Why you might ask? There are actually 8 reasons. You ready to take a look

1. Versatile - According to Wikipedia, ” Google Apps is a service from Google providing independently customizable versions of several Google products under a custom domain name. It features several Web applications with similar functionality.”
2. Secure – Google data centers have been engineered by top-notch security experts & FISMA certified. Added in at no extra cost is best-in-class disaster recovery
3. Gmail – What could be easier for your agency than having 25GB storage for your Gmail, less spam, and 99.9% uptime. Email security is powered by Postini. In addition, Gmail has been designed to be a powerhouse resource for convenience and user-friendliness allowing you to work from wherever you are, work faster, and use text, voice and video chat to connect with those people you need to connect with.
4. Google Calendar - Your calendar is equipped to handle agenda management, scheduling, shared online calendars and mobile calendar syncing capabilities.
5. Google Docs – Do you need to work on a document or spreadsheet in partnership with someone in your agency? No problem. Work in real time without having to deal with attachments.
6. Google Sites - Would you like to have an intranet or team-managed site for your local government agency? Google Sites is secure AND it allows you to set up sites easily without having to deal with special coding.
7. Video – Using Google Apps Video gives you the freedom and ease of use to share your videos — securely. Provide support to agency training programs or use videos to add a personal touch to staff communications.
8. Open Records Compliance – In Tennessee (where we are) all levels of government are required to retain certain electronic communications as part of the Tennessee Open Records Act. If your local government is archiving e-mails, it should be, and Google Apps has easy and affordable options that comply with the Open Records Act.

Google Apps for Government provides reliability in cloud-based apps — AND it is certified by the U.S. government. Want to customize by adding more apps? Just check out the Google Apps Marketplace.

Google Apps for Government has every app to make your agency run like a lean, mean machine — cost effectively. Need further proof  as to why Google Apps is an excellent collaboration tool for local governments? Check out Google Apps for Government and see the case studies, FAQ, the section on what voters have to say and more for yourself.

Twelve Oaks Group specializes in developing easy to manage online resources for Local Government and has multiple web services that may be of interest to you — or if you think of any questions about Google Apps for Government that you don’t have answers for, give us a call at (731) 337-4330. We’ll be glad to help you out.

Twelve Oaks Group

Tennessee-based Twelve Oak Group is unique in its approach to its customers. Each team member is committed to helping grow small business, making local government more accessible, and enhancing communities with their web design and consulting services expertise. We will not deviate from this approach!

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Fast forward to March, 2011, and Yelp appeared on HubSpot’s The Ultimate List: 50 Local Business Directories. What is so notable about it is that Yelp was number 4 out of 50 with only Google, Bing and Yahoo! being ahead of them.

Now that’s mighty impressive!

The bottom line is that if you’re not active on Yelp, it could be costing your business. No, I’m not talking about signing up for a business account at Yelp; anyone that is a small business can do that. What I’m talking about is really becoming active and using Yelp to its full potential . Let’s see how.

Missed Local Search Visibility

Say you are looking for a website design company – say Twelve Oaks Group — if you are not listed in Yelp’s directory, you have missed an opportunity for a potential client to contact you — and that means you could be losing sales! Yelp had over 71 million visitors to their site in Q1, 2012. Don’t miss out!

Related to missed sales is Yelp is a way to connect customers to your small business by offering deals. A deal  is you making an offer through Yelp to buy a certificate that’s being offered by a third-party vendor. Or, you could become the third-party.

Missed Recommendations

Yelp is a great way to review businesses, as well as receive feedback from other businesses. According to Yelp, “Yelp Business Accounts allow businesses to share information with the Yelp Community. Simply put, it’s word of mouth — amplified.”

Missed Networking Opportunities

When you think about it, Yelp is a super place to network with other business. You would miss out on that rapport you can get by not:

• getting in touch with people who can be of help to you,
• collecting and updating their contact information or
• maintaining regular communication with messages to and from other businesses.

Missed Reporting

Besides the “misses” listed above, there is one more I want to bring to your attention. Everyone wants to know how their small business is doing once they sign up for a subscription to a site like Yelp. They understand this and have a way for you to track your company’s progress. If you don’t have a gauge for how your business is doing, how can you hope to improve? Yelp takes care of that with up-to-date trends and statistics.

