How Angela and Justin Quinton used their $100,000 TELUS Challenge prize money to dramatically lift productivity at their Lethbridge, Alberta soil and feed testing business.

Angela Quinton isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. Not ankle-deep-in-mud dirty but more comfortable taking chances in business, which helps set Angela Quinton apart as she and husband Justin Quinton run Sandberg Labs, a soil and feed testing lab in Lethbridge, Alberta. “It’s a little scary at times. But you have to be willing to take risks. What do you have to lose?” Quinton told TELUS Talks Business.

If you feed and water your summer lawn and garden, you have an idea what the Quintons do.  A farmer seeding his fields for a bountiful harvest can’t control the weather. But if the soil is not sufficiently rich, the farmer must make it so. That’s where Sandberg Labs comes in. Today’s farmer needs soil testing for crop production and want a quick, reliable and detailed report on their samples, complete with findings and fertilizer recommendations for a maximum yield come harvest time.  Although many Alberta soil testing labs have been increasingly bought up by big multinationals and turned into testers oil patch samples, the Quintons bucked that trend.  “We’re committed to staying with agriculture. Everyone needs to eat,” Quinton explained.  

But the challenge was, as local farmers showed up on the doorstep at Sandberg Labs for soil and feed testing, the Quintons had to turn them away.  Having invested their life savings to buy Sandberg Labs from its founders two years prior, the Quintons found themselves owning a dinosaur, with outdated equipment and a cramped workplace. “We were running at full capacity as it was. We’re passionate about agriculture, and decided we needed to step up and serve the new customers. But we didn’t have it in us to do that,” Quinton recalled. 

But thanks to the $100,000 TELUS Challenge, a partnership between TELUS and The Globe and Mail newspaper to help small businesses meet their goals, that’s history.  The Quintons last year sat down one weekend to pen an 800-word entry into 2011 TELUS Challenge contest.  They focused on their changing industry, and what made Sandberg Labs different from the competition as it pursued innovation and customer service, while others bowed out.  “Here’s the problem. Here’s what we want to do. And here’s what’s keeping us back,” Angela Quinton recalled, summing up her Challenge entry.

(Photo: from left to right, Blair Kellington, TELUS, Justin & Angela Quinton, Sandberg Labs)

Among their first moves in using the grant was purchasing new equipment to increase the speed, volume and accuracy of soil crop sampling. Before, much of the soil testing at Sandberg Labs was done manually, and was chemical-intensive. “So we’ve been able to bring in more customers without a lot of difficulty since acquiring the equipment,” Quinton explained. The lab’s capacity has now significantly increased as it today runs 144 tests a day, instead of 10.

Using the $100,000 prize money on new equipment purchases and other productivity gains has the Quintons and Sandberg Labs well on their way to doubling the company’s overall revenue line to $1 million by 2015.

There’s also benefits for the local environment. “We can help farmers optimize their production and help with the environment. When they test, they are certain of what needs to go into the soil. So they’re not adding more fertilizer into the earth than they need,” Angela Quinton argued. What’s more, Sandberg Labs is a better place to work in as an employee, and be serviced by as a client. “It’s a much more pleasant place to work. We take customers on tours of the lab, and we see where their samples go, and it’s as if lightbulbs go off and they say that makes total sense,” she added. 

Etan Vlessing is a Toronto-based writer and business correspondent for TELUS Talks business.

For more information on the #challengecontest, visit: www.theglobeandmail.com/thechallenge. The deadline for submissions is May 28, 2012.

In addition to the annual The Challenge contest, TELUS hosts a year-long series of Challenge events that feature speakers, information sessions and vendors. The objective is to help small companies overcome business challenges to achieve their goals.  Yesterday’s event at TELUS house Toronto was standing room only and focused on how innovation can grow your small business.

(Photo: standing room only crowd at TELUS Challenge event yesterday, TELUS House Toronto)

After winning $100,000 to transform her agricultural testing lab, Angela Quinton on Thursday recalled the moment a business grant changed her life, as if by Godsend.

Quinton remembered standing in her office at Sandberg Labs in Lethbridge, Alberta with a stack of unpaid bills in her hand, and looking skywards for help, before a phone call to indicate she was a contest winner came. “I was actually praying, saying ‘Oh God, we need somebody,” she recounted, while attending a standing room only TELUS Challenge event on innovation at TELUS House Toronto yesterday.

Sandberg Labs had been chosen over 800+ other entrants to win the Challenge contest, an annual competition by TELUS and the Globe and Mail newspaper to identify and help a small business achieve its goals. The $100,000 prize, combined with new technology and innovation, boosted the sampling capacity at Sandberg Labs so it can better meet business demand from regional Alberta farmers and feed manufacturers.
“We’ve been able to bring in a lot more customers, without a lot of difficulty, because we got new equipment,” Quinton insisted.

(Photo: Angela Quinton, Owner, Sandberg Labs, winner of the 2011 TELUS & Globe and Mail #challengecontest)

Innovation

  But Sean Stanleigh, editor of the Report on Small Business properties at The Globe and Mail newspaper, while finding inspiration from Sandberg Labs wringing impressive growth from innovation, adds this is not a familiar story for Canadian mom and pop operations. “There’s no bigger buzzword in small business than innovation,” Stanleigh told the TELUS Challenge event attendees. While talk of innovation is heard all the time from politicians and business leaders, what’s missing in the debate is identifying which SMBs are truly innovative, where they are and what public and private financing can make them still more productive. “I think of innovation as a process, one that requires many steps,” Stanleigh added.

