Virtual Assistant, life is good.

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I'm a bit of a Web 2.0 connoisseur when the app is free. I came across 2 different ones that are really helpful tools by themselves. Put them together and they are amazingly helpful. The first app is Jott which is a voice to text transcription service that will convert your voice to text and send it to SMS or email addresses. Jott also has a Blackberry plugin that will allow you to respond to email/SMS via voice. Very helpful if you don't want to type and drive. The other app Sandy is a virtual email/reminder assistant. You can change her to him with a male name if you don't want your wife getting upset about this "Sandy" you communicate with all the time. ;) Basically you can send Sandy emails and ask her to remind you of tasks, events, notes/data, etc. She will send you iCal or ics depending on your preference and she will also send you a daily digest that can help you plan out your day. You can tag items such as @blog_entry and later query her with @blog_entry and she will tell you everything you asked her to remember with that tag. You can CC her on email and in the body put something like "Sandy, remind me to send out the proposal for Acme, Inc. this Friday 10 AM." and she will remind you via SMS, email, or both depending on your preference.

By connecting Sandy and Jott you can now call her (via Jott) and get all the above features. I have been using both services for a few months and have found them to be very helpful. The other day I was driving home and remembered I needed to get a note out in the morning for a project I'm working on so I called Sandy (via Jott) and asker her to remind me. To totally forgot until Sandy SMSed me a reminder--pretty cool. Tip: if you want to tag an item via Jott to Sandy say, "tag with projectX." You can multi-tag items too with @projectX @todo @critical. If you were tagging via Jott say, "tag with projectX and todo and critical."

Initially there is a little back an forth with Sandy until you get the lingo down but it is really simple once you get the hang of it and there are many short-cuts/dictation to speed thumb typing along. Don't fret, she lets you know if she didn't understand what you wanted her to do. I'm still exploring all of her capabilities and I'm finding new and exciting features or a way to use them in a relevant way every day.

Questions and comments welcomed.
Tim Symchych

Free email service = no service and lost revenue

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All too often small business use free email accounts which seem like a cost savings strategy. In the last analysis this is very short term thinking. Several of my customers, even though they host with me and get three business class email accounts with their account, still use yahoo, gmail, or their ISP (think road runner) email for their business. I'm amazed by this. When the service goes down you don't have anyone to call or they aren't specialists so their help is mediocre at best. Plus you are building brand recognition for someone else. Business owners are threatened with litigation from both internal and external sources. When asked to produce email communications they are unable to with these free services.

The trifecta of business email:

• Support
• Branding
• Reliable
  

When things go wrong, and they will on a long enough time line, losing email can mean losing business. The provider may not even know there is a problem while your business is at a stand still.

We provide email service to several independent real estate companies who's agents use personal free email addresses. The unfortunate issue here is that if that agent no longer works for you all the contacts he built while working out of your office go with him in his personal email. If he was using yourdomain.com then you would be reinforcing your brand and encourage the repeat customers to contact your office instead of joerealtor@yahoo.com. Additionally, since you control the email you could forward it to someone on your team if the agent does leave.

Many email providers, including your ISP, do not focus on email. Email is not their flagship product so innovation and robust system implementation is minimal or just enough. Great features like shared calendaring, blackberry support, etc are not even on their road map.

Get a service that has great support, reinforce your brand, and get the features you need to get ahead.

Comments welcomed,
Tim Symchych

Automation is killing my business

Image via WikipediaI remember in the late 90's during the up swing of Internet bubble how many companies and individual speculators put up "e-commerce" sites that were incredibly sterile. It was like doing business with Robby the robot. A lot of this was driven by the "if you build it they will come" notion. The frenzy of getting rich quick is usually coupled with a desire to stay anonymous because it is just speculation and not building value. Unfortunately the desire to hide from customers lives strong and is still quit ubiquitous. Virtually all websites you visit have a "contact us" page which should really read, "do not contact us." It should be easy (one click from any page on your site) to find your business phone number and address on your website. If someone sitting at a their computer on your site resorts to using the phone book to find your information you're in trouble.

Many people I speak with ask how do they get to the top of a Google search. Really it depends on how much you are willing to spend and whether that spend is worth it to your business. For most small businesses it is sufficient to put up a catalog style website, have domain email, and a contact us page with their phone number and address conspicuously placed. This will cover you for city searches where Internet users use Google, Ask, etc like the yellow pages. If your small business competitor does this and you don't who do you think is going to get more business?

Comment and Questions welcomed.
Tim Symchych

Small Businesses going Green

Image via WikipediaWhen the team and I decided to "go green" when we launched the new brand and service level we weren't exactly sure where to start. Should we green the office, our product line, everything? After some analysis we decided to attack the problem incrementally starting with our product offering since it would have the largest positive impact, or in the green vernacular zero impact.

The US Department of Energy has a list of certified carbon off-set programs from various providers here. The great thing about some of these companies is that they have tools to help you calculate your usage. When we got down in the details of determining our use we had a number of challenges because in our business we use various providers where the majority of our usage is on their cloud infrastructure. We reached out to some of them and they were very helpful. As it turns out, most of these businesses know intimately how much usage each node/device can handle because they must determine the profit per device, an essential component in their business model. Once we had the totals we converted our usage to "server equivalents" and used a nifty tool I found on Dell's website that provides a holistic view of energy consumption in a data center. We also compared our results with the calculator found on Terrapass. We took our findings to NativeEnergy and will buy our carbon off-sets monthly. We could do annually but we hope to grow month over month and want to make 12 bite sized purchases of off-sets than 1 huge one at the end of the year. Besides, we want to make a difference today not in a year.

So why did we choose NativeEnergy? To be honest several people on the team love Cliff and Stoneyfield products. Both use NateiveEnergy and one of their programs was with Stoneyfield. Here are some other sites/blogs we looked at in our quest to be carbon neutral:

• Tom Raftery
• Carbon Solutions
• Tree Hugger

In our next phase of going green we are going to tackle our office space and homes.

Comments, Questions, Ideas-- Bring it.
Tim Symchych