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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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."
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. WikiHow: Create a how-to guide or tutorial on wikiHow to share your company's services with the public for free.
11. 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.
12. 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.

1. LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a popular networking site where alumni, business associates, recent graduates and other professionals connect online.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. YorZ: This networking site doubles as a job site. Members can post openings for free to attract quality candidates.
5. 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."
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. Plaxo: Join Plaxo to organize your contacts and stay updated with feeds from Digg, Amazon.com, del.icio.us and more.
13. 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.
14. 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Tweako: Gadget-minded computer geeks can network with each other on Tweako, a site that promotes information sharing for the technologically savvy.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. HubSpot: HubSpot is another news site aimed at connecting business professionals.
8. 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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."
6. 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.

1. CareerBuilder: Reach millions of candidates by posting jobs on this must-visit site.
2. 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.
3. CollegeRecruiter.com: If your firm wants to hire promising entry-level employees, check CollegeRecuriter.com for candidates with college degrees.
4. Monster: Post often to separate your business from all the other big companies that use this site to advertise job openings.
5. Sologig: Top freelancers and contractors post résumés and look for work on this popular site.
6. AllFreelance.com: This site "offers self-employed small business owners links to freelance & work at home job boards, self-promotion tips" and more.
7. Freelance Switch Job Listings: Freelance Switch is the freelancer's online mecca and boasts articles, resource toolboxes, valuable tips and a job board.
8. GoFreelance: Employers looking to boost their vendor base should check GoFreelance for professionals in the writing, design, editing and Web industries.
9. 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.
10. 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.

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So there is usually a reason a hosting company can offer cheap hosting. Most of the time it is because you are just communicating with a machine and bunch of automation scripts. Since the biggest expense of providing hosting services is the humans that have to interact with it. The IT staff and support call centers and subsequent training cost way more than the hardware infrastructures, so the lessof this they can provide the more profitable they can become. Another key factor is that the bigger they get the more they get the attention of hackers and thus are more susceptible to security threats since hackers know that the companies are trying to have less human interaction they know they can get away with more if they keep looking for ways to get in etc... well this forces the hosting providers to increase the limitations on what you can and cannot do so they can further reduce their liability and potential security risks across their systems. Well if you are a novice with little system admin skills and your needs are very basic perhaps this can be a worthy option if you have the patience for long tech support hold times and fell comfortable with WYSIWYG script execution user interfaces.  However, these restrictions and automations is not how the IT guys or developers supporting your project think or prefer to work. Most system admin's wan what is called shell access which gets right down to 1's and 0's with what are called command line executions. Most good admin's can get their way around the underbelly of a server in a mere fraction of the time required by slick user interfaces and the systems themselves can manage tasks equally as efficient.

If they are limited with access or have to wait long hold times to coordinate something with an under staffed call center and go through tier one techies that have to escalate the ticket to tier two support anyway... well you are going to find a frustrated system admin or developer with a bit of an attitude after a while. So let's do the math here... you get hosting for $10 - $15 cheaper ($120-200 per year) than the competition let's say... ok your IT guy/gal or developer bills at $50 per hr or more plus you end up having to interact with their frustration so it takes your time. Then you have to figure it is going to in most cases take them longer to accomplish many simple tasks, you may have to find technical workarounds given buy the security restrictions and any frustration is going to roll up hill and stir up everyone's blood pressure.

Starting to get the picture why this may not always be the best approach...?

I have worked with GoDaddy (I was even a reseller), BlueHost, SiteGround, Aplus and Aplus Dedicated Services and HostYourSite and many others. They all have similar issues and challenges and in our case it significantly interfered with our ability to respond quickly to our customers needs and provide the best possible value for supporting their technology investments. This is why we have made the choice to build our own hosting infrastructure around our service model so we can meet our promise of Better Support, Faster Innovations and Greater value for your investment. We are not trying to mass market our web hosting but rather work like a department designed to support your business goals and objectives.

