It’s why there are so many networking groups for all industries and interests – groups for tech folks, women, marketing professionals, defense contractors, young professionals and the list goes on. It’s why people join the chamber of commerce, Rotary and their local alumni group.

We came across this article “7 Places to Hang Out and Build Your Business,” which suggests a couple of places you might not have considered. One of those is airport and hotel lounges. The article notes, “You’re likely to meet other business people who have experienced flight delays and have time on their hands.” And you can use that time to build a business relationship.

Other suggestions include entrepreneur groups, tech meetups and even your local college campus. And don’t forget social media, which is becoming a great way to build connections and to stay in touch with people after an initial meeting.

Where are some places you go to build your business? Do you belong to a more traditional networking group or have you found some unique ways to build connections?

When Twitter started out, it asked people to answer the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less. And so tweets were: “Eating a cheese sandwich” or “Stopping at Starbucks for morning coffee.”

Yawn.

But it didn’t take long for Twitter to evolve well beyond “What are you doing?” tweets. It quickly became a place where people shared information, made connections and where businesses began to engage with customers in an entirely new way. A kind of online water cooler, Twitter shapes conversations and interactions, giving people a way to comment on everything from breaking news and TV shows to the weather and sports.

Here are a couple of great stats from an article on SocialMediaToday.com that demonstrate the power of Twitter:

• It took three years, two months and one day for Twitter to hit the 1-billion tweets mark. Today, it takes just a week for Twitter to hit that same 1-billion mark.
• Twitter reports 572,000 accounts were created on March 12, 2011, and 460,000 new accounts were created each day on average in February 2011.

That’s a lot of tweets – and a lot of people. If your business isn’t on Twitter, you’re missing an opportunity to reach those potential customers. It’s also a way to engage with current customers by providing them valuable information, answering questions and giving them a vehicle to promote your product or service.

While many businesses create a Twitter account, not all of them keep it going. One of the keys is to maintain a regular presence on Twitter. That means tweeting regularly and engaging in conversations on Twitter. Don’t just spit out information or promotional tweets, be part of the Twitter community. By doing so, you’ll find current and potential customers turning to you as a reliable resource and a solid brand.

Is your business using Twitter? How does it help?

Be sure to follow Spirit Telecom on Twitter @NoStaticST.

Why bother with job descriptions? According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, a job description helps attract the right candidates; describes the major areas of an employee’s position; and serves as an outline for job training and evaluation.

Keep in mind, though, job descriptions shouldn’t be written in stone. They should be flexible enough to account for changes in the company, employee growth and new opportunities. The SBA notes, “If inflexible, job descriptions will keep you and your employees from trying or learning new tasks within the job.”

Does your business take the time craft detailed job descriptions? Do you review those during an employee’s performance review?

• Pick a tone and a focus. It can funny, informational, high-tech, not tech, customer-service oriented – just pick one and stick with it.
• Keep it updated. Make sure your company blog is updated on a regular basis – at least once a week so you keep people coming back for more.
• Promote it. Make sure the blog is prominent on the homepage of your website and link to your posts on your Twitter and Facebook accounts as well as in any email newsletters you send.

Here’s a good article from SocialMediaToday.com that looks at the 10 best corporate blogs. Among the favorites are Caterpillar, Starbucks, Whole Foods, Marriott, Manpower and GE.  They have varying goals from customer engagement to brand awareness or simply to compliment an already strong company brand (Whole Foods, Patagonia and Southwest).

Yet one key component to a good company blog is to keep it simple. Don’t get caught up in industry jargon and don’t constantly be trying to sell your products so your blog becomes one large advertisement. Make it a resource people bookmark and return to time and again.

Do you have a company blog? What lessons have you learned from it? How has it benefited your business? 

Check out this article highlighting a study out of Australia measuring the movements of almost 5,000 adults. The results: “The researchers found that extended periods of inactivity correlated with larger waistlines and higher risk of cardiovascular problems.”

Research finds that taking at least short movement breaks during the day can really help. Every hour, stand up and stretch. Take a quick stroll around your floor and maybe even trot up a couple flights of stairs for quick cardio burst.

If you can, schedule a meeting for the coffee shop down the street so you’re getting a little exercise or use your lunch break for a 10-minute walk.

Of course you could always ask your boss to spring for the treadmill desk, although we’re not sure just how long it takes to master the art of walking and typing while talking on the phone.

A recent piece by Jonah Lehrer in The Wall Street Journal highlights the benefits of not paying attention. Researchers have drawn a connection between daydreaming and creativity. Turns out being distracted by a YouTube video or what’s going on in the cubicle next door is a good thing.

