The Small Business: Bridging the Digital Divide

As we have seen, small businesses too often miss opportunities to make good use of websites and other aspects of online presence. Robert Scoble notes that this is an area in which the leading tech bloggers have failed to offer much leadership, and AxisPortals agrees.  There are many blogs devoted to things such as  

• Search Engine optimization (often referred to as SEO),
• Online Branding (for everything from chefs to churches),
• Social Networking, and
• Monetizing Blogging

But often this advice is aimed at early adopters and current enthusiasts of technology, not at those who are just beginning to explore these spheres.

Only 44% of small businesses have a website.

Where to begin?  With the very basics.  Here are some initial suggestions for small business owners who want to begin bridging the digital divide:

1. Secure a Domain Name:  If you haven’t already purchased a domain name to match your company, do so immediately.  Because the internet is now a quite a crowded space, your first choice will not always be available.  Use a tool such as Register.com  to search for available names and variations. Choose something relatively brief, descriptive, and easy to remember.  Then, make sure that you fully own and control the name.  This may seem obvious, but AxisPortals has too often worked with business and organizations whose domains were owned and controlled by a former employee or a long-since disappeared web designer. Owning and controlling your own domain name is key.  Keep your ownership current, and your user name and password secure.  Do not pass this responsibility off to an employee or a web designer without ensuring that he or she is putting everything in the company’s name, and without insisting that you can access the account.  
2. Launch Your Initial Website in a Timely Fashion:  It does take some time to design a good website, but it does not and should not take months and months.  Select a competent designer; provide the designer with key content about your products, services, location, personnel, vision, and goals; review and revise an initial draft or two, and then publish.  For the vast majority of small local businesses, this is not a process that should take months and months of painstaking review and effort.  Review a list of some of the basic qualities of a good website, get those items checked off in a timely manner, and then put your website where it belongs:  online where clients and colleagues can access it, not on the drawing board, where it serves no one.
3. Continuously Revise and Update Your Site:  Keep in mind that print publication and web publication are entirely different creatures. Once the process of revising a print publication is over, it heads to press, and then distribution can begin.  Not so with a website or any online presence.  Online, texts evolve, and content is constantly refreshed and regenerated.  Move online quickly, then, and make updating and maintenance priorities.  Unless you a) have an internal employee who is very talented in this arena and b) can afford to allow this person to devote a good portion of his or her time to working with your online presence, consider outsourcing this funtion.  It will be most cost-effective for you in the long-run if your web design company also provides ongoing maintenance services, as well.  That way, the integrity of your design will not be compromised by necessary updates.
4. Track and Analyze User Statistics:     Make sure that your designand maintenace company also provides feedback about your users: How many people are visiting your site?  How often?  Which sections do they most frequently visit?  Which portions of various pages do they click through on?  How loyal are your visitors?  Where are they located?  How do they find your site?  Gather and evaluate this information on a regular basis, and revise your site accordingly to optimize the user experience.
5. Don’t Mistake the Chassis for What’s Under the Hood: A website is a lot like a car.  We all drive cars.  We know how to get from point A to point B inthem. We know how to keep them fueled, and we know we need to service them regularly to keep them in tip-top running condition.  Most of us, though, aren’t experts on what’s beneath the hood.  Just so with a website.  A very nice lookingcar--red, sporty, and fast looking–might be a perfect lemon beneath the surface,  and this can also be true of a website.  Keep in mind, then, that while looks are important, they aren’t everything. Your website should both look good and fulfill it’s basic purpose, which is to allow users to locate you, learn something about you, and contact you.   Just as you test drive a car, you should test drive your website, approaching it as a user would.  Once the site is up, head to Google and put yourself in the role of a customer or colleague who is looking for you. Then, test the site itself.  How easy is it to navigate?  Do all the features load?  Do all forms and interactive elements work flawlessly? Does the site not only look good but also function well in a variety of browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome)?  Ask a few trusted colleagues to test drive the site on their computers as well, and to offer you feedback.  Then, bring your questions and concerns to your design and maintenance team, and make sure that they are quickly addressed.

AxisPortals Aphorism:  Now is always the best time for a small business to begin bridging the digital divide.

Next Time:  Adding interactive features and social networking elements to your site.

Technology and Education: Kaplan Ad

This terrific new Kaplan spot beautifully captures the deep changes technology is bringing to higher education.

AxisPortals Aphorism Question:  Is it time?

Tech History and Nostalgia

AxisPortals has been collecting computer history artifacts on YouTube, this morning, and has run that playlist into a widget on the AxisPortals site.   The nostalgic aspect is fun, but this is also a good reminder of how rapidly things evolve in this sphere, and of how important it is to be comfortable and confident enough about technology to go with the flow of change.  Now more than ever, it’s crucial to have general technological aptitude and understading as opposed to narrow expertise.

 AxisPortals Axiom:  Aptitude determines altitude.

