Effective Communication Related to Employee Benefits has a wide range of positive benefits. The most important one is staff satisfaction. A happy and satisfied pool of staff always results in better output and thereby company growth.

Research shows that effective communication, regarding staff benefits can reduce the cost by as much as twenty percent. Moreover effective communication regarding employee benefit helps in retaining good staff, with increasing their productivity. This also helps in generating a positive work atmosphere and securing employee loyalty.

Better understanding:
Understanding the needs of the employees is very important, as needs vary with the employee demographics. Benefits become worth to the employee only if they meet their needs and expectation.

To understand their needs and expectations it is always a good idea to partake surveys. The surveys can be designed in many ways, and they can be done in a variety of process to get the maximum number of response. Surveys through emails, desktop pop-up surveys and the old way of putting it down on pen and paper are the best options. It can be good option to use professional services for the purpose.

Visual Communication:
Visual method of interaction not only captures attention faster, it also sends message precisely. Using screen saver messages as staff awareness programme regarding their benefits can be a good option. Also interactive presentations or screensavers can help staff interact and find links to more information on the relevant place.

An in-house magazine with FAQs about employee benefits and stories regarding them can also be another option. Use the notice board or danglers or posters to grab attention. Use different channels to communicate with your employees about their benefits, as each has a different way of finding information. Short messaging services can also prove to be quite helpful.

Keep it short and simple:
Most of the staffs are not expert when it comes to understanding the benefits offered to them. Using simple and comprehensive language makes it easy for them to understand and the communication effective. Helping the staff to see and understand what is in there for them will increase their confidence and loyalty.

Adding checklists and tip sheets can be a good option, as that will help employees choose appropriately. Develop a FAQ section, where employees can ask or enquire their doubts and have them clarified. This will become an asset in the long run for you.

Coordinate Employee Benefit Communication:
Develop an internal newsletter or in-house magazine. There you can publish benefits available and how employees are getting benefited from them. This will be an interesting read for people who are thinking of taking benefits. You can have an ‘ask me’ section in there, where employees can have their queries solved regarding their benefits. Articles from employees on the same topic can prove to another way of boosting or encouraging them to use benefits. You can use the benefit of online magazines for the same as well, and send it to the desktop of employees.

Reminding and Prompting:
Use desktop scroll tickers to remind and prompt the employees. This can be used to display the headlines and updates about the employee benefits in offer. Using desktop pop-ups can also be a good tool to use. Mailers and other conventional stuff are also to be used for reminding them about the benefits, important dates, deadlines and everything regarding employee benefits.

Epilogue:
Promoting wellness programmed and health check-up for the employee and their family can boost morale and loyalty. Using all possible channels to communicate about employee benefits is the best option, while keeping it simple in description. On more important thing is to encourage employees to come for discussion regarding their needs as well as doubts. Most importantly never forget to thank the employees, in whatever they do. These magic words can still do wonders.

About the author: Alyssa is a blogger by profession. She loves writing, reading and travelling. She contributes to AEF Schools

Carbon footprint is defined as the amount of carbon dioxide gas produced in the environment by electricity consumption and transportation and heating. It has become an alarming issue in the present day life. Unless people are aware of the problem they cannot take measures to reduce carbon footprint in their homes and workplaces.

Reduction of carbon footprint will improve energy efficiency in offices and save money. Eco friendly products and gadgets are in trend these days and are being used to save energy in the offices, even in the administrative offices of hotels and resorts. Some products use less packaging, some use less power, and others run off sun or water or make us aware of the amount of electricity consumed. Tech companies are concentrating on developing greener products and gadgets for better sustainability.

Different gadgets and products

In office people should use products that can be recycled and re-used. There are eco-friend products that are perfect for any offices. These sustainable products used in workplace are laptop bags, water-powered clock, vampire slayer, DEX-ECO mouse, LED desk lamp, water-powered calculator, ProFormance mouse pad, hand-powered paper shredder, USB cell batteries and NeoGear eco-friendly speakers.
• Greensmart makes book bags, messenger bags and laptop sleeves made of recycled plastic bottles. They cost $24.99 to $59.99.
• Water-powered clock runs on salt water and battery is not needed. It costs $19.
• Four different light spectrums with LED desk lamp. It costs $59.99.
• DX-ECO is a battery free mouse and has a micro USB rechargeable cable which refills in about three minutes. The mouse costs $12.99.
• NeoGear speakers are environmental friendly and are available in market for $23.94.
• ProFormance mouse pad looks like leather but in reality it is made of 70% post-consumer waste. It is recyclable and costs $23.94.
• USB cell batteries can very easily recharge from any USB port. They cost $17.56.