I’ve given you quite a lot to think about, now haven’t I? The bottom line is that not being active on Yelp is costing you business. So I recommend you hop to it now and sign up for Yelp.

Twelve Oaks Group

Tennessee-based Twelve Oak Group is unique in its approach to its customers. Each team member is committed to helping grow small business, making local government more accessible, and enhancing communities with their web design and consulting services expertise. We will not deviate from this approach!

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How often have you been curious as to how a particular topic is doing on the Web, you know, is it being talked about a lot or hardly at all? There are ways to track topics, did you know that? Read on as Twelve Oaks Group shares successful ways to track topics on the Web.

Google Alerts

A popular method, and a very successful way I might add, is through the use of setting up Google Alerts. It’s very easy to set up. Start with going to Google News and put in your topic that you want to search for (like Twelve Oaks Group, for example). Now scroll all the way to the bottom and click on the link that says “Create an email alert for Twelve Oaks Group.” You can do this for any topic you want. The final steps would be to add your email address and make your selections for what’s showing. Voilà, click on Create Alert. Then depending on how often you have chosen to have the email alert delivered, you’ll get an email anytime anything new pops up in Google.

Social Media

If you would be more interested in taking the social approach, then two good options are Google+ and Twitter.

1.      Google+

Google+ is Google’s version of a social network. When you signed up for your Google account, you were automatically set up with Google+. If you were to go there now, you would type in your search topic. If you look over on the top right, you see a red button that allows you to save your search. To check your topics you saved on a regular basis, just go to your Google+ homepage, select the More drop-down list in the sub-menu where you’ll be able to see your Google+ circles, as well as your saved searches.

2.      Twitter

Did you know you can save your searches for topics in Twitter — whether or not you use the hashtag? Yes, that’s right; you can. Just log into your Twitter account, type in your search query in the search box on the top right and click the magnifier. Presto, all the tweets that relate to your search come into view like magic. To save it, click on the search icon at the top of the tweets and choose either Save Search or Advanced Search.

Now finding that topic that you just saved is not so intuitive to find. Remember where you typed in your initial search on the Twitter homepage? Click on that again, and you will see all your search topics that you have previously saved.

3.      Facebook

Some of you may be wondering if you can conduct searches for topics on Facebook. You can by searching a topic but at this point, it’s pretty hit and miss.

Niche Communities or Specialist Services

Depending on what you’re interested in, you may find niche communities or specialist services that you can get good information from. Reddit is a good site for a niche community.

Tracking topics and tracking visitors are just two ways that small businesses can get an edge on their competitors or become aware of emerging trends and technology in the business world. Twelve Oaks Group has many more useful topics planned that will help you become the leader in your industry.

Twelve Oaks Group

Tennessee-based Twelve Oak Group is unique in its approach to its customers. Each team member is committed to helping grow small business, making local government more accessible, and enhancing communities with their web design and consulting services expertise. We will not deviate from this approach!

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According to Wikipedia, “Website visitor tracking (WVT) is the analysis of visitor behavior on a website.” In order to measure that, small businesses should look into which applications going to give you the best results.

What is website visitor tracking?

Visitor tracking (or management) refers to how many people come to your website, what pages they are looking at, what page do they come in on, as well as leave your site on, and much more.

Look at Twelve Oaks Group, for example. By looking at any one of the website tracking tools, we can determine how many visitors checked out our site on any given day, what country they were from and even what city they hail from, how many minutes they stayed on our site, did they access our site from a mobile device, and so much more. Just imagine checking out our content overview and discovering that 69.23% of visitors in the month of June so far entered our website through our Home page.

Why is visitor tracking useful to small businesses?

Visitor tracking is useful to you because the more information you can gain about your visitors, the closer you can get to satisfying their needs and requirements. What are they looking for? Website visitor management can give you a closer look at what their searching for, how many times they are searching for it and what you can do to tell them that you have the solution to what they want. This makes your content more compelling, your mailing list management for campaigns more effective, your products more visible and likely to be purchased, and your return on investment be higher. Wow! How great can that be?

