I have written a number of posts the past few months about how important it is for small businesses to be aware of and to improve their local online presence.  Local search is getting big on its own and with the advent of mobile search it is critical that small businesses stake their claim in local business searches.

GetListed.org is a great tool to use for this.  You simply enter your business name and it checks the presence of your business on (at this point) four websites – Google, Yahoo, Bing and Best of the Web.  If you don’t have a listing it gives you links to each for setting up your business on the sites.  If you do have a listing it shows gives you a snapshot of how strong your listing is – do you have pictures, citations (references from other sites) and reviews?

In addition to the four search engines listed above, GetListed.org links you to other search websites that frequently get referenced by Google, etc.  These include Superpages.com, Brownbook.net and Yelp.  Unfortunately this service seems West Coast based – sites that are used heavily here in the Atlanta area such as Kudzu.com aren’t included…yet.

There is a lot of helpful information about boosting your local search presence in one place with GetListed.org.  I highly recommend that every small business owner go there and get started with raising their local search visibility.  Set up your local listings and read the hints and tips.  In addition, I suggest adding it to your to-do list to go out there every few weeks and make sure you are listed where you should be.

How strong is your local search presence?

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It appears that a) a lot of small business owners don’t know what “cloud computing” is and b) regardless of whether they know or don’t know they are wary of it. In this post I will clearly and simply explain what it is and hopefully clear up some of the myths and misunderstandings about cloud computing.

Wikipedia defines cloud computing as “cloud computing” is Internet- (“cloud-”) based development and use of computer technology (computing)”. Clear as mud, huh? This is simplest way I can think of to explain what cloud computing is: if you are doing something without installing hardware on your computer or a computer on your local network, you are involved with cloud computing. A great example is email – if you use Gmail, Hotmail, AOL mail, Yahoo mail or anything similar you are using cloud computing. You are using computers and programs that live in the cloud we call the Internet.  Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Twitter – yep, all in the cloud.

But what does this have to do with business, especially small business?    Essentially it means that as a small business owner you have lots of opportunities to choose whether to buy software (and likely hardware) or choose a vendor to supply services virtually over the Internet.

What are some concrete examples?  What about (lists not inclusive):

• file storage and sharing.  You can buy and install  file server and connect it to your network or use a cloud-based solution like Egnyte, Dropbox, Google Docs or Box.net
• email.  Too many examples to mention, starting with our friends at Google.
• accounting.  Good old friends Quickbooks can be run online as well as newcomers like Freshbooks
• CRM.  Salesforce.com is a pioneer of cloud computing; other entrants to the fray include Batchbook (I talk about them here), SugarCRM, Zoho and Highrise
• Word processing and spreadsheets.  In this post I talk about Google Docs, Zoho and the like
• Document Management.
• Reporting and analytics.
• and the list goes on and on.

What are the pros and cons of using cloud computing?

1. It can be fast and inexpensive to get started.  Whether you have a new business or an existing business, using a cloud-based solution can dramatically cut down the time to get up and running and reduce your initial capital outlay.  If your business needs change rapidly, using cloud-based solutions allows you to add features quickly or even move to another solution more easily.  On the flipside, as your business grows you may find that the capital outlay of in-house applications is less expensive than ongoing costs of a cloud application.  You should always read the fine print and make sure that you can easily retrieve your data and move it to another provider should you outgrow your first choice or if you are unhappy with the service you are getting.
2. Your systems and data are easily accessible.  Wow, this is a big one; think about it, you can access your data from anywhere, anytime.   Using the business center in the hotel where you are vacationing and want to check your Quickbooks?  No problem!  Your salesperson drops their pc in the lake?  Don’t worry, their contact information is safe in the CRM system in the sky.  Cloud-based applications support virtual offices and working from home “out of the box” so to speak.  Downside?  You only have access to your applications and data thru the Internet.  No Internet access?  Internet down?  Have a slow internet connection?  All of these can affect, in some cases dramatically, your access to your business information.  As a business owner you have to weigh the risks of not having access to the costs of controlling your own access (and remember, if you don’t have electricity you are likely SOL anyway).
3. Your information may not be secure.  On one hand, it may not be secure in your office either.  Is it backed up regularly and is that backup in an offsite location?  Is it on a computer or server that is secured properly on the Internet?  Is it physically secure from theft, natural disaster, etc?  Many small business owners don’t pay attention to these factors, making their systems and data LESS secure in their own office than it would be anywhere else.  Most of the companies that provide cloud-based services have shelled out a lot of dough to make sure their systems are secure, safe and stay up.  That said, not all of them do it the same way or in the same degree.  As a small business owner you should sit down and assess the level of risk you are willing to take and with which kinds of data.  Then, as you look into cloud-based applications, make sure you understand each suppliers security precautions and service level agreements.
4. You can concentrate on your business, something you are probably pretty good at.  You can leave the care and feeding of computers and systems to the highly trained and compensated personnel that work for the service providers.  It can be distracting and expensive to maintain technology; most small businesses are better off spending their energy and money somewhere else.