These gadgets are not only used in high tech companies but also in administrative offices of well known hotels and resorts where stand-by savers and mobile phone enviroplug are also used.

Fabrik’s USB hard drive is considered to be the world’s greenest hard drive. It consumes 90% less electricity than other conventional hard drives. It turns on only when the computer is powered up. Besides the recycled aluminum fence disperses heat from Energy star-compliant power supply and conserves energy. This avoids the need for cooling fans.

It is made from bamboo veneer. The drive costs $160. Voltaic Generator Laptop Bag can soak up sun using solar panels and stores it in an onboard battery. The bag can not only laptops but also phones and MP3 players via USB port, included adapter or integrated 12-volt car charger. The voltaic generator laptop bag costs $600.

Dell Studio Hybrid which starts at $500 is the greenest desktop of Dell. It is provided with included wireless mouse and keyboard. The entire system comes with a recycling kit and the whole packaging is recyclable. It has a Blu-ray player for watching high-def movies on HDTV.

All the above intelligent energy saving gadgets, used in different offices reduces carbon footprint and ensure a healthy and sustainable environment in the workplace.

About the author: Alyssa is a blogger by profession. She loves writing, reading and travelling. She is an avid golfer and loves shopping from ShipSticks.

All customer facing services and support staff had a banner applied to outbound emails that included a personal message informing clients that service levels were being monitored, and requesting them to rate their services as shown below.

Using multiple links and click alert features, all recipients had to do was click on one of the options and an email alert was delivered in real time to a central customer services inbox monitored by the client. Any negative responses were able to be dealt with in the appropriate manner.

Using cloud based technology, email branding is easy to incorporate into any business and is extremely cost effective. There is no need to purchase additional equipment or software, and no complex IT changes to be made.

Branding images and messaging are embedded into the emails, so they load instantaneously and are unaffected by spam filters. Banners are completely customisable, allowing businesses to target certain messages to specific recipients or groups of recipients.

Bold Horizon

Advertising is always marketing, but marketing is not just advertising. Often when we ask new clients what marketing they do, we get “we advertise in the yellow pages and newspaper”, or a similar answer.

Put simply, advertising is a means to communicate a message to the public. The businesses we work with realise that marketing is much more than just placing newspaper or radio adverts and hoping for a positive result. Marketing includes the development of a sound strategy to promote the company, and the successful implementation of that strategy.

You need to know who your target market is, what their needs are, and how you are going to communicate your unique value proposition to the market. It is about what you say, who you say it to, and how you say it.

Marketing and advertising do rely on each other for success. If you have a marketing strategy, some form of advertising campaign will be required to get your message out there. But without the support of good marketing, any advertising you do is likely to fall flat.

David Ogilvy, often referred to as the Father of Advertising, knew the importance of understanding customer’s needs and presenting these in a compelling manner. He once said "What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form."

So for your advertising to be effective, it needs to be based on an effective marketing strategy that provides you with:

• a clear understanding of customer needs and how you satisfy those needs
• the right messaging to portray the benefits to potential customers
• the best channels to use to talk to those customers

Only then you will see an improved return on investment from your advertising spend. For many small to medium sized companies, financial assistance of up to $5,000 is available for us to work with you developing a marketing strategy. It’s a smart investment in the long-term success of your business.

Bold Horizon

Combined with Email Brander™, the service provides businesses with a comprehensive marketing solution that works on every email sent by every individual within the organisation. It is a must have for any business that has three or more email addresses.  It is very easy to implement (no software to install) and completely scalable to suit any size business, with any number of branches. If you want to achieve consistent branding, add impact to your emails and engage with you customers, this new service puts the control of your company email signatures firmly back in your hands.

