Have you ever Googled yourself or the company you work for?  Come on, you know you have!  It’s human nature to wonder what others are writing about you and the company you work for.  Before accepting your new position, didn’t you Google your new company to see if you could find any negative information?  Googling is an easy way to lose hours sorting through irrelevant web entries hoping to find the information you’re repeatedly looking for.  Valuable time and energy can be saved by using one of Google’s many convenient and useful tools, in this case, Google Alerts.

Google Alerts are emails or RSS feeds automatically sent to you when there are new Google search results for your specified terms.  After signing up using your GMail account on the Google Alerts homepage, you enter the search term, type of alert (search Google News, Google Groups, or the web), frequency of emails (daily, as it happens, or weekly), and your email address. Google Alerts sends you an email each time a new page for your chosen term makes it in the top twenty results on Google’s web search. You can set up alerts for as many as 1,000 search terms.  Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts - News, Web, Blogs, Comprehensive, Video and Groups.

• A News alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.

• A Web alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.

• A Blogs alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.

• A Comprehensive alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.

• A Video alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.

• A Groups alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

Google Alerts’ many uses make them convenient and helpful in our daily personal lives including monitoring a developing news story, tracking medical advances, being aware of what is being written about family members, and even getting the latest on a celebrity or sports team.  But there are many professional reasons to harness the power of Google Alerts, find out how to put the power of Google Alerts to work for your business by downloading Ten Important Business Uses of Google Alert.

I’m about halfway through the book Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.   The gist of the book is that if you can find a new way to provide goods or services or a whole new market, then you can make the competition irrelevant and be a unique provider in a calm blue ocean of marketplace.  No longer will you be stuck in the churning bloodbath or “red ocean” of competition with others who all provide the same products or services and are forced to compete by price-cutting or other sales tactics with no hope of taking over meaningful market share.

To make your competition irrelevant, you have to take an in-depth look at what you and your competitors all do:

• Determine what truly has value to the customer (to do more of this)
• Uncover what the customer doesn’t care about (to reduce or eliminate)
• Look outside of your existing marketplace to see if there is untapped potential for creating a new service or product to address needs of people who do not do business with you today (untapped potential customers)

The hardest part is to put aside your preconceived ideas of your industry and open your mind to think of new ways to solve your customer’s needs.  I’ve been in the technology field for over 20 years, so this has been easier said than done, but it’s a great mental exercise.

Think about your own business.  Do you do things because “that’s the way it’s done”?  What could you eliminate or reduce without hurting the customer experience?  What could you increase or create to enhance the customer experience and set yourself apart from the competition - possibly even creating something never offered before?  What if you could recapture past clients that you had lost, new clients who chose a competitor, and potential clients with demands that are not being met in your marketplace?

If you have ideas for us to consider for what you’d like to see if anything was possible for technology support or web sites, or if you would like to brainstorm about your business to get an outside perspective, I’d love to hear from you.  Please leave a comment on the blog or email me at tlf@foresitetech.com.

With all of the buzz about Microsoft’s latest plight in the search game, Bing, I decided I should do a little research.  Naturally where did I start?  Google.  As Google has become virtually synonymous with web search, Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle even with the troops that they have, but hopefully this will help those who are trying to make a decision a little bit.

To begin, Microsoft is claiming that Bing is supposed to help users make intelligent decisions, not simply push back results so that seemed like a good starting point for comparison.  I decided to do some parallel searches with Google and Bing to see where it got me.  My first search was “Where should I eat dinner tonight?”.  For both search engines, this was just too vague.  As a seasoned searcher, I added “in Hartford” to the search to see if that helped.  While a few restaurant guides came back in each, none were very relevant or targeted for my purpose.  For example, there were ones for “restaurants close to the Hartford Court House”.  As helpful as that may be for your repeat offenders, I try to stay in the more mainstream areas in Hartford and out of trouble.

