Many of us take for granted that the information we enter online is safe. Small businesses use lots of different services to make their business successful and keep it running smoothly. Some applications, sites, and programs like Microsoft Office, Google applications, Facebook, Twitter, and other email services are naming just a few.

With your information spread so far and wide, it’s really important to keep a close watch on the sites that you use frequently. It’s particularly critical to keep the information belonging to your customers safe. While small businesses may not always be the target of hacking, scams, or phishing, it is still absolutely possible to fall victim.

Here are a few things that you can do to keep your business information confidential online:

1. Set a great password – most sites now offer the ability to use any and all characters when it comes to creating your password. Set the most unique password you can while still being able to remember it. Also, be sure to use different passwords for different services that you use. Often, people are guilty of using the same password for every single service. This is dangerous because if someone gains access to one of your passwords, they’ve gained access to all of them.
2. Try to use services that utilize two factor authentication – this is a relatively new process that is used by some services such as Google (if you enable it) and PayPal. Two-factor authentication is a process where in addition to using a password, you also have to answer another question or enter a number that is emailed or texted to the user. This way, even if someone gains access to your password, they shouldn’t be able to get into your accounts.
3. Consider scrambling some information – you know how sometimes a site makes you set up security questions in addition to your password (in case you have to reset it)? Answering these questions honestly may seem like the easiest thing to do, but think about how easily accessible some of that information might be on the web. For example, the security question “what city were you born in” could be easily answered by just about anyone with a quick Google search of your name. Instead, choose a word or phrase that is a nonsensical answer. So for the preceding question, answer something like “cupcake” or “airplane.”
4. Back everything up – if for some reason your accounts or information are hacked or physically stolen, it’s critical to have everything backed up. You can even back up your information in several places. Some good ways to back things up include utilizing cloud storage, or purchasing an external hard drive. Losing the information about your business or customers could potentially be detrimental to you company.

(Photo Source)

Megan Totka is the Chief Editor for ChamberofCommerce.com. She specializes on the topic of small business tips and resources. ChamberofCommerce.com helps small businesses grow their business on the web and facilitates connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of Commerce worldwide.

In today’s business world, it makes sense to have a greater emphasis on small business. Recent reports show that the United States Small Business Administration credits small businesses with about two thirds of new job creation over the last 20 years. While it’s possible to split hairs in terms of what exactly constitutes this type of enterprise and how many jobs small businesses create, it’s evident that a new era of globalism, a digitally connected world and the demise of many large corporate job havens have created a larger small business world that is more prominent and more active than ever before – by recognizing the central role that small businesses play in America, government and private sector leaders can help prepare the public for a future with an increasing reliance on newer and less established competitors in many industries.

So what will small business leaders see this week? Event holders will be presenting various different kinds of happenings, from workshops to webinars. Giant vendors like Verizon will offer some discounts to small business customers. Mixers and other social gatherings will give small business leaders the opportunity to talk to others with similar kinds of challenges, and big dreams for participation in their respective fields, and skill building lectures can run the gamut from items like education on business law and small business legal structures to other more ‘social’ or internal elements of running a business, focusing on skills like dynamic leadership and good time management. For its part, the national SBA will be holding various events including a video contest, while promoting other local celebrations of small enterprise at different field locations around the country.

In the sort of career where one-size-fits-all solutions are rare, small business leaders can benefit from these kinds of aggregating events and resources that help them to figure out how others are approaching some of the common issues in a given field or market: small business leaders often wear many hats and have to take on diverse challenges as they wade through all of the requirements for setting up and running a successful business operation, whether it’s in retail, trades, or some other type of product or service industry. Experts will be looking at how what happens this week will affect the overall community of small business owners and managers and where to go in the future in terms of supporting some of the businesses that are providing the most benefit to the national economy.
 
Justin Stoltzfus is a freelance writer covering technology and business solutions at Techopedia, Business Finance Store and Ringio, focusing on emerging trends in IT services.
 

Ringio offers a complete phone solution for the small and medium businesses in the U.S. and Canada, who love their customers. Celebrate the Small Business Week with a Free Trial for Ringio to explore how it can improve your customer service and sales.

CoFoundersLab is a matchmaking platform for the aspiring entrepreneurs to find their fellow co-founders and meet each other through in-person events across the U.S. It unites co-founders based on geographic location, complementary skill sets, compatible personalities, goals and values. Till date it has made 25000 matchmaking!

Shahab Kaviani, the CEO of CoFoundersLab takes you through an awesome journey in the
Startup Land. Read more.
 

