Failure to Communicate (q)

What's your small business like? Are you running it out of your home? Do you have members of your team or staff dispersed amongst several geographic areas?

There are a plethora of communication mechanisms these days from portals, communities, web folders, virtual data centers to instant messaging, voice-over-IP, and the good old telephone. What challenges do you face as a small business? I can bet that some of those challenges are data collection and storage and voice communication (whether it be in person, per phone, per voice chat, or the like).

What's the most effective method of communication for you? Is it email? Chat? Phone? Face-to-face meetings? I'd like to know. I'd also like to share some of the challenges of starting my own business and what solutions I have found to make my life easier.

My small business started out in my home as a one-man show. I only had three things: passion, focus, and a laptop. When you are running your own show, it's pretty easy to manage your documents and data. As soon as your team grows, even from 1 to 2 people, you have to start thinking of other ways to manage data and communication.

I started out by emailing documents and data back and forth and using my home phone, mobile phone, and Skype to communicate. This all became annoying very fast. First of all, I lost track of where documents were and which version was the latest. Then with regard to communication, my home phone and mobile phone bills were slowly going through the roof. Skype annoyed me fairly quickly just because I didn't find the quality to be that great. It always sounded like I was talking to and listening to a 56k modem or something.

On the data storage side, after trying out several products such as Microsoft Groove (have to buy Office to get that) or HyperOffice (great product, just needed to lower TCO in the beginning), I happened to come across a product called "Zoho."

I don't know if you've heard of it but it offers an online collaboration portal for your small business. What that means is, you can have a team of people anywhere in the world and you all log into the same place and can see all the same documents, etc. You have your own private area for email and private documents, but the shared workspace is priceless. Here's where I can upload all documents so that my whole team can see them. Furthermore, my it keeps track of all revisions, so I don't have to worry about overwriting anything. The best part about Zoho is, it's free! You just have to register and wait for the guys to approve your account and you're in! They have a whole suite of online products so that you can manage your customer relationships (Zoho CRM), manage projects (Zoho Project), create your own web applications (Zoho Creator), and several more. I mostly use Zoho Mail and Zoho Project because that's what I do. So that solved our data storage and management situation (although as we continue to grow, we will probably grow out of Zoho).

Now for the communication aspect. I don't know about you all, but I live online. I need to be able to connect to my team as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. And my team is all over the place. As I said, Skype became a no-go after a while and once I found this new product, I completely dropped all my other messenger programs and accounts. I only use goober IM. Just the name alone is great and fits our company personality. The main reason why I "converted" to goober is because of the enhanced (and secure!) chat functionality and because of the quality of telephone calls I receive with it. Here's a quick snapshot of the features goober offers today:

• Secure multi-chat
• Free voice chat from PC to PC
• Integration with MSN and ICQ messenger contacts (integrating soon with Yahoo!, AIM, Jabber, Google Talk, and IRC)
• Text messaging: you can send a text message from goober and the receiver will see it's from YOU not some random name or number
• Secure data transfer between goober users
• Data storage and sharing with your own goober WebFolder
• Instant slideshows with your goober contacts
• Free TV & Radio from various countries around the world
• Music playlists that you can share with other goober contacts
• Unique, silly emoticons that really make you LOL
• goober is available in English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese (additional languages coming soon)
• gooberMobile - chat from anywhere
• gooberCall - kind of like a calling card, but much better quality, cheaper rates, and automatically integrates with your mobile phone address book

After I found goober, I decided to sniff around the Internet to see what I could find about them. I came across a website called yourgoober.com. This site was able to give me a clear breakdown of the features goober offers. In addition, this was the only goober website I found that offered free minutes for new and existing user registrations (and a chance to win more minutes through their slogan contest). Here's how you get the free minutes and activate them. For any small business on a tight budget, we'll take all the freebies we can get, right?

• Go to yourgoober.com
• You can choose to participate in the slogan contest or not. Either way you still get 60 minutes free.
• Click on "Personal" or "Business"
• Click on the big "Download" button
• Download and install goober
• Create new goober user account
• Be sure to activate the account by clicking on the link you receive via email
• Log into goober
• Click on the green $ sign on the top right of the Contact List window
• Enter in the information it requests
• Click on "Redeem Voucher"
• Enter the following code: EXPACK07

Now that you have goober and the free minutes, I'll give you a goober 101 on how to use them. You can dig out your computer headset, click on the little red telephone icon on the bottom of your Contact List window, and dial the desired number using that keypad (similar to Skype).

OR...if you don't like being attached to your computer while you call someone, which I don't, you can click on that link that says "No headset? Placing calls without your PC." Once you click on that, enter in YOUR telephone number (doesn't matter which one, whichever one you want to talk on) and the telephone number of the person you want to reach. Goober will then call both of you. That way you are talking through the goober network but don't have to be sewn to your PC to do it and it's usually much cheaper than dialing direct.

You can see for yourself how clear the voice quality is and how inexpensive it is to call. After every call you can click on that green $ sign to see how many minutes you've used and how much that particular call cost. Goober's website also gives you a breakdown of each country's rate for calls and sending text messages.

I hope my tips have been helpful. I'd really like to hear about your small business challenges (with regard to technology at least!) and how you've been able to resolve them.

References:
goober.de and yourgoober.com