Mac Users, The Wait For a New Version Of Office May Soon Be Over

It isn’t easy to be an Apple fan and a fan of Microsoft Office, too. But some small business owners are certainly in that boat.You may prefer a Mac for work, but clients can’t stop sending you .doc files. So what is a Mac loving Microsoft Office using business owner to do?

Well, fortunately a solution is at hand. The last version of Microsoft Office for Mac was put out way back in 2011. That’s like an eternity in software years. So it’s no wonder that talk of a new version of Office for Mac is causing some excitement.

Thorsten Hübschen, business group lead at Microsoft in Germany told a magazine there that an update was coming “in the second half of 2014.”

According to that report, a special development team is hard at work on bringing out a new version of the Office software for Mac. Hübschen said the update was originally planned for last year, but office reshuffling caused it to be delayed.

Microsoft told TechRadar in an emailed statement:

“The team is hard at work on the next version of Office for Mac. While I don’t have details to share on timing, when it’s available, Office 365 subscribers will automatically get the next Office for Mac at no additional cost.”

MacLife is speculating that the news of an upgrade this year could finally mean support for iOS devices, including the iPad. Of course, Mashable observes that:

“If you’re an Office 365 subscriber, your five-device subscription already includes the Mac version, and you can download the Office:Mac 2011 apps to any machine running OS X.”

However, with the 2011 version, you would not be getting some of the bells and whistles that Windows users are currently enjoying. Those would include features such as real-time document collaboration. As Mashable also comments, we would have to presume that any new version of Office for Mac will include leveling the Office 365 playing field.

Before any possible Office upgrade though, it is widely believed that Microsoft will bring out an update of OneNote for Mac first, possibly this month. ZDNet claims that OneNote for Mac will be free, in an attempt to clip the wings of rival note-taking service Evernote. Evernote is gaining traction with their Evernote for Business.

Positive Vs. Negative Feedback: Which Would Your Employees Prefer Hearing?

Maybe you think that’s a trick question.  But the results may surprise you. It’s just about even, say leadership consultants Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman.

Zenger and Folkman have surveyed about 2,500 employees so far. If you thought most employees wouldn’t want to hear negative feedback about their shortcomings, well, you’d be wrong. A slim majority â€" 52 percent â€" say they’d prefer it that way.

What’s more, the survey found these employees feel negative feedback is necessary for job improvement. Some even harbor the secret fear that they’re doing something stupid at work that ‘s holding them back. They also feel no one, including their boss, is telling them what it is.

Unfortunately for you, 48 percent of employees surveyed felt just the opposite, the researchers said in a recent post on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network. These employees feel constant criticism not only creates a hostile work environment. They also judge their managers by the amount of praise and recognition given in contrast to negative feedback.

In fact, not only do these employees dislike negative feedback. They may develop a negative view toward their work environment and toward you as a boss because of it.

So what is an employer to do? How do you decide who needs negative feedback and who would be more comfortable with the reverse?

Well, it turns out these employees are also divided down some fairly interesting demographics, too. First, age is a factor it seems. For example, 60 percent of employees below 30 prefer negative feedback. On the other hand, 60 percent of those 50 and older do not, say Zenger and Folkman.

And gender also plays a role, the organizers of the survey said. About 57 percent of men preferred negative feedback, while 51 percent of women asked were more comfortable with positive.

Employees also seemed divided based on their profession or specialty, the survey indicates.

For example, the survey found those in quality assurance, sales, legal, operations, finance and accounting all preferred negative feedback. While safety officers, administrative, clerical and office employees all seem to prefer a more positive approach.

In the end, though, Zenger and Folkman concluded there are no easy answers. As a business manager or employer, you will need to be discerning. Hey, nobody said it would be easy!

Zenger and Folkman conclude:

“So, if you are one of those who believe the world would be a better place if people only knew what they were doing wrong, our advice to you is this: ‘Lighten up.’ Only 12% of the people in our research reported being surprised when they received negative or corrective feedback. On the whole, apparently, people in our survey knew what they were doing wrong before anyone told them anything.

But conversely, if you are a person who strives to focus only on the positive and assumes that people don’t need corrective feedback, our advice to you is ‘Toughen up.’ People need to understand boundaries, and they need confirmation from their leaders when they’re doing something wrong.”

In the end, you’ll need to make the call.