U.S. and “Emerging Markets” Customers

In general, many with an eye on the industry are expecting growth of SaaS usage in newer markets to outstrip demand in established regional markets like that of Europe – for example, this OpenView item from Jan. 15 shows how SaaS in emerging markets is expected to provide for the majority of growth, and projects current U.S. growth rates of over 5% per year, contrasting both to a more stagnant European enterprise demand.

Industry Leaders

Experts who are looking closely at the SaaS landscape are also identifying some top providers like SAP and Salesforce.com – while these vendors may not be the first choice for each and every client, they are getting recognized for specific kinds of use and prominent demand as executives and business leaders figure out exactly what each kind of web-delivered platform or service does.

PaaS and Cloud Hosting

Within the greater realm of SaaS, the idea of PaaS is also gaining traction. Platform as a Service is used specifically within SaaS to refer to a situation where the provided web-delivered software has the functionality of a platform, or in other words, the ability to support development or some other kinds of engineering. This Forbes article headlines the use of PaaS, which author Anthony Kosner calls “rentable backend platforms,” to allow developers better access to environments for building mobile apps, which leads to another main prediction for future SaaS markets.

The Mobile Revolution

In a very general sense, and also in more specific ways, lots of analysts are expecting mobile device technology to drive SaaS. This includes the idea, as mentioned above, that a lot of the ordered SaaS services will be used to create mobile apps or perform mobile marketing, and that so much of what used to be based on a desktop model will be put into 4G-capable environment that travel well with individual users. This includes not just consumer services, but internal business software, as Bring Your Own Device and other phenomena incentivize enterprise systems to move to a mobile venue.

Bypassing Internal IT Departments

Some might see this as a given, but it’s worth noting that part of using SaaS options inherently involves replacing an “internal IT” model where local techies employed directly by a company tweak elements of its software architecture as necessary. Therefore, it’s also a pretty sure thing that the internal IT departments of many businesses will start to look leaner, and that companies using SaaS will be able to simply call vendors for fixes, upgrades or improvements. There’s also the related idea that more companies will be paying by the month or by the year for software functionally, instead of buying conventional “in perpetuity” licenses and installing everything onto local networks.

All of this is part of how industry pros are reading the tea leaves for a tech change that’s currently  taking the business world by storm. Think about what an SaaS approach can do for nearly any kind of evolved business process.

Justin Stoltzfus is a freelance writer covering technology and business solutions at Techopedia, Business Finance Store and Ringio, focusing on emerging trends in IT services.
 

Customer Retention

Behind the idea of customer loyalty is the similar but different term “customer retention.” Using the latter, business experts are often looking more at the technical statistics around various kinds of business strategy, including the idea of the relative value of keeping existing customers compared to generating new ones.

With that in mind, there are plenty of business studies that have shown that it’s much cheaper to keep existing customers or clients than it is to acquire new ones. For example, this release from Baxter Strategies Incorporated puts the issue in terms of return on investment, stating that “ROI is up to 10 times higher for investments in customer retention than for the acquisition of new customers.” To put this another way, keeping your established clientele is many times cheaper than going after a new customer base. Most small business leaders who have built a company from the ground up can testify to the work and money that goes into finding new customers, but now there’s a lot of actual statistical data to back up this concept.

Using Customer Loyalty Programs for Customer Retention

Simply put, there is a reason that supermarkets, “big box” department stores and even pet stores are now signing their visitors up for little plastic tags that will track purchase activity and reward money spent with visible incentives, while other kinds of businesses are pushing branded credit cards offering deep discounts. Giving these incentives gives customers a reason to come back to a business, which can pay dividends, again, based on highly sophisticated market research about how to retain a customer. But these kinds of broad-based approaches are not the only ways to keep customers interested; in many smaller or more precise markets, it’s all about communication.

When sales and support take a more personal form, businesses of any size can benefit from adding customer relationship management or CRM software to their toolkits. These kinds of software help provide organized, detailed information on each individual customer, so that businesses can reach out with new information and serve their existing customer base in better, more efficient ways, and perhaps more importantly, in ways that resonate with customers instead of irritating or annoying them. In going after additional business from those who have purchased before, business experts warn companies about simply using any customer loyalty program, rather than crafting one that is carefully designed to work to the firm’s advantage, for example, in this business broadsheet from Deloitte.

Building those precisely calibrated customer loyalty models is one way that enterprises use visual CRM tools to their advantage. The kinds of at-a-glance business intelligence that CRM provides can help staffers to relate to customers better and serve them more efficiently and precisely, which can be its own kind of incentive value – customers who feel appreciated are more likely to stay with a particular vendor, even without a value card saving them a few dollars on this or that product or service. It’s the human touch that’s important to many customers, and that’s part of what CRM provides, for a business model that helps the company to avoid becoming an impersonal, faceless business.

