Cell Phone Etiquette

When I was a kid growing up in the sixties, we had a solitary pink rotary dial phone on the middle floor of our three story house. Whenever the phone rang, all activity in our household immediately ceased and everybody made a mad gallop to answer that ridiculous telephone. If it rang while we were all still in bed, everybody threw aside the bed covers and dashed for the stairs, with whacky bed hair and crazed, hollowed eyes. But that phone never went unanswered, unless there was nobody home to hear it ring.

In the early eighties, somebody had the good sense to invent the answering machine. This was the relatively peaceful period of phone evolution, now we could let a machine do the answering. We didn’t yet carry personal phones around with us, so if we were away from our houses (and therefore our phones) it didn’t matter. A simple machine handled the call for us.

Then a few years later we got cell phones. At first, only well-paid executives had them, and they could be seen walking around trendy restaurants with a brick phone glued to their ear. I regarded them with some disdain; I thought they were just show-offs, trying to look important.

Fast forward a few years, and now everybody seems to have a personal phone; they are compact, they often have integrated cameras, the phones are cheap or sometimes free, the plans are affordable, the coverage extends to even tiny little northern towns, the batteries last forever between charges, so why wouldn’t we all have one?

Apparently we all do, and many of us have forgotten our manners while under its spell. There is something terribly compelling about a ringing phone. What really gets me is that we have now regressed back to the sixties again – if the phone rings, no matter what else is happening, it must get answered. A few years ago, a friend and I went for lunch at Citta’s. While waiting for our server, my cell phone rang and I answered it. My friend looked at me with shock and horror at what she perceived to be very tacky behavior – to answer a phone while at a restaurant. She was right of course – it is tacky behavior. Since acquiring a cell phone of her own however, I have observed on a couple of occasions that she violates her own rule. After all, the subconscious message says, this call is for ME!

Because I find it so irritating and rude that someone will answer their phone while talking to me, I have decided upon a rule of etiquette for myself. The rule goes like this: if I am involved in any kind of social interaction with a real, live human being, then that is the first priority. If the cell phone rings, press the silence button, and let it go to VOICEMAIL! Since adopting this rule I have noticed my stress level has gone down when my phone rings. I no longer have to decide whether or not to answer my phone. My rule has taken care of that decision. Now I can wait until I have a quiet moment, when I am not having a conversation or driving my car, I can sit down, listen to my voicemail messages, write down what needs to be written down, and call the important ones back. The non-urgent ones can either be deleted and ignored or perhaps just pushed back a bit. The urgency is gone, the stress is gone, and I know that I am doing my part to practice good cell phone etiquette.

Web Analytics

It seems that everybody has a website these days. It has become an accepted practice to set up a website if one runs any type of business. But for businesses, it’s not just enough to have a website. Most businesses need their website to get some specific results… to sell directly online, generate leads, or save money by providing customer service online. So how does one go about it? Good question.

The practice of website optimization is increasingly becoming a science. Increasing amounts of resources are being spent these days on website analytics and marketing. Setting up a basic site is getting easier to do; there are many affordable software tools available to us these days, if we choose to set up our own site. There are also many website design companies around. Many rely on flash and dazzle to produce nice-looking sites, but not all of them know how to build websites that build business or save money. That’s where Web analytics comes into play.

The Web Analytics Association defines Web Analytics this way: “Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage. Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding & optimizing Web usage.”

Roy McClean, owner of Whistler-based Custom Fit Communications is a member of the Web Analytics Association and is enrolled in UBC’s new Web Analytics program. He notes “Web Analytics is the practice of studying website visitor behaviour and optimizing website accordingly based upon this analysis. We first benchmark your visitors’ behavior when using your website. For example, how do visitors find your site? Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves? What words did they search with? Do visitors come to your site from a referred site? How long so they stay? What you measure - you treasure! Knowing how your website works makes it possible to develop or adjust the layout, content and programming to produce better results. We are finding that we can often increase a website’s effectiveness by well over 100 percent by applying web analytics and development best practices.”

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the lament, “I have a beautiful website, and I paid a lot of money for it, but nobody visits it!” It is no longer good enough just to have a pretty site; you want as many visitors as possible, and more importantly, a healthy ratio of those visitors should convert into buyers. You should be getting a good return on your website investment - otherwise, what’s the point?

If you would like to learn more about Web analytics, I recommend visiting Custom Fit Communications’ Website at www.customfitonline.com. Roy McClean is leading a course in Web Analytics and Search Engine Marketing in conjunction with the Whistler Chamber of Commerce on Jan 16, 18 and 20, 2006 from 3 to 5 p.m. You can register at www.whistlerchamber.com in the Learning Opportunities section.

Threatwall Internet Security Appliances

The internet is an amazing technology; I believe it is one of the most important inventions of the century. Here we have an incredible research tool whereby we can look practically anything up, we can communicate with anybody in any country in the world in a microsecond, and there seems to be an endless variety of other things we can do on the ever-growing internet infrastructure.

As with any widespread adoption of a technology, there are those who abuse it. Those of us who use the internet on a daily basis know that there are dangers lurking, and precautions we must take. The most prominent problems are viruses, spyware, phishing scams, and spam. It is now estimated that 80 percent of all email traffic is spam. As a computer consultant, I can attest that probably the same percentage of PC repairs involve removing viruses or spyware.

I recently attended the Xchange Canada tradeshow at the Whistler Fairmont. Many of the exhibitors there were showcasing devices and strategies for battling the internet demons mentioned above. One that caught my attention was a device called ThreatWall. This is a gateway device (meaning that it sits between your office network and the internet, like a firewall), and its job is to defend against viruses, spam and spyware. It is also a content filtering device, which means that it can be programmed to disallow access to specific websites and types of websites that are considered hazardous. An example of a hazardous type of site would be “warez” or “cracks” sites. These are sites that promote software piracy and publish “crack” codes allowing software pirates to install illegal copies of software. Anyone foolish enough to visit such a site is asking for trouble – these sites are LOADED with viruses and Trojans and god knows what else.

The ThreatWall content filter can ban visits to such sites, thereby reducing the danger of virus and spyware attack, but that’s not all a content filter can do. Any business that provides internet access to their employees will know that there is a very real temptation for employees to waste time surfing the net, composing personal emails, downloading games, or chatting with messenger programs. As a former employer myself, giving my staff unrestricted accesss to the internet, I know that this was a problem. According to a Web survey conducted by America Online and Salary.com, the average worker admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per day surfing the net, not counting lunch. Over the course of a year (and even after accounting for time employers expect to be wasted), that adds up to $759 billion spent on salaries for which companies receive no apparent benefit. The ThreatWall device, with some programming by your network administrator, defends against all internet activity that is not business-relevant. It can even be programmed to unlock access to sites or messenger programs during lunch hour, and then relock the restrictions during work hours.

As for the Threatwall’s ability to defend against viruses and so forth, the device defends on two levels. The Threatwall hardware device itself blocks threats, but it also installs client software to each of the workstations on its network. Once installed, updates are “pushed” to each workstation as they become available. The ThreatWall device itself is automatically updated as often as every 5 minutes. Used in conjunction with a firewall, which you likely already have, your network should be virtually impervious to those myriad internet pests.

The ThreatWall product so impressed me that I became a dealer. If you wish to learn more or would like a demo unit added to your network for a free evaluation, please contact me.