Heather Villa » collaboration

Weekend Reading: My fav’s from this week: 5/28/10

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Fri, 28 May 2010 19:13:28 +0000

Today’s Marketing Topic: Word of Mouth Marketing (WOM) – Back in the ‘old day’s’ people used to verbally recommend products to one another It is something that many people in marketing tend to forget about in these times of social media, internet, digital billboards. Think about what works best for you when thinking about purchasing a product or services. Do you trust Marie Osmond to tell you that company ABC helped her to lose weight or do you trust your life long friend Rachel who describes exactly what she has done to drop her scale-weight down?

5 Signs You Could Be Getting More from Your Social Media Time – 5 must-know tips which indicate if you are wasting valuable time with social media. This is an article not to skip over!

Showing Bad Customers the Door – Sometimes you really need to point to the door when you have a draining, nasty, nagging customer taking up your time. Not every customer is right! Read about 4 of these “problem”clients/customers and learn how to trim the fat!

Find a Collaboration Partner That Fits Your Style – How much thought should go into putting together a team or a group of collaborators? Learn why this is such a big thing to think about before even beginning the task.

The Crowdsourcing Quagmire – Crowdsourcing? Not sure what it is? Well first, read the first 2 paragraphs of this blog and then you will know. Next read through the pros and cons of this technique and see 1 very big UH-OH by a big company when they tried their hand at crowdsourcing.

Who the Frak is Everybody? – I loved this! Do you ever find yourself saying “What if everybody thinks this is silly?”Or “Did everyone notice that my fly was down?” Who the heck is “everybody?” Sarah posted this cute rant about “everbody”.

The necessity of failure – We can learn a lot in life if we just step back and listen to what our kids are telling us. Read as this CPA talk about a lesson her daughter taught her while they were out horseback-riding!

Horrifying 12-day Cool Whip Experiment – This is easily one of the grossest things ever. So gross that I actually called up some friends to find out if they had Cool Whip in their homes – and immediately told them to chuck it! When they asked why I sent them straight to Johnathan’s blog.

Why You Should Never Charge Hourly – Is it a good idea, as a freelancer, to charge hourly? Sometimes when you present your prospective clients with hourly cost it can scare them away. Take a look at this article to help inspire a change of the hourly rate frame of mind.

Have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend and check out the rest of my favorites on HeatherVilla StumbleUpon.

Weekend Reading: My fav’s from this week: 1/15/10

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:45:33 +0000

Do Clients Need to Like You or Trust You?

Public Relations Trends for 2010

Do You Innovate with Customers in Mind?

Collaboration 3.0

10 Rules for Being Human

Forget SEO, You Need SPO: Search Person Optimization

Conan Puts The Tonight Show for Sale on Craigslist – This just cracked me up!

Read more of my favorite posts on HeatherVilla StumbleUpon.

Happy Reading!

Tools that I use in our Businesses – Virtual and Brick & Mortar

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 09:09:03 +0000

This is going to be a short post, it is something that I have been meaning to put up for awhile. I get at least a dozen questions a week either via email, twitter, phone call or another form of communication – with people asking me “What do you use for invoicing?”, “What do you use for project management?”, What do you use for X, Y, Z”. So, I wanted to take a minute and list the things that I myself use, or I have my staff at IAC Professionals, IAC-EZ or IAC University using.

FreshBooks: FreshBooks is an online invoicing and time tracking tool. Don’t be confused, it is not an accounting application – it handles billable time, billable expenses, invoicing, support tickets and document transmission. We use FreshBooks as our ‘main frame’ for client interaction. We log time to our project management system, import it into FreshBooks and bill with FreshBooks (we could log time directly into FreshBooks but our other system works a bit better for us due to our large team).

Zoho Creator: We use Zoho Creator as our centralized Database for various aspects of our companies. We use it as a CRM to keep track of leads and customers. We also track our employees, contractors, manuals, employee performance reviews, customer service surveys and more. You build your own application (or purchase one available) and it is completely custom to your needs.

Aweber Autoresponders: We use Aweber for our Ezines, Newsletters, Autoresponders and Mass Email Communication.