The first step for Sandberg Labs to innovation involved not just telling the TELUS Challenge judges about one or two business problems that needed quick solutions. Quinton recalled instead sharing the overriding challenge and solution for them – an inability to meet increased business demand, and the promise of technology and innovation to surmount that hurdle. “Here’s the problem, here’s what we want to do, here’s what keeps us back from doing that,” she said of the thought and structure behind her winning 800-word submission, which she completed with husband and business partner Justin Quinton.

(Photo: Sean Stanleigh, editor of the report on small business properties at the Globe and Mail)

Being able to see what others cannot see is also the story behind another young Canadian entrepreneur,  Armen Bakirtzian, co-founder and CEO of Avenir Medical. His Waterloo, Ontario-based company has developed a medical device, PelvAssist, that allows orthopedic surgeons to line up hips during replacement operations.  Bakirtzian, who also addressed attendees at Thursday’s event, said 95% of orthopedic surgeons still eyeball alignment when replacing hips.  And if they get the alignment wrong, the result could be expensive follow-up surgery. “So we provide them (surgeons) with the tools they need to put the implants in correctly,” Bakirtzian, whose company has received start-up financing and mentorship from the Canadian Youth Business Foundation (CYBF), explained.

Mentorship

To encourage still more young entrepreneurs to launch new businesses, TELUS and the CYBF have partnered to raise up to $150,000 to help another seven young Canadians get their business ideas off the ground and to market. “TELUS is built for business, the Canadian Youth Business Federation is built for starting businesses. So together, we share a passion for where young businesses can go,” Vivian Prokop, CEO of the CYBF, told the TELUS Challenge event after accepting an initial cheque for $21,000 from Jim Senko, Vice President of Small and Medium Business Marketing at TELUS.

(Photo from left to right: Armen Bakirtzian, co-founder and CEO of Avenir Medical, Vivian Prokop, CEO of the CYBF, Jim Senko, VP of Small & Medium Business Marketing, TELUS and Hugh Johnson, VP of Sales, TELUS)

That’s much-needed support to help close a yawning financing gap for Canadian small businesses, the G&M’s Stanleigh told the TELUS Challenge event. “The Canadian economy is full of emerging technology that needs capital for commercialization,” he argued.  Stanleigh also recommended SMBs develop a comprehensive growth plan that fully outlines how they intend to reach their business goals, and to connect with business advisors, mentors or anyone else who can point the way forward. Hence the rationale for The Challenge, an annual contest that invites Canadian entrepreneurs to share their business challenge to possibly win a $100,000 business grant.

Overcoming Challenge

Hugh Johnson, TELUS Vice president of Sales, agrees a winning Challenge entry needs to fully outline how an SMB is strategically planning for growth.  “Marketing is only one piece of the puzzle,” Johnson insisted.  He urged Challenge contenders to show creativity and a case for innovation as they explained in 800 words why they should receive support to get their business to the next plateau.

The G&M’s Stanleigh agrees, as he defined innovation for SMBs as an ability to spot a business challenge, find the solution and new customers, and to reach them as fast as possible. “Coming up with new ideas is half of the battle. You also need to implement the ideas,” he argued.
  
Back at Sandberg Labs, Angela Quinton insists her recent business transformation after winning the Challenge contest has made all the difference. “We take our customers on tours of the lab and say, this is where your sample goes and this is what happens, and it’s like little light-bulbs go off and they say, yes, that makes total sense,” Quinton said proudly.

Etan Vlessing is a Toronto-based writer and business correspondent for TELUS Talks business.

For more information on the #challengecontest, visit: www.theglobeandmail.com/thechallenge. The deadline for submissions is May 28, 2012.

TELUS Talks Business correspondent Etan Vlessing recently attended a TELUS presentation, in association with Autonomy, an HP company called "Data Protection in a mobile world". This blog summarizes why Cloud-based backup technology is important for mobile data protection.

No blue-sky thinking here: Cloud-based backup technology allows users to store and retrieve data via the Internet from anywhere in the world, anytime.

It turns out even a data storage guru can face a blank computer screen just before a big keynote speech.  Stephen Spellicy, director of enterprise data protection at Autonomy, a division of HP, on Wednesday recalled last year waking up in a San Francisco hotel room and powering up his laptop computer, only to discover his entire hard drive had been wiped as he slept.

“I had no access”, he remembered, “Hours before he was to make a key trade show presentation”.

IT had pushed down a new security patch across the network, which placed encryption software on the hardrive, Spellicy said of the IT mishap back at corporate headquarters.  So did Spellicy panic? And was he able to recover his presentation in time for his conference address?  It turns out organizations are today crawling with mobile employees dealing with the very same challenges of data storage, loss and recovery.  And that threatens IT departments scrambling to secure and protect company information and apps on employee-owned mobile devices and tablets that access corporate networks from remote locations.  Organizations routinely used cumbersome and manually intensive external USB backup drives and rewritable CD/DVDs to backup data and protect against viruses, power failures and accidental deletions.  But what about data protection at the edge, with on-the-go employees like Spellicy in his San Francisco hotel room?  Today’s on-the-go employees are armed with laptops, smart phones and tablets, and may need to recover and access corporate information from remote locations due to any number of disaster scenarios.

