Archive for the ‘tips & tricks’ category

TrackVia Video: Taking a Page From…Dave Taylor

February 11th, 2009

Today we kick off our video podcast series “Taking a Page From” with a special guest, Dave Taylor, to talk about how companies can build awareness online.

Dave Taylor is widely recognized for his writing and speaking engagements on both technical and business issues. He has written over twenty business and technical books including The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Growing Your Business with Google and maintains several weblogs two of which are the The Intuitive Life Business Blog and Ask Dave Taylor.

We invite you to watch our video and enjoy the advice Dave Taylor shared with TrackVia CEO, Chris Basham.

Some key takeaways:

  1. For any company, there is already a conversation going on about you – monitoring what people are saying about you is the first step (LinkedIn, Twitter etc.).
  2. When you are looking at your add words, look at your stop words as well
  3. Monitor your key words and refine your ad words on a regular basis.
  4. Look at the data as frequently as possible – divide the responsibility for analyzing your traffic data.
  5. Pick two or three trade shows that you want to go to and that your customers will attend. Host a dinner and get social with your customers.
  6. Look at your organic results – to get more organic results, you must give more than you take. Goodwill generates good traffic.
  7. Incentivize your customers to talk about you.
  8. Do what you can to be in front of the opinion leaders at events, in the office and networking etc. – Just don’t spit on them
  9. Marketing takes focus, attention and persistence.
  10. You can’t always control what people say about you – embrace it, be aware that it exists and respond.
  11. Look at what you can give to the online community i.e. good content. Focus more on what you give and less on what you will receive.
  12. Get your engineers involved in the discussion and in relevant forums.
  13. Consider developing free informational videos and eBooks on your key topic.

I Need to Know. Everything. Immediately.

February 10th, 2009

One advantage of using an online database is the visibility it provides into one’s data. Custom views, statistics, and powerful search features make it easy to see what’s happening with customers, orders, inventory, and nearly everything else.

Sometimes, though, that’s not enough. If a customer logs a critical bug, I want to know about it right away, not the next time I log into TrackVia and look. If our sales group has a time-sensitive opportunity that requires senior management involvement, our CEO wants to know about it immediately, not the next time TrackVia emails him a pipeline report. In fact, come to think of it, I want to know about all bugs, and our CEO wants to know about all sales opportunities, as they happen. We have a high need to know.

Now we can know. Last week TrackVia launched a new alerts feature. Alerts allow TrackVia users to be notified by email whenever their data changes in ways they’re interested in. This could be an added record, a deleted record, or any change to a specific record. It could also be a change to one or more records that meets very specific criteria.

TrackVia Alerts

The specificity of those criteria make alerts great for workflow applications, that is, using TrackVia to manage a business process. For example, an alert can notify a claims processor that an investigator in her region has approved a claim and it’s now ready for payment.

If you have a high need to know, and you’re not getting it from your current database, you might try a better database.

How to Get Your Blog Program in Shape

January 23rd, 2009

January marks the month where everyone is keen on fitness and getting in shape so we thought it was the perfect time to share some tips for getting your blog program in shape.

We aren’t going to cover SEO tips, links or categories… No, for the purpose of this post and for what we are good at, let’s look specifically at how you are gathering ideas, organizing those ideas and tracking your blog information.

Hopefully some of these tips will help you “blog masters” out there not only maintain an active blog, but also get your blog program organized as well.

> SCHEDULE: create an editorial calendar of blog posts a few weeks out

> DETERMINE a TEAM: consider a team blog where different perspectives can be shared

> SET DEADLINES: get authors and editors accustomed to a schedule

> BUILD A BASE: always have a few extra posts written and on hand

> TIMING: time posts with relevant events and planned editorial calendar opportunities with industry-specific publications

> DIVERSIFY: mix it up from time to time and do a video post or an audio podcast when time is tight but you have a good source right in front of you

> ORGANIZE and TRACK: organize all notes, attachments and multimedia files in an easily accessible database for quick publishing and easy access (TrackVia can help)

> MEASURE: track and record the number of unique visitors a blog received, what time of day it was posted and contributing factors which made it a well-received post or one that received little attention in your database – surely you will need this data at a moments notice later in the quarter

We hope that these tips were helpful. Feel free to share your tips for keeping your blog content organized.

360-Degree Online Database

December 16th, 2008

The year is winding down and it is time to ask yourself how your peers, subordinates and managers view your performance. If you are like most people, you hear the phrase 360-feedback and your head starts spinning. Obviously we could make your head spin even more by writing a post on the broken system that typically comes with the 360 process or telling stories of the poor soul who has to tabulate responses. But we thought it would be a good idea to throw out a few suggestions to make the process easier and less painful for all involved.

For those of you who have somehow skirted the 360-degree review, it is simply a tool to solicit feedback from your subordinates, peers, managers, clients or other interested stakeholders, combined with your own self assessment. A few of the benefits of 360-Degree Feedback:

  • Gives employees a broader perspective as to how they are performing
  • Identifies gaps across the company
  • Makes it easier to implement coaching and training programs

Recession or boom, there is one thing you should never cut costs on and that is the development of your employees. If you feel your company is too cash strapped to launch a 360-degree feedback program or perhaps you don’t have an HR department, consider using an online database and follow these pointers:

1. List each employee and their evaluators in a contacts database
2. Create custom views for each employee with a list of his/her evaluators
3. Create tailored website forms for each position with relevant questions for employees and a self assessment form
4. Distribute the form via an email campaign to the evaluators identified in the employee’s custom view
5. Replies will be automatically populated in your database (at least if you use TrackVia!)
6. Control access to submitted results via user permissions
7. Quickly view database statistics to identify trends by employee and the company overall
8. Continue to track employees’ ongoing development plan and progress

TrackVia’s online database can be a great tool for launching your 360-Degree initiative.  Call us and we can help you get your 360 initiative underway in no time.

Browser Shortcuts

August 8th, 2008

As you know, TrackVia is delivered through a browser. That means you can take advantage of browser keyboard shortcuts to get your work done more quickly. Here are some of my favorites, which I use all of the time – in TrackVia and anywhere else on the web:

Ctrl + F
Pressing the Ctrl and F keys simultaneously allows you to search for information that’s displayed on the current browser page. It’ll even search information that’s not visible on your screen, such as information that you’d have to scroll up/down or right/left to see.

F5
Pressing the F5 key will reload the current browser page. If you want to reload the page and also pull in fresh copies of stylesheets, javascript, and other page components to make sure they’re not cached, press Ctrl + F5.

Ctrl + Home, Ctrl + End
Pressing the Ctrl and Home keys simultaneously will instantly scroll your browser back to the top of the page. Pressing the Ctrl + End keys simultaneously will instantly scroll your browser to the bottom of the page.

Ctrl + W
Pressing the Ctrl and W keys simultaneously will close the current browser tab.

Right-click a link to open in a new tab, or in a new window
Whenever you see a link in your browser, you can place your cursor over the link, right-click your mouse, and select to open the link in a new browser tab, or a new browser window. This comes in handy all the time in TrackVia, for example when you want to open a record detail page for a particular record without navigating away from the view you’re looking at.

These shortcuts save me time because by using them, I avoid moving the cursor around, and therefore avoid taking my hands off the keyboard. Feel free to add your own favorite time-saving browser tips in the comments below.