In summary to this section, some questions you should want answers for regarding visitor tracking are:

1. Is your advertising and marketing working?
2. If you’re paying for ads on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter or Pinterest, you need to know if those dollars are well spent: do visitors from these sources stay on your site? Are they finding what they need?
3. Is your site communicating effectively?
4. By looking at the pages visitors check out, can you determine if they’re finding what they need? What do you need to tweak as far as your content? Do you need to explain further?
5. What is your bounce rate? – A high percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page needs to be addressed. You need to get those visitors to venture deeper into your site.
6. Is your home page (or your most popular entrance pages) capturing the attention of visitors?

What are some WVT tools that Twelve Oaks Group uses?

We’re only going to mention 3 website visitor tracking tools right now — and these are used by Twelve Oaks Group now — yes, it’s okay to have more than one tool to get the answers to what you need to know.

Google Analytics

Invariably, the most well-known and most widely-used of the website tracking applications is Google Analytics. Offered by Google as a free service, Google Analytics (GA) provides a wide assortment of statistics that will tell you all your need to know about your website traffic. You can also upgrade to a premium version for a fee.

Get Clicky

Clicky is a real time web analytics service. That means that once you login, you can see what’s happening on your site — right now. Google Analytics has Real-Time also with the number of visitors on the site currently, the number of pageviews during each of the most recent 30 minutes, and the number of pageviews during each of the most recent 60 seconds.

Twelve Oaks uses Clicky as well for several options that GA does not have. Since Get Clicky only focuses on real time data as a default. There is access to comprehensive history; you just need to dig a little deeper on their site in order to pull out that information.

Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange records your visitor’s every click, mouse movement, scroll, and keypress.

Lucky Orange is unique in that it provides you real time analytics like GA and Get Clicky. In addition, there are three more features that you may want to know about. I’m only going to give you 3 bullet points per feature, so for sure you’ll want to go check everything out.

Live Chat Software

• Chat box stays on the page and follows visitor as they browse your site for a seamless experience.
• Can watch visitors screen while chatting with them
• Add Customized Pre Chat Questions

Visitor Recordings & Live Sessions

• Watch in real time or automatically records visitor browsing sessions
• Watch every mouse movement, keypress, scroll, screen resize
• Ability to chat with visitor while you watch them browse.

Heat Maps

• Aggregate lots of click data to form beautiful heatmaps
• Click heat maps
• Mouse movement heat maps

Live Visitor Map

• Watch a real time visitor map of all your website visitors
• Animated with custom effects
• Plot line between points for neat effect

So as a refresher, why do small businesses need to set up visitor tracking for their websites? It’s all for the better to see your visitors, my friends.  You need to get a good overview of what they need, get feedback on your site’s performance and services and be able to be flexible so you can adapt quickly.

Do you need help setting up one or more analytic sites? The Twelve Oaks Group web services and consulting team can help you. Why not give us a call at (731) 337-4330.

Twelve Oaks Group

Tennessee-based Twelve Oak Group is unique in its approach to its customers. Each team member is committed to helping grow small business, making local government more accessible, and enhancing communities with their web design and consulting services expertise. We will not deviate from this approach!

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I have to admit I was pretty skeptical that there were any accounting solutions out there that didn’t just offer a free trial that quit after a specified time. I mean come on! Not all small business owners have the funds to dish out hard cash for an accounting system. So let’s see what I discovered when I went searching for free online accounting solutions — for you — that are free.

Wave

When Wave Accounting, Inc. first opened in November, 2010, their expectations were far exceeded as to the number of people that signed up — tens of thousands even! Then in Canada in the beginning of 2012, the company introduced Wave Payroll for Canada with expectations being that the U.S. would have their own version of Wave Payroll later this year.