Feedback Photo via Shutterstock

5 Best Contact Form Plugins for WordPress

While most WordPress templates either have built-in contact forms, or can be easily tweaked to include them using widgets, it’s often better to create your own contact form with a WordPress plugin. A good contact form gives your small business website a professional appearance, and helps you simplify managing your online communication.

The benefits of using a WordPress contact form plugin include:

• Customizations: Plugins allow you to create contact forms that match the look and feel of your site, with custom fields, defined next steps, and more.
• Ease of use: Many WordPress contact form plugins are simple, user-friendly interfaces that require no coding to install or use.
• Contact management: Some contact form plugins for WordPress include a dashboard to help you manage contact information from your customers.
• Spam protection: Often, contact form plugins for WordPress include some form of security to prevent spam comments.

Here are some of the best contact form plugins for WordPress and your small business website.

Fast Secure Contact Form

This powerful form builder is versatile and easy to use. The Fast Secure Contact Form plugin lets you add, remove, and reorder fields, permits custom field creation, and allows commenters to send emails automatically. You can also create multiple forms and redirect users to any URL you choose after the message is sent.

Fast Secure Contact Form provides automatic spam comment protection with built-in Akismet and CAPTCHA support.

Jetpack Contact Form

If you don’t already have Jetpack installed on your website, you may want to consider using this plugin. It offers many of the features built into WordPress.com websites that aren’t automatically included for self-hosted WordPress sites - stats, social comments, extra widgets, post sliders, email subscription tools, and much more.

One of this plugin’s features is the Jetpack Contact Form, a simple and elegant form creator built on Akismet. You can add a contact form to any page or post, add and reorder fields, customize your email notifications, prevent spam comments, add redirect links, and customize the form appearance, including the text for the submit button.

Custom Contact Forms

This intuitive and highly customizable plugin, Custom Contact Forms, is packed with features and is extremely user-friendly, giving you all of the benefits of CSS customization without having to know CSS. Most features are drag-and-drop or dropdown menu selections, and there are plenty of options to choose from.

Custom Contact Forms let you:

• Customize size, colors, borders, padding, margins, backgrounds, and more for your contact forms.
• Add, remove, and rearrange fields, including custom created fields (text, text area, checkbox, and dropdown)â€"unlimited numbers of fields are permitted.
• Create an unlimited number of forms and set a different destination email for each one.
• Set required fields and optional fields.
• Display forms in pages, posts, and theme files.
• Redirect to any URL, including a Jquery form thank you message or a custom thank you page.
• Enable CAPTCHA or “Are You Human?” spam comment blocking support.

There are many more features with Custom Contact Forms, including a custom HTML feature for developers to further tweak the design.

Slick Contact Forms

A widget-based plugin, Slick Contact Forms is a user-friendly way to create contact forms that stand out. You can design floating forms, drop-down buttons, or sticky sliding tab forms, located anywhere on the page. This plugin also handles multiple forms per page for additional effect.

While Slick Contact Forms is more limited in terms of personalization, allowing three text input fields and one text area, the plugin offers several configuration options. You can set your send address as your default WordPress admin address, or choose a different email for contact notification. The Send from User Email option shows visitor email addresses in the From field for improved address capture. You can also collect IP addresses and the URL of the page users submitted from.

Slick Contact Forms includes several additional features, such as custom redirects after submission, contact form widget options, shortcodes, and more.

Contact Form 7

Simple, flexible and popular, Contact Form 7 has been downloaded nearly 16 million times by WordPress website users. This contact form plugin lets you customize form fields, appearance, and mail contents. You can create multiple contact forms and insert them on any page or post.

Contact Form 7 supports Ajax-powered submitting, Akismet, and CAPTCHA spam filtering, and is available in multiple languages.

Do you use a contact form plugin for your small business website?

Plugins Photo via Shutterstock

Mobile Marketing: A Journey That’s Unlikely a Linear One

Mobile Marketing: A Journey That’s Unlikely a Linear One

We all like to think we know how a customer discovers a business. But not every customer takes the journey we imagine when we add mobile marketing to the mix. Many a time when I have discussed analytics with a potential client, I’ve seen some interesting ideas as to what a client believes is a …

Content

Usefulness

Freshness

91

Summary

Find and select the tactics and technology that best connect with your customers on the go.

