-coming professionals online, then meet them at a real-life happy-hour event where you can pass out business cards, pitch new job openings and more.
Networking For Professionals: Networking For Professionals is another online community that combines the Internet with special events in the real world. Post photos, videos, résumés and clips on your online profile while you meet new business contacts.
Niche Social-Media Sites
Consider linking up with one of these social-media sites to narrow down your business's target audience. You'll find other professionals, enthusiasts and consumers who are most likely already interested in what your company has to offer.
Pixel Groovy: Web workers will love Pixel Groovy, an open-source site that lets members submit and rate tutorials for Web 2.0, email and online-marketing issues.
Mixx: Mixx prides itself on being "your link to the Web content that really matters." Submit and rate stories, photos and news to drive traffic to your own site. You'll also meet others with similar interests.
Tweako: Gadget-minded computer geeks can network with each other on Tweako, a site that promotes information sharing for the technologically savvy.
Small Business Brief: When members post entrepreneur-related articles, a photo and a link to their profile appear, gaining you valuable exposure and legitimacy online.
Sphinn: Sphinn is an online forum and networking site for the Internet marketing crowd. Upload articles and guides from your blog to create interest in your own company or connect with other professionals for form new contacts.
BuzzFlash.net: This one-stop news resource is great for businesses that want to contribute articles on a variety of subjects, from the environment to politics to health.
HubSpot: HubSpot is another news site aimed at connecting business professionals.
SEO TAGG: Stay on top of news from the Web marketing and SEO (search-engine optimization) industries by becoming an active member of this online community.
General Social-Media Sites
The following social-media sites provide excellent opportunities for businesses to advertise; promote specials, events or services; and feature published, knowledgeable employees.
Wikipedia: Besides creating your own business reference page on Wikipedia, you can connect with other users on Wikipedia's Community Portal and at the village pump, where you'll find conscientious professionals enthusiastic about news, business, research and more.
Newsvine: Feature top employees by uploading their articles, studies or other news-related items to this site. A free account will also get you your own column and access to the Newsvine community.
43 Things: This site bills itself as "the world's most popular online goal setting community." By publicizing your company's goals and ambitions, you'll gain a following of customers, investors and promoters who cheer you on as you achieve success.
Wetpaint: If you're tired of blogs and generic Web sites, create your own wiki with Wetpaint to reach your audience and increase your company's presence online. You can easily organize articles, contact information, photos and other information to promote your business.
Twitter: Is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you answer the question, "What are you doing?" by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called "tweets", to your friends, or "followers."
Yahoo! Answers: Start fielding Yahoo! users' questions with this social-media Q&A service. Search for questions in your particular areas of expertise by clicking categories like Business & Finance, Health, News & Events and more. If you continue to dole out useful advice and link your answer to your company's Web page, you'll quickly gain a new following of curious customers.
Job Sites
If you want to secure high-quality talent during your company's next hiring spree, you'll need to maintain a strong presence on popular job sites like the ones listed below.
CareerBuilder: Reach millions of candidates by posting jobs on this must-visit site.
The Wall Street Journal's CareerJournal: The Wall Street Journal's CareerJournal attracts well-educated professionals who are at the top of their game. Post a job or search résumés here.
CollegeRecruiter.com: If your firm wants to hire promising entry-level employees, check CollegeRecuriter.com for candidates with college degrees.
Monster: Post often to separate your business from all the other big companies that use this site to advertise job openings.
Sologig: Top freelancers and contractors post résumés and look for work on this popular site.
AllFreelance.com: This site "offers self-employed small business owners links to freelance & work at home job boards, self-promotion tips" and more.
Freelance Switch Job Listings: Freelance Switch is the freelancer's online mecca and boasts articles, resource toolboxes, valuable tips and a job board.
GoFreelance: Employers looking to boost their vendor base should check GoFreelance for professionals in the writing, design, editing and Web industries.
Yahoo! Hot Jobs: This site is often one of the first places that job seekers visit. Post open opportunities and check out informative articles and guides to gain insight on the hiring and interviewing process.