“Our IT departments are struggling with how to manage information as it grows in the wilds”, Spellicy told a panel on data protection in a mobile world in Toronto.  “After all, no organization has a walled garden in today’s fast-changing mobile world”.

“Information is spreading out to the edge, and we’re losing control of information, and we have to bring that control back in”, Spellicy added.

CLOUD-BASED BACKUP

Recall our data storage guru and his lost presentation in San Francisco.  Too busy to make sense of the data loss, Spellicy recalled rushing down to the hotel lobby and purchasing a Netbook with a Windows operating system.

“I fired it up and launched a recovery page, and pulled down my required information, as well as my web email, and restored the information I needed for the trade show”, Spellicy explained.

That was fast, not surprising for a techno geek like Spellicy.  But remote access to his corporate data, and online recovery, was made possible by the use of Autonomy’s cloud-based connected technology. In effect, Spellicy was able to remain connected to his corporate network and to instantly and easily recover lost data.

“I needed to be able to recover the information I was working with, which was critical to doing my job at the tradeshow”, he recalled.  Here cloud-based data protection is migrating from traditional desktop servers to the edge of a corporate network, whether that’s mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad, Android smartphones and other browser-enabled mobile devices increasingly in use by mobile employees.  Autonomy’s Connected Backup technology allows mobile devices to find and view protected documents and other corporate data, and securely use that information anytime and anywhere.  Connected Backup means on-the-go workers never have to feel disconnected.

Even as Spellicy’s main laptop computer proved useless at the San Francisco conference, he could still use the Netbook and an SSL VPN as a web browser to securely access his corporate network, and use the backup app to identify and retrieve corporate files.  All that’s needed is a backup subscription service, a secure password and a secure Internet connection. Here the MyRoam technology allowed Spellicy to use any web browser to access files, even in a hotel lobby while using a kiosk computer.

“Go to the computer, fire up Internet Explorer, put in a simple URL to the Connected Backup app, put your username password in and you can literally bring down the content that you’re looking for”, Spellicy explained.  He adds “The Connected Backup technology is purpose-built for tablets. At the same time, the MyRoam feature enables smartphone access to files by tapping into a device’s web browser, if required”.

DATA ARCHIVING

Fast and flexible cloud-based storage and access to business information has more uses than recovering from a hard disk crash. Spellicy pointed to Autonomy’s Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) search engine platform, which enables effective records management and archiving for organizations. Why would an organization need IDOL to gather up corporate information, process, store and serve it up on command?  The ability to identify, sort through and retrieve stored information becomes crucial, for example, to complete internal investigations, or outside litigation and regulatory requests.

“When a lawyer gets an email asking for information to be supplied to a court case, data needs to be recovered to remain compliant”, Spellicy explained.  Here the Connected Backup app has a range of options to browse and search protected data using keywords and concept queries. The result is critical corporate information, ­ whether stored contracts, documents or agreements, ­ becomes more easily identified and accessed.  Spellicy insisted Autonomy’s IDOL search and discovery tools may well prove invaluable when top execs and in-house counsel are looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack to meet a litigation or regulatory request.

“We can make sense of the information that we’re storing. And we can leverage that in a litigation request, he said of the IDOL search engine platform.  In effect, IDOL enables a look into the haystack to intuitively spot and retrieve the needle. IDOL learns over time what information is and how it’s being used in the infrastructure”, Spellicy said.

IT DEPARTMENTS

Of course, if corporate IT departments do not encourage mobile employees to back-up and store data in the clouds, then retrieval and access of protected corporate data from remote locations would not be nearly as easy.

“A good IT policy will have devices, typically corporate-owned devices, backed up regularly”, Spellicy insisted. Leveraging the clouds is also about making IT departments more agile and responsive, and very much about the bottom line as virtualization reduces storage costs and risks. That’s help at hand for IT departments increasingly asked to control and protect ever-bigger volumes of corporate data with fewer resources. For one thing, Spellicy argued roughly 85% of data generated by corporate organizations today is unstructured data, or the stuff employees create everyday and which is not stored in the data center.

Cloud-based data protection technologies can allow IT departments to reduce the risks and costs of storing this growing unstructured data burden.

“We need to be able to deal with this growing data load with limited time in the day, limited time to backup data, and with limited bandwidth in remote locations with which to access and use the information”, Spellicy argued.

By Etan Vlessing

The Connected Backup solution from Autonomy, an HP company, is the world's leading data protection solution and the service supporting TELUS' Desktop Backup.  www.telus.com/desktopbackup

Frustrated employers shouldn't criticize young workers for believing they can have it all. Mobile technology at their fingertips has Gen Y'ers feeling smart and productive.

Mark Healy believes Generation Y workers get a bad rap.

A Toronto marketing strategist and partner at Satov Consultants, Healy insists comments he often hears from frustrated employers about wide-eyed 20-somethings feeling entitled and needing instant gratification distracts from the larger picture.