Bold Horizon is pleased to be able to offer Email Brander™ and Email Signature™ within New Zealand.

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You should look at your website through five sets of eyes:

• Copywriter eyes
• Visual eyes
• Usability eyes
• Conversion eyes
• Search engine optimisation eyes

Copywriter eyes

There’s an art to writing website content that reads well to both humans and search engine robots. The practice of stuffing in as many keywords as possible is easy to spot and makes for content that is irritating to read. People read content, so write for your audience first, and search engines second. People buy from you, people enquire about your services, robots do not.  Excessive repetition of a keyword will almost always see your site penalised by search engines.

Visual eyes

First impressions count for a lot. Think about how many times you have clicked off a website because the design or layout was of a poor standard, or appeared amateurish and outdated compared to competitor’s sites. A visually attractive website that makes good use of images, colour, headings and other design elements gives you an immediate advantage.

Usability eyes

Through your usability eyes look at how content and calls to action are placed. Look at how other areas of the site are linked, both through text links and menu structure. Is the site logical and intuitive to use? Is information easy to find and where you would expect to find it?

Conversion eyes

Using Google Analytics, can you establish how many of your website visitors are being converted, whether that is to an order or enquiry? Are people leaving your site without finding what they were looking for? Design of landing pages and calls to action all play an important part in increasing your conversion rate. Ultimately if your website is not generating orders or working as a 24 hour on-call salesperson then it needs help.

SEO eyes

Once a keyword has been identified a good copywriter can produce quality content. It is then a matter of reviewing keyword usage and placement and crafting the correct meta tags. Meta tags are not just for the benefit of search engine robots, so it is crucial that these also appeal to search engine users and stand out from the other results. Depending on your particular industry, brand names, value propositions, or calls to action may need to be included in the meta tags.

In summary

Successful website optimisation relies on critically evaluating your website, implementing changes and then monitoring the results. By looking at it from five unique perspectives you will gain a better understanding of why your website is succeeding or underperforming.

Bold Horizon

Hopefully by now you understand the benefits blogging offers your business, and you are looking for ways to improve the quality of your blog and the engagement you have with your audience. Here are three tips you can use to ensure your blog is well received by readers.

Offer helpful and useful advice

Avoid turning the blog into a sales pitch. Strike a balance between promoting your company and being seen as an industry authority. Use the blog as a forum to talk about problems your customers might have and ways to solve them. Talk about ways to get more value from the products or services you provide and educate you readers.

Avoid writing generic or vague copy, instead write with a purpose that leaves people feeling they have benefited in some way from reading your blog.

Make the content easy to digest

There’s a time and a place for highly technical writing and that place is probably not your blog. Keep it enjoyable for readers by using a conversational tone. Share your knowledge of the industry and, if appropriate, entertain. Injecting some humour can add life to a blog post as long as it doesn’t detract from the meaning of your content.

Break the text into easily digestible chunks. Paragraphs need to be smaller on the web than what you would use in printed form. Around four lines or 50 words tend to be about right. Use bullet point lists if suitable, and long posts can be broken up with headings.

Make it interesting and easy to understand

There are several techniques you can use to add interest to your writing and improve understanding. Analogies are a great way to explain concepts or help the reader relate to the story you are telling. In a recent post we used the analogy of Google being a library and your website being a book, to explain the role website optimisation plays in being found on Google.

Sometimes it’s necessary to write about a topic that’s as dry as the Sahara but the information itself is important. A good metaphor is worth its weight in gold. Metaphors can be a powerful addition to your content, but over use them at your peril.

Add photos or graphics if it helps explain a concept or adds impact to the story. A well chosen, relevant graphic is always a welcome addition to a blog.

Bold Horizon

Today, many organisations rely on search engines for people to find their websites. So when Google makes changes to the way it analyses sites, ranks and displays those results, we need to know what the impact has been and react accordingly.

The last two significant Google algorithm updates send a clear signal as to the future direction Google plans to head in. Namely that it is reducing ways that you can artificially influence results using dubious practices, and it is placing increased importance on

• Quality of content
• On-site optimisation
• Site structure and performance

Ensuring that you have good quality website content is easily managed by you, although there are some content guidelines which must be adhered to.  It means that you need to be pro-active in updating your website with fresh, relevant and interesting content. A blog is a very effective way of doing this.