Lehrer cites a study of 86 Harvard undergraduates that measured their ability to focus and drown out outside distractions, such as a humming AC unit or a side conversation. The results: those who had a hard time staying focused were seven times more likely to be rated as creative.

“According to the scientists, the inability to focus helps ensure a richer mixture of thoughts in consciousness. Because these people struggled to filter the world, they ended up letting everything in. They couldn’t help but be open-minded.”

Would it be worth applying this information to your business? Should you build in some leisure time for your employees to be “distracted” from work giving their brains a chance to open up and be creative?

But in some cases, an inadequate office telephone system can be more of a hindrance than a help. For example, in today’s world, the ability to have your calls forwarded is a key component. You need to be able to check voice mail remotely – and in some cases, you might prefer to have your messages sent to your e-mail.

One of the things we do at Spirit Telecom when meeting with potential customers is take the time to truly understand their business needs. It’s important to assess how a company is using its phones, the problems it may be experiencing and to take a look at future phone needs. Every business is different so an off-the-shelf phone system may not meet a business’ unique needs.

When shopping around, look for a company that provides some of the following features:

• Call forwarding
• Remote office
• A Web portal so you can easily customize features and manage your phone system needs
• A secure, private network
• HD quality voice

What phone system features are most important to your business?

Office Space

We spend a lot of time at work. We spend a lot of time talking about work, thinking about work and sometimes even figuring how to get out of work. That’s probably why the workplace plays such a prominent role in television and movies.

Each week, we can grab some one-liners from “The Office,” “Parks and Recreation” and “30 Rock” – all of which are set in the workplace. We laugh at the silliness but secretly recognize some of our co-workers. We’re glued to TV dramas that focus on a particular profession – police detectives, doctors and lawyers.

The silver screen is no exception. This year’s Oscar nominee “The Social Network” – while it starts in a dorm room – transfers to the workplace and has a healthy dose of drama and office politics. An article from the Chicago Tribune names “The Social Network” as one of the best workplace movies. Also on its list, the 1940 film “His Girl Friday,” “The Apartment” from 1960 and Kevin Smith’s 1994 film “Clerks.”

Other office-focused films that give us a chuckle are “Office Space,” (who hasn’t wanted to smash an uncooperative copier with a baseball bat?), the Dolly Parton classic “9 to 5” and “The Devil Wears Prada” with Meryl Streep as the completely overbearing magazine editor.

OK, so what’s on your list of the best office movies? What characters play out in your workplace every day?

Typically we think of brands involving logos, taglines and a color scheme, but now a company brand extends to social media as well, requiring you to monitor your brand online and develop your social media personality via Facebook, Twitter and more.

Here’s a great article from Inc. magazine on “The New Rules of Branding Your Business Online” that offers up excellent suggestions on bringing your brand into the social media world. Key tips include engaging your customers so they better understand your brand and develop brand loyalty.

Also, use social media to tell customers more about who you are; it’s easier to connect with a company you feel you know than one that’s simply a static website. Monitoring your brand via social media is important. People will be talking about you, so watch out for what they are saying and respond – whether it’s a positive or negative comment.

Let’s hear how you’re building your brand on social media.

Does your company pay for your phone or maybe half your phone bill? If so, does that mean you are literally on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week? If your company owns the phone, it’s highly likely your boss will be tracking your movements.

A recent article from McClatchy Newspapers points out how office-issued phones blur work and personal lives. Companies can monitor every personal phone call from your child’s school and every text from your husband.  Some more extreme situations may results in firings and litigation.

“As mobile phones become commonplace work tools, the legal and practical boundaries around the devices are becoming a hot issue,” the article notes. “Companies are grappling with policies and a growing number of lawsuits by employers and employees are cropping up over concerns ranging from privacy and liability to expectations and etiquette.”

But in this era of constant communication and obscurity of a true “day off,” companies need to be realistic and understand personal calls pop up during the day and, at the same time, employees may be responding to work-related e-mails on their BlackBerry from their living room.

The bottom line is that companies need to be clear on their expectations. Have a policy, establish some ground rules and work with employees to manage expectations and whether you want employees on call at all hours or can they turn the phone off on weekends.

Do you have an office-issued cell phone? Does your company have a policy? Share your experiences with us.

Feeling overwhelmed at work can be the result of a number of factors, including hitting a growth spurt as a business, dealing with staff cutbacks or even being unorganized. Regardless of the reason, it’s hard not to feel discouraged. So, what can you do to get your schedule under control and workload reduced to something slightly more manageable?