Of course young workers want it all ­ now. The simple reality is they feel they already have it all, thanks to technology and their always-wired world.

Healy spoke at the TELUS Challenge event on Workforce empowerment yesterday in Toronto, adding, "This is a generation that has grown up hyper-efficient. It¹s about contextual wiring".

Photo: Mark Healy, Satov Consultants

Smartphones, tablets, social networking and cloud apps have Gen Y'ers measuring personal and professional achievement in minutes or hours, not months or years like the Gen X or Boomer generations with whom they share today's workplaces.

Generational Differences

So Healy advises employers to manage generational differences in their businesses.

Take how we consume music.  Healy told of hearing during his first year of high school in August 1989 that the Aerosmith rock band would release its next album, Pump, in October.  I was psyched and I had to wait for that album to come out, he explained.  Even when Healy four months later arrived at the record shop, he waited in line to buy the Pump album.  Now Healy wouldn't ask Generation Y to wait for music, because they've never had to. When they hear a song they like, they download it, instantly, onto their mobile phone or computer.

Employer Frustration

No wonder employers feel sheer frustration or even hopelessness, according to Healy, over the Facebook generation believing they can go anywhere in their lives and careers.  Patience is not a strong virtue with Gen Y'ers, who are more likely to jump to a digital start-up than wait in their corporate cubicle for career advancement.

Just ask Chad Saliba, a portfolio collaboration manager at Nokia Canada, who holds in his hand a Nokia Lumia 800 device.  He points on his Windows Phone home screen to live tiles for apps, contacts, groups and web pages.

Individually, they indicate received personal and corporate email and text messages, or missed calls and weather forecasts.

But taken together, the Windows Phone, with Office Mobile apps and other features of the Microsoft operating platform, allow Saliba to take in and process his personal and professional world more quickly and efficiently.

Photo: Chad Saliba, Sr. Product manager, Nokia

It's all about controlling what goes where, and more importantly making it accessible to people who matter without sending the odd email and not having the right email address, Saliba told TELUS Talks Business.

People Hub

Here's a shortcut: Saliba uses the People Hub app on his Nokia Lumia 800 device to create a Work Group comprising his closest workmates so they become more than just a list of phone numbers and email addresses.

To process information more easily and instantly, Saliba collected their contact data, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages, and pinned his closest workmates to his home screen.

Now he receives continuous feed updates with their latest news, or can send a mass email or a mass text to the Work Group.  So I can focus in on who I want to talk to, instantly and easily, Saliba insisted.

Likewise, he created a Personal Group as a live tile on his Nokia Lumia 800 to receive a continuous updated picture of their lives via social media and, if required, link his friends together.

Importantly for IT departments, separate professional and personal groups allow Saliba to protect the confidentiality and integrity of company data on his device.

I can balance the two (work and personal) groups very easily on the home screen. So that's really helping delineate what's work and what's personal, and having it all live on the device, Saliba said.

Another tool at his fingertips is a Bing search app, which allows Saliba to do a visual search using a bar code, a voice search and even a musical search to identify a song he likes, and then buy the album.  Instant gratification is right there. But it's a matter of covering off all your needs, Saliba explained.

Empowerment is Key

For Satov's Healy, employers need to shake off fallacies about Gen Y'ers being spoiled and self-indulgent, and focus on empowerment to retain them as workers.  "If we as business owners need to retain this generation, we need to face up to the reality that, the way we worked, whether it was good or bad, will not work anymore, he told the group.

That means not telling future generations to show up at work at 8 a.m. and stay at night to 9 p,m. or even midnight, because that helped advance careers in the past.  And forget yearly performance reviews for young workers.  They (Generation Y) receive instant feedback from their technology, and demand the same from their human relationships, Healy argued.  It also means less project-based work. Take processes and routines and try to turn them into discreet projects so this generation has a stage and an end, he added.  It means providing a work-life balance to younger workers not yet weighed down by family obligations.  And it means not paying annual bonuses.  A year is like a decade to Gen Y. Incentives need to be shortened up, he added.  The bottom line, Healy argued, is look at who Generation Y is, and then use their productivity-driven culture to bridge to older workers in an organization.

We can't be running two or three parallel companies, he insisted.  We see it in our clients that have good cultures they work on and foster, that they do better getting the most out of their employees, Healy added.

That makes perfect sense to Nokia's Chad Saliba as he continues playing with the live tiles on his Windows Phone home screen.  I pick up the device and I feel there's nothing I can't do. That makes me as an employee feel better about what I'm paid to do. And it makes me more confident and hopefully more successful in what I do, Saliba said.

This is the fifth post in a series featuring candid thoughts from leaders at enterprise-sized companies on how their organizations are harnessing the power of social media.

Darin Diehl is associate vice president of Sun Life Canada Web. His role is to use social media channels to manage the Sun Life financial brand by empowering Canadians with financial tips and tools via content-driven sites like BrighterLife.ca and SimplementBrillant.ca.

1. Social media has grown exponentially in a very short space of time, yet many businesses remain unsure how to optimize social media. Has your company invested resources in social media as a communications tool, or are you waiting for a more robust success model?

