Alberta Business MarketingJul
10
2010
Why your business simply can’t rely on the Yellow Pages.
“Yellow Pages only tells people where you are. Google tells you who you are, where you are, & how good you are – or are not.” gitomer
Jeffrey, this makes so much sense!
Jul
8
2010
Social Media and Search Engines are turning the sales world on its head. Is your business attractive bait in the online ocean or is your business just a small fish in a big pond. Businesses today are looking for what you have to offer but how are they finding you?
One of the questions I get asked throughout the course of my day, as a Canadian Social Media Consultant is how small businesses across Canada can actively prospect for new business in our online world. The Internet has opened the kimono when it comes to marketing opportunities.
Is your business leveraging what the Internet has to offer?
I continue to enjoy a strong passion for sales and marketing. This passion was born in my early days as a computer tech and IT Professional in the Calgary market. As a young computer support technician I had a knack for helping those get the right IT solutions for their business and with the right mindset. These core principles I practiced 12 years ago are now very relevant today.
It started with putting service first and the need to provide the client the right solution that allowed them to achieve their crucial business goals. I loved being involved in the sales process and eventually helping build IT Matters through a strong client-first marketing focus.
Like many of you, I had a number of so-called “sales experts” try to educate me on how to sell to my customers. Some strategies worked and some flopped. That was part of the education process. The important component of any experience is that we learn from it.
In a traditional sales environment, we have always taught our sales teams to go out and prospect. Chase down potential opportunity after opportunity and shake things out. Many of us are still taught to “go out and hunt for opportunities”. We do cold calling, warm calling, selling to people in our networking groups and the list goes on from there.
The question is, does it really work in today’s world?
The market is much smarter than just a few years ago. Google, BING and the Internet have helped educate our clients on exactly what they want or need. Social Media and online communities are breeding grounds for those looking for answers. However, many of us continue to turn a blind eye to the power of social media and continue with websites that don’t perform.
Today’s consumer plays the prospector role. Educated consumers lurk amongst us and the Internet allows these knowledgeable consumers to continuous search the information and answers they want. Many will never stop until they get the answer they want. These same consumers once relied on our expertise. Today, that expertise is available with a simple Google search.
I often think in order to fill this need and to be successful in our businesses we need to flip the prospecting model on its head. The roles have to be reversed. Our sales teams and marketing professionals must become the prospect and our future clients…the prospector. I think this is how the model has to look. It is the only way it can work in today’s world where answers are at everyone’s fingertips.
What can we do online and offline that facilitates others to prospect for our services and products? How do sales professionals and business owners become attractive bait for those in need of what we have to offer? I often think about what Jeffrey Gitomer says, “customers love to buy but they hate to be sold”.
How can we become that facilitator who allows people to do what they love…BUY. Can our social media activities play an active role? I think it has to. The reality of today’s world is never before has the opportunity for many of us to become great bait and allow the prospectors out there to find us. After all, isn’t that we all love to buy? The debt crises in North America can attest to that.
The Internet allows us to be searchable. Social media and search engines are the prospector’s tools. The scary part is for many of us is we are nowhere to be found. We have little or no online presence and we wonder why the guy down the street gets all the business. Maybe it is because he is out there, helping and serving those who are looking for what he or she has to offer.
That is the reality, it doesn’t matter what market you are in, you have an opportunity to educate and make yourself the most attractive bait out there. You just need to take the first step and learn how to participate effectively.
Jun
15
2010
The City of Calgary’s Open Data Pilot Project is set to begin this summer. (Despite recent attempts to quell the future of the project at a council committee meeting. More on that in a future post.)
As the project is being mapped out moving toward a launch date, it’s important to note that it will only be as successful as the usefulness of the data included in the catalogue. Poor design or minor mistakes can be overcome and corrected, but a lack of useful data almost certainly will lead to a failure of the pilot project. This more than anything will determine how many developers and academics make the choice to get involved and try to create something out of the information provided in the data catalogue. If there isn’t much data, or the data provided isn’t very useful, the project will crumble.
So in the interest of helping things get off on the right foot, I’ve put together a list of the data I would like to see included in the initial pilot catalogue this summer.
1. Community and Ward Boundaries
Most of the conversations I have had with people about open data revolve around being able to mashup City data, or data they have accumulated themselves, with mapping data of Calgary to be able to show a visual representation of their data set. Specifically what is required is information about areas of the City that programmers may want to segregate their data by. (For example, creating a map where neighbourhoods with the lowest income appear light yellow, those with the highest appear dark yellow.) In order to be able to do almost ANYTHING useful with any data the City might provide, programmers will NEED to have the GIS created data outlining the boundaries of neighbourhoods and wards. Without providing this information I’m confident the entire open data project will be nothing more than an interesting internal exercise for the City. This will be the tell-tale sign how serious they are taking transparency and accountability: if the City publishes the mapping data for neighbourhoods and wards they have given the pilot project a reasonable chance of success, if they don’t, then it’s fair to think they’re not taking it seriously.
