Software as a Service Helps Small Businesses Stay Afloat as Economy Circles the Drain
Software as a Service Helps Small Businesses
Whether you need social and collaboration software, web content management or crm applications, SaaS saves small businesses time and money as it opens the door to efficiency and innovation.
In these tough economic times companies large and small are looking for ways to cut costs while increasing operational efficiency and boosting their competitive edge. Not an easy combination in the best of times, and even more difficult when you’ve just laid off tens or thousands of employees. Nevertheless, that’s exactly what companies over the world have to shoot for, and many are doing it with software as a service.
What are the benefits of software as a service (SaaS)? According to top industry analysts you can cut your information system costs by 40%. But that’s not all.
You also save time. Some corporate execs estimate it takes six times longer to deploy an on premise application and, once deployment is complete, you still have to support the entire IT infrastructure, rent, staff, utility, licenses, maintaining upgrades, patches, and so on. It’s time-consuming.
What else could your IT staff be doing? The possibilities are limited only to one’s imagination, and many of those possibilities could be the exact initiatives needed to gain or maintain a competitive edge.
To top it all off, SaaS enables you to gain access to the latest innovations, now. When it comes to the competitive edge, innovation plays a major role. Having the right technology, the latest technology, the technology your competitors are using, is right up there with improving the customer experience and satisfaction ratings.
Many SaaS business solutions have been streamlined to make sure you have all you need. Transmissions and storage is secure so your data is protected, their applications are available on demand, their servers are scalable so they can accommodate a sudden increase in traffic, and setting up a new employee doesn’t mean building them a computer in-house application by in-house application – you simply set up their permissions.
Whether you need web content management, customer relations, social and collaboration software, email archiving, or document management, SaaS provides just the tools you need for your business to prosper despite the economic climate. To learn more about Why Saas Matters watch a free Saas Enterprise Webinar.
Cutting Edge Collaboration Software Turns Remote Workers into a Team
Have you ever considered a virtual assistant? With the right software, and the right employee, it could be the most efficient, and most cost effective, move you’ve ever made.
The trend toward remote employees has been on the rise for years. There are currently millions of people working from out of the office. Analysts predict the number will reach one billion employees worldwide by 2011, a whopping 75% of the global workforce. Although this trend runs the full gamut of industries and job descriptions, there is one position that’s really taking off – the virtual assistant: your right-hand man, or woman. Virtual assistants are not only cost effective, they often do the job more efficiently that their in-office counterparts. But to derive the full benefit, you need cutting edge collaboration software.
What does a virtual assistant do? Just about everything except make you coffee. They can take care of your appointment book, schedule your flights, answer your emails, pay bills, transcribe your dictation – all the usual stuff.
But they often offer much more; they are specialists, experts in your industry. And they are usually very tech savvy. They can whip together a relevant spreadsheet, write articles or briefs, handle your social media and other online initiatives – they might even handle your on and offline promotion and marketing.
All it takes for this to be a success, other than finding the right person for the job (and the recruitment industry is catching on to this trend as well, so you’ll have some help), is good collaboration software.
Why is collaboration software so important? That’s what turns two people (or more) who work in different locations into a team. With collaboration software, you can meet face-to-face, view files on a common screen, coordinate tasks, manage documents, discuss topics, you can even edit the same document simultaneously – and on the fly.
In-office employees can cost a company two to five times their salary – a virtual assistant charges only for the time they’re working, and you have virtually (no pun intended) no overhead. In this tough economy, it’s a very smart move – but don’t forget the collaboration software.
FREE WEBINAR – “Why SaaS Matters”
Learn how you can lower IT expenses and save workers time by taking a SaaS-based integrated approach to collaboration that leverages Web workspaces, meetings and social tools to manage your business better and more easily.
Collaboration software company Central Desktop will be hosting a free 1 hour webinar on Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 10:00 a.m. pst with guest Mark Levitt, VP of Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 Strategies from global market intelligence and advisory firm IDC.
