Decoding the new economy

Being proud of your business

Too many businesses have bland “about us” pages featuring stock photos and generic corporate phrases

Too many businesses have bland “about us” pages featuring stock photos and generic corporate phrases, here’s two examples;

We have many years of practical experience as sales managers, directors and business leaders.

Our staff have a great deal of experience, having placed hundreds of candidates in positions at many different hospitals and clinics

Both of these businesses have owners with fantastic experience, great staff and a terrific story to tell, yet from their web site you would never know this.

For all the reader knows, they are just another anonymous branch of a multinational which is a terrible waste for these great teams.

The web is one of the few ways a small business owner can tell their story without restrictions. So there’s no excuse to be shy about why you are so good at your job. Tell people who you are, why you are doing what you do and how good you are at doing it.

And ditch the stock photos. Chisel jawed models in Italian suits playing with laptops are fooling no-one. Put your own photo up and be be proud of who you are.

Potential customers visit your web site to find about you, they want to hear your story and why your businesses will delight them and meet their needs.

So use that “about us” page properly, tell your story and introduce yourself. Don’t be shy, you should be proud of who you are and what you do.

Survey Reveals Almost 50% Of Aussies Use Mobile Phone In Bathroom

Is the title of this Microsoft press release not the dumbest one so far this year?

The release itself is full of pointless and silly factoids which I’m not going to even bother repeating.

What will be interesting is which media outlets will pick this up and run it as “news”.

The carbon cost of computing

power-station-1 The London Times reports Harvard University researchers have found two Google searches have the same carbon footprint as boiling a kettle.

This should be no surprise as it’s easy to forget the energy consumed by every computing task we do. It’s not Google’s computers that are energy hungry, those sitting on our desks or laps are almost as greedy.

There is a redeeming feature to this. One of the experts quoted later in the article points out that if the computer use is saving you jumping in your car or carrying out some other carbon intensive activity then the computer use is better for the environment.

The article points to a useful websites for calculating your carbon emissions at Carbon Footprint. This is handy not just for reducing your effects on the environmental but also for identifying where you can reduce your energy costs.

Respecting your network

This article originally appeared on SmartCompany on November 25, 2008

Australia’s Spam Act is just over five years old, and it’s had some success in keeping locally sourced junk email to reasonable limits along with catching the odd perpetrator.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has plenty of Spam Act information for business owners on its website and the requirements can be summarised in three principles – get consent, identify yourself, and make it easy to unsubscribe.

Before you can send commercial emails to people, they need to ask for them. In itself, this requirement eliminates your emails being classified as spam given the definition of spam is unsolicited emails.

Identity is important, as the recipient needs to know who the email is from. All legitimate businesses should have no problem with this.

Finally, unsubscribing is simply good manners. For a business owner there is absolutely no point in irritating potential customers and partners who don’t want your messages.

The sticking point in all of this is defining consent. The loophole in the act defines “inferred consent” if you have an “existing business relationship”. The current interpretation of a business relationship is merely having the business card of the recipient.

Sadly this gives any dolt you’ve been foolish enough to give a business card to at a networking function permission to bombard you with invites to get-rich-quick seminars and share boat schemes.

I can’t tell you how irritating I find idiots sending me three pointless emails a week because I put my card in the door prize bowl or gave the courtesy of exchanging cards while talking.

Even worse are the dills who start sending SMS messages to your mobile phone. In fact I’m amazed that anyone thinks ultra intrusive text spam is an effective way to generate goodwill for a business.

A particular difficulty with spamming people in your network is that your paths will almost certainly to cross again, which can put all parties in a difficult position.

So don’t simply add everyone who gives you their business card to your mailing list. By all means send them a follow up email, phone call or postcard, and certainly offer to connect to them on social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, but spare everyone the spam.

Understanding your responsibilities under the Spam Act will help you get more from your mailing lists. Adding some common sense and manners goes a long way too.

Does IT kill competition?

Andrew Mcafee’s article of the effects of IT on competition and businesses raises some interesting points .

http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/curiouser_and_curiouser/

His conclusion is technology isn’t a leveller between businesses – instead it creats a greater concentration of market power.

I wonder if those results Andrew cites are biased because of the economic boom and easy credit we recently been through; start ups were bought out by cashed up bigger players and that’s why we saw a concentration of businesses.

Regardless of the reasons, there’s a caveat for the bigger players; Andrew’s view is this because “good ideas and good execution separate winners from losers” and technology is what allows these good ideas to spread in a well run company.

This week’s collapse of Wedgwood is a good example of when a company’s culture stifles ideas and innovation. The New York Times has an excellent description of what went wrong and Seth Godin has some wise comments on the NYT strory.

IT for the future

CNET’s Matt Asay looks at a Goldman Sachs report forcasting IT spending for 2009. To say the predictions are dire is an understatement.

Mark’s comments are interesting. He takes issue with Goldman’s view that open source and Software As A Service (SAAS) spending will fall as corporates focus on known vendors such as Microsoft and Symantec.

I tend to agree with Goldman’s analysts that the big corporates will turn conservative for the next few years as they focus on their core operations. As long as their IT infrastructure is good enough, that’s where they will stay.

The real action for open source and SAAS will be in the SME sector. Small businesses will be under more competitive and cash pressures as the global depression bites. The who survive the next three to five years will be the ones who do things smarter, quicker and cheaper than their opposition.

This is where open source, and more important, SAAS come into their own as they give smaller enterprises flexibility and cost advantages.

Some of today’s small businesses will the giants of the next economic boom and many of them will be giants because they embraced the new tools and technology available to them.

Sydney New Years Eve

As usual, Sydney welcomed in the new year with a bang and we were lucky enough to be at Dawes Point to get a front row seat on the spectacle. A few of the better photos are on Flickr.

It’s a long night when you have three young kids and the seven year old was well and truly over it when we got home at 2am.

Funnily, it turns out we were standing close by to one of Sydney’s well known food bloggers. Helen has her own photos of the evening on Grab Your Fork.

Author: Paul Wallbank

Being proud of your business

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