Finding the Right Telecom Carrier

 
There’s a lot to know about telecommunications if you want to make the right choices for your business. You should know the basics, but – as with so many other areas of running a business – you’ll quickly find that it’s important to have experts you can trust and turn to for detailed guidance.

What is “Telecom” Anyway?

Telecom is short for telecommunications, but you probably figured that out already. This abbreviation is just the beginning, though. This is an industry full of long, complicated names; abbreviations and acronyms are a fact of life. Knowing a few of the more common ones will help a lot and I’ll refer to them throughout my telecom posts.

What are Telecom Services?

While the broad definition of telecom services includes television, radio, and all the new technologies coming to market, for the purposes of your business – and our discussion – we’ll narrow the definition to any service that’s transmitted over telephone lines. These are, primarily:

1. Internet connections
2. Phone and Fax calls
3. Data transfer

And Why Do You Need Them?

Telecom links your business to the outside world. Without it, you probably couldn’t stay in business for very long – although there may be exceptions. There are several subcategories to the list above, any or all of which could be essential to your business:

1. Basic Phone Service
2. Toll Free Service
3. Data Service
4. Internet Service
5. Wireless Service

It’s essential to analyze your needs and current services before you decide how to proceed. Let’s start with the carriers.

Local Carriers

These are the companies that provide – well – local service: calls within your immediate area, emergency calls, information, etc. They also provide the link to long distance carriers. And here’s where the acronyms start. These local carriers are called LECs (local exchange carriers) and you’ll need one – or one of their competitors – to connect your internal business network to the outside world.

When the old AT&T was broken up many moons ago, one of the groups that was created was these LECs. The more official title is Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC) and as competition entered the local phone market, they are also sometimes known as ILECs (incumbent local exchange carriers).

The competitors to these ILECs became known as CLECs (competing local exchange carriers). And, thank goodness, that’s all the acronyms for this post!

Basically, they all provide the same services and can link your company to the outside world. Most also provide extensive add-on services, like voice mail. If yours is a small company, you may be able to do just fine working with your local carrier to provide all the services you need. They love that because you’ll be renting those services; making monthly payments just like you do for your home phone, cable service, and cell phone.

The second option is to rent the lines from your local carrier, purchase or lease the hardware you need and have it installed at your business, but that’s a subject for several other posts.

Long Distance

Because of the breakup of AT&T, you can’t just pick one service provider. You need local and long distance carriers. The long distance providers fall into two general categories:

1. Facilities-based – those that own equipment and lines
2. Resellers – those that lease space on the facilities-based networks and resell it

The Wireless Option

With the explosion in technology, features, and services, it’s even possible to use a wireless network. This can be your outside link, replacing local and long distance service, or it can be all or part of your internal network creating a wireless network within your office.

If you have a large sales or technical force that’s primarily out of the office, but still requires extensive voice and data access, this may be the way to go. Remember, though, any wireless network is much less secure than being “hard wired.”

So, from a carrier standpoint, here’s what you need to consider:

1. What services do you need?
2. Are they provided by a local, long distance, or wireless carrier?
3. Which carrier(s) will provide you with the best services at the best price?

LinkedIn: The Professionals’ Social Network

 
With the gallery website up and running, it’s now time to look at social networking options to expand my network and – hopefully – my prospect and customer base. For me, LinkedIn is probably not the best place to start for this, but I’ve had my profile posted there for some time now and I’m more familiar with it than some of the other social networking sites.

The most important thing to remember about LinkedIn is that it’s a business networking tool, unlike Facebook or MySpace which have a business element to them but began their lives as social gathering places. It’s not the place to talk about your recent trip, your pets, or your favorite band.

Now that can be a good thing. You know right up front what you’re dealing with, and depending on your business it may be a great source for prospects, sub-contractors, collaborators, and other contacts to help you achieve your goals.

Your Profile and Connections

You start by creating a profile – essentially an online resume – that can be viewed by others. It’s out there 24/7, promoting your expertise to anyone who might be looking. The challenge is to get people to look…

And you do that by adding Connections. Search through your old Rolodex (remember those?) and contact lists for people you’d like to add and – if they’re on LinkedIn – invite them to join your network.

Here’s where it gets interesting. As an example, I have 32 people in my personal network. In my secondary network – people who know the people I know, but don’t know me – I have more than 1,700 contacts. And in my entire Linked In network there are more than 194,000 people. Now, none of those contacts has ever called to offer me a job, but you can see the reach the network has.

Joining Groups

If posting your profile is a somewhat passive way to build your network, joining – and participating in – the groups LinkedIn offers can really get your name out there. You can post – and respond to – questions and ideas related to the group’s activities. I admit that I’ve been a non-participant, but I just read through some recent entries for the groups to which I belong and can see the potential for soliciting information from your peers and providing it as well.