• Get focused. Part of work-related stress comes from getting caught up in a cycle of meetings, e-mails and other tasks that crop up throughout the day. Shut your door – physical and virtual – and stay focused on the task at hand. Yes, it’s easier said than done, but you’ll probably find you actually complete tasks faster when you stay on track rather than stopping and starting a dozen times.
• Be realistic – to yourself and your supervisor. Unless you’ve found some extra hours in the day, there’s truly only so much you can accomplish in a given workday. While it’s tough to tell your boss you just can’t head up another project, you have to say “no” from time to time. It’s better to say “no” up front rather than having to scramble at the end to turn in a mediocre report or a late presentation.
• Take breaks. You may feel that burning the midnight oil is the only way to meet your deadlines, but tired work usually produces poor results. Allow yourself a lunch break, a coffee break or time to hit the gym before work. Stepping away from a project can give you a renewed perspective and the chance to see things in a different light.

What’s overwhelming in your job? How are you addressing it? Or are you drowning? Share your tips and advice!

Foursquare announced its 6 millionth user last week and reported 3,400% growth in 2010 – a number pretty much any company would be happy to promote. Users logged more than 380 million check-ins last year and the app continues to grow in popularity. As this article from Gigaom.com points out, even with 6 million users worldwide, Foursquare isn’t quite mainstream. Only 4% of Americans are using such located-based services, according to the Pew Research Center.

Twitter, for example, wasn’t exactly mainstream when it started either. Facebook’s initial audience was college students. Not all technology explodes onto the scene to infiltrate our daily lives immediately. So as businesses, don’t immediately discredit what might be seen as “niche” services appealing to a small audience. That’s not to say you should jump on every tech bandwagon, but keep your ear to the ground and your mind open to the ways these tools could benefit your business.

What are some tools you adopted early on for your business that yielded great success? What tech are you watching closely?

For some people, everyday is Fun at Work Day. We’re not yet sure who those people are, so if it’s you, please chime in and let us know. For the rest of us, fun and work occasionally go together but most of the time the focus is on “work” rather than “fun.”

So, circle Jan. 28 on your calendar and get ready to have fun at work. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Surprise the office with a Keurig coffee machine and treat everyone to a morning cup of java (or make it a really fun day and have two cups).
• Set up Rock Band in the conference room and have a lunchtime concert (ripped jeans and tattoos not required).
• Take a 30-minute afternoon break and have an office scavenger hunt. The winner gets an extra vacation day.
• Let employees bring their dogs to work (well-behaved ones only!) and then head outside for a quick game of fetch.

Your employees have been probably been working hard during the first month of 2011, so Fun at Work Day is the perfect opportunity to let everyone blow off a little steam and reconnect as co-workers. Let’s hear your ideas for having some fun at work.

While most companies do their best to keep IT costs in check, a survey of more than 300 top IT execs reveal that 54 percent plan to grow their budgets this year – quite a jump from May 2009 when only 14 percent planned a budget bump.

According to this survey, mobile devices and applications will be the recipients of these funds, in large part as a way to improve employee productivity and efficiency.

Rick Peltz, CIO of brokerage firm Marcus and Millichap, says mobility is crucial to the work of his company’s 1,200 brokers. “Any type of mobile device is a big benefit to them and it leverages their ability to foster relationships away from the office.”

Are you planning to spend more on IT this year? How will you allocate the money? What’s the best value for your spending this year?

At the opposite end of the spectrum we have the awkward and uncomfortable situation in which an employee storms from the building humming the lyrics to a certain Johnny Paycheck song. Or maybe you have an employee who threatens to quit each time something doesn’t go his way. In either situation, managers find themselves with some decisions.

If the employee leaves abruptly, it’s best to just let him go and move on. This article, “What to Do When Your Employee Quits,” likens that situation to a marriage: “If someone is having an affair, his interests are elsewhere.” So, offer a box for the desk plant and family photos and move on.

The author of this piece points out you can bargain with employees to get them to stay or try to get to the root of the problem. That may work and could give you some good insights into things that may or may not be working or it could be a futile effort if the employee has already made up her mind to go.

Your ultimate decision may come down to the employee and whether she’s worth saving. If he’s overly dramatic and always threatening to leave, he may not be worth the effort of keeping. In the end, you’ll need to think about what’s best for your company and the other employees.

Have a story of an employee who walked out? Did you ever try to convince an employee to stay?