Justin Stoltzfus is a freelance writer covering technology and business solutions at Techopedia, Business Finance Store and Ringio, focusing on emerging trends in IT services.
 

Hello! We’re happy to announce that we’re launching a beta feature that will allow you to initiate Ringio phone calls right from any webpage loaded on your Google Chrome browser:

It’s dead easy to use, and will save you time if you’re doing a lot of calling from web sites like your CRM system, your ordering system or your back-office customer database.

You can find all the details in our Support portal.

The Apple program that in some ways proved a precursor to a lot of today’s best interfaces was called HyperCard. Before the web hyperlink was something that we use every day, Apple had already embraced the concept of ‘hypermedia’ and created a unique programming tool that blended scripted coding with a specific type of format that made a lot of projects more ‘visual’ in some of the same ways that Microsoft Windows innovated the operating system, or in what MS Visual Basic offers to a developer platform (in fact, the HyperCard “card” is often seen as another similar resource as the VB “form”)

A Stack of Cards

The core concept of HyperCard was that programming in the computer was manifested in the format of a stack of cards. Cards could be hyperlinked to one another, embedded with command objects, shuffled around, and generally navigated by users. At the same time, a coding language called ‘HyperTalk’ stood, invisible, behind these ‘card’ units.

Combining something as simple as flipping a set of cards with an underlying scripting capability created a lot of interesting opportunities for projects that had a lot of technical complexity but were still very user-friendly, where connecting to the nuts and bolts of the program didn’t involve the kind of tedious technicality in, say, reading the lines of an old PC-DOS session.

Today’s users still want that user-friendly phenomenon, and anyone who doesn’t wear UNIX t-shirts, talk in pseudo-code or otherwise feel comfortable in a “world of pure syntax” wants something to deliver them from the dryness and inaccessibility of linear code or text.

How Visual CRM Delivers Client Data

Great visual CRM interfaces do some of the same things that HyperCard did. Like HyperCard, a CRM resource is much more than just a “stack of cards,” but the idea that each customer or individual has their own “file” or “dossier” presented on demand means that thinking of these programs as a stack of cards can be a relevant way for non-technical users to understand how these interfaces work. Just as HyperCard fundamentally changed the way people programmed, visual CRM changes the nature of customer data. For example, many businesses used to keep customer data in simple Excel spreadsheets, and some still do – which is a shame, since Excel is not very readable or visually attractive. In fact, many of us lack the ability to concentrate on these tiny lines long enough to really learn a column representing a person’s name and other key data. On the other hand, the kinds of CRM tools that feature immediate use (pop-up caller i.d., etc.) give users much more, from a smiling head shot to go with a name, to other kinds of information that you can find without scrolling through a spreadsheet.

Business leaders who have taken the plunge and implemented these kinds of easy to use, rich visual CRM presentations have seen that changing sales force resources in this way can have a big effect on what a company is able to do to reach out and keep in touch with their best clients and customers, and to generate new business in ways that rely on closer, fuller connections. Talking to good CRM vendors can give an executive or other leader much more of an idea of how these kinds of tools can fit into a specific business plan to help a firm expand and compete in a high-tech business world.
 

Justin Stoltzfus is a freelance writer covering technology and business solutions at Techopedia, Business Finance Store and Ringio, focusing on emerging trends in IT services.

Do you measure success by the click-throughs and conversions you receive with the best Facebook ads and posts, or do you measure success as a larger, more popular, more trusted brand? That’s something a lot of businesspeople struggle with. Both would be a measure of success. One’s dealing with the bottom line while the other focuses more on brand awareness and potential.

For social media marketing in particular, it’s better to focus more on the latter when you’re measuring success.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t try hard to increase the efficiency of everything you’re doing, from ad campaigns to inducing signups, but social marketing is about increasing your network and making sure that your brand envelops the niche you’re targeting.

Metrics for Proper Measurement

Breadth of Brand Reach

Social media campaigns can be tricky things. You may not be experiencing a lot of conversions through sales at the moment, but that doesn’t mean your campaign isn’t successful. It’s important to measure the total reach of your brand. How much of your intended market are you covering? How far does your particular network extend? A larger reach equates to a successful campaign. It’s potential here that you’re gauging.

Increase in Contacts and Conversions

Why are contacts included here instead of only conversions? It’s because your particular version of a conversion funnel may have little to do with social media, or it may rely strictly on social media. The important factor to focus on here is whether or not your contacts are growing. Are you receiving a lot of opt-ins via your social marketing? Focus on individuals who are joining based on social marketing measures and see which of your actual conversions followed along social lines to get there.