Bottom line? My take is that most of the cloud-based applications are good, safe and secure and are getting more so every day.  While you should certainly thoughtfully assess your individual needs, especially where accessibility and security are concerned, I believe small businesses should seriously consider cloud-computing for many of their needs.  Determining where it makes sense and how to transition your applications should be part of your technology plan.

How do YOU feel about the cloud?

Photo attribution:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/8769295@N07/ / CC BY 2.0

In an earlier post I touched on Google’s Local Business Listings in the context of other available online exposure resources for small businesses.  There have been a few recent developments that make me realize that I should dive a bit deeper into this topic.

Google has  had Local Business Listings for a number of years and there are some good really good things about it.  First, what it is: it is essentially a free advertising space on Google.  And every business can have one.  In fact, most businesses may already have one and not know it.  How is that?  Google  aggregates company data from a number of resources and creates  default listings for all the businesses it finds.  As a business owner, you can add a listing if there isn’t already one or “claim” yours if it is already there.

Which brings us to Reason Number 1 to pay attention to the listing for your company – it is there and you may not even know about it.  Which means it might not even contain the right information.  And that can’t be a good thing – you don’t want a potential customer finding your listing but calling a wrong number.  So as soon as you are done reading this post you should go right out and check your listing.  On second thought, you should go right now.  I’ll wait.

Since you have a listing whether you want it or not (and why would you not want free advertising?) let’s talk about Reason Number 2 to check the listing – the better the QUALITY of the listing, the better chance that your listing will show up in the “7-pack” or the list of  local businesses associated with a map.  This placement is different from your regular search placement which is heavily affected by SEO (but the placement of the 7-pack itself CAN affect your overall placement in search results.).   Now Google isn’t likely to share their algorithm but a lot of smart folks (here is one source)  have spent time studying this and, while they don’t agree on the exact order, they do agree that these factors (among others) are likely to affect the placement of your business:

• local address (presumably the RIGHT one)
• good categorization
• location keyword in business description
• videos and pictures
• reviews
• the fact that the listing is “claimed” by the business owner who presumably ensured it is correct and complete

Reason Number 3 to check your local listing is that Google recently (like last week) rolled out a new feature called “near me now” (as opposed to “hear me now” of course) that is available on iPhones and Android devices.  Essentially, if you have one of those devices and go to the main Google screen you can elect, by allowing your device to share your location, to see business that are near that location.  Here is a good article about the “near me now” functionality that includes screen shots and a cutesy video.  Of course, for your business to have a chance of showing up when folks are in your neighborhood looking for exactly the service you provide, it needs to have a good address.

So now you have a nice, complete, correct, good-looking listing.  You can just ignore it now and let it do its thing, right?  WRONG!  Reason Number 4 to pay attention to your listing on a regular basis is that there are bad bad people out there that may hijack your listing.  When they do this they leave your listing intact but do things like change the phone number or the url for the website so THEY get all your hard-earned leads instead of you.  This article talks about how listings get hijacked and unfortunately sometimes getting it fixed with Google can be a pain.  At this point I don’t have any good advice about how to avoid getting hijacked; for now, just be aware and check your listing regularly!  In the meantime, let’s hope Google is listening to the growing uproar and makes it harder to hijack listings soon.  The Local Business Listings are a good thing for small businesses in theory; issues like hijacking can turn a good thing into a bad thing in a hurry.