Then genius hit me.  As someone in the network support business, I searched for “Network Support Hartford CT” to see some relevant results in today’s business world.  The results in Bing were mixed.  While 3 of the top 4 results were network support companies (including ForeSite in position #2), only 5 of the 10 results on the first page were relevant.  In Google, 8 of the 10 were related to network support though 2 were for jobs in the network support field.  While I personally believe that we should be the first result in all engines we were #3 in Google.  When you remove duplicate sites in both search engines, and the paid results in Google, the results were very similar though and it would be tough to make a decision on this alone.

Bing did have one feature that I thought was helpful which was the Document Preview feature.  When hovering a result, it tries to grab relevant text from the site and display it in a pop-up window without having to go to the site.  This was helpful to see if the displayed result was relevant without having to go to all of the different web sites listed.  This is not ground breaking, but was helpful.  Bing’s last feature that was obvious was the recent search results on the left hand side of the search page.  I’m not sure how helpful this will be over time, but I could see a few applications for it if you are looking for something you found in the recent past but can’t remember what you searched for.

So, I think this is a “no decision” unfortunately for Microsoft as they will have to come out with some real bells and whistles to de-thrown Google in the search business.

Social media - everybody’s talking about it and trying to figure out how to use it for their business.  There was a great panel discussion on Friday at the Hartford Business Journal’s eTechnology Summit which confirmed that it’s all so new that no one can really claim to be an “expert” yet, but there is so much opportunity.  I’ll talk about my own experience and hopefully that will give you some ideas of how you might be able to leverage social media.

I started using Twitter and set up a FaceBook page for my “business self” several months ago.  I had several goals in mind:

1. Although I have 20+ years in the technology business, I changed firms and came to ForeSite Technologies about 6 months ago.  I am always looking for ways to get the word out so that folks I have met in my previous life can easily find me.
2. Former coworkers who know and trust my work are a wonderful source of referrals, and I love to be able keep in touch and help them too.  But the more time goes by, the less you find yourself sending an email or picking up the phone just to check in.
3. Through face-to-face networking, I meet a lot of great people who work with the same types of clients as I do - small businesses, nonprofits, and schools.  Twitter gives me a way to send out short bits of information on my projects, events I am attending, and little tidbits about my day to help them get to know me better without a big time commitment.

The benefits so far:

• People reading my tweets on Twitter are linking back to the ForeSite web site.  This is enabling me to share information about ForeSite with people I have never met and increasing awareness of our network and web site solutions.
• A former coworker that I hadn’t been in touch with in years reached out after a layoff.  ForeSite was considering adding a new role, and now we’re working together again.
• Clients and folks I see at networking events know me as a suit-wearing professional.  I find they bond with me more when they learn that I eat Skittles by the handful and can wield a Nerf gun with the best of them.  People do business with and recommend people that they trust, and they more they get to know me, the greater confidence they have in sharing problems that they or their clients have to see if I can help.

Things to consider:

• It’s great to show your human side, but don’t forget that you are addressing clients, coworkers and others that you hope to do business with.  If you wouldn’t say it face to face, don’t say it.
• I recommend maintaining a separate FaceBook account for family and close friends for posting funny anecdotes and sharing of family photos.
• Don’t start and stop!  You can’t build a following if you tweet once and go dark for months.  Make updating your social media sites part of your daily work routine.

It will be interesting to see how my experience changes as social media continues to evolve.  Stay tuned!

One of the most common things I hear when I meet with small business owner to talk about technology is “I just want it to work”. You didn’t start your business because you wanted to design and maintain a computer network or a web site, but you have come to the realization that you can’t do business without them.

According to this article in Technology, Inc magazine the top ranked concerns for small business are:

• Using technology to reduce costs in other areas
• Stretching the lifespan of your hardware
• Finding vendors that can understand their company and tailor solutions to fit their needs

My Dad owned a small business, and I saw him struggle with the same issues. That makes it very personal for me to provide resources for my clients that my Dad didn’t always have, and to be able to save them from making some of the mistakes he experienced.