The Delicacy of Balance

 ”Balance“, Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein’s Academy Award winning animated short, is one of AxisPortals’ favorite animated films, and it’s a good one to ponder in January.

After all, balance is a perpetual problem, isn’t it?  We constantly strive to balance the professional and the personal.  When we’re working, we worry that we should be spending more time with our families, and vice versa.  Technology makes the balance both easier and much harder to strike.  If we’re with our loved ones, but constantly checking our Blackberries and iPhones to ensure that we haven’t missed a single professional communication, then are we really focused on our families at all?  It’s perfectly possible to be physically present at a meeting, but totally absorbed in texting our teens about their crises of the moment, or to be physically present at home but so totally connected to our workplace technologies that we might as well not be there at all.

AxisPortals loves “Balance” for perfectly capturing the intricacy and delicacy of any balancing act that involves others (as most balancing acts do), and for suggesting the price we must pay when we attempt to put ourselves (our needs, interests, and passions) too much at the center of things. 

AxisPortals Aphorism One (Courtesy of Confuscious):  Balance is the perfect state of still water. Let that be our model. It remains quiet within and is not disturbed on the surface.

AxisPortals Aphorism Two:  Being thrown off balance is an essential and inescapable aspect of cooperative relationships.

AxisPortals Aphorism Three:  Balance is a Delicate Dance

Technology in 2009: Resolution Schmesolution

 

Try not to be deadly serious about all things technological.  Play, as noted earlier, is the best way to learn.  Besides, play is fun, and people who are always up to their eyeballs in making smart technological decisions really need some healthy play to keep their lives in balance.

AxisPortals realizes that some folks just can’t stand not having a real goal or task, though, so here’s the “resolution schmesolution” assigment:  make a Wordle. 

A wordle can actually be a very good brainstorming and planning tool, as well, so this is play with a purpose.  No guilt allowed.  Besides, if you’re the competitive sort, you’ll not want to be the only one left in the whole wide world who hasn’t yet created at least one wordle. 

AxisPortals Aphorism:  Play is its own reward.

 

Technology in 2009: Resolution Number 3

Take advantage of free online opportunities to learn, and to share what you’ve learned with others.  CommonCraft’s series of “In Plain English” videos are a particularly terrific example of granular, just-in-time learning in action.  The videos are clear, clever, and brief.  They make learning  both accessible and fun.  Here’s one example.

AxisPortals Aphorism:  Click and learn. 

Lifelong learning is literally at your fingertips! 

Technology in 2009: Resolution Number Two

 

In 2009, resolve to learn something new about technology, or to experiment with something that isn’t exactly new, but is new to you.

Here are some possibilities:

1. Participate in a professional network such as LinkedIn or Spoke.  If you already belong to such a network, try upping your level of participation:  ask and answer questions, join special interest groups, make new connections, expand your network. 
2. Read a key text about the role of technology in business and culture.  Interesting  places to begin include
   1. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky
   2. The Wealth of Networks:  How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yochai Benkler
   3. Wikinomics:  How Mass Collaboration Change Everything, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
   4. The Long Tail:  Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, Chris Anderson.
3. Master one small but essential technological task that you usually rely on others to do.  For instance, learn to make a .pdf of a document, learn to download or upload a video,  learn to edit a photograph, learn to run your email to you cell phone, or learn to scan an image and embed it in a document.  An amazing  number of business leaders who make key purchasing decisions about technology routinely rely on others to complete such simple tasks for them.  Knowledge is power.  If you build your familiarity with technology, and gradually add to your mastery of it, your decisions will flow from experience and understanding, and will be the better for it.
4. Launch or participate in building a blog or a wiki.  Of course, there are already countless blogs and wikis in the world, and a good case could be made for being reluctant to add to the cacophony.  However, if you don’t have some hands on experience with “Web 2.0″ technologies, you severely limit your understanding of how to employ these technologies to enrich your personal and professional life.  Intimidated?  Start small!  Try visiting  the Wikipedia entry about an area in which you are knowledgeable.   If you see errors or omissions there, correct them.  Even something that simple will give you insight that most who read about these things from a distance lack.
5. Create and upload a YouTube video.  If you have a computer with an attached video camera, then you are a potential video producer.  Whether you create a serious instructional video or just record your thoughts on a given issue, the act of creating and uploading a video will sharpen your insight into the phenomenon of user created content. 
6. Build your social proprioception.  All around you, people are texting, twittering, and plurking.  Collectively, these folks–many of them young, educated, and generally in key consumer demographics–are changing the face of branding and marketing.  If you don’t at least experiment with these “always on” communication tools, you’ll never have a truly firm grasp of their possibilities.  There’s no time like 2009 for diving in.

Learning in the realm of technology is all about hands-on exploration and play.  Do read, but don’t let your reading take place in a vacuum.  When you build your experience, you put yourself in a good position to discern which theories of modern communication are best suited for putting into action.

AxisPortals Aphorism:  Ignorance is vulnerability. Lifelong learning is the best, most fulfilling path to technological confidence.