e-biz
putting the 'e' into business
Friday 30 May 2008, 6:38 PM
If You Build It, Will They Come?
Putting a forum on your site can be a great way to create a community around your products or services. Heck, you might even learn a thing or two from your customers. But if you’re the only person posting in the forum, it can quickly become the loneliest place in the world. I recently set up a forum for a venture I’m working on, and am now in the process of trying to build a community. I’ve done it before, so hopefully I can do it again. In this blog I thought I’d pass on some pointers which may come in useful if you intend to start a forum for your own company.
Forums can be used for more than getting help and advice. There is often so much activity on certain forums that a normal forum-less Web site can only dream of. While you can help other members and ask for help on the discussion forums, you can also tap into the abundant traffic of forums and drive it back to your blog.
Think minimalist. To get the ball rolling, limit the number of forum topics on your site to, say, around five. If you find yourself coming up with many different forum subjects, try and group them together under one forum. Then in that forum you can create individual topic posts to cater to each area. That way you are creating conversation starters and making the place look a little busier. As the forums grow and you have enough individual entries to start breaking down forums you can justify creating new ones. You can then move the existing topics into the appropriate categories and the forum doesn’t start off empty.
Start a ‘passionate’ discussion with another member. And by this I don’t mean you start a nasty kind of argument or discuss what each of you are wearing. Just a normal debate between you and another member where you quote each other and try to disprove your opponents’ claim or point of view. When a debate starts in a particular thread between two members, other members usually don’t interfere. But this doesn’t mean they are not reading. They silently read the debate and derive their own conclusions.
Become an active member. As the site owner you MUST actively participate in all its discussions, even though it’s hard to keep motivated when week after week you create new topics and try to stimulate conversation and you seem to be talking to yourself. Get into a routine of making a few posts everyday and try to be the first one to reply to a new thread. Always be eager to offer help and advice to fellow members. And be welcoming to the new members. This will definitely get other members to appreciate your help and altruism and have them wanting to know more about you and your company.
Go incognito. I’m not proud of this tip, but it’s essential to get the ball rolling. This little trick lets you stimulate conversation by creating a few different member accounts, each with their own personality. You can even have full forum conversations between your characters (just don’t go insane!). Only you know which characters are fake, to everyone else it appears as if your forum is getting popular. Just treat it like forum acting. Once your forum grows you can revert back to being just you.
Drop links to your products or services in the posts. Not in a spammy way, though, because if you drop links without establishing yourself as an active and helpful member first, you’ll be ignored or worse - you may drive away customers. If you are already seen as an authority member on the forum, no one would object to your occasional link dropping. Why not link to a few special offers and such like, to make your forum readers feel like they are getting a scoop?
The most important tip I can give you to grow your community is to not give up. Once you’ve built a popular forum you’ll have the best advertising tool you could ever have - you now have an audience that you can either leverage around your own products or services or start to derive revenue from through advertising, premium services or subscriptions.
Wednesday 28 May 2008, 11:11 PM
Implementing A Flexible Working Plan
After Gordon Brown recently announced his work-life balance agenda, flexible working will soon be widely available to as many as 4.5 million extra parents with teenagers. This move from the Government to support flexible working will be welcomed by millions of parents across the country. It would also be nice to see this type of initiative extended to other working groups given that companies are realising the far reaching advantages of flexible working.
Currently only parents of children under six years old have the right to request flexible working as well as carers of the disabled. The new agenda extends the right to all those with children up to the age of 16. Mr Brown said: ‘The right to request flexible working has been working for lots of people over the last few years. It is working for parents of young children and now it can apply to children under 16 where families need time off to help bring them up.’
The structure of the labour market is likely to be reshaped dramatically over the four years, with flexible and remote working expected to almost double. There are already around 3.5 million people already working from home in the UK and this was expected to double by 2012. Now an extra 4.5 million workers will now be able to request better working hours as part of a drive by Gordon Brown to improve the country’s work-life balance.
