Using Google+ Hangouts for Internal Team Communication

Using Google+ Hangouts for Internal Team Communication
Pamela O’Hara of Batchbook: Using Social CRM To Be A Social Business
The End Of November Is Bad For Me
Post Office Reports a Record $15.9 Billion Loss

Posted: 16 Nov 2012 11:00 AM PST

Google has begun rolling out some new features for Google+ Hangouts, including the consolidation of key function tools like invites, chat and frequently used apps on the sidebar, along with colorful notifications for different functions.

Hangouts has proved to be a valuable tool for some small businesses that use Google+, particularly those who use it for collaboration and communication among team members.

Here are some tips to help your business make the most of the service for internal communication:

Stay Organized

Make sure team members keep their meetings and presentations organized without the need of a separate planner or scheduling tool. Meeting leaders can send invitations to different team members and manage them now directly on their sidebar. The invites will also appear on the sidebars of those invited to the meeting, so these commitments will stay top of mind.

Chat Face to Face

When collaborating on a group project, you can chat face to face with employees, clients, or other team members in Hangouts while simultaneously making revisions or putting together documents in Google Docs, as shown in the screenshot above. You can even track edits and who has contributed what to the document.

Use Google+ Circles

Use Google+ Circles to organize employees into different departments or projects to ensure that team members in different departments receive all the necessary materials, but without overrunning every single employee with tons of data that isn't necessarily relevant to their particular job description.

These circles can also be used to update team members about Hangouts or meetings, and to distribute the necessary materials for these gatherings.

Use Hangouts On Air

For important meetings or presentations that might be relevant to your whole team, even those who couldn't make it to the meeting itself, you can use Hangouts On Air to save the meeting to your YouTube account and then share it via Google+ or YouTube with your whole team, clients, customers, or anyone else who might be interested.

Go Mobile With The Google+ App for iOS and Android

For those professionals who work from home or from a variety of locations, the Google+ app for both iOS and Android devices offers users the ability to join hangouts with their co-workers or clients from any location.

There are many different communication and collaboration tools on the market today, but Hangouts definitely offers a lot of features for no cost. Google is constantly updating its features for Google+ so Hangouts could continue to gain even more tools that could prove useful for small business users.

The post Using Google+ Hangouts for Internal Team Communication appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Pamela O’Hara of Batchbook: Using Social CRM To Be A Social Business

Posted: 16 Nov 2012 08:00 AM PST

Developing a human aspect and striving to build meaningful relationships in and around your small business can produce a wide variety of benefits and greatly contribute to the overall life span and outward growth of your small business. And having the right tools to build these relationships can help you accomplish these goals much faster than expected. Tune in as Pamela O’Hara, CEO and Founder of Batchbook, joins Brent Leary to share her social CRM solution.

* * * * *

Pamela O'Hara, CEO and Founder of Batchbook Small Business Trends: Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Pamela O’Hara: I am the Founder of Batchbook, a Social CRM product. When we met, you were giving a talk on Social CRM. I believe this was before anyone else in the entire world knew what Social CRM was.

Small Business Trends: You have a product that helps people with this area. How has tracking information on contacts changed since you got started with Batchbook?

Pamela O’Hara: Social has been a huge part of the change that we have seen. We started our product in 2006, about 6 years ago, before anyone had really heard about Facebook, or before Twitter was ever launched.

We've seen a lot of activity around social networks. However, we focus on small businesses. It's been exciting to see how it changes business relationships. How much more connected you can get, what is your network when it’s not just them walking into your store once a month or so, or sending an email once a month or so.

Now you can really connect. You can see what they are doing. They can see a lot of more of what you're doing.

Small Business Trends: Can you explain why you are not pricing per user, but are pricing per amount of contacts the company has in their database?

Pamela O’Hara: We launched what we call Relationship Base Pricing. Our feeling is, especially with small businesses and new businesses, it is really important to get your entire team involved in the relationship you are building with customers.

These early customers are so crucial to so many parts of your business. Not just revenue, these are the folks that are going to help you figure out who your market is; how to reach them; and what your price point should be.

It is really important that everyone is helping you. Even if you are solo entrepreneur, you've probably got your spouse helping you with bookkeeping; you’ve probably got one of your friends helping you build a website; someone else s ihelping you send out emails; it is important that all of these folks are helping you collect all of this information and all of these conversations.

We have restructured our pricing in Batchbook to bring everyone in. Don't share one login across your whole team. If you do that, it is going to be a lot harder for you to understand who is having the conversation with who, and you are not going to be able to assign out tasks. Bring your whole team in, invite the whole village. They are helping you build this relationship.

Small Business Trends: You announced building your Integration Engine?

Pamela O’Hara: Integrations with other Web based business tools have always been very important to us. Because our product is based around collecting information about your contacts; what your relationship with those contacts is. But a lot of that information is actually happening in other systems, it is happening in your accounting systems; or in the email newsletters system; or in your customer service system.

It is really a burden to get all of that information in one place. And you do have to do a whole lot of work to view your relationship with that customer. We have always been big proponents of integrating our products. Which really makes it easy for our customers to pull all of that information from their accounting software, being able to view it in Batchbook and being able to update that contact information very easily.