Diehl: We’ve begun to invest in social media with a lot of foundational work. Some of that is understanding what our social media strategy is. Some companies stumble into social media with a checklist: do we have a Facebook and LinkedIn account, are we tweeting about things? We try to take a more measured and strategic approach. So we have a number of initiatives around different business goals in the social media area. After all, we provide a broad range of financial services and products. It’s beyond insurance. We have 3500 financial advisors. So when doing social media, we ask what we’re trying to attain?

2. What specific resources have you allocated to social media?

Diehl:  We have a social media team at Sun Life, with a director-level leader. There are certain advantages in that the in-house team understands the business. And it gives you a level of protection, because those people over time develop awareness and understanding of our social media corporate culture and how we want to proceed strategically and cautiously, and still be innovative and bold.

3. Are they primarily in-house or are you using agencies?

Diehl: We are partnering with key agencies and outside vendors to help us with certain strategies, or who provide us with services and tools to help measure and execute what we do in social media with different target audiences. The consumer is one; employers and sponsors of pension and benefit plans represent another target audience. Or there are third party advisors that distribute the product. So we have different audiences and different strategies to pursue.

4. What research tools have you used to understand how your customers use social media to identify/buy your products or services?

Diehl: We use social media monitoring tools to track traffic to and from our social properties. From a research perspective, we look at how social media applies to financial services and insurance companies. Some of that research comes from Forrester or McKinsey. This is one thing that might surprise people in other verticals. Social media at this level of business is being researched and studied and there’s vendors and tools available to us that

are really geared to financial services. An example is Sysomos, a tool that can monitor and take the pulse of social communities to track what they’re talking about. There may be discussions we might want to tap into to become strategically part of the conversation and possibly influence it. And there are tools to monitor the mention of your brand, so you can keep track of how it is discussed socially.

5. Did social media play a role in growing your business in the last 12 months, and if so, how?

Diehl: Social media for us is a long-term play. It’s not just about growing the business. It’s managing our brand reputation, it’s connecting with our customers. But there is an element of bringing people down the path to purchase toward potential products and services we offer. The main example is a new web portal BrighterLife.ca, enabled by social media brand extensions. The site, and its sister French language Quebec site, SimplementBrillant.ca, focus on consumers by delivering engaging, plain-language content around topics that they intersect with on a daily basis. We’ve got a constant publishing model. The content is tweeted on a Twitter channel, and we post on our BrighterLife Facebook page. We also have a YouTube extension, and we have a plan to reach out and connect with influential bloggers in major categories. And we’re not on that property writing about our products and services. We’re writing about the challenges that consumers face. But we provide them with calls to action, with the next step being linking you to a fully branded extension site like SunLife.ca, or My Retirement Café’, or connecting you with a tool to help you find a Sun Life advisor.

6. How do you measure the return on investment for your social media activities?

Diehl: Metrics is absolutely vital if you’re going to do this. It just can’t be about proceeding down a path where, yes, we have a LinkedIn page, and we have a Twitter account on this. There has to be metrics around the social media. We will be measuring not just to confirm that’s it’s benefiting the way we want, but to instruct us on how to adjust our social media strategy. We’ll be measuring everything we do.

7. How do you measure the success or failure of your social media strategy?

Diehl: Some of it is longer term. It’s not something we’re measuring to determine success or failure on a quarterly basis. It’s more we make adjustments to our plans based on the metrics. In terms of how to judge success or failure, we ask are we moving the needle in terms of lead generation, for example. We can measure that and we can see whether we’re getting the benefits. We can measure whether the social media efforts we’re making are positively affecting the brand by measuring unaided brand awareness or aided brand awareness in survey questions. There’s a host of other in-bound metrics that can measure success or failure.

8. Specific to your social media activities, based on what you learned in 2011, what will you do differently in 2012 and what will you do the same?

Diehl: We will continue to have a strategic approach to social media, to be bold, but cautious, to be purposeful in the initiatives we take. As far as what we would do differently, that will again be about measuring what we’re doing, studying the results and learning and adjusting. But we won’t stop doing social media. It will be more about how to get better at it and get better results.

9. What is your New Year’s resolution for social media in your place of business?

Diehl: The resolution would be again not to barge down the path of social media initiatives without being purposeful about it, without being thoughtful about what we’re trying to achieve. We haven’t done that up until now and I’d resolve to keep that balance going forward. On the other hand, I’d also resolve not to be dismissive outright at ideas that initially may not apply to the financial services vertical. That over-caution could be a bigger risk than not taking a look at something that looks a bit bold at first, and then not taking any action on it.

Etan Vlessing is a Toronto-based business reporter. twitter.com/etanvlessing

This is the third post in a series featuring candid thoughts from leaders at enterprise-sized companies on how their organizations are harnessing the power of social media.

Todd Boone is director of market development at Psion Teklogix Inc., a global designer and maker of mobile computers. Boone is charged with enabling Psion to use social media to engage business partners and customers, and as an open network to drive innovation and external collaboration.

1. Social media has grown exponentially in a very short space of time, yet many businesses remain unsure how to optimize social media. Has your company invested resources in social media as a communications tool, or are you waiting for a more robust success model?