The next two items are more complex. Having properly crafted meta tags that accurately describe each webpage will help Google identify if a webpage contains information that is relevant and helpful. Correctly meta tagged images are also a must. Are your pages optimised for keywords that people actually search for or ones you think they search for? If the latter, we suggest keyword research is required.

Websites, like any form of technology, change over time. Design principles and functionality are continually advancing, with a year in web design being like ten years in fashion. If your site is more than two or three years old not only could it be looking dated, it may be lagging behind in functionality and its ability to perform in Google.

If anything mentioned above sounds like a foreign language or too technical, don’t panic. When it comes to website optimisation and design we pay close attention to the latest trends and keep up to date with new developments. If you want your website to perform better in Google, we are here to help.

Bold Horizon

When you think about Google, picture it as a library and your business as a book. When a customer enters the library, how are they going to find your book? Will they know which section to look in? Has your book been put in the section most relevant to the topic? Will people even know your book exists?

Unless your book is titled and catalogued correctly, it will be lost among the millions of other books on the shelf and will never be read. How do readers even know which are the most popular books?

In the context of your website, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is used to manipulate off-page factors to increase your sites popularity and Website Optimisation is used to influence on-page factors to improve your indexing. The goal of which is to increase the chances of being found in the library. Part of the process is ensuring that Google knows exactly where to best place your book in the library, and that it is the most suitable and popular book for you to read.

What we are seeing now is that Google is working to reduce the ability to artificially manipulate your position in the search results through SEO, requiring us to place more emphasis on Website Optimisation. Google constantly updates its algorithm (around 400 changes per year), so you can’t expect a website to continue performing at its best without applying the latest techniques to stay in step with Google.

For example a major update that occurred on April 24th codenamed “Penguin” has seen some high-ranking sites drop dramatically down the results due to duplication of content, link anchor text and other dubious practices  which were previously overlooked by Google.

Optimisation of your website is an ongoing process and Google is sending clear signals that it will continue to tweak the results to reward websites that follow the best practices for design, coding and quality content. If your website has been neglected through a lack of new content, or was designed more than two or three years ago it would be wise to take a critical look at it to see if current best practices of are being applied.

Read more about the art of website optimisation.

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While businesses readily acknowledge a website is essential, many overlook the important role a blog plays as part of the marketing strategy. A blog is a highly effective tool to promote your business for a number of reasons.

Search: Google loves fresh, high quality content. When used effectively, a blog will improve your search engine ranking. Too many companies build a website, load the content, and never add to it in any way. A stale or stagnant website has little appeal to Google or potential customers. It is crucial that you have up-to-date and helpful content if you are to be even considered.

Be an industry leader: The internet has made it incredibly easy for people to shop around and compare products or services. Buyers seek information from those that are seen to be knowledgeable and helpful, so smart brands position themselves as respected industry leaders. Done well, a blog allows you to provide information as an expert in your field. Make it easy for visitors to find the information that is most important to them.

Brand development: Blogs allow you to continue telling your brand story and expand on what makes you better than your competition. It lets you talk about indirect benefits of dealing with your company that may resonate with certain niche groups. For example you can mention your environmental policy, or ways you support the community.

Easy redistribution of content: You need to start engaging with your market. Once you have created the content for the blog, add a link to it on Facebook, Google+, Linkedin – whatever social media platforms you are involved with. This gets you in front of more people and provides the opportunity for people to like, repost, share and comment on your blog article.

If you are not actively blogging we recommend you start. Decide on who will be responsible for blogging, how frequently posts will be added and get writing.

Bold Horizon

A great marketing strategy can be the difference between a mediocre business and one that is highly successful. It helps align your unique value proposition with your customer’s needs, defines effective ways to engage with your market and much more.

The importance of a having an effective brand marketing plan is recognised by NZ Trade and Enterprise, the Government’s economic development agency. Through its Accelerate Success initiative, the organisation is providing eligible businesses with a substantial subsidy to develop one. The subsidy is available to almost any small to medium sized business and you do not need to be an exporter to qualify.

