FCC Hopes to Improve U.S. Digital Literacy with Corporate Computer Donations

By Jake Neeley | Published: September 7, 2012

According to the FCC, more than 17 million still-useable computers are prematurely retired from businesses in the U.S. each year. These computers could help millions of Americans get online and interacting with small business websites hosted on cheap hosting platforms, including e-commerce applications.

Read More »

Share This!

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Pinterest Makes San Francisco its New Home!

By Jake Neeley | Published: September 5, 2012

One way to track the progress of a social media company is to view changes in the corporate headquarters. We recently caught wind from Business Insider that Pinterest, the massively popular visual bookmarking site, has moved its base of operations from Palo Alto into a bigger space in San Francisco.

The new warehouse spans over 60,000 sq. feet and will accommodate roughly 200 employees; another indication of the growing power of this tech favorite. Founded in 2008, it raised $100 million in May 2012.

San Francisco appears to becoming the new center of gravity for the tech industry, including Zynga, Twitter, AirBNB and Adobe.

Read More »

Share This!

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Google releases yet another Panda update which impacts search rankings

So what exactly is going on at Google Plus? On the one hand The Wall Street Journal reported in late February that that Google+ is nothing more than a virtual ghost town, reflected by a growing amount of users who sign up but then never go much further in engaging the platform.

A large number of small businesses are on the fence as to whether to launch yet another social media site to complement their existing website strategy on affordable shared hosting, dedicated hosting and cloud hosting platforms.

“Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn’t have data on mobile usage,” said the WSJ.

On the other hand, Comscore reports indicates a growing number of visitors worldwide.

It seems the WSJ may have been a bit too early in writing off Google + with the latest numbers from Comscore, showing healthy activity.

“It has clearly captured the attention of the technorati and as usage incubates among this crowd it will likely continue to proliferate to a more general audience,” said Comscore.

Bear in mind that Google does have an existing user base of about 1 billion, which allows it to pursue aggressive conversion targets.  Comscore said that while the U.S. leads in Google+ audience, it currently accounts for 27% of the total worldwide audience.

There may also be evidence that 9 out of 10 Google+ users were male in the initial days of launch. Now the numbers look more balanced with males accounting for 63% of visitors to 37% females. In addition, 58% of the total Google+ audience is between the ages of 18-34, with 25-34 year olds representing more than 1/3rd of the total.

All of these stats suggest that critics may have been wrong when they collectively stated that “While Google+ has some original features—including ‘Hangouts,’ which lets people start a video conference with up to 10 people—analysts and some consumers say the distinction isn’t enough to lure Facebook members away and persuade them to build a network of contacts from scratch on Google+.”

A new survey suggests that at least 56% of small businesses are now using an online CRM cloud to help manage their business operations.   This is 10% higher than last year and confirms a general trend towards increasing cloud utilization by SMBs as we approach 2016, considered a watermark year for cloud computing.

Cloud hosting is also becoming increasingly popular for small-to-medium sized businesses, which seek to reduce datacenter complexity and pursue an on-demand, utility pricing model.

The survey mentioned earlier, also stated that only 15% of respondents admitted to still having some reservations on the adoption of online CRM, web CRM and small business CRM; a vast improvement on the 23% in last year’s survey.

“From a sample of 685 respondents, the majority from small and medium-sized organizations with less than 50 employees, over half revealed that they believe online CRM, web CRM and small business CRM solutions offer better value than in-house equivalents (up on last year’s 44% to 50.1%),” said the Sacramento Bee.

The survey said that confidence in online CRM, web CRM and small business CRM solutions overall has increased substantially, with 72% of respondents claiming to have more confidence generally that a year ago and 80% saying they thought online CRM, web CRM and small business CRM solutions required less IT support.

LinkedIn has emerged as the most popular tool, capturing nearly 80% of the survey results. Overall, 67% said they used social marketing and nearly 34% said they got a positive ROI from the effort. Nearly 59% said they were unable to measure the success of their social marketing efforts.

A CRM is a valuable contact management and sales progression tool for small businesses that wish to keep track of their customers and sales pipelines.  While Saleforce.com has captured the market in terms of cloud leadership, it can also be expensive. Other players such as ZohoCRM.com offer a free version, which is proving very popular with SMBs.

A cloud CRM can be used as the backoffice tool for an SMB collecting web leads off a cloud hosting platform from Westhost which costs as little as $50 per month for a dedicated 1.2GHz CPU, 752MB of RAM, and 20 GB of storage. In many instances, the cloud CRM will allow you to automate web lead capture by deploying a custom form generated from the CRM on the website.

The incoming inquiries are then automatically deposited in the CRM lead pipeline where sales can work on converting that prospect into a paying customer.   Increasingly, automation is becoming a key goal for both smaller and bigger companies as they seek to reduce staff overhead and increase revenues.  A cloud CRM in tandem with a cloud business website can help with this pursuit.