Boone: First and primarily, we’ve put in a community or I should say a social media platform which is intelligent and helps power a Psion-focused community. That enables us to get our employees engaged with our customers, as well as our partners, to discuss issues about the company and about potential opportunities and technologies. We see social media as integrated into the fabric of the business, because one of the key elements of our strategy going forward is to pursue an open hardware model. And one of the enablers of that model is social media. The community we’ve created is a primary vehicle to have that discussion with the community at large. And then, on top of that, we use other media such as Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook to get the message out there. But in most cases, we’re focused on bringing the conversation back to our community so we can have it focus on our infrastructure.

2. What specific resources have you allocated to social media?

Boone: There are really only a couple people in the organization. One of them is tasked with overseeing social media as part of their PR responsibility. But we have enabled the entire organization to get involved. Two years ago, social media like Facebook and Twitter was blocked on company premises. Then we decided to open the company up to social media to give employees full and complete access. And a topic that always came up was how to monitor the conversation on social media. What we found was, when all employees have access and are engaged, and everyone is responsible to some extent for the conversations going on about Psion, it actually makes that ongoing monitoring easier because people naturally jump into the conversation where they’re comfortable. The other adjustment we made is the help desk now treats social media as just another tool. And because it’s public and open access, we’ve seen a reduction in the number of calls coming into the help desk by around 10%. The information is now public and searchable and people can help themselves without needing to pick up the phone.

3. Are they primarily in-house or are you using agencies?

Boone: We are almost exclusively in-house. The only support we have is for the platform itself from a technology perspective. We don’t have any agency support from a content perspective because we want to build trust with the market. That means being as transparent and open with people as we can be. That has an impact on purchase decisions, and how people perceive us before they issue that first equipment order. If we start putting things in a very refined manner, it feels scripted and doctored by an agency. We want real people and real things. Even our CEO writes his own blog, and there are typos in it. At first he was worried about that. But my feeling is that makes it valid and real.

4. What research tools have you used to understand how your customers use social media to identify/buy your products or services?

Boone: We’re a B2B organization. We haven’t done that much research. I can see in a consumer-focused organization, research is key. For us, we haven’t done a lot of research on the specific issue of people buying based on the social media aspect of what we do. That said, what we do have is linkages where we track leads into the system. And the next step is attributing that to revenue. But there’s not a lot of third party research.

5. Did social media play a role in growing your business in the last 12 months, and if so, how?

Boone: It’s hard to say, that’s the task underway right now. We now have on the website an ability for our partners to market themselves quite robustly. They get their own page, they control the content. And that allows someone who’s browsing our website to hit the partner and say I want some more information. What we have not created yet is linkage to revenue from people hitting that link and approaching the partner.

6. How do you measure the return on investment for your social media activities?

Boone: There is a revenue aspect. But the second aspect is what we call open source mobility. Think of Lego, where you can construct anything and then you can deconstruct the same pieces to create something new and different. The open source ability allows us to customize. Having designed something in such a way, partners can create and add their own technology to our technology platform. The way we do this is the third element: having a very open and documented capability for development on the devices. The reason we do that is technology is changing dramatically, and is being used in new and different applications. And we can’t do all this ourselves. So our outcomes from social media are different from other companies because we integrate it into the very fabric of our strategy. What we’re looking for is actual product, and new business opportunities that are coming directly out of social media.

7. How do you measure the success or failure of your social media strategy?

Boone: The next step is figuring out new product and new markets and new revenue streams, which is easy to track because it’s inherent in the new platform that we’ve created. And we’ll also know when a partner has made revenue transactions.

8. Specific to your social media activities, based on what you learned in 2011, what will you do differently in 2012 and what will you do the same?

Boone: We’re looking to invest in some monitoring infrastructure so we have better capability than what we’re doing now. It’s really the analytics that are not that good. We want a better picture of actual traffic flows, with a visitor profile of who’s coming in. We’re growing and we’re looking to continue growing the amount of people going into our site for information, but this is where the analytics become so important.

9. What is your New Year’s resolution for social media in your place of business?

Boone: I would say to push social media in a way that’s it’s not so frightening. Let me explain. I think social media is becoming the new norm on the web. People expect interaction, to have a conversation, rather than receive static content. But I still think that, particularly in our organization, we still have an 80/20 rule. There’s 20% who use social media often and 80% who use it sometimes. If we can continue to educate people in such a way that the fear factor of posting their comments online goes down, it can have an impact in terms of leveraging social media in a company like our own for knowledge transfer. So it’s the ability to listen to what’s happening in the marketplace, and have people then share that knowledge.

Etan Vlessing is a Toronto-based business reporter. twitter.com/etanvlessing

This is the first post in a series featuring candid thoughts from leaders at enterprise-sized companies on how their organizations are harnessing the power of social media.

Edward Perry is global senior director of social media, OTA partnerships & innovations projects, for Worldhotels. His role is using social media to communicate a consistent brand strategy to a portfolio of around 450 properties worldwide. And going forward, Perry is moving Worldhotels beyond online travel booking to enabling customers to book a room on a dedicated Facebook page.

1. Social media has grown exponentially in a very short space of time, yet many businesses remain unsure how to optimize social media. Has your company invested resources in social media as a communications tool, or are you waiting for a more robust success model?