91

We all like to think we know how a customer discovers a business. But not every customer takes the journey we imagine when we add mobile marketing to the mix.

Many a time when I have discussed analytics with a potential client, I’ve seen some interesting ideas as to what a client believes is a customer journey.  Viewing an offer on a billboard does not mean someone will automatically stop what they’re doing and go to your website.  It will likely take a multiple number of opportunities to connect.

To make sense of those opportunities, read Mobile Marketing: How Mobile Technology Is Revolutionizing Marketing, Communications, and Advertising by Daniel Rowles (@DanielRowles). Mobile Marketing gets to the heart of effective marketing consideration of mobile device usage among consumers. I picked up my review copy via NetGallery as I was choosing a new book to read.

I think this book will answer your search for new business books to read.  Rowles, a host of a top ten business podcast on iTunes called the Digital Marketing podcast, has written a packed guide that businesses large and small will appreciate and can use.

The first chapter gets into basics of the “user journey,” labeled as discovery phrase and engagement phrase.  These lead to more organized usage of QR codes, mobile email, and mobile paid search. B2B and B2C examples exemplify Rowles’ belief that:

“. . .the journey will unlikely be a linear one.”

Rowles also ensures that the reader is not too caught up with in-person vs digital debates. Check out this comment regarding the death of in-store retail:

“So does this mean that retail is dead? No, but it means it needs to change and adapt to an environment that has radically changed. People will still go in-store, but for different reasons…The one thing you can be sure of though, is that if you are competing on price, in-store retail is going to be increasingly challenging, unless your store acts as part of a multi-channel approach.”

Greater nuanced details continue in a chapter on statistics. Mobile trends are covered, such as smartphone adoption, broadband subscriptions, and mobile social media usage, all global and all meant to better understand the end user.

The book’s second half examines and offers tips for a mobile strategy.  One chapter on apps is particularly useful for small business owners who want to create and implement a mobile app, but are not sure where to start.   The detail does not include programming language considerations, but it does cover the differences between hiring an agency vs. a freelancer, and what questions to ask.

I flat out liked how Rowles covered app development, as well as other tactics, such as the growing importance of Web analytics for multichannel reporting. An aside: The analytics chapter is a good read for those who need to understand why analytics can be more than “Web traffic.”  It is not as comprehensive as Performance Marketing, but it does drill-down to report essentials that can compliment the book, even as analytic feature sets have changed since I’ve started reviewing over 4 years ago.

This book provides terrific value because Rowles wastes no page on tech trivia, and really displays deft discernment of mobile device specifics.  Outside of the stats chapter, with its date-specified graphs, I never got an impression that the reading material would grow stale - an accomplishment given the ever growing number of ways that customers can digitally reach your business.

A few of the book details are pretty advanced stuff for small businesses. Three chapters are dedicated to augmented reality, Near Field Communication (NFC), and Short Message Service (SMS).  These chapters are still worth the page turns because Rowles describes some of the current hindrances for tech that can surprise and delight your customers further than a tweet.

For example, consider Rowles explanation of the value behind NFC and the limitations that currently exist:

“NFC is supposed to be the QR code killer. Why use an ugly QR code for which you need to launch an app before you can even scan it, when you just touch your phone onto something to do the same thing?”

He goes on to detail a limitation that can reduce NFC’s advantage:

 “…Apart from the limited number of phones that actually support NFC currently, there was initially another major hurdle to their adoption. If you are familiar with Bluetooth on your phone, you are also probably aware that many people switch it off because leaving it on drains your battery. This is also true of NFC on some devices….This means if you want to use NFC you have to go to your phone, switch the NFC on and then touch - not dissimilar to the QR code scan process.”

These insights are explained so that any professional, from the director in the corporate corner office to the owner of a bed and breakfast, can learn what a customer can experience from a campaign. Rowles’ writing and eye for details will accelerate your effort to learn best practices, instead of slowing it down.  The book’s ending segment includes a handy series of checklists ready to ensure you have the basics in place.

Read Mobile Marketing to select the tactics and tech that best connect with your customers on the go.