A while back I worked as a developer for a company and the IT guy whom personally I liked but he admittedly did not understand the needs of my development team. So he kept imposing security restrictions and other measures that inhibited our ability to work efficiently and what he did not realize at the time was that what we were doing impacted many other aspects of the organization through dependencies on us completing our work on time and to a particular standard. While what he was doing on one hand was keeping the company safe and making his job easier he was actually on the other hand strangling our ability to make our deliverables, satisfy customers and generate new business. Not to mention that it drove the costs of development up considerably due to the lack thereof efficiency. He was not realizing that the reason he was there was to support our efforts ... we were not there to serve his. I could go on but it is not an uncommon type of dynamic in many organizations.

This is in effect what you are doing when you go with the cheep hosting solution thinking you are going to save money. We recently had a customer with a board mandate where they were required to have a different company host than support develop. So once the site was finished we whet to move it to their new host. This is usually a simple job that takes a couple hours depending on how big the site is and how long it takes to pass the files and wire it up to a new DB. The customer  chose the $9.99 special at a company with a glitzy marketing campaign and pretty WYSIWYG UI tools and as it has happened similar in the past... we encountered a number of issues determining that the new host would not be compatible with the technology they wanted us to put there. Ok so first we uploaded a file set and gave a DB dump so their IT guy could spent endless hours beating his head against the wall, so then he passes this back to us and we spent 5 hrs of billable time (frustrating billable time which should cost more don't you think J ) to determine this hosting environment was not going to be compatible. Granted this is a very big site with a tone of technical goodies but not very fun to be in this situation for anyone involved.

Now what if they got the "better" deal through purchasing a year up front ? What if they made the choice in the first place because they were already on a tight budget?  Where does that put all of us techies that worked our tails off now that the customer is feeling more pain and still without a solution? Well I think you get the picture here. They are surely not saving any money and none of us get a warm fuzzy out of the experience.

You will most likely, unless you have very specific security restrictions such as DoD contracting or Medical Services, be much better off, from an efficiency and cost savings perspective, by  outsourcing your hosting at a datacenter vs trying to manage tone yourself. I have a whole server cluster bought and paid for in the other room in my office and even with this I am saving tons of time and money by having our internal systems outsourced at the same data center we use for our customer solutions.

I know we charge a little more than our competitors for our hosting but we are not trying to compete on price but on value. The big difference with our approach is that we have built our server infrastructure to support what our customers and developers need, so we can respond efficiently with the specific platforms we service and support and keep the required investment in balance. We can still provide the highest level of security but you are getting metaphorically "the healthy home cooked cuisine and hospitality vs processed fast food from a drive up window". While the "fast food drive through" approach has its place it is not for everyone and it is very important that you weigh your options carefully before you make decisions for your solutions provider. If you are building your business on the web you need to have a much more reliable and responsive hosting and support infrastructure and personalized technical support.

Through our approach though it has take time and careful planning to achieve, we are now more than ever able to put focus on what is going to help you achieve the best results for your business, proactively respond to your needs with greater efficiency and deliver more value in service and advise.

I hope this little insight is useful when considering your hosting and I encourage you to go with value over price any day since in the end this decision with more than pay for itself in savings and peace of mind.

CN

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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.

  CN

For more information about how you can get your business integrated with a Virtual Office Suite visit the following web sites: www.cnpintegrations.com (home), www.infoathand.us and www.glueble.com

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In the midst of all that has been going on here I have been meaning to post some links and info that I have found interesting. The first was an article about the trends in Social media and the growth in advertising dollars being spent. According to eMarketer, advertisers spent an estimated $920 million on social networking sites in the US in 2007, and are projected to spend $1.6 billion in 2008. Thisis encouraging news for folks getting in to growing their online communities and

it just shows the value of Social networking even if you do not push ads in the face of your visitors. http://www.mediapost.com/ommasocial/

This is just one example, Social networking is expected to grow to a 5 billion market by 2012 as per the graph I found in CRM magazine.