The next three data sets I think are required because of the first two Laws of Open Government Data:
2. Community Statistics
The City of Calgary produces and posts on it’s website statistics for every community in Calgary. There is a ridiculous amount of interesting and immensely usable data contained in these reports that are updated every few years after a census is completed. However unfortunately you can’t do much with the documents because they are PDFs. You can read each one individually and that’s about it. Right now it is impossible to do comprehensive comparisons because the information is not open and machine readable (and therefore doesn’t engage as much as it could). To make this data available in CSV format would greatly increase its usefulness and potential. The City has made it available to the public for a reason. Making it available as part of an open data catalogue would go a long way to fulfilling that reason.
3. Transit Schedules and Stops
Wow do Calgarians like to complain about Calgary Transit schedules and the Calgary Transit website. For the most part I disagree on the former, but I too find the website’s trip planning functionality cumbersome. You know what though? I say if whiners like me want to complain, then let them try to make something better. There are hundreds of applications online and on smart phones that do what the City is trying to do, but better and cheaper. This might be the conservative side of me coming out, but I say it’s time the City got out of the way and let these small business people show us why they are so good at what they do. If the City were to make transit schedules and stops available I’m confident that within a month we will see current app providers add Calgary to their rosters, thereby giving Calgaraians dozens of new – and more than likely better – ways of planning their Calgary Transit trips. (And yes, if they wanted to, Transit could even eventually partner with ones they liked, shut down their site, and save some major money this way.) They’ve already done this with Google so let’s give the small guys a chance too.
4. Crime Statistics and Locations
Again, all this information is available online for free to the public, but it is behind a proprietary wall. The City of Calgary Police I’m confident spent a lot of money making their “Crimes Web Mapping Application” that they didn’t need to. There are many crime map providers out there that would be happy to do this job for them, if only they made the data available in a machine readable format. The other – and more important reason – this data should be made available in a machine readable format (instead of only via the map application where it can only be read and not used) is so it can be mashed up with other data sets. If someone were to, for example, mash it up with the community statistics or locations of services we might be able to see some patterns emerging and create an even more effective police presence where potential crimes might occur in the future. The police do this currently using anecdotal evidence and personal/personnel experience, but open data allows for all kinds of potential permutations to be created by others that the police may not have the time or money to undertake. We already allow for this kind of work to happen via the most successful public engagement initiative undertaken by police of all time: 911. If they trust us to report the crimes, they should trust us to do something useful with the data too.
5. Fire, Police, Recreation Centre, Community Centre and School Locations
This one is almost a no-brainer. This information is surprisingly hard to find, yet it is so basic. I can only imagine how much more useful it would have been to have this information when we were house hunting a few years ago. (I’d love to see this info and the crime data mashed up with the Canadian Real Estate Association’s MLS.) But I can’t imagine how many other fantastic mapping systems may be created if this data were available in a consistent format. Simply listing the name of the building, it’s street address and it’s longitude/latitude coordinates should be more than enough, and easily put together by anyone at the City in an afternoon.
6. Development Permit Locations and Contact Information
It baffles me that the City publishes crime data in a map but not development permit locations on a map. Any citizen can go down to City Hall and get a copy of the permit for any construction occurring in the City, but this information isn’t published online for some reason. I would have thought it would be a privacy concern of some kind, but that doesn’t make sense either considering the name and phone number of each permit applicant is published on a blue board out front of every location during a two-week window before construction begins. (I think it is also included in the newspaper advertisements during this window too.) This would be great information to have available in a useful format like CSV and KML instead of just a document file at the planning office and on a sandwich board on the street. As a community association president, this would certainly cut down on phone calls at the very least! And would be helpful in keeping track of all development going on in our neighbourhood.
It is important to note that ALL of these suggestions involve ONLY data that is already publicly available, but just in a format that limits the data’s usability and usefulness (such as PDF or proprietary software solutions). The good news about this is there will be many less hoops to jump through in order to get the data included in a pilot. I can think of many other data sets I’d like to see available, but let’s start with the low hanging fruit.
There is one data set that is not currently available to the public that I would like to see included in the initial data catalogue however that is not currently. It’s not really “data” per se, but I think it is something, which should be made available:
7. City of Calgary Contracts
I outline my rationale for this request in this blog post. It probably won’t be in the initial data catalogue, and that’s okay, but the conversation and process required to make this data available in the very near future should begin now. Otherwise it could be years before we see something so simple made available to citizens.
There is one other thing however that must be sorted out before a Pilot Project can go live: the terms of use. I’m sure the City of Calgary’s lawyers have been working overtime on this one, but I would like to suggest the City uses the same terms of use the City of Toronto and City of Edmonton are using. There’s are identical. (Seriously, click those links and read them side-by-side.) Clearly if it is good enough for BOTH of those cities, some major investigation has been done to arrive at that wording. At the very least it should be used as a starting point. We should build on the work of others rather than starting from scratch. I like these terms of reference for many reasons, not the least of which is the following section of the license which alleviates much of the concern I’ve heard from some aldermen:
The City now grants you a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use, modify, and distribute the datasets in all current and future media and formats for any lawful purpose. You now acknowledge that this licence does not give you a copyright or other proprietary interest in the datasets. If you distribute or provide access to these datasets to any other person, whether in original or modified form, you agree to include a copy of, or this Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for, these Terms of Use and to ensure any such person agrees to, and is bound by, them but without introducing any further restrictions of any kind.
