Social Networking or Social Notworking?

OPEN Forum by American Express OPEN

Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends February 9th, 2009 - 03:53 PM

“How do you make sure you’re networking, instead of notworking?” ...

I think it’s getting harder to know where that line is. With today’s social media — especially sites with lots of interactivity and immediate feedback such as Twitter — you can easily get caught up in chatting and surfing. It’s a constant mental interruption. Before you know it, you’ve squandered a couple of perfectly good hours of prime workday.

For small business owners, entrepreneurs, managers and professionals, it’s become an especially sticky problem. We convince ourselves that online networking is important for marketing. ... However, in the terrestrial world, no business owner does marketing all day long to the exclusion of other activities. ...

My stock answer to the social notworking phenomenon is: “have discipline, set a certain time limit, and know that it’s time to stop.” Some people have no problem setting time limits and sticking to them.

But today’s social sites are so interactive — sites like Twitter and FriendFeed — that the attention and instant response can be addicting. ...

So the question becomes, how do you force yourself to limit your social networking activities?

...I find that it is important to put social networking in the context of business goals. If I set goals, and determine how / what I want social networking and online social activity to achieve, it becomes easier to know when to stop before I waste time — and to actually stop.

Setting goals gives you a clearer sense of purpose to your daily activities, as this quote at the Mindful Source points out:

While listening to a Brian Tracy audio program recently, I was struck by the following words - “You can’t hit a target you cannot see.” ... If you don’t know where you’re headed, how will you ever get there? ...

So start here. Figure out what it is you want and start moving towards it. Spend time today writing about your goals to clarify your thinking. You may be surprised. * * *

... As you begin to crystallize your goals in writing, you will create that “target” for your daily living. Your life will take on far more purpose than before ….”

... Your goals and sense of purpose will guide you in determining what to spend time on each day. But without goals, you’ll soon be adrift, like a boat without a rudder or sails, enjoying the interaction on Twitter, but not getting much done for your business.

Concierge benefits give employers an edge in recruitment and retention

Employee Benefit Adviser

By McLean Robbins

January 1, 2009

... Katherine Giovanni, president of the International Concierge and Errand Association, says that concierge benefits are an effective and still largely overlooked work-life benefits offering.

"It's going to give you an edge up on your competition because not everyone is offering this benefit," according to Giovanni. ...

Doug Cook, owner and founder of Birmingham, Ala.-based Concierge Worldwide, advocates for concierge benefits because they have a direct and lasting impact. He puts the rationale in terms employers understand.

"If you add in 1% [to the match] on the 401(k), people think, 'Wow, that's good,'" Cook says. "Two days later, they've forgotten about it."

... Dalbey Education Institute, a 275-employee Denver-based company, ... [brought] a full-time concierge into their office. Within seven weeks of implementing the program, Dalbey says 70% of employees were onboard, more than twice the one-year national average.

Dalbey's HR Director Nancy Bodnar ... and her three-member team had been brainstorming for some time about how to increase employee satisfaction and improve retention, especially among the "what can you do for me now" Gen X and Gen Y set.

"Our culture is first and foremost. If our employees aren't successful, our clients aren't happy," says Bodnar. ...

... Concierge benefits, she says, can actually affect cultural change - the way employees view a workplace, and the way they perform day-to-day activities at the job without personal distractions. ...

Show me the $$$

When marketing his services to potential clients, [Todd Wheeler, owner of Concierge Resources] ... says that he focuses on finding companies that understand that people are their most important product. ...

["We do what you don't want to do, what you don't know how to do, and what you don't have time to do," Wheeler says.] ...

"It was about helping employees focus on work and not having to worry about all the little things that can bog down their time," [Bodnar]says. She wanted to increase retention and make the organization a true "best place to work."

Bodnar's data suggested that employees can lose as many as one to two hours each day with non-work related activities while in the office. Thus, she said, even if productivity loss was cut to a mere 30 minutes daily, when averaging the monetary loss of each employee, the net loss for the company was more than a million dollars annually - several times the price tag for an effective concierge program.

Depending on the size of the office, Wheeler estimates that full-time, in-house concierge benefits cost between $20 and $40 per employee, per month. Given the economy and the ever-shrinking pile of employee benefit dollars that sounds high, but Bodnar disagrees. "It's a modest financial impact; really ... we're talking a couple of people's annual salaries." She says that if you lose several employees each year and consider the cost of finding, training, and re-hiring new personnel, the costs even out, particularly when factoring return on investment.

Hiring a concierge is indeed less expensive than many cash-strapped businesses fear, according to Giovanni. Older workers looking to retire and work part time, or younger employees looking for a foot in the door can make great concierge workers, she says.

There are green benefits to having a concierge program as well. Wheeler says that in a single year, one business's concierge program eliminated 130,000 vehicle miles from the roads.

Effectively-developed concierge programs should create a positive feedback loop and numerous referrals when implemented correctly.

"Our executives have commented that this has been the best benefit we've ever offered," Bodnar says.

When baby boomers in the organization begin to retire, many spots will open up for Gen X and Gen Y employees who will "shop around" for the best positions. Since work-life balance plays a decisive role in their decision making, a concierge program could become more valuable over time.

