Do you have a good business practice agenda in your business?

How do you decide what is good business practice for your own business and how are others doing it?

There is a new online tool that has been created for Australian Small Business providing a platform that will enable small to medium businesses to establish their own responsible and sustainable business practice agenda. St. James Ethics Centre and the Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia in collaboration with Australian Businesses, has developed the Good Business Register.

The site is secured by log in and will allow you to build and publish your Responsible Business Practice Profile as a marketing tool that showcases your company’s image and reputation building trust and understanding.

You can print your profile, save it allowing you to use it within any other marketing strategy documents or send or publish the link to stakeholders, customers, suppliers and staff.

Currently this is a free online tool and can be completed incrementally to your time constraints and as your business grows or changes.

The site is based around 5 principles of responsible business practice – Financial sustainability, Inclusive workplace environment, Promoting responsible business through the supply chain, Active engagement with stakeholders and the community, and Minimising the impact of business activities on the environment.

We are all subject to a range of responsibilities and obligations that govern our day-to-day business operations. These obligations define minimum requirements we must meet within our business and information on them is provided within the register. However the register is about encouraging business to go beyond compliance – to be more aspirational than merely complying, and provide you with the platform to showcase this important competitive edge, improving your image and reputation.

Click here to register and use the Good Business Register

What value does your site offer that is distinctive from any other site? Now this is not a very different question from one you should be asking yourself about your business in general – what makes your business different from every other similar business in your area, why will someone choose you?

Is your site well branded? Your branding should dovetail harmoniously into all your business branding – when someone comes to your site they need to ‘know’ that they are with you, and feel good whenever they see your branding.

Is your site optimised for search engines? It is critical to remember that if you want your site to attract new customers, they have to find you, and that happens through a search engine. If your site does not come up in the first 10 results the chances of someone finding you diminishes greatly.

Do you offer your visitors a site that is easy to find information on, easy to contact you for more information and the ability to get exactly what they want on the spot?

This is a harder one as some business lend themselves perfectly to shopping cart services, but maybe it’s information they need from your site to bring them to making contact. Whatever it is you need to identify this clearly and ensure your site provides it.

If you have a web site it must be included in your business plan and treated as a high priority – keep it relevant, informative and updated regularly!

How are you going to do this?

Social networking has become the buzz word for everyone including business.

Like it or not, it is becoming a part of the workplace, but should sites like Facebook be used and how?

Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites at the moment and it seems that ‘anyone who is anyone’ can be found there.

Is it ethical to use Facebook to check up on existing or potential staff?

Are you losing productivity to staff being logged into a site like this?

Are they just chatting inanely about their private life or is information about your business at risk?

Facebook is often used as a gossip avenue, and work gossip is nothing new, but it used to be restricted to hallways, staff rooms and telephones.

It can be surprising what people will write on these sites, especially in the heat of the moment.

There have even been many cases of employees losing their jobs through Facebook. There is no accounting for stupidity really – imagine calling in to work sick, then writing on Facebook that you are hung over or have a hot date and have chucked a sickie! Well it happens around the globe and is likely to continue to happen.

What about putting your business on Facebook?

This is becoming increasingly popular and could be a very innovative idea.

However I would strongly recommend that before you do this you analyse – why would I do it, who will look after the profile, what would I want broadcast about the business, how does it fit my business plan, who will become our friends and how much paid time will be needed to keep the page updated? No point in having a Facebook page that is not updated often, people expect regular updates there!

There are a host of brilliant web tools out there for business, but don’t just use them all simply because you can.

We all use the internet in business every day, or the very large percentage of us do. I wonder how many in business really know if they are on the most cost effective plan for their usage? It is common that a plan is chosen and instigated, then forgotten about. Some years down the track it is still forgotten and maybe it is no longer the best plan for your needs. Many home and business owners also just sign up with a company without really checking their options out, and I admit sometimes doing the comparisons is daunting as there are so many technical terms to trawl through that a choice is simply made on price, thinking well that looks affordable.

The internet has changed significantly over the past 5 – 10 years, providers seem to come and go, and availability in our regional areas is confusing.

For example a new Pipe Pacific Cable connecting Guam to Sydney via Papua New Guinea has been launched recently, promising significant increases in speed. Ever since the Pacific Pipe dream was announced earlier this year there have been talk of 100 MB / second speed plans. However it would now seem that speed increase is not the first change consumers will see, but larger data quotas (the amount of data you can download on your plan) for the same price will be a welcome start for many users.

Not every provider yet has access to this new cable, but negotiations are continuing with many of the large providers.

It could be a good time to start checking what your plan is, what speed you are getting and how much you can download per month. Check this against what you actually are downloading per month as you may be paying hefty charges for going over your limit.

I was reminded the past couple of weeks, of the power there can be in the written word, published on the internet.

A lady started an entity on facebook, rather than a page for herself, and people could become fans of this entity. I’m sure she knew that the entity would attract some fans, and more than just a few, but I wonder if she expected the number of fans to increase the way it did. I wonder what she thought when it reached the first 100,000?

Businesses are starting to use mediums such as facebook and twitter to communicate with their clients and some types of business are finding this very successful.

Still this case I have in mind was not a business themselves, yet

the following continued to increase, and not only that, the following began to impact on a large business to the point that they influenced that business to undertake a business activity that I doubt would have been taken otherwise.

I became a fan about 4 months back, but at that time had no idea the power this facebook entity was about to have!

The fan base increased and went over 200,000 and the power of sheer numbers caused Channel 9 to take action.

Many of you reading this have probably guessed now what I am referring to, but if you haven’t just consider the power of internet publishing – to attract a following that this morning has reached 334,673, and persuad a television station to air nearly 7 new hours of a show that finished 10 years ago. Add to that the fact that they rocketed to become the world’s largest following on twitter and you have a powerful medium indeed.