As a Registered Service Provider for Accelerate Success, Bold Horizon can now work with you to develop a brand marketing plan with up to 50% of the cost paid for by NZTE. This is a comprehensive marketing strategy based on Need Satisfaction Marketing, where you gain a clear understanding of the needs of your target market in order to build a strong value proposition that will resonate with buyers and result in sales.

The programme we develop does require your involvement, as part of the process is that you are being mentored and gaining new skills as opposed to us doing all the work for you. We structure the programme so that there are several interactive sessions in between periods where both parties have specific tasks to complete before the next session.

We like to see our clients develop a better understanding and capability of marketing through the interactive sessions. With the inclusion of our philosophy and methodology you will receive a valuable and highly actionable marketing plan that will define your business and act as a valuable reference point when making marketing or advertising decisions.

The first step is to discuss your requirements and develop a specific programme for your business. We then provide you with a quote to complete the programme and arrange an appointment with a representative from Opportunity Hamilton to assess your eligibility. We will assist with your funding application, so no need for you to stress about it.

If you feel your business would benefit from a smart marketing strategy, we would love to hear from you.

Bold Horizon

When it comes to being found in search engines there are two broad strategies. The first is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) which aims to lift your website’s presence higher in the organic results. The second is using Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, such as Google Adwords. Both strategies are crucial to achieve online marketing success.

Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages (SERPs) that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to the paid adverts which are there because the advertiser wants to target that keyword. In the past there had been some reluctance to click on paid results but, recent survey data shows this is not necessarily the case anymore. The survey found that adverts at the top of the search results received very high click through rates, although right column adverts did not perform as effectively.

Few companies are fortunate enough to appear on page one of Google, but the importance of being on page one cannot be underestimated. The reality for most companies is that a PPC campaign is required to generate website traffic, and as such part of your annual advertising budget should be set aside for this purpose.

Even if you are on page one of Google, there is a rapid drop in click-through-rates as you move down through positions two to ten. Because of this you should still commit some advertising budget to PPC ads.

In stark contrast to traditional advertising, PPC is low cost, highly targeted, and the results can be accurately measured. PPC allows you to immediately change any aspect of your campaign and react to changes in the market. Some planning, a compelling ad, and identifying the target market are prerequisites to starting any ad campaign and PPC is no different in this respect.

Its a case of not putting all your eggs in one basket. PPC campaigns lead to instantaneous results while organic SEO will produce lasting results, even though it will take longer to do so. Many of the largest companies in the world recognise the important part PPC advertising plays in online marketing, so shouldn’t you be using it too?

Bold Horizon

If you haven’t noticed the subtle changes to how paid advertisements (Google Adwords) appear at the top of your Google search results, you're not alone. Over many months Google has made these ads less distinguishable from their organic counterparts.

Results of a survey just completed in America show that the changes have been successful in blurring the line between paid and organic results, with many users only able to identify the results in the right column as paid advertising.

Some interesting findings were:

• Google ads attract 64.6% of clicks for high commercial intent keyword searches
• The top organic listing received only 8.9% of clicks
• 45.5% of people didn’t identify the results at the top of the page as being paid adverts
• 89% of traffic generated from paid ads is new traffic outside of organic reach

High commercial intent keywords relate to terms such as “home theatre”, “ wheel alignment” or other search terms people use when looking to buy.  Searches for information, such as “John Key”, have been excluded from the data.

So how has this happened? Some of the changes include:

• “Sponsored links” changed to “Ads – why these ads”
• Paid ads layout and appearance is virtually the same as organic results
• Ad  background colour made more subtle to provide less differentiation

The Adwords background colour is now so subtle that on some screens, my Dell laptop for example, it is not even visible.

The number of ads has also increased. Not only are there top and right column ads, but footer ads also appear on some searches. To make it even more challenging to be found organically, Google is dedicating a higher proportion of above-the-fold space to paid adverts. Research from econsultancy.com found that, depending on screen resolution, only 40 per cent of Google users can see the first organic result for certain searches without scrolling down.

