About BizTech101

It used to be easy enough… master email and you were a tech guru. Now if you don’t have your own Twitter account, Podcast, Blog, Linked In network, Facebook and MySpace pages, to name a few of the new kids on the block, you are no doubt feeling left behind. The good news is that most people are wasting their time with these tools… a huge productivity drain.

Even before Twitter came along in full force, a study way back in 2007 of 3,500 companies in the UK found that sites such as Face Book were costing firms 233 million hours of lost productivity each month.

While the social network evangelists will tell you not to worry… that all those hours chatting with friends was actually done by employees that “got it” and were indeed establishing helpful business partnerships and attracting new customers… you have to wonder what part of technology helps versus hinders your growth and when the tech vendors are pulling the wool over you.

In fact, the plethora of tools is creating a whole new generation of adults that can’t focus for more than 15 minutes on a task. In fact a recent story on ZDNet by Tom Steinhert-Threlkeld, “Adult Attention Disorder: The ‘Splittering’ of Communications” reports that Dr. David Goodman at John Hopkins University in Baltimore concludes the multiple channels of communications is putting strain on the “executive functioning” of the brain. Some can keep on top of the fire hose of information but other succumb to the distractions and the tool supposed to help you with life or business becomes an impediment.

It would be convenient if we could just discount it all as a passing fad, a dangerous, productivity-sucking one at that. But that’s not the whole story. This stuff is for real and it’s going to stick. There are a smaller group of really smart folks that have found the best tools and the best ways to really leverage them to produce top results to their bottom line.

In this column, we will be showcasing what we believe are the best business and tech tools and give you tips for how you can leverage in your business, not just for the fun of it or to be on the latest trend of the week but so you can better meet your organization’s goals and objectives.

We aim to help you better determine which tools make sense for your business and how to best use them. When we are looking at a tool, we are looking for potential return on investment, simplicity of design, and tools that are offered from reputable organizations.

So we didn’t want to end the inaugural column without giving you at least one tool…

We all know that truly understanding our business stakeholders is important for business but hiring your local market research company can set your budget back thousands for even simple surveys.

A good, do-it-yourself approach that even starts with a free option is Survey Monkey (www.surveymonkey.com). There is a free option that gives you up to 100 respondents per survey and up to 10 questions per survey that will help you get your online survey set up in a few hours or less. It’s great for quick, employee surveys or for surveying your customers on a new offering. More feature-rich options of Survey Monkey are available for $19.95 per month or $200 per year.

This is just one simple example of an elegant tool that can help you improve your business at little or no cost. In the coming weeks, we will be profiling more tools that together could make a measurable positive impact on your business. We strive to help separate the hype from reality and filter out the “okay” tools and give you just the best ones. If you would like to recommend a tool for review, please fill in the form on the Contacts page.

Cyri Jones is a marketing and project management instructor at Capilano University and BCIT and Principal of ZEN Strategic Consulting Services Inc. Ivan Surjanovic is a marketing and strategic management instructor at Capilano University and CEO of iPower Strategy Inc.