Tech Forward:

I’ve been meaning to share this information with you for some time now . . . oh, where does the time go?

Anyway, I was reading through the recent (OK, I know it’s from October!) Downtown Women’s Club “Online Networking: How Social is Your Media?” survey, and its results show that “businesswomen in all generations now prefer e-mail (82 percent) to the telephone (64 percent) when it comes to networking.”

I can honestly say I must agree.  I see telephone calls as a bit of an intrusion, and I usually only pick up the phone when I’m totally “over” e-mail (which lasts about an hour or so) or if I feel that it would be quicker to communicate what I have to say by voice mail or speaking directly to the person.

People are doing exactly as Faith Popcorn predicted. We’re cocooning. We’re sitting at our desks, behind our computers and not answering our phones–at least, most of the time, I am–and I know I’m not alone.

I know that I mostly connect colleagues that I think need to meet one another–and they connect me to people they feel I need to meet–via e-mail.  None of that calling back and forth stuff.

I recently had a very painful conversation with a businesswoman whom I respect immensely. She has a stellar track record, and I have watched her career skyrocket. I’ve always wanted to meet her. What made it so painful? The person who introduced us insisted that we talk on the phone.

Wrong move. I knew it was wrong when I agreed. It’s not that I didn’t want to meet her. Heck, no! I just think we should have built up our rapport a bit via e-mail first, and then we probably would have increased our chances of having a fabulous conversation–when it was time.

You can listen to all the pundits who say that e-mail is dead, but do so at your own peril.

Image credit: Crunch Gear

If you read my post a couple of weeks ago about Keeping Social Networking Simple, you know that I feel the pain of everyone who’s suffering from social media overwhelm.

The temptation with social media is to join every social networking community that launches, agree to blog for any company that will accept your posts, be a guest on anyone’s podcast and accept “friend” requests from people you barely know–with no visible results or connections–all in the name of being part of the conversation.

A few months later, you’re tired, stressed out and your business is suffering. You’re left wondering why your social networking efforts aren’t worth the megabytes they gobble up.

I’ll be leading a teleclass for the Downtown Women’s Club this Wednesday, November 19 at noon EST to show you specifically how to avoid that whole mess while still finding the time for social media. Yeah, you. The one sitting there reading this blog post.

Whether you’ve got five minutes or 50, I’m going to show you my personal low-tech, low-cost tips and tricks for getting the most out of social media while keeping your sanity in your back pocket.

Check out “Social Media & Time Management: How Do I Find the Time?” You need to be a member to listen in. Not a member? Tsk, tsk.

According to a recent Jupiter Research survey, sharing personal information is the number-one reason consumers do not complete their purchases online. Quite understandably, they’re worried about their privacy — a concern that many smaller retailers with a lot on their plate tend to overlook. Tsk, tsk.

So what should you do? Do what I did, get the skinny on best practices for online retailers from one of the leaders in online privacy, Fran Maier, CEO of TRUSTe. (You know TRUSTe, it’s the one that gives you that nifty privacy graphic for your website, like the one on the left.)

You say you don’t know Maier? Well, it always pays to go to the top. Here are some pearls of wisdom she shared with me the other day:

• Hold onto your current customers tightly. That means better insights and better targeted messages, promotions and appeals. But it’s important to gather information about your customers in the right way. Collect data about your customers while staying compliant with privacy obligations, to gather more accurate data about your customers and ultimately serve them better.
• Enhance privacy. Don’t let trust or privacy stand in the way of your brand reputation. Participating in a certification program like TRUSTe’s and displaying a trustmark on your online retail site shows your customers that their information is safe and protected. In a tough economy, many online retailers are tempted to cut corners and take less-than-ethical approaches to increasing sales: Make sure you’re the one who’s trusted.
• Make your privacy statement both easy to read and easy to find. When your privacy statement is in straightforward language, your customer is more likely to feel confident, stay on your site and make a purchase.
• If data spills, contact the trustmark organization immediately. Take the appropriate steps if there is a security breach; organizations like TRUSTe, are able to track those complaints so you can respond to your customers quickly.
• Take advantage of your company’s reputation. Is your reputation rock-solid? If so, now is the time, with modest investment, to capitalize on that differentiator. If it isn’t, then your competition will have an easier time luring your customers away and converting new prospective customers.

Hop to it, the holidays are a’ comin’.

If you’ve always wanted a Flash website, but found the average cost of having one professionally developed ($10,000-$15,000) to be out of the stratosphere, this might be your lucky day.

There’s a gaggle of new web-based applications that allows anyone–yes, that means you–to design his or her own dynamic, Flash website.

Here’s a quick rundown of all the key players:

Wix is brand-new on the market and allows anyone to build Flash-based web sites that are not template-based. There are two other goodies: The Wix sites are SEO friendly, and hosting is included. Yeah!

Synthasite is a free service that offers template-based Flash websites that are pretty easy to use. The service also offers free hosting.

Weebly is another a free service like Synthasite and Wix, and it offers template-based websites so you can quickly and easily design your website–without all the pomp and circumstance.

And you’re still reading this? Why? Get to work on that Flash site! Happy Flashing! (I mean that in the best possible way.)

