Four Technologies for Growing Your Business

The end of the year is an excellent time for small businesses to look both backward and forward. In looking back, take stock of how your business changed over the past year. Did you meet your goals? If not, why? Did your business grow? Has your market changed?

When looking forward, now's a good time to set your goals and objectives for the coming year. Decide exactly how you want your business to evolve next year. Do you want to enter new markets? Target new types of customers? Respond to new competitive pressures?

Once you've set your business' goals and objectives, the next step is to map them to the technologies that can best help you meet them. In this column, we'll look at four network-based technologies that can help small businesses achieve their goals, whether it's increasing productivity, improving customer satisfaction or reducing costs.

Video Conferencing

Video conferencing provides real-time, face-to-face communications with partners, clients, contractors and employees over a broadband network. With a video camera at either end and a robust network in between, you can see as well as hear others during a conference call.

Video conferencing promotes greater communication -- and thus, understanding -- in several key ways. For one thing, you can see the nonverbal signals you'd otherwise miss in a traditional phone call. A video conference also allows you to present far more information than during a phone call. For instance, you could demonstrate a new product as you explain its benefits to others on the call -- a much better way to convey that information than standard conference calls allow.

Video conferencing can also save you time and money by eliminating or reducing the need for you and your employees to travel. And your employees can take advantage of training courses via video conferencing that they might not otherwise be able to attend.

Until recently, video conferencing was really only available to large businesses, which had the necessary financial resources as well as dedicated video conferencing rooms. But today, video conferencing is financially within reach of smaller businesses. You can opt for basic video conferencing solutions, such as those offered by free or inexpensive plug-ins for the Skype voice-over-IP service. Managed video conferencing services over a converged IP network is another affordable option.