Telecommunications: Neglected but Essential Aspect of Your Business

 
I must confess to an oversight on my part. In all the writing I’ve done about marketing and running a business, I’ve neglected an essential element: telecommunications.

In part, it’s because I’ve focused my posts on business and marketing. And I take some comfort in knowing that most other business owners don’t think about their telecom needs until something breaks, so I’m not alone in neglecting it.

But I still feel guilty. Your telecommunications network is probably the backbone of your business and deserves much more attention – especially if you want to keep your business up and running effectively.

Even if you’re selling knock-off sunglasses from a blanket on Venice Beach, you at least have a cell phone to contact suppliers and keep your inventory up-to-date, although that’s not much of a telecom system. In my own case, I have a cell phone, a desktop computer linked to the Internet through a cable modem, and a local wireless network for my laptop. At the other end of the spectrum are Fortune 500 businesses with thousands of phone lines and data cables as thick as your arm.

So, where do we start to rectify this oversight?

Disaster Recovery

Every business is different and has different telecommunications needs. A small retail store might have a couple phone lines to handle calls, faxes, and credit card approvals, a computer to track inventory and accounting, Internet access for those slow times when all you want to do is surf, and a cash register.

When all this stuff works, your business hums along just fine, but what happens when you can’t approve credit card sales or your computer crashes and you lose six months of accounting records? Then you’ve got a real problem – one that may be serious enough to jeopardize the continued existence of your business.

I’ve written before about the importance of being prepared for a disaster – whatever form that takes. Sometimes you just fry a hard drive for no reason at all and there’s nothing you can do about it…

So here are some basic disaster recovery ideas that will help keep you out of trouble and get up back up and running as quickly as possible.

1. Redundancy – You don’t need a complete backup system of phones and computers, just enough to help you limp along until your primary equipment is fixed. If your phone lines go down, have a cell phone handy – and who doesn’t these days? – so you can call tech support and get somebody out to fix your problem.
2. Back up Your Data Frequently – Honestly, some of the information on your computer probably couldn’t be duplicated even if you wanted to. Can you afford to lose it? Can you afford the time it will take to duplicate it, even if you can? External hard drives, DVDs, Internet services, all are easy and inexpensive ways to preserve valuable data. If you’re not comfortable setting it up yourself, pay for a tech call. It’s worth the money.
3. Maintenance and Service – Let’s face it: the average person just doesn’t understand technology anymore – if we ever did. And, do you really want to spend your time fooling around with a computer network or phone system when you should be running your business? Find a reputable, experienced technical support company to handle your technology needs for you. They can tell you what you need, how much it will cost, and how long it will take to install. Hold them to a high standard; after all, they make money by selling you new equipment. The good ones will even tell you that what you have works just fine, even if it’s ten years old.

There’s much more to the world of telecommunications and I’ll be delving into it in greater detail, but for now, here are some other things to consider – after you’ve backed up your files and have found a reputable tech support company!

1. Identifying and Assessing Your Carriers
2. Understanding Cryptic Telecom Terminology
3. Identifying and Evaluating Your Hardware and Software
4. Deciding What to Upgrade or Replace, When, and How
5. Maintenance and Service
6. Who’s Responsible for What and How to Get Help When You Need It
7. Voice, Data, or Both: Which System is Right for You

Yes, I know it’s not marketing, but, like a good business plan, without it you could be creating big problems for your business. Better to get the knowledge up-front and make the right decisions the first time around.

What Good is Twitter, Anyway?

 
I admit it. Of all the social networking endeavors, Twitter is the most difficult for me to understand. I mean, what can you say with 140 characters?

But a recent article in the New York Times has given me some additional insight; there actually may be more to Twitter than the absurd stream of consciousness I’ve seen so far.

According to the article, “By tapping into the world’s collective brain, researchers of all kinds have found that if they make the effort to dig through the mundane comments, the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiment – and even help them shape it.”

And combined, the “tweets” – I still want to call them twits – appear to carry a lot of weight.

“…over the weekend, Amazon.com learned how important it was to respond to the Twitter audience. After one author noticed that Amazon had reclassified books with gay and lesbian themes as “adult” and removed them from the main search and sales rankings, a protest broke out on blogs and Twitter.”

For any business, the potential for both positive and negative coverage is now at someone’s fingertips on a massive scale, even compared to the more mundane – and mainstream – blogs.

I wrote in an earlier post that e-newsletters are probably losing ground to blogs and other social media. Well, it appears that some of these old “new media” may already be losing ground to Twitter as well. It has an immediacy and speed that are astounding.

