Stuart R. Crawford

Are you on Facebook? How about LinkedIN? Do you have a blog? Are you leveraging all the social media tools that are available to you and your business? Many IT Professionals do not leverage the power of social networking as a way to promote your business and the services that you provide to the industry.  The only question I have is why not?  Social media is a very cost effective tool to promote your business and you can do it for free.  Now of course there are some guidelines that you need to follow.

My good buddy Will Kriski has a blog called “The Wealthy Worker“, I highly recommend that you put this one in your RSS feeds or get it via email.  Will has some pretty good stuff.  I like his approach on leveraging the Internet and consulting to businesses on the power of the net.  This is where you will make some serious money in 2009, leveraging the power of the net.

Now, saying that, I was having a coffee with another friend of mine yesterday who is looking at his entire web presence and how he does business on the net.  Now, of course he is struggling because he needs someone like Will or myself who really understand the power of social networking, social media and the power it has.  What shocked me was some of his statements about his website.  This is one of those business suicide moves that I always talk about.

In our chat, he mentions that he doesn’t want to do any lead capture, no newsletter and no blog.  Wait a second, you have a world surfing around looking for your services, you have a Facebook list as long as your arm, you are using Twitter and other tools to meet new people and you don’t want to capture those leads.  Hello, are you going back to the stone age here?

The Internet is here for our picking, we need to get out there and start marketing our businesses to use this great tool that is available.  I came up with with a quote once.

The Internet is no longer a tool, it is the toolbox

That is exactly what it is, it is a toolbox and your tools are thing like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, Blogs, Wikis etc.  We need to start leveraging these tools that are available to us today.

Here is how you can link up with me

Facebook
LinkedIN
Blog
Twitter
Plaxo

I welcome you all to link up with me on these social platforms.  It is important now more than ever to have a strong Internet precence, even if you are just an IT tech right up to being an owner of your firm.

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Have you heard of this terminology in the IT space yet?

If you haven’t where have you been, you see it pays to get out of your office from time to time and attend conferences, be part of a peer group and communicate with those in your industry.  Even if it is attending a group like SAMUC.  SAMUC is a local Calgary focused Microsoft Partner Community that shares the business side of technology and Microsoft solutions.  But, enough on SAMUC.  Visit www.samuc.com for more information.

Early this week I participated in a great webinar with my friends at integratedmar.com on their Trusted Business Advisor program, you can read the write up on the webinar here.  In the write up I was quoted on something I said during the webinar and it is pretty important for all the VAR’s, SBSC’s, Microsoft Partners etc out there.

“If you are a VAR and are still pushing the technical reasons why clients should invest in technology and not understanding the business reasons why they need to, [you're] going to be left behind,” said Stuart Crawford, president, IAMCP Canada. “We’ll see a number of resellers close the doors this year because they don’t understand the fundamentals of why companies are leveraging technology to make better business decisions.”

I was having a chat with a colleague who works with a Microsoft Partner here in Calgary the other day about being a TBA in today’s world, and you know something there are still a number of IT Pro’s out there that still don’t understand the importance of playing the business advisor role when it comes to technology support.

During this conversation we were discussion accounting systems for small business and the response my respected friend told me that it was the client’s decision on what accounting system to use and their responsibility to find one.  This is totally old school thinking and it will kill your business.

In my early days of doing IT consulting, boy, I am going back about 10 years now.  Understanding the business reasons why my clients leveraged technology was just a natural behaviour for me.  I took the responsibility to create long term relationships with local and national vendors and facilitated the introduction, decision making and eventually the deployment of a new solution.  I was involved throughout the process, I never ever handed it off to a client and said “there, make up your mind and get back to me”.  Clients don’t want that, they hire an IT consultant to hold their hand throughout the process.

In today’s gloomy economic conditions it is my belief that those of us who get this will remain strong in business and work with our clients through the economy rough times ahead so that they can survive and leverage technology so that they are successful and those of us who simply say there you go, will close the doors to their business for a very long time.

I can’t make it anymore clear here, we need to be TBA’s today!

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I am going to shift gears a little today from what I have been blogging about over the past couple of days - Yes, Microsoft, you get a day off.  However, not a long day off, I will be talking about the value of my TPAM over the next few days.

The Purpose of Christmas

Today’s post is a reflection on a great book I have been reading for the past couple of days by Rick Warren called “The Purpose of Christmas”.  Over the past several years I just viewed Christmas as a time of year that many business didn’t enjoy a healthy revenue stream, because we shut the doors and we weren’t billing.  Boy what a big change in my life since those days.

This year I reconnected with my family over the holiday season.  I enjoyed decorating the 1 1/2 Christmas trees in our house, we have a big one and a small one.  I have enjoyed spending time with my spouse doing things we haven’t done in a while.  We toured Confederation Park the other day and checked out the Christmas light displays.

I have been fortunate to have most of the month of December off since my days at IT Matters are coming to a close over the next few weeks and really got to spend time with me and then time with my family.  We also invested a tremendous amount of time in friends and inviting them into our home and sharing the Christmas season with them.