Guru.com: Build your company's repertoire with top freelancing professionals by advertising projects on this site, otherwise known as "the world's largest online service marketplace."
The original source of this article is InsideCRM.com, part of the Focus network of sites. I was in the middle of compiling my own and stumbled upon this great list. We hope you find it useful.
Over the past three years I have engaged several folks to work on our SEO and Google AdWords programs. Everyone has a little different approach and each vender has strengths that the others did not. For the most part I felt yuck adwords statistics and number crunching all so boring... I just wanted to pass the buck and run as far away as possible. Yet the results have the most dramatic effect on our sales. To not hone my skills up front was a very expensive lesion learned. Like any technology if you are going to direct teams to manage this for you, you have to know and understand the rules of the road and how to navigate the ship in changing waters. I feel like quite a goof for not digging deeper into this earlier in this process. I guess having worked with some talented SEO folks it was always a bit intimidating. I have recently found it is not really that difficult but requires some skill, patients and consistency over time. If you are someone like myself whom enjoys more instant gratification this can be rather frustrating. I will not get in to the great techniques we are learning for Google adwords since there are several great books on Amazon that can steer you in the right direction and this is part of our secret sauce. What I can tell you are a few things we tried and some of our lessons learned.
SEO for Joomla.
On the SEO side we went through our content after researching keywords to make sure we had the right density but we made some mistakes early on our Joomla CMS configuration so this did not work as well as we had hoped for natural search. Over time we found ways of optimizing the Joomla CMS environment to get better results. The key things that are important in a Joomla CMS optimization for
Search Engine Optimization:
1. (SEF) Search engine friendly URLs. There are a number of components that do this and depending on whether you are using Joomla 1.0 or Joomla 1.5 there is a little different process for implementing this.
2. Meta tags and Keywords management. There is a great component from iJoomla.com called meta tag generator that allows you to manage the keywords and meta tags for your articles from a central location.
3. Careful use of Style attributes such as H1, H2 and H3 tags and bold etc. In Joomla 1.0 there are a couple things you need to do under the hood to optimize the templates use of these tags and then you have to make sure you implement the content management consistent with this. There are a couple great Joomla SEO books available that help guide you. Check Compass Designs web site for more information.
Directory Submissions:
This worked out pretty well and we had a great team implement a couple rounds of over 1200 directory submissions. This created a nice boom of traffic to our site but these have to be updated often and it is helpful to submit alternate pages. Most of the directories require manual submission since they have captua codes to avoid spiders from flooding them. I had a nice piece of software that would do small batches to a couple hundred directories that showed some quick results in traffic but the real key to success was working with a vendor that had an extensive list of over 6000 to rotate to over time.
Landing Pages - Lead Capture:
This was an effort to set up but can be a real powerful tool with significant impact on the conversion results. The landing pages must have targeted content based on the source that is driving traffic to them. If you have an adword campaign for Customer Relationship Management you need to have a page with targeted content and Keyword optimization for this campaign. In our case we integrated lead capture forms with a few select fields. Our goal was to direct the user to three options. Fill out the form, call us or go visit the web site at a page of our choosing. There is a real art to synchronizing the messages in your landing pages with the ads and associated keywords. Effective use of related video or graphics on the page is also something that can really give the campaign a boost. If you get your message wrong here you will not get good conversion. They will come and say "Yikes! ...another ad... bub bye." We ad some light (4-5 links back to main site) at the bottom so that it feels more like a mini site vs. an ad.
