Cautionary tale of the new social marketing tools

Andrew Smith out of Scotland has a very interesting article on the pitfalls of not properly understanding the true cost of providing a large discount online through sites such as Groupon.

The article breaksdown the true costs of one British photographer who's online deal might have cost him the next 12 months of revenue.

You can find the article here.

One man's business flight recommendations

For what it's worth... As a frequent flyer, I have many times refined my strategies to limit frustrations and headaches. Finding the proper balances of convenience versus time is tricky. Take these recommendations for what they're worth, keeping in mind that most of my travels lately have been in North America.  International destinations were a lot more common for me between 1999 to 2008.

Luggage can be the root of many problems during travel. Lost or delayed bags, the wait at the carrousel that can be up to 30 minutes, running out of overhead room in your plane, etc... can make a stressful situation unbearable.  If you can, limit yourself to carry-on bags only. However, many individuals will do the same and unless you are willing to risk having your suitcase take up most of your foot space, plan ahead. Many airports and airlines will allow you to check-in up to 24 hours before departuyour unless you are part of that airline's frequent flyer executive program, take advantage of this to move your seat to the back of the plane (keep in mind that many times the last overhead storage bin is used by the flight attendants). All airlines will board in the following order; those requiring extra time, first class, top level members of their reward programs and then the rest of the cabin moving from the back of the plane forward. Being at the back ensures you will have room for your bags as you will be one of the first on the plane. Other benefits include a greater chance of not having someone beside you and better seats as they used less often.  Keep in mind, you will exit last (not a problem as you do not have any checked bags) and you might not get your first pick of the in-flight food. Window or aisle? If you don't mind asking for the person beside you to get up when you need to go to the bathroom, get the window. You never get inconvenienced by someone wanting to get up, people and carts moving down the isles do not hit you, you control the window shades and you never risk the overhead bags falling on your head during a rough landing. I've seen this happen twice.

Once again, these are my personal recommendation based purely on my experiences and discussions with colleagues and clients.  If you have your own recommendations, please share them in the comment section below.

Microsoft Hosted Exchange and Google Apps SLA versus internal up times

The holy grail of corporate uptime is 99.999%. Meaning that for any given week, the server only goes down for a few seconds.  A great goal that is rarely met.  True that week over week, when things are good, corporate uptime can be nearly 100%.  However when things go bad, such as a server crashes, hard drive failures, network issues can result in hours, even days without connectivity.  Hardware failures are the hardest to recover from as backups and redundancies require the primary hardware to be up and running.  As a result, corporate uptime is frequently below 99.5% when measured yearly.

Both Microsoft(and partners) and Google offer guarantees with their paid solutions.  The 99.9% uptime guarantees offer money back or credits for downtime that exceed these benchmarks.  This measurement equals downtimes of less than a few minutes a week.  Additionally, Amazon S3 and Rackspace offer similar uptime guarantees.

When making a decision on your email ecosystem, keep in mind that cloud-based solutions offer similar or greater security, uptimes and features while reducing direct and indirect costs, speed of execution and capital costs.

Backing up your cloud

Software, services and platforms-as-a-platform provide countless growth, cost and management advantages over rolling out these services in-house. Data reliability is also greater as these services offer greater data redundancy and backups than is usually available internally. As a result, they are highly reliable and data loss is rare. Human error is the main consideration as accidental deletes or changes can be costly mistakes.

The reliability that comes with these prividers ensure that the files you have are accessible should something happen on their side, many of these services do not allow you to recall files you've deleted or rollback to previous versions. Additionally, data portability which will allow you bring your data to a new service should you wish to move on also deserves consideration. Data exporting (for portability) is available in many of the better solutions such as Google Docs, Facebook, Squarespace... However not every solution offers this and as a result this should be a strong consideration when choosing your provider or investement. Third party solutions have started popping up to automatically (daily) backup your data. Backupify is an example of a solution that will backup your Google Docs, emails, sites, Facebook data, Twitter posts and more. These backups are automatic, accesible from any browser and the data can be re-inserted as needed for certain services. Other services such as Spanning Backup keep multiple versions of the same documents allowing you to rollback to a previous version, however it is limited to documents, calendars and contacts.

In short, ensure and demand that you can access your data should you wish to leave and move on to a competitor. Access your risk of human error and implement the backup solution that best meets your needs.

In this post:

• Backupify www.backupify.com
• Spanning Backup www.spanningbackup.com

The advantages (so far) to Google Docs

ReTool Consulting is a strong supporter of Google Docs.  Having reviewed the alternatives, it was quickly determined to be the best solution, even preferred over Microsoft Office, this is why.

Data loss due to power failures, unexpected reboots or human error are common with desktop Office applications, especially if auto-save functionality hasn't been properly configured and assuming you are working on a previously saved file. Google Docs instant save feature removes that concern.  Should you close the application, suffer a reboot or internet downtime, Docs will have every change you made until then (minus a possible few seconds of work).  Even files that we never saved can be found in your work folders with a generic "New document" title that you can rename later.  Accessing files from a growing list of personal devices such as work laptops, home PCs (possibly Windows at the office and Mac at home), smartphones, tablets and netbooks can be difficult requiring to save documents to USB keys, online storage solutions or simply emailing files around.    This often results in multiple versions of the same document with changes having to be reconciled.  As these device all access the web, you can work off the exact same file no mater where you are within docs.  Document sharing with colleges and friends is done in a similar awkward fashion unless your organization has implemented an expensive Sharepoint server to host and monitor files. Docs not only provides the ability to easily share your document with whomever you wish, you can easily monitor who is currently working on your file and see changes as they happen.

Although Google Docs addresses all of these issue in a simple and efficient manner, online apps do have limitations versus there locally installable counterparts. For example; grammar verification, effects, pivot tables, templates and so on all have limited or no equivalents in Google Docs. That said, if after running Google Docs you determine you cannot live without these features, you can easily combine the best of both worlds by using Microsoft Office as the editing tool while leveraging all of the collaboration functionality of Google Docs.  Just remember to click save every few minutes.