Exchanging Thoughts

My five top internet tips to improve your business

The internet is awash with information and it’s a great place for you to improve your business efficiency for nothing.

Everyone knows Google holds the key to most information finding, but it can be top heavy with sponsored links and cleverly SEO’d eBook sellers – so I thought it might be useful to save you a bit of time by sharing my top five tips for using the internet to improve your business.

1. Sign up to LinkedIn – it’s like Facebook, but for businesses. It’s a great place to recruit (saving you the huge recruitment fees you’d usually face) and you can use it as a business support network. It’s a community of likeminded people, so you’ll get out of it exactly what you put into it. Network with other new business leaders, the huge corporate leaders and potential partners and customers
2. Skype – I love this tool, it provides one-2-one video calling completely free. This means if you have employees on the road working from home you can stay in touch for next to nothing. Many of our calls at work are long distance as we have clients all around the world. Skype calls can be free if the calls are done completely over the internet or much cheaper and it allows users to roam around and not be tied to a land-line. You just need a headset plugged into your computer and away you go
3. Get into Google. Google is the fastest single way to find where your customers are, what they’re talking about and what they think of your product. The most useful advice I can give you as a professional communicator is to listen. If you have a web presence you can do this using a free analytics service such as Google Analytics as you can track your sites most popular pages and see how people get to your site which can help you tailor it to be more effective for selling your product or service.
4. Yammer - Yammer is a private social network for companies that want to stay in touch with each other. If you have team members working in different rooms or on different sites it’s a great way to stay in touch easily. Each user is given a profile displaying their photo, title, expertise and background. Yammer then asks a question: “What are you working on?”. It basically acts like a discussion board for your company. You can post a status update; ask a question; shares news, links, opinions, and information.
5. Speed up your news - Download and install an RSS (really simple syndication) reader like FeedDemon (download here) or Google Reader (sign-up here). It acts like a personalised newspaper – when you’re on a website, if you see the image on the right then you can add the websites news updates to your newspaper. The best things to sign up for are news websites (the BBC, FT, The Guardian etc), corporate blogs (with the top ten here, and listed below) and obviously our blog, here
• These blogs should give you the inside view on some of the world’s larger corporations:
  1. The Google blog
  2. The LinkedIn blog
  3. The whole foods blog
  4. The eBay blog
  5. The Wal-Mart blog
  6. General Motors blog
  7. Future Banking blog
  8. The McDonalds blog
  9. Amazon Daily
  10. The Cisco blog

The Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme is it going to work?

This is my first post on Exchanging Thoughts, so please be gentle with me, my name is Chris Norton and I am Director at Wolfstar a public relations and social media specialist. I have been working with Helen on a number of things over the last eighteen months and from now on I hope to be teaming up with her to share my thoughts and tips for businesses.

On Radio 4 on Friday morning, Evan Davies discussed the fact that there is very little awareness among small businesses when it comes to the Enterprise Finance Guarantee (EFG) Scheme, which is what has inspired my post today.

The Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme aims to motivate lending to SMEs which are currently struggling to secure finance from banks in the current climate. To me this sounds like a good idea – we could all do with some help with our cashflow.

In my opinion, the scheme sounds ideal for SMEs feeling the strain under financial pressure. However, Mike Symes of SME Business News suggests that some banks may not be wholly behind the scheme or have very little product awareness. He writes about the experience of Joanne Ward of Wesley Services in Leeds:

“Joanne Ward, the company secretary and financial controller, attended a meeting with her bank manager to discuss renegotiating the firm’s overdraft. When she mentioned the EFG, Mrs Ward was shocked at the reply she received. “He just said: ‘We don’t like these schemes and we’re not interested in them.”

This is further emphasised by a recent article on Times Online, which suggested that banks are “not up to speed with the parameters of the schemes” and “are still being very harsh with small businesses.”

In the piece on the Today Programme, the person being interviewed did say that the lack of visibility of the scheme is the reason why a lot of small businesses hadn’t secured any of this funding yet. So, although the scheme seems excellent in theory, it is yet to be seen whether it operates well in practice. I would be interested to hear the experiences of other SMEs who have enquired about the scheme – is it any good?

Technorati Tags: EFG Scheme,Today Programme,Evan Davies

4X Currency to expand into America

It’s been a busy few weeks and looks set to get even more so. I’ve just returned (and recovered) from Washington, where the city hasn’t yet got back to earth, post-inauguration. It still has a pleasant air of relaxation and satisfaction about it, even down to the immigration officials, one of whom thanked me ‘for smiling’. No matter how much you prepare for that flight back, though, the ‘red eye’ is still a killer…

The reason for the visit was not just to pick up some cheap Obama ‘We did it!’ caps, but to finalise talks to launch our service into America – which will start in the next few weeks. We’ve been getting increasing demand from American companies to use our international payments service, 4X Dealer and now we will have all the necessary licences and compliance in place to deal with them. Guess I’ll have to start getting used to that flight.

It’s been a busy time in the UK as well – 4X is proud to announce that from March we will be working in partnership with Chamber International in Bradford. Yorkshire businesses are reporting some impact of the recession, but not as bad as other regions. We want to do everything we can to make sure they can survive, and even benefit from, these tough conditions, and Chamber International will be putting together some comprehensive cost-saving seminars to help them.

We’re also getting our best frocks ready for the Business Moneyfacts awards evening in March.

4X is shortlisted, along with three major banks, for ‘Most Innovative Product’, for 4X Dealer. We are thrilled to have been recognised at this level, and if we win we might give Kate Winslet’s Bafta speech a run for its money.

All this of course means that I have shamefully neglected to blog and am likely to have even less time to do so in the future. To that end, I shall continue to comment on currency issues, but will also be joined by Chris Norton, social media specialist and blogger extraordinaire of Wolfstar, who will run his jaundiced eye over newsworthy business issues and keep us informed. Take it away, Chris.