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Sharing Business Value Reports

Antivirus company AVG pushed a great report to me earlier today called a “Threat Report”.   The security company with the ‘Freemium’ model wanted me to give them credit for protecting one my computers from a series of problems.  It’s a smart, relatively passive way for the company to prove its product’s worth to a user who is a potential up-sell.

silver-beacon-marketing-logoSilver Beacon Marketing does a similar thing, showing clients their return on investment (ROI) for advertising campaigns or other goals from our search engine optimization efforts.  That is proprietary data that few would publicize, but I’ve lost count of the number of times a referral has quoted their friend’s ROI to me. Sharing your business value is easy.

Bragging about the number of threats your computer stopped is something you might share with anyone.  The whole thing sounds like fun.  And even a small adoption rate can mean some great exposure.  Let’s say that the report showed your level of web savvy and a fun rating about your computer’s strength along with some Twitter and Facebook share buttons.  Your product gets valuable exposure every time someone sends that report to their Twitter or Facebook stream.

Enabling that sharing function is only a part of the battle though. Sharing has to be simple–absolutely frictionless–to get the best possible return.  And that’s what I experienced today when I reactivated a StumbleUpon account.

Signing up was easy–only four fields after I clicked “connect with Facebook”.  And the company was smart enough to ask, “Hey, since you’re recommending pages to strangers, how about recommending them to your friends?”

Why not?  That makes perfectly good sense.  And with each post to my Facebook page, StumbleUpon gets a big endorsement from me to anyone connected with me.

Asking that question is smart.  My Facebook friends might not have a StumbleUpon account, but all the work is done for me if I want to post a link to my Facebook page or other social media channels. That is completely frictionless.

Your takeaway as a small business leader is to consider how your company communicates its real business value to stakeholders.  Special bonus points if you make sharing that information easy.

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Google Documents already had a place in my heart for the ease with which basic lists could be shared across devices and accounts with a complete audit trail.  The features were more than enough for almost any personal or business reason.

Then came word last week that Google Documents was integrating email and comments into “discussions”.  The concept is simple.  Using the @ function that is quickly becoming the standard in new media communications, people sharing documents can now have discussions about them.   Even better is the new “resolve” feature.   After a discussion inside Google Docs without resorting to long email threads that may not have brought everyone up to speed, the item can be marked as “resolved”.    And if the person you’re trying to reach doesn’t have the document shared with them, simply type the @ sign and their email address to bring them in.

Finis.   We’re done here.  On to the next issue or quit tangenting off and focus.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because the discussion feature in Google Docs is an awful lot like the feature set in Google Wave.  The main difference is that Wave was built around an email box while this new discussion feature is built into the document, spreadsheet or slide deck.  The change of where this functionality is located creates an entirely new way to use docs.  We’ve written before about collaboration inside Google Docs when the ability to share a drawing was launched last year.  We suggested that was really the Google Whiteboard.

That was before seeing this new collaboration feature being used.  This is truly the Google  Whiteboard and a great example of a company repurposing its assets to enhance its service offerings.  With this, Google Apps continue to be the small business’ best friend.  Your takeaway as a small business leader is that Google may not only replace Microsoft Office, but can bring a new level of  collaboration to your operations by integrating partners, remote team members and even clients.

Have a look at the video and start thinking about how you can integrate discussions into your workflow.

 

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One of the most attractive characteristics of Google Chrome when it launched in 2009 was its speed.  Everyone I knew had already added enough plugins to Firefox to choke the browser as it tried to load.  Even worse, Firefox add-ons, which the industry now calls plugins or apps, were an integral part of the browser’s loading time.  A misbehaving program was enough to crash your browser, potentially losing work and certainly losing time.  By comparison, Google Chrome seemed mysteriously sleek, like a racehorse running on an empty track early in the morning.  Even better was the way Chrome handled crashes for its extensions, allowing one part of the program to crash while keeping the browser intact.

I vowed to never add so much baggage to Chrome to cause the program to lag.   And I’ve been fairly faithful, pruning unused extensions whenever they’re unused.  That cyber-take on the “stop sending the report and see who complains”  has kept Chrome running fast.   The time to launch Chrome on my system, the only one I care about, is about 3 seconds.   Firefox typically runs 5-6 seconds unless it’s updating an add-on, and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was apparently tested for speed using a sundial.   That’s one takeaway for you as a small business leader:  it’s nice to know how software and machines perform in magazine testing, but you should ultimately care about how they perform in your office.

Since then, Big Thinking has published a list of must-have Google Chrome Extensions with a short explanation of each.  The list was divided last year into extensions for everyone and extensions for marketers, and that’s still a method that works well for me and readers who have commented.   Since the first list in December 2009, only StumbleUpon has been on the list each time, but the venerable page recommendation engine is on my endangered list because I know I’m not using the tool very often any longer.  Whether the lack of use is due to lack of time or burnout after years is irrelevant because it will be uninstalled if still aboard Chrome when it’s time for this summer’s list.

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