Keeping Up with Everything

Once you’re set up, it’s pretty easy to keep tabs on what’s happening. LinkedIn does the hard work for you, alerting your network connections when you make a change to your profile and informing you about what others are doing.

Adding to Your Profile

Of course, the more you have in your profile, the easier it is to renew old relationships and build your network. I just found two people I worked with more than 15 years ago and invited them to join my network. It remains to be seen if they even remember me – or if they do, how positive that recollection is – but they just popped up as links from my previous jobs.

LinkedIn continues to add options to make your networking more effective. One I just found – and really like – is the ability to link my blog to my LinkedIn profile. The titles and first few lines of my most recent posts now appear on my profile.

Searching for More

LinkedIn also offers Search options for People, Jobs, Answers, and Companies. People and Jobs are pretty straightforward, but Answers and Companies have some interesting options.

In Answers, you can either ask or answer a question – duh.  But this feature allows you to poll your peers for their insights into your specific problem. And, of course, you can share your insights as well.

Here’s a quick example. As I was writing this post, I asked a question on LinkedIn about finding a telecommunications service provider in Ventura, CA and have already received a response – basically a sales solicitation – for me to call about all my telecom needs. It will be interesting to see what else comes in, but people are reading these things.

The Companies feature allows you to search for potential employers as well as service providers and includes background information to help you find exactly what you’re looking for.

And that’s just the Free Stuff

If you’re willing to spend quite a bit more – $49.95 a month for the Business Plus program and $499.95 a month for the Pro program – you can really leverage your LinkedIn presence with more messages, more profile searches, and more alerts. But for me, free is just fine, thank you.

Building Customer Relationships

 
As I’ve mentioned before, I subscribe to several marketing and sales-oriented newsletters. Some are better than others – like MarketingSherpa – but all have some useful information.

A new one to add to your list is RainToday.

A recent article by Andrew Sobel (www.andrewsobel.com) defines six levels of customer relationships and five strategies to progress to the highest level.

Much of marketing seems to be about finding and getting customers and we seem to forget that keeping is at least as important. An estimate that’s been thrown around for years is that it costs approximately eight times as much to get a new customer as it does to retain an existing one. So if you have limited marketing funds, you’d probably do well to spend a good part of it on keeping your customers.

Here’s a short outline of Mr. Sobel’s Relationshp Levels:

Pre-client:

Level 1 – Contact: You know people you’ve met once or twice over the years, but with whom you have no particular relationship.

Level 2 – Acquaintance: You’ve developed a relationship with people who’ve become more than contacts.

Client:

Level 3 – Expert for Hire: You’ve been hired for a specific job and these people have a positive opinion of you and the work you did.

Level 4 – Steady Supplier: You have an ongoing relationship with someone who gives you regular repeat business.

Level 5 – Trusted Advisor: You’ve developed a long-term relationship with someone who trusts you and your judgment.

Level 6 – Trusted Partner: You’re viewed as someone who is a long-term partner in the business, not just a vendor.

To reach the highest level, there are five growth strategies:

Relationship Expansion – building many relationships within the client’s organization.

Capabilities Expansion – showing your breadth by linking to your client’s agenda and working with them on broad business issues.

Relationship Management Intensity – becoming “focused and systematic about a broad set of relationship management activities.”

Team Leadership – creating a client relationship where the best professionals in your company aspire to work with those clients.

Client Account Planning – developing a dynamic process that evolves to meet the client’s needs.

Not all client relationships are going to reach Level Six. In fact, those relationships are like your best friends; you’re lucky if you have a few that stand the test of time. And, depending on your business type, you may not get past Level Three or Four.

The important thing to remember is that success in business is based on relationships. The better your client relationships, the more value you add and the more success you help them achieve, the more likely they are to stick with you, helping you to be successful as you help them.

More Challenges of Technology: Websites, HTML, and Ecommerce

 
Well, it’s been the technology week from hell, what with the computer crash, launching the website, and trying to set up my PayPal account.

This will probably sound a lot like whining – and it is – but hopefully, there will be some useful advice mixed in as well…

First, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. My computer’s fixed – now all I have to do is re-install all my applications and restore my backed up files. Here’s hoping…

I’ve also come to the conclusion that using a web host-provided template is not all it’s cracked up to be. Not that it’s terrible, if you don’t want to modify it very much and are just going to upload your own content. In that case, it should work fine. Although there will still be some nasty surprises.

The big one is HTML or HyperText Markup Language. The bad news is you’ll have to learn a little of it, even if you use a site template, and it can drive you crazy until you learn to think like it does.