Webinar Topic is: Why SaaS Matters – The Benefits of an Integrated Approach to Collaboration and Social Technology in Today’s Tough Business Environment.
Tips to Achieve Collaboration Success
FREE WEBINAR – Collaboration Success Best Practices
COLLABORATION…a frequently used word in the workplace, in simple terms means working together to obtain a common goal. Whether we collaborate on a conference call with a supervisor or on the completion of a project with colleagues, collaboration is essential when you’re part of a team.
Today’s collaboration software and applications are making it easier for businesses to achieve collaboration success.
Central Desktop’s collaboration success webinar will be held this Thursday, January 22, 2009 from 10:00 AM PST to 11:00 AM PST – 40 minutes of training followed by a 20 minute Q & A session.
Get ready to learn how businesses have:
* Doubled profits
* Saved Travel Time
* Managed global staff remotely
* Boosted Employee Productivity
* Deployed Central Desktop as an Intranet or SharePoint alternative in under 15 minutes
* Eliminated Email Overload
* Reduced Training Time for New Employees
Register Now – It’s Free for all Central Desktop Users.
7 Tips for Leveraging Social Technology for Nonprofits
Social Technology
What is social technology? Social Technology are tools that enable us to easily create, share, and connect with each other. A few well known examples would be YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. As the economy slows down and nonprofit budgets get tighter, it’s crucial that you find alternative ways to communicate with potential donors, volunteers and communities.
The following are ways you can score more fans by utilizing social technology with little or no money:
1. Personify your Organization
Create a public profile about your organization and tell your story. People can relate to stories and begin discussions from your point of view.
See the following nonprofits on LinkedIn and also check out LinkedIn for Good
American Red Cross
Kaiser Permanente Thrive
The Salvation Army
2. Use Social Networks to Build a Following
Create profiles of your organization on different social networks. Connect with other groups and once you build your presence, begin a conversation and encourage interaction.
See the following nonprofits on Facebook
Peta (People for Ethical Treatment of Animals)
Kiva
American Red Cross
3. Start a Blog on Your Website
Write about what your organizations goals are and how you’re going to achieve them. Make sure to be consistent and post quality blogs on a regular basis. In addition, be sure to post comments on other blogs that cover similar issues.
See the following nonprofit blogs
Save Darfur
Peta
4. Use RSS
All of your blog traffic must have an RSS feed. RSS allows your information to reach your audience through their chosen media.
5. Get Organized and Network
Use your social connections to have Meetups (Meetup.com) or Tweetups (Twitter.com). Arrange a quick event that your social media followers can attend in the real world.
See the following nonprofits on Twitter
Humane Society
National Wildlife Federation
Peta
6. Use Collaboration Software
Use a social technology platform that helps you to organize, interact, share and manage your daily work activities from anywhere at any time.
The following nonprofits are using collaboration software
Southwest Baptist University
Greenpeace
7. Social Bookmarking
The basic reason to “bookmark” online is to share with your friends and colleagues. Being able to collect, organize and share content related to your cause will keep everyone up to date with the latest information.
Recommendation: Delicious.com or Ma.gnolia.com
Obama Did It Using Social Media and Collaboration Software
Not since the implementation of televised ads and debates in 1960 has politics seen such innovation take precedence in any election, be it for the presidency of the United States or the graduating class of a local high school. Newly elected president, Barack Obama, managed to render predominantly red states blue through a grassroots campaign that included house visits, phone calls, text messages and even Facebook reminders to citizens across the United States.
To run a campaign of this magnitude and outreach required tedious organization and concise communication that could only be achieved through Web 2.0 tactics, namely SaaS (software-as-a-service) and Social Media. Barack Obama managed to sway legions of young voters through a web campaign launched from social networks the likes of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and more while commandeering the efforts of thousands of campaign captains through the SaaS, collaboration software.