The adwords for us has been on and off success and failure. Everyone that we has worked with on this had a different take on how to structure the ads and manage campaigns. While it is important to track and manage your campaign in a way you can optimize your results to improve over time, often if you need to drive traffic quickly to offset a slump in sales or current event it is more important to make sure your message and content is in sync than how deep you are tracking the results. This is one of those gut things you have to balance with statistics and strategy. Creating ads is really a science but having them connect with the pulse of the folks you want to attract takes a little more intuition. There are a ton of great tools in Google and elsewhere that can help you do more than just get a good ad campaign initiated. If you are intuitive with these tools you can really gather a significant amount of business intelligence regarding your competition. For small businesses this is best gathered and most efficiently managed if you can get a little hands on with developing these campaigns. Since your ability to compete effectively moving forward will most likely involve the internet. So you had better start getting savvy about these tools and how to use them. Adwoords can help you connect quickly with a large audience of folks with an itch to scratch related to your products and services. Great book: Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords
Social Technologies and the blogosphere;
Well it is a no brainer that social communicates are taking over the web waves and having the connections to the popular social networks and rss feeds built into your web framework helps you syndicate your articles and take advantage of a bit of the Social technology groundswell. Each of the many social networks has unique demographics and features that you want to review for the best audience you wish to attract. You will need to get involved and contribute to the conversations to get traction and link backs to your site. You also may want to segment which you will use for more of your professional verses personal profiles. The real power that kind of blew my mind was how blogging and twitter seemed be like gasoline on a fire. With the blog being the fire and twitter being the gasoline. The buzz right now to build a following is to have something to say that is honest and somewhat personal. In this new digital world we still want to communicate with humans vs the technology itself. So I started this blog a couple years ago and posted very little but I wanted to be cool and say "Hey yea I have a blog" so I posted some pictures and shared a few stories. Once I discovered twitter and looked at what many folks were doing "ding" the light bulb finally went off. When building a business the first rule in sales is to meet greet and relax before you try to sell anyone anything you have to sell yourself and build confidence that they can come to you for solutions to their pains. This is where blogging can help you communicate your message, corporate philosophy, approaches to doing business and other information that will build trust and confidence.
Being a Thought Leader:
The most successful bloggers are "Thought Leaders" where they are helping to inform folks by being ahead of the trends and often they help set them. So when you can find a voice for presenting interesting information that folks can identify with and where the information you present is useful, naturally you will grow an audience. When you throw the power of twitter at this it actually gives you a real time platform to drive folks to your blog. At the time of this article I am rapidly approaching 6000 followers on twitter and when you post links to your blog with this many followers, most likely someone in this group will go there. If you catch them with something interesting, they may RT or retweet you or send reply's (wink wink nuge nuge fellow twits... please RT this!). This pushes the information into the "twitosphere" that may get pushed to every other social network depending on the buzz that is created. Stop and think about this for a minute. You can now as an individual working from your spare bedroom or basement office reach out to and connect with the market place like never before. It really can be a powerful set of tools if you use it effectively. Look at how Ashton Kutcher competed with Media Giant CNN for the most followers on Twitter through his grass roots campaign and won. (http://twitter.com/aplusk) as of today he is up to 2,057,829 followers. Man... I would love to get a RT from him for "our company voice"!
Press Releases on the web:
This is by far one of the most effective tools for getting your message out quickly. An earlier blog post on my blog lists 23 links for web sites that can push your press releases out to the world on the web . What this does is puts your "News Worthy" message out in circulation on the web for quite some time. Other bloggers may take this and expand upon it and perhaps add their two cents worth. This actually cascades across the web and cell phones reaching a huge audience very quickly. I sent out a release last year for the info@hand training support we offer and some new training modules we built. I was blown away when I did some Google searches at how many articles and other sites had picked this up and added to their syndication feeds. Regular press releases can really help get good track backs to your site and get your message syndicated quickly and over time for great results.
Conclusion:
There is no real silver bullet since all of this stuff takes time, patience and has to happen in concert with each other. There should also be a thread linking everything together with a pulse and rhythm just like conducting an orchestra. I remember a funny trick they used to do at the state fair where they would have a kid conduct the orchestra... they would give him/her the baton and whatever they did with it the orchestra would play. This often led to some very funny and unpredictable results. I kind of equate this to running an effective eMarketing campaign. If you write a good score and then study all parts, cast the right players, practice a lot, understand how to conduct the orchestra, keep a solid beat of consistency, then and only then can you create powerful music that will compel, inspire and motivate your audience. If not you are paying a lot of talented musicians to follow you on a goose chase and you could waste a lot of cash and miss potential opportunities.
