Posts tagged First
4 Ways to Avoid Hiring Your First Employee
Apr 9th
It happens to every moderately successful entrepreneur or startup. At some point in your growth trajectory you realize you can’t go it alone anymore. To get to the next step, you need help. But the transition from a one-person-show to actually hiring your first “real” employee runs you smack into an overwhelming number of rules, regulations and taxes – and lots of other ways to mess things up.
No worries. There are ways to get help – without actually having to commit to hiring “real” employees.
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These four approaches can help put off that day when you enter the realm of being an actual boss. At least for a while.
1. Hire interns. Interns come with a healthy number of positives and negatives. On the plus side, you get fresh, young talent who approach your business with an open mind and new perspective – for minimal cost. Offering internships is also an effective way to build a “farm team,” a way to try people out before you offer them full-time positions.
The down side? You may have to do a lot of training, educating and handholding.
Before you go this route, check your state’s employment laws. Some states require interns to be paid. Colleges and universities may have formal internship programs, but they’re often accompanied by numerous regulations and a lot of paperwork.
2. Hire independent contractors. This may sound like an easy solution, but it’s actually fraught with danger. Too often entrepreneurs (who operate without the benefit of HR staff) misclassify employees as independent contractors–and the IRS loves to catch the offenders. This happens so often the IRS offers a special page with helpful hints on how to classify workers.
In a nutshell, using independent contractors gives you the right to control or direct the result of the work, but not how the work gets done. Meaning you can’t set their hours, make them come into your offices, etc. Is that clear? Probably not, so make sure you get good legal advice before heading down this road.
3. Hire part-timers. Since they work fewer hours, part-timers cost you less. But you may not know that part-time employees are subject to most of the same rules and regulations (and depending on where you live, some may be entitled to company benefits) as full-time employees. The number of hours worked denoting part-time status varies by state. Check with your state’s department of labor to make sure you’re in compliance. And yes, minimum wage rules apply.
4. Barter services. Exchanging services with another business is a great way to get work done without having to hire someone, or spend any money. For instance, you could trade x dollars of your Web coding services with a marketing company in exchange for the equivalent amount of marketing services. One caution here – our friends at the IRS consider bartering taxable income, so you’ll have to note the exchange when you file your taxes. The IRS also has a handy page on bartering’s tax implications.
In the long run, of course, having to hire actual employees is a good thing. It means your company is growing and it provides the new jobs our economy needs. Just be sure you really need a full-time employee before you take the big step.
Photo courtesy of shutterstock.com.
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First Steps in the Anti-Piracy Discussion Stumble Out of the Gate
Apr 5th
It is not a Mexican counterpart of SOPA, as we’ve covered here previously, but the piece of legislation known worldwide as the “Döring bill” or Ley Döring remains as much a hot topic throughout Latin America as SOPA was in the U.S. It is an anti-piracy bill, though rather than blocking access to websites at the ISP level, it would have ISPs shut off Web access from users found to be repeatedly trafficking in illicit, copyrighted material.
The largely unpopular bill re-entered the news this past Friday in Mexico City, where a public discussion on the bill and on anti-piracy legislation worldwide – the very type of discussion this issue has demanded – ended with the principal invited guest, Sen. Federico Döring Casar, not showing up.
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As it happened, according to El Economista, the event ended up being something of a rally against anti-piracy legislation of all forms. The president of the Mexican Internet Association, for example, stated the Döring bill put undue obligations on the digital publishing industry to police its own readers, arguing that (translating from Spanish) “we should not criminalize the publishers to protect the authors.”
Sen. Döring had spoken out against SOPA prior to his introduction of the bill (which is still under consideration), so many have characterized the senator has somewhat hypocritical. As he explains it, anti-piracy legislation is necessary, but not in a form that endangers a publisher’s right to free expression. From his vantage point, his bill would not shut off the faucet when illicit material is discovered to spew out of it. Rather, it would tap users on the shoulder and remind them not to drink from that faucet – and then take them away from the sink once they’ve shown that they’re not listening.