A flexible and remote working plan enables companies to retain valued staff by offering them choices to suit their lifestyle demands. It also gives employers the added advantage of recruiting talented individuals from anywhere in the country instead of just around their local office. The change would come into effect next April and will affect all businesses from multinational organisations to small shops. It may be a cultural shift for many organisations, so Sheridan suggests setting out a flexible working plan.
If the idea of flexible working appeals to you and you feel it may hold significant benefits for your staff and business, follow these few key steps and you’ll be well on your way to a happier workforce:
1. Establish the business case and the objectives of introducing such a scheme. Consider how increased flexibility could enhance working practises across the company.
2. Ascertain goals and the action expected to reach those targets. Determine the issues that flexible working needs to address.
3. Communicate the concept to staff at an early stage to realise the positive impact on the business. Survey all employees to find what they would appreciate and value. Ensure this works both for the individual and the business. Personal flexibility will build a strong and loyal workforce.
4. Consult with HR specialists to prepare relevant documents such as a ‘Home Office Health and Safety Checklist’ to ensure you become a responsible employer of choice.
5. Talk to managers to analyse what jobs can be flexible within the organisation. Clear rules from the outset will avoid future confusion. Employees with flexible working not only need to be managed, but evaluated and rewarded with career development.
6. If necessary, prepare an equipment budget for remote and home workers. Decide on the technology that will be required and how to secure data. Consult with IT providers to streamline solutions.
7. Set up an activity programme for remote workers to keep staff involved with team meetings, virtual conferences and home assessments. Keeping remote or home workers ‘visible’ with support and resources will reduce absenteeism and improve productivity.
8. Review the plan to monitor the effectiveness and productivity of flexible working. Once a flexible plan is in action it cannot be put to one side, it will constantly evolve and grow with the company.
Tuesday 27 May 2008, 5:34 PM
Build Interaction: Add User Reviews
It’s hard to believe I know, but your Web site’s community of users represents a wealth of knowledge. By letting your customers add their own reviews on your site you will quickly amass a valuable collection of user opinions about products that relate to your site. There are even products on the market that use your existing forum login system (if you have one) to keep your users from having to register twice.
One program that I’m playing with at the moment is called Five Star Review Script, an Amazon-style script that allows users to rank a product or service on a scale of 1-5 stars and make comments (reviews) related to the product for other users to read. E-mail notification allows the administrator to approve comments before adding them to the Web site.
Some other products to play with include Star Rating System Pro and ReviewPost PHP Pro.
Let me know how you get on!
Tuesday 20 May 2008, 10:00 PM
Working@Home: Keeping Secure
National Work from Home Day has come and gone, with an estimated five million people skiving to enjoy the comforts of their home. However, even though employees sat comfortably, IT mangers were no doubt uncomfortable at the thought of the security issues that exist around working from home.
To ease this discomfort, here are some top tips on how to be safe and secure while working from home:
1. Use an approved computer for working at home. This way, the company has verified that the necessary protections are in place (up to date virus protection, approved VPN tools, etc.). This will protect you from introducing malware into your company’s environment inadvertently and it will protect you from your company’s ire if ‘something goes wrong.’
2. Make sure everything is updated. Before you start working on your computer or laptop make sure you turn on your automatic updates for your applications as well as installing the latest anti-virus and anti-spyware software to make sure you and your personal information is also protected.
3. Never enter your username and password on a page you arrived at by clicking on a link in an e-mail, IM message, third-party Web site or social networking site. These are the tools hackers use most often to steal passwords.
4. When entering your username and password on any site, always verify first that the URL in the browser’s address bar matches the URL of the site you (think) you are accessing. This is the best way to ensure your password won’t be intercepted by some evil-doer.
5. Set limits about what you are willing to expose about yourself when working online and remember the context of the interaction (business or personal). Be wary, since embarrassing or inappropriate information about yourself may appear in contexts that you did not expect. It is very difficult to ‘clean up’ your profile later on.
6. Social networking sites and blogs are business tools, make sure you are using a safe environment for professional networking. Treat the network as a resource of valuable information, and tap into your colleagues’ expertise with the collaborative tools available on the network.