Small-Business Owners Await New Tax Breaks

NYTimes.com

By CONRAD DE AENLLE

Published: February 7, 2009

...A provision would allow businesses that had a loss last year to offset it against profits earned as far back as five years. Businesses could immediately recoup tax paid on the profits that the 2008 loss wiped away.

“Ordinarily when a business suffers a net operating loss, it can carry back the loss two years,” Barbara Weltman, a lawyer and author of “J. K. Lasser’s Small Business Taxes," explained. Lawmakers “want to extend that to five years, so if you have a very big loss, you’re going to be able to get a refund now. They’re trying to let businesses get some money back so they can use it to survive.”

The amount that can be carried back is limited to 90 percent of the loss; the rest is forfeited. This piece of the provision is known as “Rangel’s wrinkle,” she said, a reference to Representative Charles B. Rangel, the New York Democrat who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the panel that oversees budget matters.

Deductions and accounting devices won’t prevent some businesses from being unable to pay their full tax bill. As with individual taxpayers, the Internal Revenue Service is willing to show businesses some leeway, a spokeswoman for the agency said. Debt collections may be postponed if matters have gone that far, and leniency may be granted when payments are missed under installment agreements. ...

IT is not as though business owners have nothing else to occupy their thoughts. The complexities of taxation and a concentration on other aspects of running a business may mean that new tax breaks are not as beneficial as these owners hope. ...

The Jevons paradox and why more efficient cars won’t solve our emissions problems

Switchboard, from NRDC :: Kaid Benfield's Blog

Kaid Benfield

Director, Smart Growth Program, Washington, DC

By and large, the environmental community - including my own organization - has put far more resources into making our vehicle fleet more efficient than into reducing our dependence on driving through better land use. ...[The] relative lack of commitment to land use strategies is a mistake.

In part, this is because land use strategies pay off with multiple benefits - not only reducing greenhouse gases and other tailpipe emissions, but also conserving land, promoting fitness through physical activity, reducing stormwater runoff, rejuvenating disinvested neighborhoods, and saving money on infrastructure, among other rewards. ...

But there may be another reason: in a provocative new article in The Progressive ("The Myth of the Efficient Car"), Alec Dubro argues that making cars more efficient will actually encourage their use, wiping out some or all of the benefits of efficiency:

"In 1865, English economist William Stanley Jevons discovered an efficiency paradox: the more efficient you make machines, the more energy they use. Why? Because the more efficient they are, the better they are, the cheaper they are and more people buy them, and the more they'll use them. Now, that's good for manufacturers and maybe good for consumers, but if the problem is energy consumption or pollution, it's not good.

"The so-called Jevons Paradox ... is occasionally referred to as the Khazoom-Brookes postulate or the more explicative rebound effect. It's been neatly summarized as, 'those energy efficiency improvements that, on the broadest considerations, are economically justified at the microlevel lead to higher levels of energy consumption at the macro level.' Or, in short, you make money on each transaction and lose it in volume."

... I've wondered about this, especially when gasoline prices climbed so high for a while last year as, given global demand, they are bound to do again.

The market responded with more purchases of smaller cars and reduced driving, and we have stayed there since . ...

Dubro goes on to challenge the trendy premise that a 100-mpg "hypercar" is the key to a sustainable transportation future, and suggests that our continued love affair with driving needs to end, for a variety of reasons. He argues for more controls on sprawl and more compact, walkable neighborhoods ...

NRDC believes we need to do both, and I agree. But we and other environmental groups need to do more for land use. Dubro's article is well worth a read.

Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment. For more posts, see his blog's home page.

Who Discloses What?

New regulations clarify the duties of qualified retirement plan fiduciaries and advisors. Posted using ShareThis Financial Advisor Magazine By Janet Aschkenasy Pending regulations from the Department of Labor require retirement plan vendors to disclose in writing just what services they provide to qualified retirement plan sponsors, and what sorts of compensation they’re receiving—including gifts, awards, trips, research, finder’s fees, soft-dollar payments, fees deducted from investment returns and other kinds of compensation. There are several steps advisors need to take immediately to prepare for the regulations, says attorney Reish. Not only does 408(b)(2) shift the burden to the service provider, he notes, but the information must be delivered sufficiently in advance of entering into the arrangement to give the responsible plan fiduciary time to review the information before entering into the transaction. It’s important to keep in mind that the reasonable-contract fee disclosure regulation appears as part of a multifaceted Labor Department effort. This includes the department’s so-called rule, “Fiduciary Requirements for Disclosure in Participant-Directed Individual Account Plans,” requiring plan fiduciaries to disclose the dollar amount that each participant pays for administrative services such as accounting and record keeping every quarter. The Labor Department estimates that those disclosures would save participants $6.1 billion over ten years, including $2.3 billion from lower fees as investment houses become more cost-aware and more competitive. Reish believes that those particular regulations won’t take hold until 2010. Members of the private sector have argued strongly that it will take another year at least to get up to speed with all the new rules, he says, and “people can only do so much.”