As an entrepreneur I always have to look for tools that can help our business become more successful, improve our ability to compete and to get better business intelligence. Since our company works to provide consulting and technology solutions for small businesses we are always on the lookout for great links or resources that can help our customers grow their businesses. It has become a passion of mine to be able to learn about a company and the personal dynamics of their culture and to help them identify ways our CRBM platform and talent resource network can add value to the evolution of their business processes and to get the most out of their investments. We all know that technology and its use is only part of the equation. It is refreshing to see a list like the one below since he found some good resources for each slice of operating a small business. It is all about balance and making sure you are looking at all aspects of your business that will help future proof your business and prepare you for the many turns and bumps in the road forward.
We also have put together a great links page here on our CNP Integrations site where we post links to many of these kinds of tools, blogs and resources. We are always adding more great links and categories so check back from time to time and you will see this repository grow. There are also some white papers/research reports that you may find useful if you are considering use of social technologies or consolidating your business systems or implementing a customer relationship business management solution.
The Entrepreneur's Handbook - 58 Resources For First Time Entrepreneurs
As a first time entrepreneur you probably have tons of questions. And every time you do a Google search for an answer you are bombarded with too much information and in some cases that information contradicts other things you have heard. Due to this, I have created a list of 54 resources that should help you out.
Legal & Accounting
Legal and accounting issues may not seem important when you are starting your company, but they are. Legal and accounting mistakes that you make early on can haunt you for years and can be expensive to fix. So if you are going to start a company you should do things right from the get go.
S Corp. vs. LLC: Which Structure is Right for Your Business - Determining the type of legal structure for a new business can be daunting for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Learn more about S Corporations and Limited Liability Companies (LLC), and decide if one of these business structures is right for you.
Findlaw - a directory of all the lawyers throughout the US.
Bookkeeping 101: Debits and Credits - Accounting ends with score keeping but begins with record keeping. The first task of accounting is to accurately record transactions. Transactions are events that change the composition of a firm's assets, liabilities, and equity.
Accounting Basics - This explanation of accounting basics will introduce you to some basic accounting principles, accounting concepts, and accounting terminology.
Docstoc - A free place to get legal documents and templates which can drastically help reduce your legal fees and in some cases allow you to do some legal stuff yourself.
Legal Issues to Consider When Starting Your Business - There are a multitude of legal issues to think about when it comes to starting your business. Everything from your business name to its structure to its operation has legal implications.
Web Design
Design is something we tend to take for granted. Not only is important for your website to look good, but you also want to make sure it is usable and converts.
Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design - The ten most egregious offenses against users. Web design disasters and HTML horrors are legion, though many usability atrocities are less common than they used to be.
You can have a great product or service, but if no one sees it you will never make any money. Now this doesn't mean you have to hire a marketing firm to help you out, but you could learn some basic things about Internet marketing.
Web Analytics: An Hour A Day - Google's analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik, breaks down web analytics and the tracking needs you may need for your website.
Dullest - The blog of Google's main search engineer, Matt Cutts. Before you get into search engine optimization, you probably want to read his blog.
MailChimp - Sending high quantities of emails isn't an easy thing to do. In most cases your emails won't go through unless you use a service like MailChimp.
When you don't have much cash in the bank, you can't afford to make hiring mistakes. Sooner or later you are going to have to hire a few employees, so you better know what to look for.
RescueTime - Employee time tracking and time management software.
Raising Venture Capital
Raising money can be a pain in the ass, especially if you have never done it before. If you want to raise money, you need to know the basic terminology that venture capitalists use, how to create a pitching deck, and how to get in front of venture capitalists.
Vfinance - A directory of venture capitalists, angel investors, and business plan templates.
