Small Businesses - Ditch the Consumer Email Addresses

Hey, small business owners!  It is time...well past time actually...to move past using "consumer" email addresses to represent your business.

You know which ones they are: hotmail, gmail, aol, the one from your cable company.  You should be availing yourself of every opportunity to promote your business, not advertise someone else's  - and your email address is the first place you should start.

In case you are wondering, or perhaps are a new or about-to-launch business, what we are really talking about is a custom domain.  Every business should register a custom domain name for themselves - yourcompany.com.  No good excuse not to - registrars like Go Daddy and 1 and 1 (among many others) offer custom domain name registration beginning at $12.99 per year.  

The next step is to find an email plan that allows you to utilize that custom domain for your email address: yourname@yourcompany.com .  There is probably an email plan attached to your website hosting, and if you want the same email system that is used by the largest companies in the U.S., look at Microsoft Office 365.  Small business plans begin at $6 per user per month.

That is the how and how much, but we should revisit the 'why'.  We already mentioned advertising another company.  Your own email address also generates a perception of permanence, commitment, and substance regarding your company.  As a small business owner, you know the importance customers attach to a long-term, professional relationship.  Your own email address goes a long way towards demonstrating to prospective customers that choosing your company is the right decision. 

We routinely talk to companies with questions about their websites and keywords, questions about social media and engagement with customers, questions about email marketing with newsletters - some fairly sophisticated questions, which indicate good comprehension of the social media landscape.  And they already have registered a yourcompany.com custom domain name - yet they still use a consumer email address.

Don't let this be you!  Make the move to a professional email address based on a custom domain name specifically for your business.  Let every aspect of your business image match the brilliance of the work you perform.  And do it before your competition.

Keep it Simple, Not Stagnant

Simplicity is often a key for small businesses.  Keep It Simple is the famous mantra.  And for good reason; small businesses tend to be under-resourced and the impact of needless complexity can be swift and painful.  "Simple" tends to go hand-in-hand with lower cost.

Simplicity is an admirable, efficient goal.  But small business owners must guard against rejecting change in the name of simplicity.  The pace of business is increasingly fast, and yesterday's solution, simple and elegant as it may be, can prove insufficient in the face of new competitors and more sophisticated demands from customers.  Staying alert to new, lower-cost capabilities than can help a small business, such as marketing with social media and leveraging the IT power of the Cloud, are good examples of this type of change.

One risk for a small business owner lies in judging the capabilities of the new solution against the old simplicity/complexity (and cost) criteria.  Imagine having never heard of email marketing and trying to assess "producing and sending" a newsletter every month.  Suppose a company website conjures images of expensive web development and maintenance.  What if a company-wide email and shared information network immediately brings to mind thousands of dollars worth of computer servers and special facilities?  Without the proper knowledge, the small business owner would fail to grasp that these capabilities are now simple and inexpensive, and well within the reach of every small business. 

Another risk for a small business owner lies in the relative speed with which the customers and competition grasp that these capabilities are within their reach as well.  If the customers come to expect their suppliers to have these capabilities, and competitors are quick to introduce them, the market shifts.  And the impact of a market shift can also be swift and painful.

Are Small Businesses Safer in the Cloud?

Viruses named Flame and Stuxnet, and now another loss of customer data - this time from LinkedIn.  At the same time, leading small businesses everywhere are implementing cloud solutions like Microsoft Office 365 and reaping the benefits of this low cost/high capability revolution.  Which leads to a question: when it comes to the security of my business data, is there greater exposure to these threats from being in the cloud?

Small businesses are actually safer in the cloud.  Let's take a look why.

Security for your business data is, and always has been, important.  The basic idea is to protect that which you need to keep your business up and running, and out of the hands those with malicious intent.  (In the words of a David Taylor, a colleague in insurance: "don't risk what you can't afford to lose").    Before the advent of computers, businesses locked file cabinets, stored the cash in a safe, destroyed sensitive documents, restricted employee access to sensitive areas and information, and used an alarm system to deter break-ins.  Modern businesses extend those same types of precautions to computer networks and data storage.

But the question is whether putting a greater amount of your business processes and data online - in the cloud - represents a greater risk than an isolation strategy - keeping as much as possible in-house.

There are a lot of variables, of course.  The greater the number of cloud service providers, for example, the greater the potential exposure if any one of their security efforts fails.  But one thought that may cross the mind of a small business owner should be banished - that an isolation strategy might keep their business 'below the radar' of potential hackers, viruses, and malicious software attacks.

The truth is that this type damage to a small business will come from an "automated" attack of some kind - a virus that comes in through the internet or a flash drive.  The reason these types of attacks are called viruses is because the malicious software is designed to replicate itself and spread from computer to computer.  The viruses can wait until they "see" a vulnerability and find a suitable environment to infect and reproduce. This type of viral behavior puts the burden - a significant burden, as it turns out - of prevention on those would potentially be infected.  Under an isolation strategy, the entire burden falls upon the small business owner.

The world of viruses, malicious software, and other attacks is extremely dynamic.  There is (evidently) a dedicated community out there continually seeking new vulnerabilities and developing new viruses.  On the other side, governments, legitimate software companies, and cloud providers are waging a pitched battle rooted in the best security and authentication practices, research, and software upgrades and patches to quickly close a vulnerability or make a preemptive change.  They are employing resources and exercising vigilance levels that cannot be matched by the small business.  They often address the problem before a small business might even know about it.

When you think about this particular set of vulnerabilities, your business is actually safer in the cloud.  There are always basic requirements that every business must follow to keep their data safe (good resource for small businesses here , from NIST).  A medieval corollary is the cottage and the castle.  One might argue that the castle is a greater target than a cottage, but in the face of marauding hordes, the castle is a better strategy.    

Social is Collaboration Plus Communication for Small Businesses

"Do we need to be more social?" is a question we hear in various forms from small business owners.  Pressed to explain, their focus is almost always on the realm of 'social media marketing'; the company Facebook page, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Foursquare, Yelp...the usual suspects.  Small business owners want to know how to use these social media tools and if they are 'missing out' on customer engagement and revenue generating opportunities by not being fully immersed in social media.


Let's try to put the whole thing in context.


Companies are, and always have been social constructs - groups of people coming together to collectively create solutions that solve the needs of other people.  Companies have always performed best when all the groups are talking to each other - when there is a free flow of information.  When businesses were predominantly small and local, the information was exchanged in person.  As businesses grew larger and more remote, the information was exchanged via tools that substituted for the face-to-face interaction.


Social media are just another set of those tools.  Just like their predecessors, the choice of tool for a particular business or use is important, and based on their suitability for the task at hand.  It is not too difficult to understand that a hammer is optimized for a different set of tasks than is a screwdriver.  Social media tools should be viewed in the same manner, and chosen for the specific tasks to be accomplished and for which they are optimized.

The definition of a company offers a "social" insight; social media tools need not be only for customers.  They can be used to enhance any type of social interaction - between the company and customers, but also between customers, between company and employees, between employees, and between any other constituencies.


When the interactions are between the company and external parties, we talk about communications, of which social marketing is a part.  When the interactions are between internal parties, we talk about collaboration.


Collaboration tools, such as Salesforce and Microsoft Office 365, recognize this and include functionalities (such as chat) that would normally be associated with "social media" alongside their specific, application-focused offerings.


The correct question for businesses large and small is how to use these new tools to both enhance communications externally and improve collaboration internally.  Communication and collaboration are two sides of the same coin - enabling the free flow of information between all corners of the social construct called a company; driving increased revenue and lower costs in the process.