* Wells Fargo hosts SMB experts
When small business becomes important, big companies pay attention. Wells Fargo Bank, one of the biggest of the big, is halfway through a series of Webcasts aimed at small businesses. I know the details first hand because I had the privilege of being one of the panelists on a Webcast slated to air Aug. 15 (register here).
I think you know me pretty well by now, since this is newsletter #251, so I won’t list my credentials. The other two panelists are Denise Wakeman, co-founder of The Blog Squad, and Russell Morgan, founder and president of ITSPA (Information Technology Solutions Providers Alliance). Wells Fargo is ably represented by Debra Rossi, an executive vice president at Wells Fargo.
Wakeman, as one might expect from a blog expert and coach, started blogging about the process immediately. She even got some candid shots from the set, including me misbehaving. (She says she wants to interview me for information on small business technology, and I’ll demand to interview her at the same time on better ways for small businesses to reach more customers through blogging. Stay tuned for dueling notepads at twenty paces.)
My topics focused on saving money, getting the best value for the dollar spent, and protecting assets like data files. I suggested saving hundreds of dollars per computer by using OpenOffice rather than Microsoft Office, getting more value for your phone dollar by moving to VoIP, and protecting assets by using centralized storage and backing up your data files. I even get to do my Johnny Depp imitation when explaining the Pirate Backup System (ARR).
Rossi talked about the bank’s Merchant Payment Solutions and what companies need to do to start selling online. Although I always enjoy making fun of idiot vice presidents, Rossi falls squarely into the smart vice president category.
Of course, you can’t sell anything from your Web site if no one knows about it, so Wakeman started explaining how to use various marketing tools like blogs to find and attract customers. The fact she was invited reinforces her point, since Wells Fargo found her through her blogs.
Morgan wrapped the various threads with a security wrapper and explained how businesses can best measure the value of added technology. If you don’t know how to measure success in your business, you have problems. To work your way through such problems, a relationship with a solutions provider will help. It’s best to find a partner you feel comfortable with before everything crashes down around your ears.
The tricky job of coordinating the panelists fell to Robb Boyd of Cisco and co-host of that company’s TechWise video shows. No doubt, Cisco employees behaved better than we did, but Robb handled everything quite well.
I have to say that as a writer, I believe text provides the most efficient learning experience for most people. If you already know a topic, you can skip ahead. If you don’t understand a paragraph, you can go back and reread it easily. However, TV so dominates our world that video on the Web, like this upcoming Webcast and all those done by Boyd at Cisco and Keith Shaw and Jason Meserve on the Network World video pages, captivate us. Add in the ability to rewind a video presentation on your computer to catch what you miss, and you now have almost as good a learning system as text. Of course, the auditory and visual learners who prefer to hear spoken words and see people’s face learn more from video than text, so they’re happier.
If all this sounds like I believe small businesses should look into blogging and even video to help explain themselves and their products and services, that’s exactly right. Customers buy products from people and companies they like, and these new ways of reaching out and introducing yourself to customers make it easy to establish a relationship. The videos can be homegrown like mine or have all the production value of a network television program like Cisco and Wells Fargo. But any outreach will improve your standing in customer eyes.
