Sean Price – Tech Geek & Business Mind

Health and Safety – Every industry must pay attention

I recently had the pleasure of working with Sue (Safety Sue!) from Safety Sorted – which is a health and safety consultancy based in Weston-super-Mare and it blew my mind the amount of Health and Safety procedures and documents there are out there!

For starters every industry has to abide by certain health and safety laws, which is understandable but then I looked at the cost involved in making sure your business is up to scratch with these laws, policies, documents, time and energy needed to apply yourself to sort this out.  Having NO IDEA what health and safety policies in particular I would need to follow – I took their questionnaire which asks a few simple questions and then emails you a list of all the required policies you should be aware of.

Looking at the state of this country and how important health and safety seems to be and how difficult it is often to implement such policies in your business I found that being given a list of what I should at least be *aware* of was very handy. I did look through the site and see that Safety Sorted offer a variety of “health and safety contracts” available but for my use I found the individual policies more appealing, being able to download, edit to my needs and then put into place in my business was very useful.

At least this way its another corner of my business that I should be able to keep covered.  Has anyone else had experience with Health and Safety issues in the workplace?

Email Marketing – Get it right!

In business many of us use email marketing campaigns (with legit opt-in lists!) to be able to broadcast to our customers many things be it latest offers we have, important information, upcoming events, promotions, surveys and so much more.

But at what point do you draw the line, are you including all the necessary information, are you including too much information, are you ensuring that your customers/subscribers are able to forward the message to a friend easily enough should they choose and most importantly are you giving them a clear and easy manner in which to unsubscribe from your newsletters should they want that and are you respecting that choice?

Most of all are you even paying attention to the goings on and responses you are getting from your customer base as surely they are of the most important to you when you send out an email newsletter?

Recently I have been received email newsletters from a fairly reputable online forum to which a long time ago I subscribed to their newsletter to keep on top of certain pieces of news, however now I find that the information has run dry, not what im after and have found alternate avenues to source better information.  Now I have followed through several pages in order to unsubscribe from their newsletter and every one that forms part of the same network of sites, yet week after week I continue to receive them. Thankfully Gmail has a nice way to filter and delete automatically such emails but still this begs the question, are you simply not listening or reacting well enough to customers requests in order to maintain a larger email list and broadcast count?

Whats more after countless attempts to unsubscribe, each time saying that it had been successful the other day I received yet another and this time I had an auto-responder to say I no longer wanted to receive this newsletter and go a response to say “thank you very much for your entry into our survey, your results have been very helpful and we shall contact you soon to verify your answers”. Ok at this point several unsubscribes, emailing the list owners and even auto responding surely this should now be enough.

So for anyone who has used or continues to use email marketing which by the way is a fantastic avenue to bring old customers back, keep in contact and for many of our clients bring in a lot of revenue then at least remember to keep on top of your responses, clean the data, ensure its up to date and your email campaigns are effective, trackable, measurable and overall not being spam sent out no matter if you have 10 or 10,000 people you are contacting.

Ensure you have quality content, things people are actually interested in when they registered to join your list. Do not sell your lists to 3rd parties and do not throw useless information/advertisements at your customers if they are not interested in such things.

Remember there is a lot you can do with emails, A/B split test campaigns, spam test, design test, monitor results to see their effectiveness and so much more.

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Investing in small businesses

Investing in small businesses is becoming more and more of a big thing here in the UK whereby small to medium sized investments are made in startup or small businesses to aid increase cash flow and/or to help the business by giving it time, attention and effort to aid its growth.

Often with small business investments the amount of investment is low with a small stake/equity of the company being taken by the investor and at the grand old age of 22 I can now confirm that I have invested a stake in a small jewellery business Crystal Jewels.

My participation and actions in the business shall become more noticiable as the coming months progress as I attempt to help grow the business over the coming years to where the business is in a good position and can keep providing the excellent quality of service and beautiful products it has already become known to provide.

I have always been a fan of products by Crystal-Jewels as in the past I have purchased items for my sisters 18th birthday and more. Find out more about our deal and what Crystal-Jewels has to offer by visiting the blog and reading more.

Ning – time to upgrade social networks

Very shocked today as I am catching up on a serious backlog of RSS news items to see that NING a popular DIY social networking site where by you are able to create your own social network ala facebook about any product, service, idea, whatever you like with features such as posting content, media and adding friends have now scrapped their free service and opted for a tiered pricing model.

This has personally come as a surprise as I personally know several people managing relatively decent sized social networks on Ning and cannot see them paying for such tiered pricing to continue their community when facebook would offer pretty much the same service for free. The pricing levels Ning have introduced are not over priced at all starting from around $3/month with its core features and going up in price dependant on a variety of factors that the user would wish to bolt onto their “social networking website”.

Tiered plans are rolling out in June and we shall see the true backlash of this as many users will undoubtedly flock to Facebook for a “newly released” community page which is a branch from the popular “Pages” used by businesses and the like. Others I suspect if they are serious about their social network website on Ning will opt to spending money creating a true self owned platform/website and shell out the initial cost as opposed to paying a monthly fee.

Ning ID is also being chopped which in a sense is a good thing, this was a single sign on created by ning so you would be able to sign into any social network hosted by ning with a single username/password combination. I say its a good thing because now we have so many other single sign on platforms ranging from the age old Microsoft Passport, to the variety of OpenID providers and of course the fairly newcomers of Google, Twitter and Facebook connect programs.

What is your view on Ning?

Be competitive but don’t kill your competitors

In business competition is what keeps us on our toes, keeps us current and keeps us fighting to maintain that edge, unique selling point or maybe its the flip where it keeps us struggling to get the edge and catch up, discover our unique selling point and it can be one of the most stressful, thrilling and exciting things that keep a business going.

Now I had a chat just the other day with one of my competitors and it wasn’t hands round their throat, instead it was a civilized drink and chat to discuss not in too much depth each others businesses and where we are heading. Who says you have to be ruthless with the competition and can’t be civilized.

I saw recently an advert from said competitor that got my uneasy about some of the direction and current position both my business holds and theirs also so with just a phone call a meeting was setup and we discussed things. Now don’t get me wrong when it comes to business and anything really I am extremely competitive. Just for the case that you got your new laptop a day before mine arrived will agitate me slightly – but back on business having the competitive edge is really important but you do not need to low ball your competitors to out perform, out sell or plain out beat them.

Our hour long discussion ranged from what we were planning “more or less” to do in the second half of the year and what demographic for certain items we were focusing on and this led to a very interesting discussion as it would seem that someone who in 2009 was a direct competitor in 2010 we are taking separate paths and not only that but over the course of the next 6 – 12 months could see a collaboration between the two businesses that will complement each other and be highly beneficial.

Moral of the story is just because you competite doesn’t mean you should ignore. Get to know your competition and not just from a market perspective, you never know you could end up being regular golf buddies, drinking friends, go out for meals and so much more and if business comes into play then it can lead to very interesting conversations.

Always keep in mind how much you talk to your competitor about your business, you wouldn’t want to be giving TOO much away.

What is your view on competition, would love to hear it!