Why business should be investing in information technology

Excerpt of Report by Jeanne-Vida Douglas. BRW Magazine

Technologies once limited to only the biggest budgets are now affordable for businesses of any scale. Here are five of the most rewarding.

Information technology has been the biggest driver of productivity since mechanisation took over from manual and animal labour at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Research from Finland suggests that access to simple data storage and processing computing facilities will increase the productivity of an average worked by 9 per cent a year; access to the internet will boost it by 14 per cent; mobile computing will increase worker productivity by 32 per cent.

Nonetheless, small businesses, which stand to gain the most from investing in It services, are often the most reticent to take advantage of the opportunities technology provides.

Unlike their larger counterparts, SMEs are often founded and run by specialists. The real estate agent, the carpenter and the distributor all know their trades, but don’t necessarily have the time to investigate emerging technologies or sit down to create a strategy for how a certain piece of software or hardware might make their businesses run more efficiently.

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8 reasons to turn your marketing Inbound in 2010

Inbound marketing is like a magnet for your company

Basically there are two forms of marketing:

Outbound marketing- where you spend money trying to interrupt your potential customers with your message

Inbound marketing – where your potential customers find you and decide to find out more

Outbound marketing is like a shotgun. Inbound marketing is like a magnet.

You are probably already doing Outbound marketing, so here are 8 reasons why you should be turn your marketing Inbound in 2010:

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Top 27 Australian Finance Brokers

Australia’s leading Finance Brokers. Do you know who they are?

BRW recently published the Top 27 Finance Broker Companies. Here, we put them to the online performance test with NLYZR. The results ran the full spectrum of great to very poor.

NLYZR assess a website using criteria such as On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Keyword search results, Competitor scores, Social media and traffic conversion. These are crucial aspects of Inbound Marketing.

Note: some of these sites have been listed previously by NLYZR. Scores can vary from month to month and depending upon search terms.

How do Australia’s leading Finance Brokers rate….

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Socialnomics: the new way to view ROI

Tired of achieving diminishing returns from outbound marketing? Worried your marketing is being lost in the clutter? Looking for a better ROI from your marketing department?

Welcome to socialnomics. This very entertaining 4 minute video cleverly illustrates how many successful organisations are using social media to create effective Inbound Marketing. Most of the examples are from the US but can easily be applied to the Australian market.

Hat tip to Gavin Heaton for finding this.

Sticky TV – Social search, SEO basics & Gary Vaynerchuk Crushing It

This week on Sticky TV Kendall Wheeler and Craig Wilson discuss how social media is becoming an important part of online search, Craig talks to Gordon Whitehead about search engine optimisation basics and we look at Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book Crush It!