The Obama camp utilized the shared online workspace provided by Central Desktop to set up My Precinct. This allowed the Obama camp to manage and monitor the efforts of their nationwide network of precinct captains’ task assignments, calendaring, documents, lists of key information, and other pertinent updates regarding the campaign trail without the calamitous use of emails or haphazard bulletin boards.
Having embraced Web 2.0 tactics, Barack Obama and his campaign managers have accomplished what they had set out to do, that is, to elect
- Barack Obama President of the United States
– a position still thought to be the most powerful amongst all elected officials in the free world. If collaboration software worked for Obama, just imagine what it could do for your business.
Read More on how Barack Obama used collaboration software
Social Media Marketing to Create a Buzz
You have a business, a cause that you want to spread awareness about, or maybe you’re an author who has just written the next blockbuster novel and you need some publicity. What you are really looking for is to create a ‘buzz,’ which simply means spreading awareness of your book or product or idea to the point that people are talking about it amongst themselves. In this article we are going to discuss how to use social media to plant the seeds to create that buzz that you seek. Your product must actually be buzz-worthy in order for your campaign to gain the necessary momentum, reach the tipping point and begin to take on a life of its own.
For those who have heard of the term ‘social media’ being thrown around, but are a little fuzzy on what it means, social media is basically a dynamic, collaborative approach to communicating ideas using the Internet as a medium of communication. Social media web sites allow people to become far more involved with the messages that they send, and it allows them to interact with the messages that they receive.
With social networking sites like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, people are no longer relegated to be mere consumers of news and information. Social media provides a platform for conversation between those who disseminate information and their audience. If you read a particularly compelling post on a blog, and you’d like to recommend it to your colleagues, you might Digg it using the popular social media site that allows visitors to tag stories that they think are worth sharing. YouTube has recently launched its citizen’s news vlog (video blog) which allows anyone with a video camera anywhere on earth to share the news as it is happening wherever they might be. As viewers around the world watch these videos, if they like them they will share them with their friends and eventually they spread like a virus, thereby creating a buzz.
Many people have begun to leverage the power of social media to create awareness by utilizing these interconnected networks to share ideas, market their business, educate people about important causes, raise money, and create mutually beneficial relationships among people. Individuals or business people can take advantage of the high page rank and traffic of the major social media sites by developing their profile and building a network of friends, and linking back to their site from their profile.
To make the most of your social media efforts, you will want to focus your efforts on your ideal clients rather than trying to be all things to all people. Spending time on the different social media sites and interacting with your prospects will give you a deeper insight into your audience and how they are using social media. Then you can use what you learn to more effectively communicate with your audience. In this way you will become a participant alongside your customers within the social media experience.
Twitter is a great example of a social media site that was designed simply as a way for friends and colleagues to keep in touch, but is also being used for marketing and raising awareness about issues and causes. It’s a micro-blogging platform that gives you 140 characters to answer the question: “what are you doing now?” In addition to sharing about what they are doing, users now employ twitter to share URLs of web sites that they find useful or compelling; they exchange technical assistance in real time, and generally give a glimpse into the lives of people online all over the planet in real time as life happens.
The @twisney site is a case study of social media in action. It is an effective amalgam of Twitter, email, Flickr, and virtual earth to bring you a real time glimpse of what people is doing and what is going on at Disney theme parks. Visitors to Disney parks can send updates about what they are doing using email, twitter or IM from their mobile phones. They can upload and share photos, and when they include the name or an abbreviation of the name of their location in the park, it updates the virtual earth photos of the park.
Once you have set up your profile on the various social media sites, start groups around your area of interest and create networks of friends that you can communicate with. You’ll then begin to develop relationships and engage with your target group. If you want to gauge how your ideas are spreading, you can take a look at a couple of sites that track several social media sites. Take a look at surchur.com, which returns results including photos, videos, products, blog posts, and news about what is happening right now online. The next site to check out is serph.com, which says that it will, “track buzz in real time.” Type in your keywords into either of these sites and find out who’s talking about your product or idea.
Whether for business, artistic, religious, political or any other purposes, gives people a platform through which they can to create, distribute, interact with and ultimately to evolve the information and messages that shape their daily lives.