The other stuff I wanted to post this week was some cool utilities and web tools that we have just started using and found to be very powerful in our business processes. The first was http://www.makanasolutions.com/ they have a great new tool suite for developing and calculating compensation plans for your sales teams. Another is http://www.mindjet.com/ which is a mind mapping tool that has a desktop version which integrates with MS Office, MS Project and Visio in addition to sync with a web based tool for real-time collaboration on mind map diagrams. Since we work with so many folks in different time zones I have personally found http://www.qlock.com/ useful to keep track of world times.

Other news on the development side, we are going live with http://www.bavc.org/ tomorrow which is a fantastic new social networking community for the Bay Area Video Coalition. We partnered with Airbag Industries and developed not only the Joomla Portal Framework but also a complex and well designed custom template. Real Life Radio just launched this week at http://www.realliferadio.com/. This was a partnership with Canonball Creative and is a good example of a simple JoomlaCRM installation. Our JoomlaCRM social networking CRM 2.0 portal will be officially released in the couple weeks. We are excited to be one of the first to bring to market what will be a common business framework of the future for integrated customer communities. You can learn more by visiting http://www.joomlacrm.com/ to see a live demo of the community portal or http://www.infoathand.us/ to learn about the Infoathand CRBM system. We also just started a new project with Pro-Link this week. Exciting and busy times ahead and we are thankful to our many customers. Ahhh... that reminds me of my favorite quote of the week "Great companies are built by great customers". We are glad to offer and be part of great collaboration teams...

There I got it out... clear head...now back to the grind :-)

CN

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This past week Sony and I had the great pleasure of participating in the Entrepreneur Launch Pad program sponsored by the Providence Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce. This educational series kicked off with a three day “boot camp” led by Jack Derby and George Simmons from the Derby Management Group and is part of a 6 month program designed to educate and introduce startup businesses to the Venture Capital and Angel investor funding community. This initiative is intended to stimulate economic growth for the RI business community. Perhaps I am bias as a participant but what an excellent idea on behalf of the chamber.

I have to say the program was excellent! We took away a lot of valuable information and met some wonderful folks. This was set up as a workshop where the lectures by George,  Jack and others provided insider information on how to hone our pitch and fill in the voids of information required to improve our focus and solidify the vision and factual information in our business plan as it relates to the funding community. What helped make it powerful for me was the workshop setting with 16 other startup businesses that are going through some of the same strategic and growth challenges that we have been going through. I know there will be a lot of homework over the coming months since they unraveled so much great info to digest and apply but well worth the effort. This program has the potential to be just as it is intended by its very title, a “Launch Pad” for growth and success.

Quick overview:

Through six months of intensive coaching, the Chamber will provide entrepreneurs with hands-on, real-world specifics and answer the vexing questions that keep them awake at night. Entrepreneurs will also have the opportunity to meet investors from throughout the New England region who are specifically interested in generating deal flow from Rhode Island.

Among the topics to be covered in Entrepreneur Launch Pad:

• How to successfully raise venture capital?
• How to craft a winning business plan?
• How to ramp-up sales?
• How to recruit an "A" level team?
• How to protect intellectual property?
• How to get to the next round of financing?
• How to land the next meeting?
• How to meet the right people?
• How to negotiate a term sheet?

The ideal applicant would look like this:
• Revenue: 0 to $10 million
• Number of Employees: 2 to 50
• Market Size: Would support company growth to $10 million in sales
• Product or Service: Non-commodity
• Growth Capital Needed: $1 million to $5 million
• Market Sectors: Software, hardware, clean tech, alternative energy, health care, medical devices, preventive health, defense related, oceanography, financial services

If you want to learn more about the Derby management group check out their site: http://www.derbymanagement.com, if you want to learn more about the program visit the Providence chamber site: http://www.providencechamber.com/Launchpad.aspx or contact Janet Raymond, senior vice president/economic development/operations at jraymond@provchamber.com or 401.521.5000.

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