Rate of Amplification

It’s a somewhat fancy name for a very simplistic metric. The amplification rate is the rate by which your secondary networks are growing, and this growth is spurred by individuals who are sharing your content amongst themselves and throughout their entire social network. Pay attention to the number of shares you’re receiving on Facebook, Google+, and other locations where this metric is available. A lot of shares can equate to a successful campaign.

Content Acceptance

Another strong way to gauge your success is to check the acceptance of your content. Of course, having a lot of “likes” does matter for something here. It’s showing that your content is approved of by fans. But don’t rest on this one factor. Also pay attention to who’s talking about your content and what they’re saying about it. Focus on unique page views, the time people spend on your page, and the overall metrics of your pages when you release new content.

In this layman’s version of social media success measuring, you were spared the mundane, headache-inducing numbers and were given a simple way to judge whether or not you are experiencing marketing success. Whether you crunch numbers for hours to deduce something or take a shortcut, you’re reaching the same result. You can always check detailed analytics to figure out different ways to make a campaign even more successful, but measuring whether or not it’s doing well is rather easy.

Eric Taylor is a business developer and a freelance writer for the Facebook ad campaign tool Qwaya.
Ringio is happy to have Eric as a guest writer.

Using Hosted PBX for Business: Logistics

Using a specific kind of PBX called hosted PBX can allow companies to upgrade their telecommunications systems with less cost and effort. The principle behind this is that hosted services put much more of the burden of logistics onto the supplier, rather than the client. People who are talking about hosted services often refer to “the cloud” which is a remote data storage destination maintained by a supplier.

The bottom line here is that hosted PBX allows businesses to work smarter without getting caught up in a lot of the issues with installing physical hardware in a location. This includes outsourcing items like system upgrades, patches, line changes, etc. In a sense, hosted PBX means less wrangling with hardware and less in-house work on calibrating these systems or maintaining them.

Hosted PBX and Financial Business Models

Hosted PBX solutions also help businesses to fit these expenses into their balance sheets in precise ways that can help make these acquisitions efficient. For example, where buying a lot of actual hardware for use in an office may be an expense that needs to be depreciated over time on tax filings, purchasing hosted services is usually something that can be written off immediately as an operating expense. Not to mention that hosted services are easier to adjust in terms of scale: someone who purchased X number of hard phones will have a physical surplus if needs change, but someone who ordered X number of lines in a hosted PBX setup can often just call and have their service adjusted accordingly, in order to avoid wasting money or tying up capital in underutilized assets.

Hosted PBX and Neat Extras

Another selling point of hosted PBX systems is that many of these come with additional functionality that can make a big difference in how an office works day to day. One of these is the CRM module or interface, an advanced business intelligence tool that presents clear data about customers to salespeople, support workers, or other employees. These solutions allow businesses to “know their clients” and to handle sales and customer outreach more effectively. Companies like Ringio that offer services like hosted CRM are giving clients the tools that they need to really break out of an outdated business model and into the future of enterprise telecom.

For many of the small to midsized businesses that have not enhanced their data and voice communications for a while, it makes a lot of sense to take another look at how newer service models can actually add a ton of value at relatively low prices. Rather than adding complexity, web-delivered or hosted services can take a lot of hassle out of what it takes to maintain the core operations of an office. Look for vendors offering affordable, easy to use products and services that will push productivity without breaking the bank.

Justin Stoltzfus is a freelance writer covering technology and business solutions at Techopedia, Business Finance Store and Ringio, focusing on emerging trends in IT services.

Each one of your users can now decide whether, when being tried, Ringio will call all their devices (IP phones, softphones, cell phones, landlines, etc) at the same time –what we call call blast– or only call a second device when they don’t answer the first one (or in the case of VOIP devices, there is connectivity issues).

Ways you can use escalating endpoints:

• So you get the call where you want it without going nuts over multiple phones ringing at the same time. E.g.: Only ring your cell phone if you don’t answer your office phone.
• Get an extra degree of redundancy for your VOIP: Give your VOIP phones a second line with a different provider and if the phone is not registered with the first provider, try the second line.

Things you need to know:

• Users can change this behavior on the Ringio Desktop software under “Receive Calls At:”
• By default Ringio will call blast the endpoints of a user
• You can mix and match users with call blast or escalating endpoints
• The time to try an endpoint before moving on to the next endpoint is set by the account administrator on the Ringio web portal, under “Other Settings”
• Escalating endpoints works nicely with Department Routing Methods (Round Robin, Call Blast and Escalating).

Hope you like it! As always, if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out to our Support Team.