As Mónica Fonseca from Colombia’s NTN24 asked me this morning for an interview slated to appear on her “C.S.T.” program this week, how do we get to a perfect balance between protecting copyright and enabling the freedom of individuals to post what they want, where they wish?
I had to answer her, when and if we do reach a balancing point, it won’t look like the right for individuals to post whatever they want. For decades, copyright law protected artists from having their works presented to a broad audience by some unaffiliated individual looking to make a buck. While in retrospect, it seems silly to imagine someone pitching a tent in his backyard, putting on a couple of LPs, and charging a thousand people 10 bucks admission to hear them, this was a legitimate fear once the fidelity of recorded works reached such a high level, and not everyone had access to such quality.
The Internet has turned everything upside down. It effectively gives every individual the power of a broadcaster. I took a gamble that Mónica would agree with me that I would not have the right to rebroadcast an episode of Project Runway Latin America (the other show she’s known for) with someone else’s advertising attached. The Web might give me the means, but means and rights are two different things. (If you search YouTube for videos of PRLA, you’ll find the producer has issued takedown notices on several.)
The balance she’s hoping for, I argued, can only be achieved if the two important factors in this argument (let’s leave out the pirates altogether) agreed to meet each other halfway. First, content creators and the lawmakers who act in their interests must resolve to stop being so skeptical about the motives of everyday individuals. They just want the means to use the media they download fairly, and technology is often so convoluted that they must resort to unusual means to accomplish it – and sometimes, yes, that does mean copying discs.
But individuals must learn not to be so hypocritical themselves. We talk a lot about how a third-party monitoring system, like the one the Döring law proposes, could conceivably be used to infringe upon individual liberties, and would be an invasion of individuals’ rights to anonymity. We say this while we’re updating our status on Facebook, we’re broadcasting our GPS location to “the community,” we’re telling the world when we’ve left home and when we’ve come home from work, and we’re sharing every last thought in 140 characters or less. Obviously there are some third parties we’re willing to trust without a second thought; we’re just skeptical of those that actively advertise themselves as monitors of Web behavior. We’re more skeptical of systems that are at least being honest than of the thousands or more that are inherently dishonest.
Maybe most importantly of all, though, is that we need to show up and have this discussion. Our absence does far more damage than our participation ever could.
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Looking Back At Larry Page’s First Year At Google’s Helm
Apr 4th
Two articles appeared today that reflect on the first year of Larry Page’s return to the CEO role at Google. Bloomberg’s Brad Stone does a Q&A with Page in which he discusses the larger competitive challenges Google faces and some of his management philosophy. The other piece is…
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Brands See Fan Engagement Drop in First Month of Facebook Timeline
Apr 2nd
A pair of studies out this week confirm what the anecdotal evidence and rampant speculation we’ve been collecting for the month already suggested: The introduction of Timeline for brands has actually decreased fan engagement with companies on Facebook.
Both studies seem to add more evidence to the case we have been building for most of the past month: Ultimately, Facebook users interact with brands on their own newsfeed and rarely, if ever, visit a company’s timeline. And that’s good news for Facebook which, ahead of its IPO, would much rather have companies resort to paying for ads than use free brand pages.
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Facebook is in the quiet period ahead of its IPO and is declining comment on the business side of its operation.
EdgeRank Checker looked at 3,500 brand pages and found that all — whether or not they switched over to Timeline or not — lost traffic during the month of March. All brands were automatically switched to Timeline on Friday, but many started switching over just after the new feature was announced February 29th.
“Brand managers can rest assured that they are not experiencing significant losses when switching to timeline. Nearly all engagement takes place on the news feed, not on the page itself,” EdgeRank said. “Regardless of how Facebook changes the appearance of a page, this should rarely have a significant impact on engagement. This also suggests that brand managers must continue to focus on optimizing engagement within the news feed as usual.”
HubSpot has a more anecdotal take on the drop off of traffic, noting that content scheduled to publish automatically to Facebook in March, after the company switched to Timeline, posted a 234% decrease in user engagement. Content posted manually, however, had about the same level of pre-Timeline engagement.
