To improve your cybersecurity, go phishing!
I don’t think there’s any question that the world is getting more dangerous every day, if only in the fact that due to our reliance on technology, there are more ways the bad guys can get to us. If people and companies with incredible resources, like Sony, HBO, and the DNC can get hacked, what chance does a small business owner have? Frankly, because of your size and your ability to monitor and communicate with your employees, I think you have a better chance to avoid cyber-disasters than bigger operations – if you are proactive about protecting yourself online. Types of phishing scams It seems that the biggest vulnerability right now are the phishing emails. These are emails designed to look legitimate and lure the recipient into clicking on a link. The link may download malicious computer code or trick the user into entering personal information on a bogus – but legitimate appearing – website. In the case of the download, the users may believe they are receiving a Word file, an invoice, or some other document that is typically sent via an email attachment. In the case of entering personal information, users are often told that their bank account, PayPal account, or some other entity needs them to verify information or their account will be suspended. Employee training, regular reinforcement, and updates are at the core of your ability to protect your business. Not long ago I directed you to a couple of online cybersecurity quizzes that can help you get your team up to speed on the basics. Checking, testing, and monitoring your employees must be an integral part of your strategy. Send simulated phishing emails Given the current dangers, one of the best things you can do is to set up a program that sends simulated phishing emails to your employees to train them as well as test their knowledge and vigilance. There are various free and paid services that will send these faux (phaux?) phishing emails to your team to see how they react. (I have a list below. Note that a few require good technical knowledge.) You need to tell your employees that they should expect to receive these testing and training phishing emails as part of your cybersecurity program. The simple expectation of receiving these emails will heighten the awareness of your employees, which is one of the best benefits of the strategy. You need to have a company email where these phishing emails can be forwarded to; employees need to have an “action” they can take when they suspect malicious online activity. Further, you need to examine and discuss these phishing emails in meetings. When you do this, the activity begins to act like your body’s immune system – you develop protection against each phishing email style and strategy. Your “immunity” builds and becomes stronger over time. Paid and free phishing simulators Here’s the list. Some are DIY and free and have a fairly easy user interface. Other DIY applications require more technical know-how. Finally, several companies are offering simulated phishing emails as either a stand-alone service, or part of a cybersecurity training package. Terranova (paid) Wombat Security Technologies (paid) Phishing Box (paid) Sans Securing the Human (paid) KnowBe4 (paid) Lucy (paid) SecurityIQ (free personal starter account) Gophish (free open source software) Phishing...
read moreYou’ll be surprised to see how under-30 women value workplace factors
I’m joking a little bit here, but do you think there’s a correlation between the increased popularity of yoga and the increased importance of workplace flexibility? A Fairygodboss online survey of 100 women showed that flexible hours/part-time employment is one of the most cherished job factors for women job seekers. But while workplace flexibility is important to women under 30 years old as well as to women over 30, some unexpected findings surprised me, including this one: Flexibility ranks number two in importance for the older group of women, yet only third for the younger women. Although this is just a ranking difference of one place, I think it’s interesting that flexibility is somewhat more important for the older women. I would have anticipated the reverse result. More important distinctions Good compensation is at the top of the list for both groups, but the younger women rate good company performance above flexibility; this attribute (company performance) only ranks sixth for older women. The other most striking disparity is in the category of good benefits, such as health care. It comes in at number three for older women but is pushed way down to number 10 for women under 30 years old. (That may explain why younger, healthier Americans aren’t signing up for Obamacare in the number predicted.) In fact, for the younger women, it was even more important (eighth rank) to work for a company that’s involved in the community than to have good company benefits. Is this telling us that Millennials value the health of their community above their personal health? And, wouldn’t you expect the younger Millennials to want the ability to work from home (or from a coffee shop)? Apparently not – that was number 15 and at the very bottom of their rankings. Having women in leadership roles was slightly more important for the younger women, coming in at number nine, while older women put it at number 12. I think the wisdom of Millennial women is highlighted by another disparity between themselves and their older peers. For the younger women surveyed, having the opportunity to be mentored was very important, ranking fourth on their list. With the older women, this company attribute came in 14th – next to last. Another place of major disparity is in the category of vacation time. It was fifth on the over 30s’ list while it came it at number 12 for the young women. Recognize what’s important to individuals There’s an important lesson to be learned when you begin to appreciate how these groups diverge: In managing people, be sensitive to individual differences. You need to value everyone equally, but this doesn’t mean that you need to treat everyone the same in the sense of enforcing “cookie cutter” policies. Consider surveying your workforce – women and men – on these job factors and see which are important to the individuals you employ. This could lead to discovering some simple ways to improve your work environment. For example, setting up a mentoring program for those who value that job benefit would be easy and low cost. Of course, it’s critical to keep your entire team happy, satisfied, and loyal, and if you can cultivate positive working relationships with Millennials, you’re doing a lot to assure the future success of your...