Perry: Worldhotels is a small company compared to many companies out there, and we need to be forward in the marketplace and not sit on the sideline. So we appointed a social media evangelist, and have a community team spread throughout the world as a global company. The idea is to address the needs of our global portfolio. That means having a presence in the Americas, in Singapore, in Beijing and in Frankfurt. So it’s an opportunity to get the Worldhotels brand out to more people. We realize that our social media development will take a long time. So while we can’t pinpoint the monetary ROI, we certainly are willing to put in the effort so people understand and are willing to interact with our brand.

2. What specific resources have you allocated to social media?

Perry: Worldhotels is fortunate to have considered social media an important element of its business in 2011, and we will continue to do so through 2012. Our company decided to appoint one spokesman for the company, one social media evangelist, as well as one person in each geographical region of our business to manage the expectations of our communities, and to reach out to our communities. Right now, we have one person in our Beijing office, who is reaching out to the China community, one person in Singapore to work on outreach in South East Asia, and one person in Frankfurt responsible for the European region. And I personally sit in Canada where I’m responsible for outreach to North and South America.

3. Are they primarily in-house or are you using agencies?

Perry: Social media will continue to be employee-based at Worldhotels. Anything we out-source in the future will be either design or operational. And here Worldhotels is fortunate to have received budget approval for a social media agency in 2012. We are in the final stages of choosing that agency, which will be involved in content design and development, as well as campaign management for our brand.

4. What research tools have you used to understand how your customers use social media to identify/buy your products or services?

Perry: For Worldhotels, we’re engaging in a new frontier here. We never expected to have a social media department dedicated to social outreach. We’re really in the beginning stages here. But I can say we use every available tool in the market to do research on our customers. Everything right now is on an experimental basis, and our company fully supports our need to expand in the future with tools we might need to be better prepared for the marketplace.

5. Did social media play a role in growing your business in the last 12 months, and if so, how?

Perry: One of the most important reasons Worldhotels has invested so much in social media has been to build the Worldhotels brand. We understand we have a lot of work to do to position Worldhotels as a household brand in North America and globally, and more social outreach is needed. But here social media is the perfect opportunity to make people aware of the values that our brand has, and why we would like to have them as a customer.

6. How do you measure the return on investment for your social media activities?

Perry: First and foremost, the main ROI factor for us is awareness and engagement with our brand. But as a business, we’d also ideally like to see some financial ROI in the mix. So we also invite any customer to directly book on our Facebook page. Now, if they don’t feel comfortable doing that, that’s fine. But our vision is, in a very short period of time, we want to enable that customer to seamlessly make that booking on our Facebook page without having to go to another website to do it.

7. How do you measure the success or failure of your social media strategy?

Perry: Again, it’s about engagement. It’s about the quality and level of the dialogue that we’re having with our community members. We also see success of failure by the number of followers that we can attract, and in the influence of the followers we attract to evangelize the brand on their own level. So how many people are sharing the content that we provide to people, and are they chatting about it, or giving us positive or negative feedback? For us, most press is good press. Even if they’re talking about things they don’t like, it gives us a better understanding of where we need to position our brand to become a better brand for our customers.

8. Specific to your social media activities, based on what you learned in 2011, what will you do differently in 2012 and what will you do the same?

Perry: Being a hotel company, the individual properties within our brand are truly the soul of the brand. Without the properties in our hotel portfolio, the Worldhotels brand would be but a name. What we envision doing in 2012 is more heavily engaging our hotels in our social media activities. For the last couple years, we’re been ramping up our hotels to participate in our brand activities, to include their own hotel-specific activities. In 2012, we envision several campaigns that will heavily involve the activities, the input and pricing and prizes and all the fun things that go along with campaigns. And we will put our hotels at the forefront of our social outreach. They are the reason we do it, to ensure our hotels are part of our story.

9. What is your New Year’s resolution for social media in your place of business?

Perry: Our social media New Years’ resolution would have to be more internationally focused. Worldhotels is a brand with 450 hotels worldwide. Each of the geographical regions has their own cultural requirements. We need to focus more on the regional social media opportunities that we may not be getting with low hanging fruit like Twitter and Facebook. So we are increasing our engagement in other social channels. We also want to elevate brand in China. We’re in a good position to do that with a social media evangelist that we’re going to be working with in China to ensure we can get our brand name out. So it’s really about taking our community outreach to the next level, to definitely work on what we’re already do, but also ensure we act as a global brand when it comes to our social media strategy.

Etan Vlessing is a Toronto-based business reporter. twitter.com/etanvlessing

Forget the cloak and dagger setting of the Cold War.

In the treacherous new world of corporate espionage where spies use distant computer networks to gather business intelligence, the scene of the crime may well be your mobile phone or laptop computer.

It all makes dollars and sense: Canadian companies connected to the Internet spend more on R&D than most foreign competitors.

So agents for foreign companies, and their sponsoring governments, are electronically mining social media on Canadian smartphones or tablets to steal valuable business secrets, rather than create their own intellectual property.

And all the while global hackers hide behind proxy computers and dispersed routers on the other side of the globe, and with the junk mail folder of your laptop computer or other mobile devices as their ultimate attack destination.

Sure, global hackers can attempt to defraud ordinary people by stealing their credit card data or other personal information.