Forbes Midas List - A list of the top 100 venture capitalists for the year 2009.
The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint - Before you make a powerpoint that showcases your company and how much money you are raising, you should read this.
Venture Hacks - A blog for entrepreneurs that discusses everything about venture capital.
The Funded - An online community of entrepreneurs to research, rate, and review funding sources worldwide.
How To Raise Venture Dollars - Ben Elowitz who has raised over 40 million dollars breaks down the tricks to raising money.
General Business Advice
Other entrepreneurs have already solved many of the problems you are going to face. So when you run to into these generic problems, here are some websites you can turn to.
Inspired Startup - Successful entreprenuer Andy Liu breaks down how to take your startup to the next level.
The 50 best business blogs - There are thousands of business blogs, but here are the 50 best according to Times.
Struggling Entrepreneur - The Struggling Entrepreneur is a free podcast series that deals with the issues, challenges and problems of the individual who wants to be an entrepreneur, but who encounters a somewhat difficult path and appears to be struggling.
Litemind - Exploring ways to use your mind more efficiently.
Mixergy - Successful CEOs share their experiences with the masses.
Living The Frugal Life
Although it may sound sexy to be an entrepreneur, most entrepreneurs don't make a ton of money. You are going to have to learn to live a frugal life so that you can continue to do what you love and not worry about paying your mortgage.
Though I am still in Chapter three of the new book "Groundswell, winning in aworld transformed by social technologies" published by Harvard Business Press and Authored by Chharlene Li and Josh Bernoff with Forester research, I had to say a few words about this great manuscript of insightful information.
Since I took the helm of CNP Integrations as CEO and we decided to go down the path of supporting all of the technologies discussed in this book and after reading Paul Greenberg's CRM at the speed of light I have been attracted to books filled with statistics. Mostly because I have to justify what we are doing and investing to my board. Well... Groundswell maps out the Social Technology spectrum better than any other book I have found since it has not only the statistical foundations to quantify this magnificent transformation in our culture and how we communicate but it identifies how anyone with a business can use these tools to create a direct and honest communication link with their customers. I emphasize honest because while this creates significant cost savings for connecting with your customers they can be brutally honest in return. So "that which does not kill us makes us stronger" can often be a common mantra when embarking on social networking as part of your communication strategy. However the feedback you receive could save you a ton of money by providing valuable insight into how you can improve your products and services with the least amount of investment.
There are some great simple graphs that illustrate the global use and impact of social networking. It explains how business owners should approach social networking, how it changes relationships and a good overview of how these technologies work.
Though it covers stuff we have been entrenched in for years, I hope that all of our customer read this since it will make my job a lot easier. Much of the discoveries phase in each of our new customer relationships involve making sure that we are all understanding the technologies we are implementing or integrations. I think Groundswell will be my first recommendation to customers that want to create vibrant social networks.
One of our best customers Fred Friendly Seminars (www.fredfriendly.org) I met at a workshop with Paul Greenberg in NY city about CRM and Social Networking Web 2.0. What helped us really move forward quickly with this project was that we did not have to get them up to speed on the technologies only how to redefine their model on to the web and train them on how to use some of the tools.
An old friend use to tell me to "Train your customers well" and while this may seem to be a bit of arrogant, it is really true. The better your customers understand what you do and how you do it the more you can offer them and the greater value they can get from your services. Do not get me wrong since this works both ways in that you really have to understand your customers if you are going to give then what they need and build trust and loyalty in return.
With that said if you are planning to embark on a social networking community web site or start using some of the social technologies as part of your communication strategy you should get "Groundswell".