What we did is build this new sort of tool for us and we call it The Integration Engine. And now, when we are doing these integrations with other products, we are able to have a very consistent experience for our customers within Batchbook. One of the things we were finding was, when we would do these integrations, or if other people were actually integrating with our products, depending on who wrote that integration, it would be an inconsistent experience for our customers.

What we wanted to do was really give some consistency. Consistency leads to usability. It just makes it a lot easier if you always know where you're going to be going to find that information, or how you will import it, or how do you export it, or how do you think about it. So we are pretty excited to be able to now give our customers a much more friendly access to all their other systems through Batchbook.

Small Business Trends: I know how important that is to your customers, because it's great having all of these services. But if they're services that are standing alone or not connected, it makes it difficult for folks to get the most out of them.

Pamela O’Hara: Exactly.

Small Business Trends: Where can people learn more?

Pamela O’Hara: Our website is Batchbook.com , and we also organize the group called The Small Business Web. Which is a lot of other staff companies, like MailChimp; a lot of big staff companies like Google, and smaller staff companies who do invoicing, or different things that small business need. That website is TheSmallBusinessWeb.com.

That is a great place to go and see what all these other products are. If you can see from our website which one integrates with each other, it is kind of a nice way to build this nice little, almost enterprise level product. But they all focus on small business, and even more importantly – price for small business.

Pamela Ohara by smallbiztrends

The post Pamela O’Hara of Batchbook: Using Social CRM To Be A Social Business appeared first on Small Business Trends.

The End Of November Is Bad For Me

Posted: 16 Nov 2012 05:00 AM PST

business cartoon

This is one of the kinds of cartoons I love that take just an extra second for people to get. When I was doing the art fair circuit a few summers back I’d watch people read this cartoon, puzzle for just a moment, and then laugh loudly, usually followed by showing it to the person next to them.

You can almost see the gears turning:

“Turkey on the phone… End of November… November… OH! Thanksgiving! That WOULD be bad for him! Ha!”

Plus a turkey in an office on the phone is already a funny place to start.

The post The End Of November Is Bad For Me appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Post Office Reports a Record $15.9 Billion Loss

Posted: 16 Nov 2012 02:30 AM PST

The U.S. Postal Service’s endless battle with red ink has been an ongoing story year after year, as decreased demand and increasing labor costs have outstripped even Congressional bailouts. This year the service saw record losses. Entrepreneurs and business owners have no one to bail them out when things go badly. Various problems from cash flow to productivity issues can affect your business. Here we review some of the top issues and how to keep your business strong, despite the economy.

The Bottom Line

Return to sender. The U.S. Postal Service’s troubles are nothing new. With shrinking demand for its services due to issues ranging from e-mail to independent parcel delivery companies, the postal service has seen decreasing revenues. But a record $15.9 billion in losses for this year was also thanks in part to $11.1 billion in mandatory future retiree health care benefits. While the Postal Service’s problems seem rooted in insurmountable obstacles, many businesses have challenges that are more easily met. Associated Press

Cut your costs. Many businesses don’t know how much money can be saved by taking advantage of various companies offering services from legal to hiring to document printing and beyond, that significantly reduce the friction of starting and running a business. The list includes companies like LegalZoom, Elance, Vista Print, HP Magcloud, and RingCentral. Ramon Ray interviews John Suh, CEO of LegalZoom, in this video. Smallbiz Technology

A Winning Team

Hire the right help. Cutting costs in important staff positions isn’t always the key to making your business profitable. If an entrepreneur can be thought of as the super hero of his or her small business, that hero sometimes needs a sidekick. Serial entrepreneur and blogger Matthew Toren has some suggestions for how to find a right hand man or woman who can keep up with problems that may arise in your company, and allow you to focus on the big picture stuff. If you don’t yet have a sidekick, you may want to consider recruiting one to make your business more successful in the long run. Entrepreneur

Treat your people well. You might think by looking at the problems experienced by the U.S. Postal Service that the cost of employees is one of the greatest challenges businesses face. But in this post and accompanying video, two entrepreneurs, one of them well known author Gary Vaynerchuk, insist business owners who think of their employees only as an expense are making a huge mistake. Instead, put your employees first, and you may find that customers will follow. Chris Ducker

Build relationships that last. In a world of purchased “likes” or worse yet, Twitter followers, it’s easy to forget what true business relationship building is really about. Well, blogger Rosemary O'Neill is here to remind you of just how important the real deal is to creating a successful business. Real connections will help you when the chips are down. Invest real time and energy in building those relationships and they will be worth much more than that investment as time goes by. Successful Blog

Room for Improvement

Be productive. Business owners and managers are all busy people, but there is a difference between being busy and being productive. Business coach Ray Williams, President of Ray Williams Associates, says learning to be more productive is the key to becoming more successful in your business. Finding the time to complete what needs to be done will help you grow your company. Daily Blogma

Automate your operations. Bookkeeping and invoicing can be two of the most time consuming functions in your business. Some of these and other administrative functions can, of course, be outsourced. But another option is to automate some of these functions, according to Melody Waterberg. Doing so can improve the efficiency and operations of your business while giving you more time and money to focus on profitability. Check out more details here. Waterberg & Company Bookkeeping Inc.

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