I’m confident if we can get each of these items included in the Pilot Project, the City has done everything in it’s power to ensure it’s success.
If any readers have suggestions for other data you would like to see, you’re welcome to put it in the comments below, but you should probably send it directly to the City. (I’m just an interested citizen with no direct connection to the pilot project.)
Jun
12
2010
Over the course of the past 48 hours, one continuous message was almost a centre of discussion at the SESTO show which has recently wrapped up in Toronto was the elimination of spam in search.
The other day I got to see “doorway page” spam at work. I was on a conference call and was fielding some questions about search engine optimization with a potential client of ours at Ulistic. This client has an older site laced with hundreds of links in the footer of their main corporate site and is reluctant to remove them. He believes they work and my guess is some inexperienced SEO guru told him this is what he needs to do in order to succeed online.
Well, nothing is further from the truth in today’s search world. Those links at the bottom of your page are not scoring high in the Google world and they may be flagged as spam and will potentially harm your overall page ranking. Driving off page one instead of keeping you at the top.
What works? This list is quite a lengthy one but I will touch on just a couple of examples right now:
Keyword Rich Content – I preach about then importance of balance of design and content. Your website needs to work for the reader and for Google. Balancing the design of your site with well-written and keyword rich copy is crucial to attract qualified prospects from the search engines.
Be personable – This point is very important. You need to be personable online. Blogs and social media are wonderful ways your business can “have a face” online. Using Facebook, Twitter, video and blogs are key important personable tools all business must embrace.
There is more to life than self-serving links, especially spam-filled self-serving links…this is from the horse’s mouth and was shared with us SEO professionals at the Search Engine Strategies show in Toronto. Stop the cycle of pages filled with spam.
Get personable and educated your followers. Share your insight and share your knowledge and you just may rise to the top of the table.
My company Ulistic works with business across Canada understand SEO, social media and the importance of doing business online today. Give us a ring at 403.775.2205 with any questions you may have.
Jun
11
2010
A full onslaught war is brewing online between Google and Microsoft. For those military friends…forces are assembling and loading the mags. As a career Microsoft Partner (Ulistic is a Microsoft Partner) who wandered away from the mother ship for a while I am starting to slowly move some of my day-to-day technology use back my colleagues from Redmond. I am very excited about the upcoming Microsoft Office 2011 for the Mac and interested in learning more about what Microsoft has to offer online through there Office Cloud.
My friends at CRN Canada recently reported that the new Microsoft Office Cloud (get Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote online) has been opened up to Microsoft SkyDrive clients as a response to Google slamming the Redmond software powerhouse a few weeks ago urging Office users to switch to Google Apps. Microsoft Office Cloud solutions is a free Web-based Office applications, dubbed Web Apps, gives users access to Web version so Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Web Apps has been in beta for roughly nine months but no Outlook or email client. Maybe Microsoft still wants people to use Windows Mail or some other mail solution. Microsoft claims that Office online will work exactly like the desktop version…looking forward to testing it out on June 15, 2010.
Prepare the forces, a war is brewing on another front between Microsoft and Google.
I wonder how it will work with Safari on the iPad?
I am sure readers of this blog can go and find examples of where I praised Google and their Apps solution as a suitable replacement to Office. I gave Google Apps and Google Doc an honest attempt in my early days at Ulistic but since those days I really missed the functionality Microsoft’s productivity solutions and I recently moved back to Office. Electing to go with Office 2008 on my MacBook and now I rarely use Google’s online apps. The move back was brought on simply by a lack of simple and common features that Microsoft offers that are nowhere to be seen in Google Apps. Simple features that may not mean much to the average user but this power user who requires basic functionality to work noticed.
Sure my email is hosted with Google on the back-end, as a mail platform Google is pretty good for $50 per year. However you really need a mail client. I have elected to go back to my MacMail which is a good mail platform on the MacBook. But nothing beats the look and feel of a robust email client (something I miss by not having Microsoft Outlook) and with Office 2011 bringing in the powerful Outlook application that will be a wonderful upgrade from Entourage.
But, who should you trust with your data. Do you trust Google or Microsoft? You will get a chance on June 15 to test drive Microsoft Web Apps and compare to Google. Both solutions are free for you to test out or use. Give it a chance…but keep in mind where the data is housed. Web solutions normally offer storage and the Microsoft offering with SkyDrive or Google both supply a limited amount of data storage as part of the free offering.
It will be interesting to see what happens.
For those who are concerned on what is missing:
1. Booking meetings across multiple time zones (calendaring)
2. Page breaks (Google Docs vs. Word)
3. Smart Art (Google Docs vs. PowerPoint)
For the record…I still love my MacBook..but need Office to survive!
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