I often kid with my wife, friends and family about our/my business being like a second wife that is much needier than my “;first” wife. Not that my wife is needy, she is actually very independent. However, the point I make is that owning and managing a small business can be very demanding on your time and mental bandwidth. One of the other challenging things with many small businesses is the required office space and software and hardware resources required typically to get everyone working to serve your customers in a common direction. So this is where the idea of a Virtual Office became so appealing to me. We started our business we spent a lot on building out office space and investing in assets that today actually collect dust since we have shifted everything to a virtual space. I once thought I would have a team of busy beavers working on our little office space and we would have long winded conversations around the water cooler as in most traditional offices. I was wrong though, since meetings on site became much less frequent and as our workforce grew with independent consultants located across the United States and abroad. So this has actually saved us a lot of money since we have lower facility maintenance costs and overhead. It also provided our workforce to have more freedom and independence, thus improving their productivity and increasing loyalty.
The other key component of a Virtual Office is that the tools typically have a variety of business automations that can, if you configure them correctly, actually let your business talk to you, your workforce and your customer in real-time. With event triggered workflows and collaboration tools you can interact and respond faster and much more efficient than ever before. I am a bit of a geek so I like web based tools and have spent the better part of the last 10 years researching and experimenting and even building from the ground up tools to fulfill this dream of a Virtual Office that could connect a geographically dispersed workforce and offer the real time collaboration that made doing business fun.
Allas… all the pieces have come together. A few years back I set out to start a new business model to support small businesses with the web based tools that can hopefully make their lives easier, reduce costs and give them more freedom and independence and control from their businesses. I wanted to learn from many mistakes either I had made in the past 20 years of being an entrepreneur or that I had seen others make. So… on this road I found some great technology tools, some smart people to help us integrate them and build a platform for delivering such a powerful capability.
We use the info@hand Customer Relationship Business Management system with a Joomla Customer portal and sync it with Quick Books. This not only gives us complete ecommerce transaction management but an effective marketing and communication interface with our customers, stakeholders and workforce. We have leveraged several workflows to communicate and respond quickly to the needs of our customers and stay informed as project life cycles progress. It is a well proven fact that this kind of customer relationship management significantly reduces costs and builds customer loyalty when applied correctly.
The closer for me was the new Glueble Suite . This is like merging Skype, Yahoo, linked in, facebook, myspace, youtube and Go-to-meeting all in one. In addition to the great desktop collaboration client there is a robust social community for interacting with real live people. This offers us and our customers private collaboration workspaces for communicating in real-time with video, audio, chat while sharing desktops, documents or delivering presentations. It also allows us to build personal relationships and keep the process of doing business interactive and enjoyable.
Oh yea and by the way this "Virtual Office" concept is all very "Green" friendly so you can feel good about the investment required to get set-up. In the end it will save you a ton of cash if you are smart about how you do it.
All-n-all it has been a lot of work to get this all implemented in a way that impacts our bottom line as intended but now that we are over the hump I have more quality time with my “first” wife, friends and family, our workforce is much less stressed since our business communicates with them, our customers are much happier since they get faster and more responsive attention and we are all having a lot more fun doing business together from all corners of the world.
Now with that said, I am off to Brazil for a month… but you will hardly notice.
Our core team of service and support technicians,
configuration specialists, project managers, Sr. CRM Consultants, creative content designers and subject
matter experts all share a common thread with our "Value Builder Methodology".
We make sure the chosen web solutions align with your top
priority business goals.
Our proven integration process assures expectations are realistic and clearly defined.
We are committed to deliver Superior Value and Return on Investment
People, process and technology
all have to live in harmony.Whether you are implementing a
complex business management platform, a simple web site or e-commerce portal they
all must target your intended business goals.
Testimonials...
“Throughout the past year, I have had the pleasure of working with
several members of your staff as we designed our corporate website.
Each associate displayed a high degree of integrity, responsibility, competence and ambition. Their good judgment and
experience ensured a logical and practical approach to our endeavor
which resulted in the completion of our project ahead of schedule –
exceeding our expectations.
The services which CNP
provides are a force multiplier for any organization, and I am happy to
give them my wholehearted endorsement.”
Internet provides powerful networking opportunities that allow users to effectively target their audience by logging on to social sites like LinkedIn, Digg and more . Take advantage of these tools by asserting your company's presence online and reaching more potential customers, business partners and employees.