Mobile Marketing: A Journey That’s Unlikely a Linear One

Mobile Marketing: A Journey That’s Unlikely a Linear One

We all like to think we know how a customer discovers a business. But not every customer takes the journey we imagine when we add mobile marketing to the mix. Many a time when I have discussed analytics with a potential client, I’ve seen some interesting ideas as to what a client believes is a …

Content

Usefulness

Freshness

91

Summary

Find and select the tactics and technology that best connect with your customers on the go.

91

We all like to think we know how a customer discovers a business. But not every customer takes the journey we imagine when we add mobile marketing to the mix.

Many a time when I have discussed analytics with a potential client, I’ve seen some interesting ideas as to what a client believes is a customer journey.  Viewing an offer on a billboard does not mean someone will automatically stop what they’re doing and go to your website.  It will likely take a multiple number of opportunities to connect.

To make sense of those opportunities, read Mobile Marketing: How Mobile Technology Is Revolutionizing Marketing, Communications, and Advertising by Daniel Rowles (@DanielRowles). Mobile Marketing gets to the heart of effective marketing consideration of mobile device usage among consumers. I picked up my review copy via NetGallery as I was choosing a new book to read.

I think this book will answer your search for new business books to read.  Rowles, a host of a top ten business podcast on iTunes called the Digital Marketing podcast, has written a packed guide that businesses large and small will appreciate and can use.

The first chapter gets into basics of the “user journey,” labeled as discovery phrase and engagement phrase.  These lead to more organized usage of QR codes, mobile email, and mobile paid search. B2B and B2C examples exemplify Rowles’ belief that:

“. . .the journey will unlikely be a linear one.”

Rowles also ensures that the reader is not too caught up with in-person vs digital debates. Check out this comment regarding the death of in-store retail:

“So does this mean that retail is dead? No, but it means it needs to change and adapt to an environment that has radically changed. People will still go in-store, but for different reasons…The one thing you can be sure of though, is that if you are competing on price, in-store retail is going to be increasingly challenging, unless your store acts as part of a multi-channel approach.”

Greater nuanced details continue in a chapter on statistics. Mobile trends are covered, such as smartphone adoption, broadband subscriptions, and mobile social media usage, all global and all meant to better understand the end user.

The book’s second half examines and offers tips for a mobile strategy.  One chapter on apps is particularly useful for small business owners who want to create and implement a mobile app, but are not sure where to start.   The detail does not include programming language considerations, but it does cover the differences between hiring an agency vs. a freelancer, and what questions to ask.

I flat out liked how Rowles covered app development, as well as other tactics, such as the growing importance of Web analytics for multichannel reporting. An aside: The analytics chapter is a good read for those who need to understand why analytics can be more than “Web traffic.”  It is not as comprehensive as Performance Marketing, but it does drill-down to report essentials that can compliment the book, even as analytic feature sets have changed since I’ve started reviewing over 4 years ago.

This book provides terrific value because Rowles wastes no page on tech trivia, and really displays deft discernment of mobile device specifics.  Outside of the stats chapter, with its date-specified graphs, I never got an impression that the reading material would grow stale - an accomplishment given the ever growing number of ways that customers can digitally reach your business.

A few of the book details are pretty advanced stuff for small businesses. Three chapters are dedicated to augmented reality, Near Field Communication (NFC), and Short Message Service (SMS).  These chapters are still worth the page turns because Rowles describes some of the current hindrances for tech that can surprise and delight your customers further than a tweet.

For example, consider Rowles explanation of the value behind NFC and the limitations that currently exist:

“NFC is supposed to be the QR code killer. Why use an ugly QR code for which you need to launch an app before you can even scan it, when you just touch your phone onto something to do the same thing?”

He goes on to detail a limitation that can reduce NFC’s advantage:

 “…Apart from the limited number of phones that actually support NFC currently, there was initially another major hurdle to their adoption. If you are familiar with Bluetooth on your phone, you are also probably aware that many people switch it off because leaving it on drains your battery. This is also true of NFC on some devices….This means if you want to use NFC you have to go to your phone, switch the NFC on and then touch - not dissimilar to the QR code scan process.”

These insights are explained so that any professional, from the director in the corporate corner office to the owner of a bed and breakfast, can learn what a customer can experience from a campaign. Rowles’ writing and eye for details will accelerate your effort to learn best practices, instead of slowing it down.  The book’s ending segment includes a handy series of checklists ready to ensure you have the basics in place.

Read Mobile Marketing to select the tactics and tech that best connect with your customers on the go.