SEO Expertise

If you need some technical advice on optimizing search and making it work for you (and who doesn't?), Kelly Jones is an SEO specialist at Plexus Web who is remarkably good at what she does. I'll bet you won't be able to ask something she can't help you with.

Will "complications" with outsourcing serve to stem the tide of domestic job cuts?

Companies that are immune to the latest labor cuts don't seem to fall into any particular categories. Even stalwarts like Caterpillar, Sprint and Home Depot added to the more than 40,000 layoffs announced this week. There's some hidden pain in these numbers as well. Cuts in overtime hours and part-time or temporary workers don't show up.

Apropos hidden numbers, what if companies were required to state how many of their layoffs are domestic vis-a-vis offshored positions as a percentage of the total? Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan of the free market, but only when minimum standards for business practices are met. Somalian pirates do not qualify, for example. Nor does Satyam Computer Services, where State Farm is cutting 400 jobs because of fraud, which has also complicated things for PriceWaterhouseCoopers as two of its auditors responsible for Satyam's books were arrested in India over the weekend. Early last year, Moira Herbst was prescient in pointing out other risks and conflicts of reckless outsourcing in her Business Week article about the then half-million H1B-visa workers.

It may be wishful thinking, but the numbers of outsourced jobs being cut could actually become a statistic companies would be pleased to have splashed across the FOX News business page. My friend George Moraetes is a displaced State Farm consultant who would like to see that.

Ten Questions on Risk and Compliance with Joe Degidio

Got risk?

If you're a small (or large) business looking for new ideas and some prognostication on risk and compliance over the next few years, here's an interview I did with compliance expert Joe Degidio in TechRepublic today.

You can post a comment or add a question below the article. (FYI - they are going to ask you to do a one-time registration to make a comment, but this is a great publication and you should be registered anyway.) Thanks!

Synchronicity 2.0 (mashups)

Is it CNN or is it Facebook?  To quote the inimitable Bo Jackson, "Both."  

It's a cool mashup of CNN's video coverage of the inauguration with all your friends' simaltaneous discussion in a live forum. Apparently the idea went over fairly well as the site was maxed out on user-spots shortly before the ceremony started.  It's been unmashed again now, but bookmark the link for the next memorable event that comes up.

It was a good day for Twitter too.  The growing deluge of the world's most transient blog posts had about five times the normal amount of "tweets per second" during the ceremonies.  Of course, depending on who's in your "following" list, these might be anything from, "I just ate a bagel" to "Watch my new life-coaching video."  But here's a new twist on it - again with an interesting mashup.  Yahoo! has gotten together with the folks at Twitter to create "Tweetnews," which matches up the latest headlines and their sources with the related "tweets." This adds a bit of authenticity to the frivolity (and immediacy) of newsflashes on Twitter with a measure of mainstream corroboration.

Remember when the future was in plastics?  Now it's in mashups.

The Great Accelerator

A lot of people are in a hurry to break with the past, leave Q4 and 2008 behind and get on with their tabula rasa using the new social media tools, web 2.0, 3G, etc.  OK, so did your new year's resolutions have to do with doing things better, or just faster?  

Hopefully your marketing was structured and personal before and is going to get even better - and not just faster.  In itself, the internet only makes things faster.  It is excruciatingly ambivalent to good or bad and serves to accelerate the effects of either one.  If your communication is powerful and relevant, it will get to more people faster.  If you make mistakes and underestimations, the web will also syndicate those errors faster.  

It's amazing how powerful good marketing is - even when it's not new; not flashy, just effective communication, as in the great communicator.  See how long it takes you to figure out how old this thirty-second video is.  

Effective presentations, web sites and podcasts still require, like the new nation, people who distinguish good from bad, technically and otherwise.  It is wholly unsuited to any other, just much faster.