Not every technology investment is a good one, but the ones that make sense can really pay off. For example, when personal computers were just making their way into the business world, Dad saw a demonstration of the “paperless office” concept and immediately saw where using computers to gather information once, store it electronically, and move it from order taking to production to delivery could save time and prevent orders being lost along the way. His return on investment came quickly as less people handled an order, mistakes were reduced saving material and labor to redo orders, and the gap between taking an order and receiving payment was greatly reduced.

This positive experience led to a misconception that all technology investments would be great for business. I’ll talk about examples of failures in future blog posts.

What can you do when facing these concerns?

• Take a close look at your business. Ask employees how they spend their time and where they see bottlenecks. Is there a way to automate process?
• Weigh cost and risk. If the hardware and software can handle your needs for another year, then hold off on the replacement, but don’t skimp on maintenance and keep the hardware under warranty. These two steps can prevent unexpected and costly downtime.
• Find a technology resource that you trust and talk to them about your whole business, not just your computers. The more they understand what you do, how you do it now, and why you do it, the better their recommendations can be.

As I am finishing out my Executive MBA program at the University of Connecticut School of Business, I have started thinking of themes for 2009 that I will employ to fill up all of my newly found “free time”.  One theme is “learn how to be a father to my first born daughter”, now 4 months old, but writing about that would be much more than a simple blog post and so far, I am no expert. A theme that applies better to ForeSite is “Turning Data into Information”.  We have spent many hours and thousands of dollars creating and updating systems that track all sorts of data.  The problem is that we, like most companies, never turn it into useful information for our business.

I will have several posts about the successes of this undertaking throughout the year, but some examples of places I am looking to achieve results are:

1. Looking more closely at the profitability of certain product lines, and even certain clients
2. Figuring out the best areas to focus internal training efforts based upon the success of past projects
3. Evaluating the health of our client base using certain metrics and measures that can be regularly calculated
4. Looking at how our workload flows between recurring scheduled work, project work and work that crops up day to day so we can better schedule and plan our technical staff on both the web development and network support teams

We have painstakingly gathered the data to properly derive this information, but the act of actually mining it is what’s next on tap.  By integrating what we have built into our PHP web based production system called HaTS and pulling data from other systems such as Quickbooks and ADP payroll I will have much better tools for managing the growth of ForeSite.  You can most likely do the same with varying levels of effort based upon what data you have collected over the years in your business.  If you start looking, you’ll probably be amazed at how much information you have hiding in data that you are not putting to good use.  Stay tuned for what we find!

There are a lot of ways people will try to spend your money, especially during a difficult economy.  When businesses are struggling, everyone is looking for the silver bullet to keep their business alive and there are plenty of people out there who say they have it for sale.  But how do you decide which ones to try and which ones to pass on?

From a technology perspective, we generally encourage our clients to focus on projects that can have a real return on investment for their business.  This can be in creating efficiencies, saving real dollars, or saving time for their most likely overworked staff.  Seem daunting?  It doesn’t have to be.  You don’t need a gaggle of Harvard MBA’s to figure this out for you because YOU are the only expert in your business. You can achieve success in this by following 3 easy steps:

1) Identify things in your company that are done repetitively.  These are the items that by shaving just a little bit of time off the regular process you can generate great time savings for the business.  Examples of these might be  time entry, regular reporting, or product inventory.

2) Find ways to automate some or all of the repetitive process.  Sometimes this can be as simple as having shared documents and spreadsheets so that there is not duplicate entry being performed.  On a larger scale, it might involve investing is a work flow software designed for your industry.  In between would be having a custom web based application built for a process that is specific to your business.

3) EVALUATE THE RESULTS!  Take the time before you change the process to measure how long it takes.   Then after you automate the process, measure it again.  You will quickly start to see the results you can achieve and realize where future efforts can be worth while.

Changing a process you know and love is not always easy, so start small.  Find something that can be an easy win for everyone involved.  Most importantly, make sure you communicate with those involved in the process that you are not trying to automate them out of a job, but trying to help them focus their talent where it is best used.