The Savvy CIO

We’ve all done it. We’ve walked into a retail store and bought something. There’s a comfort in being able to examine the item, compare it to similar products nearby, and talk to a salesperson. Looking around the store, it’s easy to see sale and guarantee signs. When paying for the item, we don’t think twice about pulling out our cash, check or credit card. We leave the store knowing that if we are not happy with the purchase, we can return it.

Things are not always so cut-and-dried when shopping online.

According to a study done by McAfee, most online shoppers wait one to two days between visiting a site and completing a purchase. Armando Roggio at Practical eCommerce has an excellent article that explains many of the hesitations that consumers have and the reasons they abandon their shopping carts instead of making a purchase.

• Shipping charges that were too high
• Going to other sites to compare prices
• Looking for coupon codes
• Not finding their preferred method of payment
• Confusion about contacting customer service with questions
• Reluctance about providing their personal or credit card information

How can you decrease abandoned shopping carts?

read more »

I use local rail to travel in and out of Chicago every day. While waiting for the train to leave the Chicago station each evening, my laptop often reports two or three Free Public Wi-Fi connections eager to accommodate my web browsing needs.

I never connect.

Setting up bogus “Free Public Wi-Fi” connections in heavily traveled areas is a common trick of hackers and other folk with less than kind intentions.

By broadcasting a fake “Free Public Wi-Fi” connection with a packet sniffer enabled, an attacker can see everything that a person who connects to their broadcast can see, including passwords.

Here are a few security tips for travelers in need of Wi-Fi:

read more »

To balance out my previous post (perhaps rant is a bit more accurate) about Facebook and Twitter, here’s a fairly well-balanced overview of 30 Valuable Lessons Learned Using Social Media for Small Business.

My only beef? The author, while providing many good points, is in the hospitality industry. That’s business-to-consumer and somewhat of a lifestyle brand, exactly the two areas that have seen some social media success.

I still hold reservations for the near-term prospects of most social media for business-to-business industries. (Though we obviously blog and use some other targeted social media, so we’re in the pool, even if not wholeheartedly!)

Regardless, good tips for any type of business using or considering social media.

If you lend half an ear to “marketing experts”, “industry analysts” or “social media gurus”, you’ve probably heard your company should be using the social web for marketing, sales, customer support, brand awareness and about anything else you can think of. Now the “social web” can mean a lot of things of varying use, but the two tools that really get a lot of publicity are Twitter and Facebook.

Here’s my advice: Don’t believe the hype.

At least, most businesses shouldn’t.

I’m a technical consultant, so I’m sure I’m missing the marketing brilliance happening here. But the truth is, very few businesses are doing anything with tangible impact with Twitter and Facebook right now.

After watching social media and business with interest for a few years now, here’s my take: read more »

Every morning I walk about a mile from the train station to the office. This morning around 6:30am I was traversing the gray streets of Chicago when a guy I’d never met sidled up beside me.

He greeted me and I returned his greeting.

“Why’s everybody so wrapped up in themselves?” he asked.

I stopped. We talked for a little while. This fellow lived on the street. He had his own reasons for trying to get me to stop, of course. But his sense of isolation was palpable.

I’ve heard it said that one of the worst parts of poverty is being cut off from relationships. Everyone is “so wrapped up in themselves” because we don’t want to be taken advantage of, because we fear what a conversation might bring, because we believe our time is better spent at the place we’re headed to, whether work or home. It’s easier not to stop, not to listen, not to look others in the eye.

It’s hard to tend to and care for people.

At the risk of diminishing the importance of this man and the problems of poverty, can I suggest that this lesson applies in business too? read more »

Working at a tech firm, I’m surrounded by a lot of very technically savvy people.

I find, in general, very technically savvy people tend to be paranoid about privacy and security on the Internet.

This worries me.

What do they know that I don’t know?

So in a toast to technically savvy Internet paranoia, here’s a trio of Firefox browser add-ons designed with the security paranoid in mind. read more »

Check out this great story about how open source crisis-mapping software has saved lives in Haiti, Chile and elsewhere. Two people wrote the program in a few days during the 2008 Kenyan post-election violence. The result?

The Ushahidi program provides a way for volunteers to collect information from sources like text messages, blog posts, videos, phone calls, and pictures, which are then mapped in near real time. It can be used to plot everything from disasters to wars. And unlike older forms of crisis-mapping software, Ushahidi is advanced enough to paint an accurate portrait of events while remaining incredibly user friendly and easy to build on.

This is open-source software at it’s best: fast, powerful, extensible, user-friendly and leveraging existing platforms instead of reinventing every wheel.

Kudos to the folks at Ushahidi. What great work.

The Ushahidi site and a photo of the software are after the jump. read more »

Darren Rowse over a ProBlogger has some good thoughts about website and blog content for click-happy browsers. It’s a short and funny read.

Darren experimented with a video chat site called ChatRoulette. The site randomly paired him with another person, and either person can click away to a new partner whenever they want. Darren couldn’t even get others to acknowledge him before donning a clown wig.

Applying his experience to the people browsing his blog (and your website), he offers this summary of visitor behavior:

• They don’t stay till long - they’re always clicking
• They are always looking for the next best thing
• They only pause if they see something that is interesting, intriguing or completely relevant to them
• They are ruthless
• They are impulsive
• They will judge what they see within a split second of arriving on a site
• They rely upon instinct and first impressions

He has some take home lessons for interacting with this type of person on a blog or site, but it’s important to note that not every site or blog (especially business ones) should plan their web strategy around this type of visitor. read more »

Every business person knows it is cheaper to keep your current customers than to gain new ones. Customer support is often thought of as a necessary cost of business, and a cost that grows as your business grows. But good customer support is also the lowest cost means available for gaining additional sales of any form.

To do customer support well, your support reps need reliable, current information about your customers and any outstanding problems. Without good data requests are missed, responses are duplicated, and your company ends up looking incompetent at best and uncaring at worst.

A CRM can empower your staff to make your customers truly satisfied and help lower the cost of doing so.

Here are six ways a CRM can help customer support: read more »

Traditional email programs that are disconnected from everything are still the centerpiece of many a businesses’ communications. Each staff member has their own Outlook or Mac Mail or Thunderbird pulling email down from a server somewhere and storing all of their own email, contact information, company directory and calendar.

Everyone is on an email island.

Staff members have their own internal ecosystem (emails related to people related to appointments related to tasks), but there is only one way information comes in our out: through an email.

Usually staff members are also managing a separate “phone island” with contact phone numbers and voicemails completely disconnected from their email.

This is a fractured and frustrating setup.

Every person is managing two (phone and email) critical but separate communication islands. And those islands are separate from everyone else in the company as well.

There is a better way: moving email and phones from islands into a communication hub.

Here’s what I mean: read more »