Here are 4 reasons to pay attention, regularly, to your Google Local Business Listing – have you checked yours today?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dyanna/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

If you have spent any time in corporate America you are likely well acquainted with the ubiquitous Microsoft Office Suite of products (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) and their close companion Visio.  How dependent on them have you become and what happens when you want (or need) to use one of the free competitors?

When I started my own small business last year I bought a new laptop that did not include Microsoft Office.  Though I had used the tools almost extensively for most of my professional career I decided, since my new PC didn’t come with Office, to try and use the free alternatives.  After all, many of my clients are in the same situation; what would I recommend to them?

Before we start, a few disclaimers.  This not a complete, formal or even impartial review. After many many years (I was 12 when I started) of using MS Office I have a lot of unlearning to do.  All those years of using MS Office has set expectations that may or may not be reasonable.

First,  I started using Google Docs (Document and Spreadsheet).  These work OK for very simple things.  With Document once I get into anything beyond rudimentary formatting I quickly become frustrated.  Something like adding a table then resizing the columns takes many more clicks than I am used to.  Spreadsheet is a little better; I can most of what I am used to doing.  At first I was worried that I couldn’t do graphing or Pivot tables but it appears that there are gadgets that do those things; I haven’t used them yet.   I scoffed at Presentation and didn’t even try it when I couldn’t figure out how to do slide transitions or animations (ok, does every presentation need them?  No, unless you are 9 years old.  As my son is.   Enough said.).   I am also concerned that you can’t embed fragments of Documents or Spreadsheets.

Next I tried Openoffice and at first glance I was pleasantly surprised with Calc; for me it was easy to use because it was so much like Excel.   Only little things were annoying (for example, the tab under the sort function that includes the option to specify a header row is a different tab from most of the rest of the sort options).  Writer is similar; simple things like resizing the columns in a table are as intuitive as click and drag.   Where I get aggravated with OpenOffice is with reliability and performance.  I consistently get crashes and have to recover documents.   One night I was helping my son with a school project and we were using Presentation (which, by the way, support transitions and animations).  Literally, we’d type one sentence and hit ‘save’ because every other sentence we’d have a crash and have to recover the document.   The applications would also hang up a lot.

After a while I completely uninstalled Openoffice, re-downloaded it and re-installed it.   It seems to be a little better now but I have recovered at least twice already today while preparing this post.

I then tried the Zoho versions of these programs.   I don’t know if did something wrong or I was losing my mind but I would open a csv file, modify it and save it and export it; I NEVER got the resulting exported file to contain the correct modified data.  The problem might be related to the fact that Zoho really doesn’t support Safari, which I use most often.  After that I didn’t spend much time with the other Zoho applications.  I will at some point.  The media loves Zoho, I want to love Zoho too.  I just don’t yet.

The high point of my frustrations came when I wanted to do what I thought was very simple…print mailing labels based on addresses in a .csv file. OpenOffice?   I finally figured out how to do it but it crashed about 2/3 of the way thru the Mail Merge.  Google Docs?  If you can do it I couldn’t figure it out.  Zoho?   After my issues with spreadsheet I kind of gave up.   After many frustrated hours I moved to my husband’s PC, which has MS Office, and knocked out the labels in about 10 minutes.

As a techie, Visio has long been one of my favorite applications.  I consider myself the Viso queen.   Frankly, I’m afraid to try the free competitors at this point.  I imagine it would be painful.

What is the moral to this story?  First, unbeknownst to me, I have been trained (brainwashed?) into performing certain functions in a certain way; in fact I expect certain functions be available.   If you are in this camp, the learning curve costs of switching may be more expensive than the dollar cost of buying MS Office (cost of learning curve proportional to your age and the number of brain cells you’ve lost over time).  Second, despite my frustrations, I think with more modifications and enhancements these free alternatives will be viable choices for some folks; they are already viable choices for some tasks (I am using OpenOffice right now).   I plan to continue trying to use them; but may spring for Office to get me thru humps and gaps. Seems like someone could make a ton of money writing books that bridge the gap for old MS Office users like me…

What do YOU use for spreadsheets and word processing?