If you’ve explored our website or attended any of our events, you might think that the Australian Businesswomen’s Network (ABN) is a large organisation — but we’re not. We’re a small business, a small team of six people on a good day. And the six of us have to cater to clients all over Australia because women in business are in country towns, rural areas, urban areas and overseas. They’re not always available to come to events, so we had to make our education and information available to them. Because of this need to make our information widely available and easily accessible, we were very early adopters of many different technologies, and now we train our community of businesswomen to use that technology.
We rely on technology because we don’t have a lot of resources.
I’m sure that a lot of you can appreciate that. We have a small team, with one of our staff actually based in the U.S. and an off-site advisory board, so we need to be able to communicate, share files and collaborate efficiently, sometimes in real time. We rely on technology to manage our inventory. We need to communicate with our clients every week because 16,500 women rely on us to give them new information about education and resources. As a business owner, I use technology to make sure that I’m updating my skills and have the right information to run my business. I had the pleasure of attending the largest technology conference in the world this year, South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, where 19,000 attendees shared the latest technologies. I came back with so many great ideas about new technologies that can be used in small business. But so many people are not taking advantage of the most helpful technology: the basic website. For most businesses nowadays, if you don’t have an online presence, you do not exist. If I search for and cannot find you using Google or any other search engine, then you don’t exist for me.
The Internet has changed the way we communicate with our clients.
People expect us to be able to comment on what we’re doing, to collaborate with them and to acknowledge their opinions. We can’t just broadcast to them; you have to give them the opportunity to give feedback. In this way, you can co-create your business with your clients. At the ABN, we use an online editable website to collaborate on projects, so anyone on our staff can edit it and add content on a moment’s notice, from anywhere. We use YouTube to provide training videos on small business subjects, have our own Facebook page where we provide interesting articles and community updates, a Twitter account, as well as two iTunes channels where we publish podcasts: Social Media for Small Business and herBusiness – Insights for Women in Business. We use a lot of different devices and gadgets and we try to integrate them to give our clients multiple paths to the same destination. Technology allows us to connect with clients, educate ourselves and grow our business.
At this point in history, the question is not: “Should I be using these technologies in my business?” but rather: “How quickly can I adapt the most relevant technologies to grow my business?”
Start with a basic website, then use all those other social media tools to drive traffic to your website. From there, you can start to generate new leads and then communicate with those leads.
For new users, technology may be daunting.
I’m not really a tech-savvy person, but my business goals demand that I use new technologies. When I’m confused or overwhelmed, I may outsource a project to meet my goals. So, if you’re not tech-savvy (like me), don’t let that stop you from taking advantage of all the wonderful technologies available to increase your business. Go to Google, start researching technologies relevant to your business and you’ll eventually come across a community of individuals in a similar position, looking for the same information. That’s how the ABN has developed into what it is today!