Given that a significant amount of Google’s revenue is from paid advertising, it is not surprising that the search engine giant is making paid advertising increasingly important.  What this does mean for businesses is that it is not just enough to rely on achieving good organic results in Google, you also need to consider supplementing this with an Adwords campaign .

View the key findings from the survey in this Google Adwords infographic

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About a month ago I wrote about the impact Google's Penguin and Panda updates have had on some websites. These updates were in response to over-zealous and dubious search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques that attempted to influence search engine results.

What we are seeing is that Google is reducing the ability to artificially manipulate your position in the search results through SEO, requiring us to place more emphasis on Website Optimisation. SEO is used to manipulate off-page factors to increase your sites popularity and Website Optimisation is used to influence on-page factors to improve your indexing. The goal of which is to increase the chances of being found by Google and shown in the search results.

Bad SEO practices, such as buying backlinks and keyword stuffing, are firmly in Google’s sights. If it deems that a website is using these techniques it will bury that site deep in the search results. SEO is not a service you can contract out to the lowest bidder or rely on automated services to do - it requires human input. Some site owners have found this out the hard way.

Google said in its Inside Search blog that it can detect a number of link schemes used to manipulate search rankings. By targeting these inorganic backlinks, Google can be sure that companies looking to give their sites a lift through low-quality methods are not given prime position in the search results, resulting in a better user experience.

We can’t stress enough that there is no shortcut to getting good search results in Google. Just like you can’t decide one weekend to play touch rugby and expect to be selected for the All Blacks in three months, good rankings take time. You need to play smart, have a good understanding of the game, and be prepared to put in the effort.

Google is working to reward websites that follow the best Website Optimisation principles. The following infographic captures the essence of what is required to get in Google’s good graces. If you are adhering to these guidelines, you will have a much greater chance of good rankings.

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Stand out in the inbox

An email sent as an image-based HTML newsletter rather than simple plain text allows you to make your email reflect your brand identity, increasing the likelihood it will be read. Photos and graphics in an email attract attention. Using an effective subject line and a personalised introduction are important in getting your email opened and read.

The mail must get through

A professional email marketing system such as Bold Horizon’s Email Marketer^TM will deliver great looking emails, monitor the number of emails opened, and enables clicks back to your website to be tracked. It will also test your email against spam filters before you send it, ensuring the highest probability that your message gets through.

Building an email database

Email marketing is more than just writing an email and hitting send. It’s a potentially complex process that relies on your ability to provide interesting content via an interactive delivery platform, to a contact list full of subscribers who want to hear from you. Your email database must contain accurate, up-to-date contact information to be of any value to you.

Segmenting your customers for great results

A valuable feature of professional email marketing is that it allows you to target specific segments of your market with different messages. Why is this important? If you want people to read your emails and respond, you must send relevant content and offers of products they will find appealing and want to buy. In other words, don’t bore people with information they aren’t interested in.

Read more about email marketing...

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Google works hard to index and return search results for pages with quality content that’s relevant and distinct. If you put in the effort to ensure your web content meets these requirements your search engine ranking will benefit.

It's unreasonable to expect every new webpage published anywhere in the world to be completely fresh, and inadvertently phrases will be repeated that have been used elsewhere. The big issue is with blatant plagiarism where only a few words have been changed.

As an example, if you are a retailer or distributor of a range of products and you decide to copy and paste product information from the manufacturer's website (something they may even encourage you to do) then your ranking will be poor. Google will see that the content on your site has been scraped from another site and as they published it first you will receive little credit for it.

But there are times when product specifications and details will need to be repeated. Try and add some unique content that your website visitors and Google will find interesting. Widespread and blatant use of copied content increases the risk that your site will be penalised or banned, but the odd reproduction of publically available, non-copyrighted data won't.

One of the techniques you can use is to "repurpose" content. In short, you rewrite the content in a slightly different manner or style of language, but still retaining the original context and meaning. This really isn't hard to do because you already have the basics written for you. It's a bit of effort but it could avoid being tagged as duplicate content.

Google have stated that when it perceives duplicate content is being used to manipulate rankings and deceive users, they will make adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result the ranking of the site may suffer or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index.