“The results of our study do not indicate whether Timeline itself was the direct cause of the decrease in engagement,” Anum Hussain cautions in a post on HubSpot’s blog. “However, the sharp decline occurred simultaneously with the drop, raising the potential of the two being correlated.”
Both studies note slightly less of a drop-off for brands that have switched over to Timeline, but both also go on to note that this may be attributed to the media attention brand timelines received last month. There’s no way of determining if that better performance is sustainable.
We were one of the first to report on how to pimp your company’s brand page, but beyond that, the money you spend on professional designs for timeline may be better spent on targeted Facebook ads, which are poised to be the only surefire way to bolster brand recognition on the world’s biggest social network.
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Dealers United Announces First Deal for Members: SEO Services from KPA – SunHerald.com
Mar 28th
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Dealers United Announces First Deal for Members: SEO Services from KPA
SunHerald.com KPA beat out more than 30 other SEO vendors to be given the opportunity to present their best offer to Dealers United members. SARASOTA, Fla. — Dealers United, the first service to truly leverage the buying power of individual dealerships, … |
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Dealers United Announces First Deal for Members: SEO Services from KPA – MarketWatch (press release)
Mar 28th
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Dealers United Announces First Deal for Members: SEO Services from KPA
MarketWatch (press release) KPA beat out more than 30 other SEO vendors to be given the opportunity to present their best offer to Dealers United members. SARASOTA, Fla., Mar 28, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Dealers United, the first service to truly leverage the buying power of … KPA Selected by Dealers United for SEO Services |
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FREE SEO Report by Sigma Infotech to Help Businesses Take the First Step … – PRWire
Mar 24th
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FREE SEO Report by Sigma Infotech to Help Businesses Take the First Step …
PRWire To help businesses that want to rank high on SERPs but don't know how to go about it, Sigma Infotech is offering FREE search engine optimisation report to make them understand SEO better. Many modern business owners understand the power and the … |
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Dear Google: Take Me To Dinner First Before You Try To Score
Mar 23rd
In the ongoing wake of Search Plus Your World, there has been a lot of piling on the ‘beat down Google’ bandwagon. Much that has been written has been fair criticism of the search giant, but more than a small portion has been a gratuitous ‘piling on’ frenzy. I myself admittedly took part in some…
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Cost of a Data Breach Declines For First Time, According to Ponemon
Mar 20th
For the first time in seven years, both the organizational cost of data breach and the cost per lost or stolen record have declined. The organizational cost has declined from $7.2 million to $5.5 million and the cost per record has declined from $214 to $194. These according to the latest Ponemon study for Symantec that was released today. The study also found organizations which employ a chief information security officer who has enterprise-wide responsibility for data protection can reduce the cost of a data breach by 35 percent per compromised record. That is a decent ROI and good news all around.
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The study examined 49 data breach cases with a range of nearly 4,500 to 98,000 affected records, from 14 different industries ranging from finance to retail and transportation. Larry Ponemon has been studying this issue for many years and does extensive interviews with the IT managers at the companies who have had breaches. This year he has extended his range to cover India and Italy along with several other countries too. This is the first time he has seen a decline in the cost for the exploits, which he claims is because organizations have gotten better prepared and are using a variety of protective technologies, such as data loss prevention monitoring equipment. Also helping were faster customer notification systems too: 41% notified their customer victims within a month of what happened.
More than a third of the breaches Ponemon studied were as a result of lost or stolen devices, including laptops or USB thumb drives that contained confidential or sensitive information.
As we wrote about last year, insider threats are still huge and their negligence is still the root cause – and biggest cost — of many breaches.
Symantec has a nifty data breach calculator that is based on more than seven years of trend data here that can be used to gather intelligence for improved security investments.
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Google’s First Day Of Spring Logo
Mar 20th
Today is the first day of Spring in many parts of the world and to celebrate, Google has a special Spring Equinox logo. This logo’s design was by Marimekko a Finnish company. It obviously resembles the Google logo but has various flowers, birds, animals and insects to symbolize the Spring…
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