I know some of you who read my blog may not share the same commitment to faith as I do, and trust me I didn’t for the longest time and yes I still have a long way to go.  I am thankful to my friends Arlin, Rick, and Brad who have shown me the way to reconnect with God and all that He has to offer.

In Rick Warren’s book “The Purpose of Christmas” it is exactly what I have been writing about, it is the real reason for the season.  Yes, trees, Santa and all the Christmas commercialization are part of our culture, however it is not the real reason we celebrate Christmas.  Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, who was sent to earth to basically take care of us and offer us salvation.  Sure, I can go into a lot of Bible passages and stuff, but I won’t.  My purpose for writing this post today is to share this book with you.  It is a very easy read and worthwhile read.

I highly recommend it.

Order it online here

OK, I will share just one passage with you “If God is with us, who can be against us” this is from Romans 8:31 and something that I believe fully.  Especially today, what has really seen me through life over the past few months is the knowledge that I am sitting in the passenger’s seat and God is at the controls.

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For all my Microsoft friends, honestly I am not picking on you guys.  Even though I posted on how I am trying out Google Apps for my stuartcrawford.com domain email and calendar I still love Microsoft.  Now with stating this, I am also using Firefox for my web browser and I have fallen in love with Firefox.  Why am I using Firefox?  It has nothing to do with the patch that is coming out - more on this later.  When I was looking at Office Live, it wouldn’t work on Internet Explorer 8 and one of the recommendations was to install and use Firefox.  Wow, Interesting from Microsoft to recommend Firefox.

Now back to the issue of the day.  Microsoft identified a huge security concern with versions on Internet Explorer ranging from IE 5 to IE 8 Beta 2.  So Redmond, you have a challenge here.  The next patch Tuesday is not until January 9th, 2009, however we may see a patch to fix this prior to the next schedule release date for patches.

What is up with Internet Explorer these days?

There is a security flaw with Internet Explorer that could allow a malicious hacker to take over your computer system.  Not to worry, only 0.2% of the users across the world have fallen victim to this hole in Internet Explorer.  Read the story here - http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3189.

Now I am a huge fan of Microsoft, don’t get me wrong.  Microsoft has allowed me to make a pretty good living providing Small Business in Calgary with solutions that make sense for their business.  After all, I wouldn’t recommend any Open Source solutions to clients, it has to be Microsoft, because they work and can be supported without having a rocket scientist degree.

Microsoft does work around with a huge target on their back, while their competitors like Firefox can usually have a bug found and it would never make the morning news here in Calgary like this one did today.  So yes, it must be tough with a constant target on your back.  So let’s lay off of Microsoft just a bit.  You know something if you give me all day to find a bug in a piece of software I would find one.

Microsoft is being accountable to their users and getting this problem fixed as soon as they can.  However, it is Christmas and Microsoft employees have families as well that need Christmas gifts and credit card bills to pay.  They are like you and I.

Here is the official Microsoft Security announcement for the Internet Explorer security advisory 961051 vulnerability.  Click Here.

One last note, this vulnerability was made public on Dec 10, 2008.   It is amazing how slow people react to this

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Many of my colleagues have been pressuring me to try out Google Apps, especially mail and calendaring.  For the past several weeks, I have been wrestling with calendar syncing since I am no longer on a BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) and I have to admit that I am very frustrated with having to cradle my Blackberry.  Way to many duplicates in my calendar and lost appointments.

So these friends of mine talked me into trying out Google Mail and Calendar for my stuartcrawford.com domain. I have to admit that I admire the concept of having a service like this in the cloud. My beliefs are that cloud computing will be the standard in the future. Will it be Google or Microsoft, I am not sure yet!  The cloud is here are you prepared for it?  Can you feel comfortable recommending cloud based services to your clients or do you suffer from what many IT Professionals have - the fear of change!

I like the idea of having Google host my email and calendar and that I can share it with my colleagues and my family. Thanks Fraser for the tip on having the family link in to my calendar, that alone is totally awesome -  plus my colleagues can see what I am up to and book meetings with me - without the need for Microsoft Exchange.  The downside is that in Outlook and where I can see the average user can become frustrated with the IMAP folders and also having a Personal Folders for Contacts and Calendar items.  These really need to come together before any real traction happens in business.

So in my Professional opinion, Google Mail and Calendar has a lot of work to do to catch up to what a Microsoft SBS Server or even Hosted SBS and Hosted Exchange can offer a small business. Now with lots of work ahead to get it up to speed with Microsoft’s offerings, Google is a firm that can actually do it. I am looking forward to what the future brings for this. In order to really make it ready for prime time, Calendaring, Contacts and other MS Outlook functions need to be in one central location.  Let me repeat that, it has to be in one location inside Outlook or a mail client.  This is why I don’t like CRM solutions that can’t offer a central link to the main Outlook folders.

I can see Google Mail and all their other services work wonders for the small business or just a couple of guys working and don’t have the budget for their own server and then add in the complexities of IT support.  I always say that any small business needs to have an expert close by, either a Microsoft Small Business Specialist or qualified IT Professional. You need an IT Professional who is a Trusted Business Advisor and not just a technician.

Try out Google and see if it works for you.

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