There is no point in Google displaying two pages within their top results that have exactly the same content. They will list either the most authoritative or the first to publish the content. Use this handy free tool to avoid duplicate content and help your search engine ranking. And remember: whenever you add content to your website please make it as unique as you possibly can.

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It is often said that your brand lives or dies at the point of customer service (the brand experience). Provide a better experience than your competitors and you are more likely to succeed.

Imagine for a moment that you have a successful, nationwide company and business is booming. You have more sales enquiries than you can handle and people are calling you desperate to handover their hard-earned money for your products and services. Naturally you would look to hire more people to better serve these customers and make sure the transaction is completed quickly, and with a minimum of fuss and effort.

You also know that in your industry a big frustration for potential and existing customers is the time spent on hold waiting to talk to someone. So an investment in more staff at the coal face of your business will generate great returns as customers will be so amazed by the experience they will spread the word . Your customers will love you for it and your brand image will go through the roof. From Trademe message boards to Facebook, people will be talking about how great you are compared to your competitors.

So why was it that last week one of our Bold Horizon team spent 45 minutes on hold (no doubt a priority queue) to sign up for an internet connection? Although in fairness to Slingshot they are no worse than my own internet service provider, which also suffers from ridiculously long call centre waiting times.

In a highly competitive industry, wouldn’t a company that provides a faster response to customer sales enquiries gain a significant competitive advantage? And as we all love to complain about the poor service received from telecommunications companies, wouldn’t you be so surprised to get great service you would recommend them at every opportunity?

Sadly the brand experience of many companies does not measure up to expectation. The expensive advertising that lured you there is followed by a lack of customer service that leaves you decidedly underwhelmed.

Bold Horizon

Only a few short weeks ago, one of the best things you could do you to enhance your local search engine result was to create a Google Places page for your business. Proving that when it comes to search engine optimisation the only constant is change, Google has now started to merge Places pages with their Google Plus social network, providing you with a new Google Plus Local page.

To add confusion you also have the option of creating a Google Plus Business page. Fortunately Google is working on merging these two pages together to provide a better user experience, and so that you only need to manage one listing. This is an ongoing process, but what we know at this point is:

• Your Google Places page now appears as a new-look Google Plus Local page in search results. This does not display all the photos, videos and other information that was contained on your old Places page.
• It does show reviews, a map, and the brief business description that you used on your old Google Places account. It also shows a Zagat (a Google owned company) score based on customer feedback.
• If you join the Google Plus social network, you can also create a Google Plus Business page. Without going into all the details, this is similar to creating a Facebook page and provides you with a medium through which to promote your business and interact with other Google Plus users.

Whether Google Plus becomes a credible social network is yet to be seen, but Google's intent seems to be to ensure businesses see it as a necessary part of their online marketing.

Even though these changes could take several months to rollout, our advice is to setup a Google Plus Business page (if you haven’t already) so that you maintain a presence across as many Google products as possible. It is clear that Google is moving to make search engine results as local and relevant to each user as it can. You would be wise to move with the times or risk being left behind.

Bold Horizon

Newsflash: Westpac and MYOB have announced a joint venture offering small businesses a free website for 12 months, which can be built in around 15 minutes. No doubt this will appeal to some, but the decision to have a website is not one that should be made just on the basis of it being low cost or able to be implemented the same day.

There are considerations to make before you even start building a website, and you need to be clear on what your objectives are.  Website development is a mixture of science and art, and the low-cost DIY websites generally fall short in two areas:

1)    They have been simplified so much to keep the cost down that they lack features or customisability

2)    The skill level of the individual building the site

With all due respect to small business owners, point number two is a valid one. There is disparity between having a web presence (essentially what is being offered by Westpac) and a website that tells your brand story, engages with visitors, is well indexed by Google, and is a valuable part of your marketing toolbox. There is a big difference between reading how to do something and actually implementing it properly.

You also have to question what the motivation for this is, as for Westpac and MYOB it is a shift away from their core business. Does a bank and an accounting software company want to collect $2.50 per month (that’s the $5 monthly fee afte

r the free period expires, split two ways) or is it purely for publicity and of limited value to small businesses? To me a bank offering website services seems to be no more logical than getting financial advice from a taxi driver.

Bold Horizon