Tools of your trade

An interesting divide is beginning to appear between businesses using technology well and those that don’t.

This was bought home to me last Friday after an ABC Radio discussion on finding work using social media.

A lot of the follow-up emails were from employers and job hunters using social media sites like LinkedIn, blogs and web forums to find the right people and jobs. This is at the time online employment ads have halved.

The show itself lead to a Twitter exchange (another useful tool) with Laurel Papworth, an expert on business uses for web 2.0 applications.

Laurel makes the point web 2.0 isn’t just social networks and social networks are more than just kids swapping vampire bites on Facebook, as she shows on her blog.

The first instinct of most managers and IT staff is to dismiss all of this as time wasting, and while there is a problem with staff wasting time on these sites, we should remember business had exactly the same concerns about the telephone, email and the web itself.

What’s overlooked are the benefits. For instance social media can be an excellent marketing tool, particularly for smaller businesses that want to establish a free and easy to maintain web presence.

For recruiting a good start is LinkedIn, where profiles take the form of an online CV and the person’s connections give you a great run down on their experience and their professional network.

It could be the adopters of these opportunities could be the survivors of the current economic downturn. Just as those businesses that saw the opportunities in relatively new innovations like the telegraph, telephone, mains electricity, the steam and internal combustion engines were the survivors of previous depressions.

Social media tools aren’t for every business or industry, but for those where they do work it’s a great way to get an advantage over your competitors and deliver better services to your customers.

Most of these tools are free or very cheap to set up, so give them a go and see if they work for your business.

Paul Wallbank has spent 15 years helping businesses with their technology issues. Over that time he also grew PC Rescue into a national IT company and set up the IT Queries website. Today Paul assists business facing the challenges of today’s market and believes entrepreneurs and new thinking is what will fix the global economy.