But taking bold steps – while sometimes uncomfortable – could be the best thing you do for your business this year. We came across this article about 11 New Year’s Resolutions for Small Business Owners and found that while a couple of the resolutions may be tough to swallow, it’s a good list for making you think about what bold steps you might need to take in your own business.

One of the first suggestions is to “stop complaining about the bad economy.” Every business – large and small – has bemoaned the impact of the economy on his or her business over the past couple of years. It’s an easy scapegoat and for some businesses may be serving as a crutch. The author of this article suggests business owners accept this economy as the “new normal” and start offering up solutions.

Another bold move on this list of resolutions is to “fire the employees that do not increase profit.” Tough? Well, look at the author’s suggestion: “If that employee went on a month-long vacation, would the company suffer?”

What bold moves are you making this year? What bold moves do you want to make but just aren’t sure how?

The survey was an initiative of Smart Brief, which publishes free e-mail newsletters that provide top stories and news for various industries.

The State of Social Media for Business 2010 report found that most companies surveyed have adopted the use of social media in the past 18 months, using primarily Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and blogs.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that 60 percent of respondents say that even though their companies are using social media, they have little confidence in their social media strategies. Our guess this stat may be tied to another finding in the report: While companies have a primary goal of using social media to build their brand, most are using the tools to push information out rather to engage customers and potential customers in a two-way conversation.

That engagement and conversation is the key to harnessing the power of social media. Consumers are bombarded with messages and sales pitches all day long. Businesses shoving information out via Twitter and Facebook are simply part of the noise. The trick it to engage with consumers so they develop a relationship with your brand that is more likely to lead to a real return on investment.

Share with us how you are using social media in your business. Or are you struggling to get started?

“Dilbert” creator Scott Adams wrote a great column for The Wall Street Journal called “The Perfect Stimulus: Bad Management” with a terrific sub-headline: “If no one had a hamster-brained sociopath for a boss, who would start a new business?”

Adams’ premise is that the frustration of working for less-than-stellar managers fosters entrepreneurship as workers imagine jumping ship and striking out on their own.

You wouldn’t leave an unpleasant but relatively safe situation unless you could imagine a better outcome. So the people who tend to leave a company first tend to be the visionaries who can best imagine entrepreneurial success.

Do you agree with this theory? Do you know – or maybe you are one – an entrepreneur who couldn’t take one more day at the office and so left to create his or her own business? Did it work out?

Getting organized at work is truly a great way to start the New Year. You can purge files, e-mails and those articles you intended to read but are now completely out of date and irrelevant. But if your office looks like a tornado swept through in 2010, you might be feeling a bit overwhelmed.

Your best bet is simply to take it one step at a time. Chances are you can’t devote an entire day or two to cleaning and organizing (you do have work to do after all), so break the task into several pieces to tackle over the course of a week or two. Maybe you clean out one file drawer each day for a week. The following week you work on weeding through 10 old e-mails first thing in the morning.

Finally, when you’re finished and your office looks like something out of a magazine, work on developing some good habits to keep it that way. Resolve to devote the last 10 minutes of each workday to tidying up your desk, filing and filtering out some e-mails.

By the end of year, you’ll be so organized your co-workers won’t recognize you! Let’s hear your best organizational tips. Did you resolve to be more organized in 2011?

1. Password Overload: Seems we struck a cord with a common affliction. We’re torn between creating a cryptic password and actually remembering the password. This blog post offered some tips for both.
2. ‘I’ll Be Out of the Office …’: Who hasn’t gotten a vacation voicemail greeting that’s three weeks out of date? This post offers some good tips on recording a useful out-of-office voicemail greeting (such as providing the name and number of a colleague who can offer immediate assistance) along with a video poking fun at our favorite voicemail greeting pet peeves.
3. Using Video for Business: With easy-to-use tools like a Flip video camera and basic editing software, it’s not tough to create a video promoting your business. This post has tips on doing it right, such as not making the video too technical and filled with industry jargon.
4. Unsubscribing From Your Company E-Newsletter: This post took at look at ice cream giant Ben & Jerry’s decision to forego its e-mail marketing in favor of social media. Even though social media may be less costly for your business, should you completely eliminate the e-newsletter?
5. Even Volcanic Ash Isn’t an Excuse to Miss Work: Like it or not, technology has us so connected that sick days, snow days and even personal days are practically obsolete. We also found last April that even volcanic ash isn’t an excuse to miss work. As ash clouds floating over Europe put a halt to travel, businesses turned to conferencing to keep work flowing and meetings moving.

Were these posts among your favorites? What’s your top pick? What topics should we cover on the No Static Blog in 2011?