THE BEST ALTERNATIVE TO TIME CONSUMING PRODUCTION MEETINGS
Collaboration software does away with the free for all’s of production meetings by seamlessly weaving the sharing of information and task delegation into the regular work routine.
So you managed to get your team to show up to work on time. Now all you have to do is cram them all into a stuffy room for one of those dreaded production meetings. Between distributing meeting outlines and waiting for everyone to be situated, you’ve probably already wasted a good half hour…which also means you have also fallen slightly behind schedule and you’ve just burned a good chunk of money on what was, essentially, a game of musical chairs. Welcome to the world of a third grade school teacher.
Production meetings are forums for sharing ideas, giving feedback, assigning tasks and establishing guidelines. Unfortunately, production meetings also consist of several or more individuals, each with their own workloads and agendas. Unless you were the former head of the United Nations, chances are your moderator skills will see your production meeting quickly morph into the trading floor at NASDAQ.
Collaboration software has been developed to rectify those weak points in project management where the dreaded production meeting falls short. When opening up the meeting to comments and suggestions, collaboration software delivers sophistication and clarity. Simply create a discussion, a “thought loop” where users have the ability to post their ideas as well as comment on others in an organized fashion. Production meetings are streamlined further with these innovations in the software-as-a-service phenomena of collaboration software:
• Easily Share Files – “File Sharing”
Because all files and communiqués are shared on an intranet, a private computer network, information is easily shared and distributed on this shared online workspace.
• Easily Engage in Group Discussions – “Centralized Communication”
Emails utilizing Bcc’s and Cc’s are reduced to easily accessible posts on a bulletin board. As an added bonus, collaboration software also provides access to its intranet network and the information stored on it from any where in the world with a mobile device.
• Easily Manage Your Team/Contractors/Customers – “Task Delegation/Time Tracking”
Your team members are displayed plainly, allowing you to upload documents or assignments wherever you see fit. Comments, questions and prioritizations are amongst the many details you can note on posted documents for the rest of the group to see. This saves time and money on travel and it allows your team to stay on task without having to break their flow to attend a production meeting.
Not only does collaboration software save you time and money, but its very user friendly as the user interface is template based. Additionally, setting up your company with collaboration software can be accomplished within minutes. Production meetings are not so much eliminated as they are seamlessly woven into the fabric of your team’s every day routine.
More on Collaboration Software
http://www.centraldesktop.com
Central Desktop
Collaboration Software Central Desktop Launches the Industry’s First Customer Network
Collaboration Software Central Desktop Customer Network
Did you hear? Word on the web is collaboration software Central Desktop is launching its very own customer network. With well over 200,000 users world wide, this tight knit circle of web 2.0 savvy go-getters is going to be a veritable bee hive of productivity. From the small ‘mom & pop’ operations on up to the geographically dispersed conglomerates, Central Desktop users now have a water cooler to swap both implementation methods as well as success stories.
“Central Desktop has become a key tool for us to manage and collaborate on day-to-day business operations both with internal teams as well as with customers and partners. It has essentially served as an ERP replacement for us, and I’m certain there are multitudes of other applications for the platform,” said Eric Golden, CEO, Equipois. “The Network is a perfect way for our team to share our experiences as well as learn from other Central Desktop users as we continue to look for ways of web-enabling additional business operations. We have implemented Central Desktop in some unique ways that add great value to our business, and we could certainly benefit from the resourcefulness of the hundreds of thousands of other Central Desktop business users out there.”
Discover every nuance of the software-as-a-service, Central Desktop, from the scads of user submitted tips & tricks that are sure to help you maximize your efforts through Central Desktop. You can even be a “Central Desktop Hero” and submit your own best practices. Interact, share and manage. With the induction of the new customer network, collaboration software Central Desktop is, truly, your anywhere, anytime business solution.
Visit Collaboration Software Central Desktop Customer Network
More on Collaboration Software
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