Wave Accounting is loaded with features. Just take a look:

• No Cost
• Easy to learn
• Secure & Private
• Online
• Easy payroll integration
• See your overall financial picture
• It’s got real accounting
• So much more

Outright

Outright helps small businesses like you streamline their accounting and bookkeeping and organize your payroll, income, expenses, and more.  Back in 2006 when Kevin Reeth & Ben Curren left Intuit to start their own business, they found themselves in the same predicament many of you may be find yourself in now — the best way to keep their financial data organized. Not an easy task, is it? Well, Outright will enable you to wipe that disorganization away forever.

• Accounting tasks on auto-pilot
• Uses same categories IRS expects
• 100% free
• Safe and secure
• Super reporting
• All online
• Ability to upgrade to paid version — at a cost that won’t burn you.

BIG4books.com

BIG4books is all about providing general purpose small business accounting software, as a FREE* service (SAAS) using the Internet. You may have heard this type of service referred also as Online Small Business Accounting Software, Web Based Accounting Software, Simple Small Business Accounting Software, and other descriptive names.

• Completely online
• Simple to use
• Delivered as SAAS
• Access anywhere, anytime
• Nothing to download or install
• Runs on secure servers with 99.9% uptime
• Full security for your data

Notes: 

*The reason they are able to run this for free is due to their having sponsors, which means that you will see advertising from the sponsors. To avoid the advertising, you would need to upgrade to a paid subscription.

Please be aware that the free (Bronze) service option has limits of a maximum of 5 customer records, 5 maximum vendor records, 5 maximum inventory limits and only 1 non-admin users. You want more, you would have to pay for it.

I’m sure there are other free online accounting solutions out there; however, I would caution you to do your research before you sign up for a service. I was quite picky in picking out the above.  Also, don’t become near sighted when you do your research. Be sure you pay attention and don’t fall for the free trial offers when you search for free online accounting solutions for small business in your search engine.

Twelve Oaks Group

Tennessee-based Twelve Oak Group is unique in its approach to its customers. Each team member is committed to helping grow small business, making local government more accessible, and enhancing communities with their web design and consulting services expertise. We will not deviate from this approach!

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There are many ways that you can create new content. SocialMediaToday has 11 tactics to help create new content.

Reuse, repurpose and recycle. Some of the best content for your organization might be “evergreen”, meaning that it is not necessarily time sensitive. Consider repurposing speech transcripts, marketing presentations, or any audio/video that you may have from trade show presentations, webinars, seminars or any other content that you’ve already generated. Take some of those larger content pieces and break them into smaller content chunks that can be easily shared across social media channels.

Subject matter experts. The use of thought leaders both inside and outside of your organization as sources for popular content is increasing. News consumers appear to relate to content that comes from a “deep source” within an organization much more than traditional press releases cranked out by a PR department. Also, consider reaching out to subject matter experts outside of your organization for possible content about your industry or about your organization’s place in that industry. Prudential and Ameripriseare two organizations that are currently taking advantage of subject matter experts in a successful manner.

You can also contact Twelve Oaks Group. If you’re not coming up with fresh ideas on where to get content, we can give you some additional ideas. We can also help you with redesigning your current website. Why not give us a call at (731)-337-4330 right now while you’re thinking about it.

Twelve Oaks Group

Tennessee-based Twelve Oak Group is unique in its approach to its customers. Each team member is committed to helping grow small business, making local government more accessible, and enhancing communities with their web design and consulting services expertise. We will not deviate from this approach!

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As the company grew at an amazing speed, it was becoming more apparent that businesses were not having their needs met on Facebook. Facebook has come up with an alternative called Facebook “Pages.” So why is it a business should have a Facebook Page? Let’s take a look.

New Fans

According to Forrester Research -State Of Consumers And Technology: Benchmark 2011, US Report, 96% of the total US adults online using social networks have an account with Facebook. With Facebook ranking as the number one social network of choice, the obvious question might be why isn’t your business on Facebook? (Elkay Corporate Advisors, “Top Ten Benefits of Having a Facebook Business Page,” November 10, 2011)

Personal accounts were designed specifically for individuals – not businesses or brands. A Page allows a business to showcase their work, as well as communicate with fans. And let’s face it – there are a whole lot of fans out there. That means potentially you could gain a whole lot of sales for your products and services. Even if they don’t visit your website or blog, the likelihood of a Facebook user logging into their Facebook account at least once a day has a high probability of success. In turn, that means they just might click on that new post you put out today.