Whether or not you liked Hey Hey It’s Saturday, the phenomenon of how the internet was used is an incredibly interesting case study for business.

There are times when you wish to remove a page that google is displaying and returning when someone does a search.

Below is the basic information and links to google information on doing this.

Webpage Removal Tool

Google provides a tool for removal of web pages that are already showing up on searches.

You need to create a google account if you don’t already have one (it’s an excellent idea to have a google account as it gives you access to many services and is free).

Go to the webpage removal request tool

Select one of the 3 reasons for removal, fill in the details of the address for the page to remove and submit.

One problem that may occur is that after you remove the page it still shows on searches!

This is what google has to say about the reason:

After we delete the cached copy of a page, the page’s title and URL will continue to display for the same search queries until our robots revisit the site. Users will still be able to visit the live page. But because the relevant information has been removed from the live page, this page will not return as a result for searches on related keywords after our next crawl.

I haven’t been able to find out just how often a spider from google will visit your site, however from experience I can tell you that within days of putting pages up I have found them indexed and showing as a result in google.

More Google information on removing pages and sites

Robots.txt files

These files are used to tell google and other search engine spiders not to index a site or a page on a site.

How to create a robots.txt file

On this page you can find the actual code you need to put into a file, or you can use a tool google provides to create the file if you don’t feel you have the technical skill to create one yourself.

Adding a site to Google

You don’t need to do anything to add a site or page to Google as the robot spiders do trawl the net all the time, however you can choose to do so.

One last helpful link from Google on good design for search engines.

An important site to assist you with online security is SCAMwatch
This is an Australian Government site provided to assist online users to be protected from scams and allows you to report scams that you may find out there.

Verisign is one of the leading online transaction security providers.
Seeing Verisign when conducting online transactions alerts you that you are indeed conducting a secure transaction.

Googles Postini services are some great online tools you can investigate

You Tube has gained extraordinary popularity.

If you haven’t been there yet it is a huge collection of video clips that you can view and search.
It has become quite a controversial site because anyone can become a member and upload video and so content has caused concern particularly for parents.

But the phenomenon of putting video online is one that business can embrace and the uses of video for marketing and education are boundless.

You Tube is only one way of putting video online, and even though it is well used by business today I want to chat particularly about podcasting in general.
The important aspect of podcasting that sets it quite aside from simply making video or audio available online is that people are able to subscribe to syndication services which will find the material for you and automatically deliver it to you.

Large-scale syndication started in 2001 with online games.

Podcasts can be delivered to computers and portable media players such as iPods or other MP3 players.
Radio stations such as the ABC podcast a lot of their programs as do other radio and television stations.
Podcasts can also be used for marketing of products and services, providing a way to get marketing material to people who want to receive it, and keeping your products and services fresh in your customers minds.

You can create a podcast with a minimum of a computer and microphone – this would allow you to create an audio file. Many modern computers have a web cam on them, and simple video can be created this way.

Often they are not expensive productions as the important thing to remember is that you are better off creating a simple podcast every week rather than spending money on one really great one. The nature of the podcast is to receive small bites of information that is fresh and regular.

There are software tools that assist you in maintaining your computer system no matter what kind of system you have and these are important and have their place.
However one thing I learned years ago, when living on a small farm was – vigilance against ticks is the only way to protect a young dog.  I could spend as much money as I liked on any number of chemicals, but nothing is 100% effective, and a single tick is now even more likely to kill a young dog.
The parallel I’m thinking of here is that too often people install antivirus software and then forget to be vigilant.

No antivirus or similar single product can ever give you 100% protection out there in the wild.

Malware attackers are relying on tricking people as anti-malware software becomes more sophisticated.
Phishing for example works mostly by tricking you into thinking that you are at a legitimate site.  The purpose of a phishing scam is to steal your identity – passwords, account details or credit card numbers.

Firefox (a web browser many people use instead of Internet Explorer) checks sites you are visiting against lists of known phishing and malware sites.  Google has also implemented a great tool for Firefox that alerts users that a site contains malware.

Even so, each person using the internet must stay vigilant.

People are busy, tired, distracted and under time pressures, and these factors often contribute to people clicking on links, opening attachments or clicking on OK when they should not have.
Microsoft Windows Vista has the best security to date of any Windows system, but if this decreases the vigilance of the user an attack is still going to happen with potentially catastrophic results.

URL’s or web addresses follow a logical pattern and so do email addresses.  It is very easy to tell if it is an email or web address.
Email works through a system of post offices that direct your mail around the world to the intended recipient, though it is more similar to owning a post office box than having mail delivered to a street address.
The actual email address has 2 major sections to it.
Firstly the section before the @ sign indicates who the email is addressed to.
This could be a name such as Katrina, a position such as manager or any word the owner of the address chooses.
The second section is the domain where the mail is hosted.  We examined how web addresses and domains are patterned last week and this is exactly the same in the second section of an email address.
The @ sign literally means ‘at’.
So when you send an email to katrina@bitts4learning.com you are literally sending an email to the person Katrina whose post office is hosted at bitts4learning.com.
Your email program or web email service looks only at the second part of the email address and sends an email you have written to that address.  When the host receives that email it looks only at the first section to see which email mailbox owns that name and puts the mail in that box.
When you open the email program on your computer you have set it up to hold the key to your mailbox and the program pops down to your post office and collects your mail for you.
If you use web-based email (such as gmail) you go to the post office and open your mailbox with your key (password)
You can always tell an email address from a web address as email addresses always have an @ in them and web addresses never do.