“…Twitter was most evident during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November and when a jetliner landed in the Hudson River in January. People were twittering from the scenes before reporters arrived.” (Italics mine.)

One last spin on Twitter that made me sit up and take notice comes from Paul Saffo, the Silicon Valley futurist, quoted in the Times article, “Twitter reverses the notion of the group. Instead of creating the group you want, you send it and the group self-assembles.”

What texting was, just recently, to groups of friends; Twitter now is to the entire Internet world.

Of course, from a practical standpoint, there are a lot of other things you can do to promote your business; Twitter still seems to be on the “bleeding edge.” But, I’m pretty confident that its move into the mainstream is inevitable. All we need now is some nice, simple, cheap software to allow us to monitor and assess every “tweet” and project how it might affect our businesses…

Plan to Keep Product Development Moving Along

 
With everything that goes into starting and running a business – even a small one – it’s easy to get so wrapped up in the new, exciting things that you let something slide.

The solution is to develop a comprehensive business plan to begin with, along with a schedule for implementation. Of course, then you have to remember to check it regularly so everything stays on track!

Fortunately, my product development lapse was not a major one. Since I’ll be selling my own art in my online gallery, there’s a bunch of it lying around, ready to be promoted. But, I’m also planning on selling limited edition prints of some of my work. And, after doing initial research on vendors, I hadn’t followed up on the details to make sure everything would work as I’d planned.

Turns out, at least one of my assumptions was incorrect – the time required to make the prints – which will adversely affect production and delivery times. For example, it takes three to five days to make a print and I had assumed one or two. I plan to wait until I have my first order for each print to produce the entire edition, so my planned production and shipping time from receipt of the order – at least on the first print – has gone from my projected five to seven business days to a minimum of seven to ten business days.

While this isn’t an insurmountable problem, one of the basic rules of customer satisfaction is to under-promise and over-deliver. I certainly don’t want my customers to be upset because their prints don’t arrive when I say they will.

To resolve it, I’ll do two things: (1) Manage customers’ expectations by changing the shipping information on my website to allow for the longer production time, and (2) Locate secondary vendors of the same quality to ensure I have a backup if there’s a problem like an unusually large volume of orders.

Implementing the first is easy, since I haven’t even created the website yet. With the second, although I don’t anticipate a lot of orders, it’s good to be prepared and I might even find someone faster and better to become my primary supplier.

Every business will have problems, but the better you plan, the easier it is to see them coming and minimize them.

On Wikis, Websites, and Cloud Computing

 
I promise, this is the last thing I’ll write about wikis – at least for awhile. But several posts from the last couple weeks all came together for me and I thought I should share my insight.

First, a final (for now) word on wikis. After my wiki frenzy which resulted in my failure to launch due to both hardware and software inadequacies, I checked with my planned web host provider and guess what? They support both PHP5 and SQL4. This is good news because, when you launch your business website, all the hardware and software you need to support a wiki will probably be right there.

I also received a comment from Aaron Fulkerson directing me to download the free and open source MindTouch Core here: http://mindtouch.com/Community. Thanks, Aaron!

That’s one of the great things about having started this blog – the more I write, the more things come back to me. I’m looking forward to experimenting with the download.

I didn’t see specific wiki software listed as one of the features, but I’m sure – since the hardware and software are there to support it – that you can add one to your website. Which, believe it or not, brings me back to the idea of cloud computing.

Cloud computing – if you’ll recall – provides storage for both your software and files on the Internet, allowing you access from almost anywhere at any time, even if you’re not using your own computer. So, if your website is hosted online and your wiki and blog are hosted online, and almost all the research and news content you need is online, is it such a big step to running your entire business from a simple Internet portal, letting someone else handle all the hardware and software hassles?

Except for production, in my case creating the art, digitizing it, and loading it to the website, you really could do it all.

Urgent News! I Don’t Know Enough to Run My Own Wiki

 
Having just tried to download the software for MediaWiki, I realize – once again – the limits of my technical knowledge.

It appears that I can’t just dump it on my computer and run it. Who knew? Not me certainly, but probably tech guys everywhere. To make it work you’ll need – at least – a web server running PHP 5 or higher; don’t have one and don’t know what PHP 5 is.

You’ll also need a database server running SQL 4 or later. Don’t have one of those either, but I do know what a SQL database is, I used to work with programmers.

So, it appears that my simplistic plan to create a wiki on my computer has backfired. I hope this keeps you from making the same mistake.

But not to worry! Since I did my homework, I know that MindTouch will host a free wiki for me – with a WYSIWYG interface. Now I just have to decide if this is something I really want to do, or should I just dump all my files into a gigantic Word document…