QuickBooks: We use QuickBooks Premium to maintain one of our businesses’ accounting, we use QuickBooks Online to maintain another and we use QuickBooks for Mac to maintain another. All around we are definitely a QuickBooks powered enterprise.

Custom Built Project Management System: No we do not use Basecamp or similar, we had a custom built project management system with FreshBooks API integration built by Becker Web Solutions, They are offering our system for resale ($2,500.00) and are more than willing to show you a demo account. Tell them that Heather Villa sent you and receive a 10% discount.

‘GoTo’ Products: We love GoToMeeting and GoToMyPC. We use GoToMeeting for online training, troubleshooting, teleconferences and staff meetings – all very important in the virtual world. We use GoToMyPC for our virtual employees to access our in-house servers (since we do not let client data leave our premises). Use any of the links above (no they are not affiliate links) for GoTo products and receive a 45 day free trial for either.

The list could go on and on – but here are some brief highlights of our other tools:

We utilize Wordpress for all of our blogs; HelpDeskPilot for our IAC-EZ Support Desk and KnowledgeBase; Pivotal Tracker for Road Mapping for IAC-EZ; Brosix for our Corporate Messenger; Spry, Joyent and Sliqua for our Hosting and Content Delivery Network; DNSMadeEasy for DNS, and Mailtrust for Email Server.

A couple of other services we use rarely or have just begun using are Egnyte for Back Ups and Unfuddle for something to do with our IAC-EZ tech/deployment department.

I know that recommendations are hard to ‘believe’ in a blog post, so let me say this – with the exception of FreshBooks, QuickBooks and Aweber – nothing listed is an affiliate link – and as for the three with affiliate link – I am a fanatic of all three and have nothing but excellent things to say.

Let me know what services you use and who has worked out well for you.

Best,

Heather

When Benchmarking Becomes Bad Practice…

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 06:35:07 +0000

Been awhile. For those of you that don’t know, I have been pretty busy with the release of www.iacez.com and www.immigracion.com.mx, so I have not had much time to blog, but this evening I am feeling a tangent coming upon.

Disclaimer: Names have been changed to protect the innocent (me) from lawsuit.

Benchmarking used to be a very common practice (and still is), however it is not real efficient in the Web 2.0 arena. Think of it this way, Web 1.0 (I know we did not call it that) was all about putting information that was once offline – online. Web 2.0 is all about collaboration and making everything on the web work for you in an efficient way.

What has happened? It has brought SaaS – Software as a Service. That is right, a service, the key word. This is not ABC Computers – calling their Tech Support outsourced overseas… this is Software as a Service, that means not only are you providing a product, but you are providing a service. I bet if you asked most of your clients/customers – they say that the service is worth more than the software. Which is why many SaaS products have built communities around their users.

So, what is my tangent? The fact that the providers of this service (Let’s call it Service #1), have users asking for things for months and years but never comply. Users ask over and over, hundreds of users, and Service #1 keeps ignoring the requests or providing lame excuses. Just so you know – that is not my tangent – let’s be honest, developing a software is hard work and it takes time, money, patience, prioritizing and thick skin. If a software service provider cannot provide something, I understand.

My tangent is when… a new provider (Let’s call it Service #2) comes into the market place with a nice service and it has a demand because it is offering what what Service #1 never offered -the common request(s) from it’s user(s) – and all of a sudden Service #1 catches wind of it and says “oh yeah we are releasing that next week or in two weeks”.

WHAT?

So let me get this straight…

1. You sell a product and service

2. Your users ask for something, repeatedly.

3. You ignore or turn them down

4. Somebody else takes the time to build it

5. Then you think it is important to do?

How is that fair to your users? It’s not.

So… two pieces of advice:

Tip 1, to Users: Be loyal to those who listen, yet at the same time fulfill your needs, there will be service or combination of services that fulfill your needs. Remember you are the paying customer, you should not need a competitor to enter the market in order to light the candle under your service providers tush in order to get what you deserve!

Tip 2, to Service Proviers: Listen to your users, they are your community, they are your followers, most times they pay your bills! Respect them, listen to them and try to please them within reason. If you can’t do something, be honest, but don’t say you can’t and then do it because someone else did it!

Well – that is my tangent and with that, I say Happy New Year and Good Night!

Best,

Heather Villa