If you’re lucky, HTML is the only programming language you’ll have to deal with because there are others out there and they make HTML look easy.

Then, you’ll have to figure out how the site development program works. There are tutorials, but I found that they only cover the basics and are sometimes out of date. No matter how you look at it, it takes time. This can either be your time – as I’m doing – or someone else’s time that you have to pay for. You just can’t get away from it.

And if you think you can get along without a website, forget it. When a dinosaur like Yellow Pages has an online presence, you can be sure you’ll have to do it too, or you’ll be watching your customers flock to the competition.

I’ve mentioned  before that I know enough about DreamWeaver – Adobe’s web development software – to be dangerous and I’m about to find out just how dangerous I really am. I’m really tired of being hamstrung by the constraints of my host-provided template when I know that the things I want to do can be done, with just a little know-how.

For example, anchors. Not the kind used on boats, although these perform the same function for spots on your web pages. You’ve probably seen one in action when you get to the bottom of a web page and there’s a link that says “back to top.” You click on it and that’s where you go.

You can also link to anchors on different pages, which is something I’d like to do. However, according to my host’s online support, I can’t do it using the template I have and they recommended that I find a good book on HTML. Thanks a lot!

I hit another glitch when I tried to install my PayPal buttons. Everything went fine until I tried to use the “Continue Shopping” button. I spent most of the day going back and forth with support and reading through the 384 page users’ guide. Do we really need anything so complicated that it requires 384 pages to explain? Unfortunately, we do because setting up your own ecommerce program will probably cause your head to explode.

I found the solution by accident and I’ll share it with you – as I did with the folks at PayPal – in case you have a similar problem.

First, they don’t tell you that you have to paste additional HTML (there it is again!) code into your link to redirect it back to your website.

Second, the instructions in the users’ guide are unclear and don’t match what their website shows in many cases. Not that I blame them; it’s easy to update the website and a nightmare to rewrite the users’ manual – believe me, I know.

Third, you have to past in the link from the website page you want shoppers to return to.

Finally, and this is what really drove me insane, the instructions show the sample code ending in “.html” but don’t you believe it. About 90% of my problem was the fact that the code I used included the “.html” at the end. I deleted it and – what a surprise – it worked just fine!

Now I’ll grant you that everyone I’ve dealt with in tech support over the last few days has been very nice and helpful. They just couldn’t figure out what my problems were or how to fix them.

So be prepared. You’ll have to endure a lot of frustration and figure out a lot of things for yourself, unless you’re willing to pay a professional.

Is it worth it? I think so. Technology is rushing along and the competition is using it. If we don’t, we’ll be watching our customers go somewhere else and won’t be able to do a thing about it.

Making Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Work for You

 
Now that my art website is up and running – somewhat – it’s time to focus on making the Internet work for me – and you. My expectation is that by using all the options available, to the degree that they fit my business, I’ll be able to drive traffic to my website and generate sales.

Using Keywords

One of the easiest things to do is to incorporate key words into your website’s Title Tags or Meta Tags. If you’re using a web designer, this is easy; just tell them what to change.

If you’re building your own site using templates provided by a hosting service, it’s not much harder. For example, JustHost, which hosts my website, has a video tutorial titled How to Set Meta Tags which walks you through the whole process, and it really is easy.

The hard part is deciding what keywords to use. In a recent post titled Use Google AdWords to Increase Website Traffic I touched on the subject. The important thing is to do some research first to get an idea of what words will work for you. Then, review them regularly to see if there’s anything new you might add to keep your site high on search engine lists.

There are no hard and fast rules for this, you just have to experiment and see what works for you.

Create a Blog and Use It Regularly

Search engines regularly search for new content among the millions of websites, blogs, forums, and social networking sites on the Internet. It’s easy to get lost, but a blog that’s updated frequently – a couple times a week at least – will push your website up the list.

Content is important as well. Your blog shouldn’t be promotional. Readers are interested in information they can use. Of course, if you can integrate your product or service into an informative post, that’s just gravy. Just be sure you’re providing information readers can use.

Leverage Social Media       

At its most basic, social media is any user-generated content, whether it’s blog posts, videos, Facebook pages, or any other content created by users rather than by the owner of a site. You can take advantage of social media by creating your own pages and profiles on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and other sites and link to your business website. Adding friends to your social network extends the reach of your marketing activities.

Send Out Press Releases

Press releases will create visibility for your business in news results and regular releases will increase your standing with search engines. Just remember that to get coverage, they must be newsworthy and follow the same public relations rules on the Internet that you would using more traditional channels.

I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: The old rules of marketing still apply. To be successful, all we need to do is leverage them in the new media we have available.