Indexing

By creating a fan page on Facebook, you are increasing your chances that the search engines will index the content that you publish on your page. Hmmm, that means the name of your business and your brand is going to appear in front of more eyes than ever before increasing your visibility tenfold.

Analytics

Who’s visited your fan page? You don’t know? One of the beauties of having a Facebook fan page is that you get comprehensive reporting called Insights. For those administrative representatives (Admins) that you appoint to manage your page or app developers, they can have access to metrics on the performance of your Page or app. Gain everything from user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content. Admins and developers can use this information to make more informed decisions on how to improve your business with Facebook.

Facebook Places

If you have walk-in traffic to your business and have a street address, you can incorporate Facebook Places to have clients and customers check in. Places is a Facebook mobile application that gives you information as to where your friends are, but it can also let you share your physical location. You can check in to nearby Places to tell your friends where you are, tag your friends in the Places you visit, and keep track of your friends’ comments that they’ve made about Places you visit. Use Places to experience Facebook in a completely new way by connecting with your friends in the real world which can help drive traffic to your fan page.

Price

You won’t pay a better price for a Facebook Page because it’s absolutely free! Now that is sure to fit your small business budget, wouldn’t you agree?

Facebook has been described by some people as “the new web”. Your small business can leverage Facebook pages and ads to connect with customers and potential customers. Why not call Twelve Oaks Group at (731) 337-4330 right now and let us show you why it only makes good sense to have your very own Facebook page. If you’re not marketing on Facebook, your small business is missing out on one of the best values in online advertising anywhere.

Twelve Oaks Group

Tennessee-based Twelve Oak Group is unique in its approach to its customers. Each team member is committed to helping grow small business, making local government more accessible, and enhancing communities with their web design and consulting services expertise. We will not deviate from this approach!

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You can’t “like” the Profile – the owner must “friend you”

Now if I land on a profile and it’s been created as a profile page, doggone it, I can’t tell you that! I’m at your whim as to whether they will friend me or not. With a Page, you can like their wall, their post, their photo, oh my.

You can’t check into the profile

Facebook has a mobile application that allows you to see where your friends are. Not only that, you can share your physical location. The things you can check with your “Place” page is amazing. It gives you a map of where the Place is located, a list of friends who are currently checked in at the Place (if any), and a Friend Activity stream of other friends who have visited the Place in the past. Cool, huh?

Having a place on Facebook provides you with a way to interact with your customers, as well as to promote and grow your business. Give potential customers the capability to check in at your business and you give them the ability to tell all their friends about it.

You don’t get any “Insights” so you have no idea who’s visiting or if they’re reading your content or sharing it.

Here, let me show you. As you look at a the image below, you will notice all sorts of activity for a particular Page.

You can’t get this level of reporting on who is checking out your business if you use a Profile page for your business.

The Profile Name is restricted — first and last name — which makes it hard to enter a business name.

Say for example you did want to set up a Profile for well, Twelve Oaks Group. You can’t have that in a Profile because you are limited to and required by Facebook to put your real first name and your last name. See the problem?

Facebook Has and May Crack Down Further on Non-Human profiles (like businesses).

Now, try as you might, you’re just not going to convince Facebook that your business is a human. If you insist on setting up a profile for your business by skirting the rules, they may just delete your profile without warning. Then where would you be?

Some people describe Facebook as “the new web”. Small businesses can leverage Facebook pages and ads to connect with customers and potential customers. You can target specific target groups based on location, age, and interest. If you’re not marketing on Facebook, your small business is missing out on one of the best values in online advertising anywhere.

Your Dyer, Tennessee-based Twelve Oaks Group has social media marketing experts that can guide you in your marketing efforts with not only Facebook, but also Twitter and LinkedIn. Why not contact us right now while you’re thinking about it by calling (731) 337-4330.

Twelve Oaks Group

Tennessee-based Twelve Oak Group is unique in its approach to its customers. Each team member is committed to helping grow small business, making local government more accessible, and enhancing communities with their web design and consulting services expertise. We will not deviate from this approach!

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