read moreKeys to engaging the perpetually connected customer
We’re surrounded by the cyber-sphere today almost as much as we are surrounded by the air we breathe. And, for many, maintaining a constant connection to this digital reality is almost as important as inhaling and exhaling. While this is true for members of every consumer demographic, it’s especially true for today’s younger consumers…and they’re the folks who will be your “bread and butter” customers and clients in the coming years. For these reasons, it’s important to have a marketing strategy that includes all the digital avenues through which you can engage prospects and customers. Consider these eight components of the digital ecosystem: websites, social media, email, content (words, visuals, video), mobile, apps, search, and pay-per-click and other online advertising approaches. How many of these are included in or addressed by your current marketing program? I won’t say that you have to do all of these all of the time – although some of you should. However, it’s critical that you at least consider each of these, prioritize them, and then experiment to find out which deliver the best return, staying aware that what works with your prospects today may not work as well tomorrow. I suggest that you look at all of the items on the above list, “unpack” them, and then grade yourself on your current status. Let’s look at the first item: website. Some small business owners might convince themselves that they are fine in this category because they have a website, but it’s important to dig more deeply. Here are some website questions worth asking yourself: Is my website in keeping with today’s design standards and aesthetics? Am I using landing pages and squeeze pages to convert visitors? Is my user interface clear and navigation easy? Are vital website elements, such as contact information, clear and obvious? Am I collecting the visitor information I need? Is my content engaging enough to get visitors to stick around or do they quickly bounce? You need to ask yourself these kinds of questions for each of the eight components of the digital ecosystem that I listed above. In other words, you must conduct a critique of each of them. Bring in others to help you with this. This is the kind of brainstorming exercise where you benefit greatly from having people with different points of view contribute their questions and ideas. This process starts out as a “high altitude fly over” but evolves into an examination by microscope. See all the elements here as great opportunities, always keeping in mind that the consumers you want to develop are perpetually living in the digital realm. That fact gives you thousands of opportunities to discover, connect, and engage with your prospects. Don’t miss an...
read moreThis week in small business: Secrets to a great daily grind (and we aren’t talking about coffee)
Whether you think of it as your “daily grind” or simply your daily schedule, you’ll find a lot of tips to help you get it under control and maximized for success and productivity among this edition of our carefully curated content. Leadership, management, and productivity Even when you’re chasing your dreams you need to deal with the “daily grind.” Sherrie Campbell offers eight ways to structure your daily grind for success. And if Campbell’s tips aren’t enough, check out Sujan Patel’s advice on how to optimize your daily schedule for maximum productivity. Team loyalty is central to business success. Annie Pilon delivers 25 employee appreciation ideas that are ideal for small business owners. Marketing and sales Chris O’Neill explains why you need to keep SEO in mind and ask the right questions when you’re designing your website. Could your future success be as simple as telling your story? That is certainly a major component of success today, says Damon Brown writing for Inc. Duncan Alney gives us some experiments to conduct to discover ways to drive more visitors to our websites. Snapchat’s new Snap Map feature can boost your social media marketing, according to Jonathan Furman and he explains the basics. In this infographic, Shubhomita Bose shares 10 marketing lessons we can swipe from the Apple play book. Need to build your mobile online presence? Siobhan Kenna introduces a range of new Facebook tools to help you get the job done. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Failure is a reality for many startups. Peter Daisyme talks about how to pick up the pieces after a startup failure. Aditi Wardhan Singh, founder of @Raising World Children, gives us five challenges to entrepreneurial goal setting when you are an entrepreneur from home. Is there one piece of advice that causes 97 percent of startups to fail? Yes, contends Chad Perry. Politics, government, and the economy If you follow business and economic reporting, you’ve seen almost daily pieces on Bitcoin. And, if you’re a bit confused by Bitcoin, this article/slideshow by Stephen J. Bronner will get you up to speed. David Z. Morris contends that a universal basic income would grow the U.S. economy by an extra 12.5...