7. Secret is not secured. Some social networks, like Facebook, allow users to engage in private or secret groups. Although these forums take place away from the public eye, apt hackers can still crack open the discussion boards and access conversations, unless appropriate enterprise-grade safeguards have been put in place.
8. When adding RSS feeds to a feed reader, always prefer to use a link you got from the content provider’s Web site rather than from any third party (an e-mail, an IM, a link on a social networking site etc.) This improves the likelihood that the information you are seeing is what the content provider intended.
9. When accessing corporate applications from a Web browser, use a separate browser instance, not just a new tab or a new window opened from the browser you are using to access public sites. This makes it more difficult for hackers to launch request forgery attacks that target your corporate systems.
10. When using public sites for work related tasks, be aware of the information you expose. Keep In mind, the search queries you run, the sites you visit, your Web-based bookmarks and tags, the RSS feeds you've subscribed to and your social network connections are all potential sources for data leakage.
11. When using Web-based collaboration tools, avoid exposing proprietary information. Even when communicating with colleagues, the information you provide can easily become accessible to unauthorised parties.
12. Familiarise yourself with your employer's acceptable use policy for employee blogs and social networks. Adhering to such policies will help avoid any unpleasant situations. If your employer hasn’t published such policies, demand them.
13. Keep personal and business ‘digital assets’ separate. As personal lives and business lives merge, it becomes increasing compelling to do personal tasks on work time. Be careful not to merge these two lives on your computer. Some tips - use business time for business and do not store personal files on your business computer (and vice versa).
Friday 16 May 2008, 9:26 PM
IT Departments Are More Than A Fixer
It’s probably fair to say that the majority of end users still perceive IT as a support function. The general perception by those in cubicles is that the IT department’s main function is to maintain existing systems and provide IT support when something goes wrong.
Most of us contact our IT department every day, especially when Facebook won’t load or we want to change our display picture in Windows Live Messenger, and most of us would say that our IT requests were completed within a few hours. Only a handful of unlucky sods have to wait over 24 hours.
But wouldn’t we like to have a more automated IT support system to enable greater self-help? Nah, that would mean we have to do stuff ourselves, which means no downtime to chat and make coffee. Plus, while the IT department is vital in the day-to-day running of an organisation, we don’t want the power trippers to get above their station and see themselves as a strategic business unit responsible for implementing change. Or do we?
Innovation can often be sidelined due to the time-consuming management of repetitive tasks, with the IT department dealing with standard requests rather than concentrating on driving strategic change initiatives such as the introduction of new services. This indicates that either the majority of IT departments are offering basic levels of IT support without really embracing their potential as a business change-maker, or are ineffective in communicating their value and goals to the rest of the organisation.
Despite IT support ranking high on the list of end users’ priorities, the true potential of the IT department has yet to be fully tapped. The sheer volume of daily requests from end users suggests that most IT departments are purely fire-fighting - they’re bogged down in day-to-day activities because they don’t have the right systems in place to deal with repetitive, routine requests effectively.
Given the high volume of end-user enquiries and the length of time taken to fulfil many requests, your IT department is probably spending too long on the type of activities that could be dealt with more effectively through the adoption of more automated processes or a self-help system.
Too much time is being wasted on ‘reinventing the wheel’ because solutions to common problems aren’t being properly recorded and shared among support staff. Similarly, many basic but time-consuming issues - such as password resets - could be dealt with by users themselves if only they were provided with the right tools. The sooner organisations give users more autonomy the sooner they can free up more time to dedicate to driving strategic change initiatives within the business itself.
If CIOs and IT directors want to have real influence in the corporate decision-making process, they need to be more effective in making themselves heard within their organisations. This is another way in which better automation and monitoring of business processes can help. The bottom line is that IT departments have to prove their worth if users’ perception of IT continues to undervalue the role it plays within an organisation.
I’m sure the majority of CIOs or IT directors do not have systems and processes in place to make IT changes effectively, while also lacking solutions to automate the handling of day-to-day IT service and support issues. It seems likely that the daily demands on the IT department are hindering CIOs from delivering ‘great’ IT services i.e. services that can make a real strategic difference to an organisation. It's time to look differently at the Geek Dept.