Just in case you didn’t go sign up for my friend Jim Kukral’s online video toolkit when I suggested it a few weeks ago, he’s been featured in a handy how-to article over at Marketing Sherpa on how to get started with online video.

Part of what I do is write for a living (obviously), and this article is well-written and has straightforward, step-by-step directions for you if you’ve always wanted to get started using online video, but were nervous/scared/hesitant/lazy Whatcha’ waitin’ for?

There’s nothing worse than having some clueless person clog up your inbox with a multi-MB file attachment.

If you ever need to send a large file to someone and FTP’ing is not an option, burning a CD and sending it overnight just seems like a huge waste of resources, and you don’t want to create an account with some clunky online file sharing website, you might want to do what I do and send the file via YouSendIt.

What I like about YouSendIt is that you don’t even have to create an account to send a file.

1. Just fill in the recipient’s e-mail address.
2. Fill in your e-mail address.
3. Add an optional small note (100 characters or less).
4. Attach the file and hit “send.”

The recipient gets an email from YouSendIt (not from you) that he or she has a file waiting and can click the handly link in the e-mail to download the file. Recipients have seven days to download the file; otherwise it’s toast. It’s virus free and totally secure.

With the free account, you can send files up to 100MB, and if you want to pay YouSendIt has convenient monthly plans that will allow you to increase your file size permissions.

This is Part 4 of Your Website Needs to Get a Job.

Get caught up with Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

In Part 3, I mentioned IP addresses. Ok, now we’re getting into tech speak a bit, but let me explain.

Think of an IP address like the street address for your home.  It’s the street and number – the identifiers – that have been assigned to where you live so that friend, family, emergency personnel, mail services, etc., can locate you. Same deal with an IP address. The IP address is the identifier that has been assigned to where your computer lives on the Internet. And, just like no one else has your exact same address, no one else has your IP address. It’s a bit like a fingerprint in that way.

Who Cares?

Let’s say, I sign up for your thai chicken. I conveniently forget that I’ve signed up. The next bit of information I get from you doesn’t ring a bell. I mark it as spam or I complain to your hosting company that you’re sending me unsolicited information. How can you prove that I indeed DID sign-up to receive information from you?

You can’t. Unless you have my IP address on record. Most top-level intenet marketing services offer IP address grabbing as part of their service. What happens is, I request your ‘thai chicken’ and immediately, my IP address – my computer’s identifier – is stored in your account with the internet marketing service.

It’s never shared with anyone and usually you never have to do anything with it. It just hangs out. But, if I ever say that I didn’t make the request to be on your list, you can reply, “Yes, you did. You did it on this date and oh, by the way, here’s your IP address to prove it.” How powerful is that?

In fact, this is one of the problems I have with Constant Contact. I really like their service, but new businesses tend to get caught up with their fancy templates and colors and lose sight of the functionality they need to run their business. The last time I checked, Constant Contact DOESN’T collect the IP addresses of people who request your ‘thai chicken’. This can leave you in a bit of a lurch if you ever had to, beyond a shadow of a doubt, prove that the person really did request the information. Not good. (They also don’t let you do split tests, etc., but that’s another story.)

For so many reasons, I much prefer Aweber. Yes, the learning curve is a bit steeper, but with the ability to do split tests, use timed autoresponders, grab IP addresses, manage multiple mailing lists and segement those lists….you just can’t beat Aweber.

Doing business online requires managing and measuring lots of moving parts. And, I always say that what doesn’t get measured gets forgotten. 

So, with all the metrics you could monitor, what do you assess? In short, everything. Here’s a list of at-minimum ‘think abouts’ to get you started:

Website metrics.

How many unique visitors do you have?

How many should you have based on your industry?

How many page views?

How many should you have?

Who are your top three referral sources?

E-mail mailing list.

How many people are on your e-mail mailing list?

How many subscribers do others in your industry with comparable experience have?

What is the percent increase from last month?

What’s a good percentage to increase?

Website lead generation.

Does your lead generation tool deliver the “lead trinity”? 1)Positions you as an expert. 2) Qualifies the lead as a quality lead for your business. 3) Gives you permission to market to them again.

If not, what lead generation tool would?

Does your web site automatically produce leads regularly?

Product/marketing funnel.

Do you put potential clients in the position of either working with you or not?

Do you have freebies for them to sample – without signing up?

How many should you have and what topics should they cover?

Blog activity.

How many visitors does your blog have?

How many posts per week do you post on average?

What are the industry standards?

Are you meeting your blogging goals?

Online marketing.

How many original articles are you posting online?

How much time are you spending adding thought leadership content about your area of expertise?

Online sales.

How much revenue do you make solely online?

How much should you make?

Which is your most profitable product/service?

Which is your least profitable product/service?

Overall direction.

Where are you going with your business online?

By when do you need to ‘get there’?

Who can help you get there faster, easier?

What are your KPIs (key performance indicators) – measurements you can use to see if you’re on-track?

Again, this is certainly not an exhaustive list but it’s more than good enough to get you started. This may seem like a long list of things to consider. And, if you’re just starting out, your answers to these many of these questions might be “zero”.  But, that’s OK. Start at the top and take a section at  a time. Figure out a way to keep the information you find pertinent on your radar *at least* once per month. Maybe it’s a report. A graph. A spreadsheet. Something. Anything.