But the way security expert Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former operative with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, tells it, click on a hacker¹s email, download its contents, and you may well start a cascading series of events that could compromise an organization’s computer security system.

And the impact could be not only immeasurably costly to the victim organization, but immensely profitable for the cyber spy or hacker after they acquire key proprietary or confidential information to be sold onto competitors or on a global black market.

Here’s how it’s done

Juneau-Katsuya, now CEO of The Northgate Group, a security consulting firm, told a November Toronto media conference about a recent incident involving a Department of National Defence (DND) employee that sounded a lot like a plot from a Hollywood movie thriller.

Except it actually happened.

The email was innocent enough, and suitably bland.

“The National Defence employee returned to work on a Monday and received an email from a fellow employee whose name he didn’t recognize, but whose email address made it look like he was in his department,” Juneau-Katsuya recalled.

The author of the email said he¹d had a great weekend and his daughter had played in a soccer game against the daughter of the DND staffer.

“By the way, the email read, ‘could you send me this specific document,’” Juneau-Katsuya added.

It turns out the document was classified top secret, not to be sent electronically.

Sensing a honey-pot trap set by a hacker to exfiltrate or steal classified secrets, the DND employee flagged his superiors, who launched an investigation.

The email was of course bogus, but it also came from China.

Worse, the hacker constructed and sent his deceptive email from the comfort of his computer half-way round the world using photos the DND staffer posted on his Facebook account of daughter’s weekend soccer match.

Juneau-Katsuya, on hand to help unveil the fourth annual study on Canadian IT security by Telus and the Rotman School of Management, said the DND incident is instructive.

Security breaches in Canadian companies and government agencies are increasingly inside jobs that originate across national borders as mobile computer proliferates.

“You need to identify the threat of who is after you, who is after what in your company. And here you find the true vulnerability within your organization to better spend your IT security dollars,” Juneau-Katsuya said.

Photo: Security expert Michel Juneau-Katsuya (l), a former operative with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, joins Rafael Etges (c), Telus director of security solutions, and Walid Hejazi, professor of business economics at the Rotman School of Management, at the Toronto press event unveiling of the results of the 2011 TELUS-Rotman study on IT security in Canada. 

Breaches down, risks up

The Telus/Rotman study, in offering a snapshot in how Canadians collect and convey personal and professional information in the workplace, should set off other alarms when it comes to social networking and mobile security.

The survey of 649 Canadian firms found the number of security breaches of corporate and government servers fell to an average 7.6 attacks a year in 2011, compared to 14.6 breaches in 2010.

That marks a reversal in the number of virtual attacks countrywide that after a spike following the 2008 financial crisis.

But the more worrying trend is cyber spies increasingly target average individuals in organizations and their data, and are using mobile technology to reach their victims.

“In the past two or three years, the introduction of tablets and smartphones in organizations has changed the dynamics around security technology and precautions,” Walid Hejazi, professor of business economics at the Rotman School of Management, told the roundtable discussion on Canada’s IT security landscape.

Yes, all good technology, smartphones and tablets, but ultimately undermining the ability of organizations to detect and control security breaches.

“We’re talking about any corporate data that was shared as a result of a mobile device or a laptop computer falling into the wrong hands, as well as global hackers accessing data without authorization from an employee working at home,” Hejazi explained.

Top threat: cyber spies

The Telus/Rotman study, first released in 2008, goes far beyond finger-pointing to help combat cyber spies and hackers as they have Canada in its cross-hairs.

Its forensic analysis instead identifies the top corporate and government security breaches in an age of global hacks, with an eye to steering bots, worms, spam away from a company’s computer servers as part of a strong cyber security system.

The latest Telus/Rotman study identifies the top threat to Canadian corporate and government security coming from cyber spies who use spyware and malware to take control of computer technology in an organization so they can harvest personal and professional data.

It’s insidious. An organization may not spot a security breach by a cyber intruder in time to stop it, nor be able to fully measure the cost to the company after it takes weeks or even months to repair the damage.

An example: a recruitment company builds up its base of resumes from which to fill vacant posts.

A competitor then hacks into the organization’s computer system, or steals an employee's laptop or mobile hardware device, and virtually exports those resumes to a remote computer from which they can never be retrieved.

Now the recruitment company’s competitive advantage is lost.

Another scenario has a hacker stealing key credit card information form a corporate database. The company then has to shut its computer system down to clean it.

The company also has to ring the credit card company to inform them of the security breach, which costs both in terms of dollars and lost reputation.

“That’s where we see the greatest number of breaches, where employees and their technology willingly or unwittingly become the window or the door that gives access to that information,” Hejazi explained.

And social networking promises to make that security challenge even larger.

Tomorrow: How companies that ban social networking in the workplace are inviting a higher number of security breaches.

To hear more from Rafael Etges, co-author of the 2011 TELUS-Rotman Study on Canadian IT Security, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqWpT9mnXyE. Here, Etges joins Peter Macaulay, head of security of the Government of Ontario, and host Shane Schick, Editor-in-Chief of IT World Canada, to discuss trends in IT security in Canada. The discussion covers breaches and more personalized threats, mobile security, managing social networking in the workplace, and IT complexity.