read more11 ideas for engaging emails #infographic
This infographic has two purpose: one is plain to see, the other is a bit less obvious. First, the easy to spot purpose: Communicate to you a variety of ideas you can use in your email marketing. Switching things up a bit with unexpected content will keep your readers better engaged. Check out this 11-item list and see if there are a few you might take advantage of in your business. Now the less obvious reason for this infographic: It illustrates how you can take existing blog content and transform it into another format – in this case an infographic. We have the good designers at Venngage to thank for this example. They came to us and said, “Hey, we think your article on 11 email marketing ideas would make a good infographic. Can we give it a go?” We gave them the green light and what you see here is the fruit of their artistic labors. A job well...
read moreThe ABCs (and PDFs) of moving to a paperless office
We’ve been talking about it for decades, but the idea of the paperless office still finds some resistance. However, with the dramatic increase of the use of mobile devices and virtual teams, eliminating as much paper pushing as possible is absolutely necessary to maintain a level of productivity that assures you are competitive in today’s marketplace. Central to accomplishing this is understanding your ABCs and PDFs: Apps Backups Contracts PDFs (Portable document format) Before we hit each of those topics, let me stress the importance of planning and establishing a system for file naming and folder creation. This is one weakness of a paperless office. You’re more likely to lose and forget about a computer file and therefore leave it “unfiled” than lose a piece of paper. Eventually you’ll uncover a piece of paper on your real world desktop, but files on your computer desktop are a different story; they are easily lost or deleted. (I really appreciate the auto-save feature that is available on a lot of our software today, but it’s not foolproof.) Let me add one thing to this discussion. I love the way you can use tags within many apps today, and you should take advantage of this feature. However, this advice comes with a big warning: Don’t overuse tags. If you go overboard with tags it will render your tag searches useless because you’ll get too many search results for the same tag. Use tags wisely and sparingly. Apps for the paperless office Evernote. This app is at the top of virtually everyone’s list for going paperless or merely improving productivity. This is due to its ability to organize and disseminate both digital and paper assets. Using the Evernote scanning app, Scannable (5-star rating on Apple’s App Store), you can bring paper documents into Evernote’s notebook-based system of organization. Once you bring your scans into Evernote, words within the scans become searchable. Below is a scan of small type for a wine offer associated with an airline loyalty program. I searched for the term “rapid rewards points” and you can see all the hits. Further, scanned business cards can be directly added to your contacts. If you’re a devoted Microsoft user, you probably know that OneNote is that company’s version of Evernote. Along with something like Evernote, you need a file-sharing app. The two best are Google Drive and DropBox. Microsoft has OneDrive and Apple has iCloud Drive, but Apple’s product isn’t really designed for business sharing. These services generally offer a free level and various paid tiers. Backing up the paperless office In the paper office you have file cabinets full of documents that later get moved to boxes and put in storage somewhere. You need to establish a backup system for your paperless office to take the place of those file cabinets and boxes. Above, I mentioned the importance of developing a folder and file naming scheme that will bring order to your paperless system. This is especially critical when you consider backups and archiving your files. If you change file or folder naming schemes and experience employee turnover, someday it might become next to impossible to find some old records you need to retrieve. You should be backing up to an off-campus location. Today there are many affordable services that...
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