For the life of me I can’t figure out why more businesses still don’t see the value of offering free wifi internet connectivity to customers. I wrote about this once before but I think it deserves more attention. While, using Free Wifi hasn’t been proven to be a conclusive way to increase business, the cost of offering it is so minimal that it seems inevitable that places would offer it.
Let’s look at exactly who you potentially turn away from your establishment by not offering WiFi:
Business men and women
Young Professionals
Students of all ages
The Casual User (email, chatting, google)
Professors/Teachers
Today in Lakewood (just outside of Denver) I drove around for an hour looking for places where I could sit and work for a few hours while grabbing a bite to eat. Here’s a list of the places that I found Lakewood that offered WiFi:
Starbucks
Borders
Whole Foods Market
Moosehill Cantina
Village Roaster
Atlanta Bread Co.
The Press Coffee Company at Belmar
Peaberry Coffee
Chad’s Union Street Cafe
Baker Street Pub & Grill
Yard House Rest.
Belmar Library
Lakewood Library
McDonald’s
Volkswagen of Lakewood
Stevinson Lexus of Lakewood
What’s ridiculous about this list is two of these are public libraries, two are car dealerships while four are huge mega-franchise corporate entities. The Village Roaster and the Atlanta Bread Co. are also franchises albeit a smaller level than McDonald’s and WholeFoods. That leaves only about six independent local restaurants that have realized that WiFi is an added value that customers appreciate an thus, the businesses that could benefit from it the most have failed to adopt it. Subsequently, the big corporations that tend to swallow up smaller competitors are made stronger. For instance, I’m writing this from Starbucks instead of the local coffeshop New York Bagels.
New York Bagels, which I stopped at for breakfast this morning, looked like exactly the type of place that would benefit from offering WiFi. It had an intimate atmosphere, good food, coffeeshop-style decor and seemed to draw much of the business class from the surrounding at breakfast and lunch time. I can only imagine how much more they would draw if people knew they could go there and still get work done. Unfortunately, the owner told me that he was “still debating” on whether or not to offer WiFi.
Seriously? What’s left to debate?
You aren’t going to chase away customers for offering them more. For the minimal investment of $50 to $100 dollars a month you can serve password-protected WiFi that might actually make you money in the long run:
Simply offering WiFi (even if you password protect it so only paying customers can use it) you’ll bring in new customers who wouldn’t solicit your business otherwise.
If you offer free wifi that is maybe ad supported, you can make money by selling that ad space to local businesses. Those business benefit the most because you’ve qualified customers for them in advance by proving they are physically located in the area, have money to spend and are tech savvy enough to get online and find said advertisements. It’s a variation of the impressionistic advertising that advertisers have used for decades.
One argument against offering Wifi is that it causes people to come to your establishment and sit for hours without buying anything. Or that having a bunch of gadgets around somehow ruins the atmosphere of small community oriented businesses. This is the debate that Javaology in Atlanta used for the longest time. These business consider the crosstalk and chatter part of their draw.
I don’t buy these arguments at all. For the customer who sits for hours without buying anything, establish some sort of minimum purchase that they would need to make before they are even given access to your connection. While the connection is still free, you’re forcing them to at least spend money on something else in shop so that you aren’t losing money on them. You might also want to consider offering paid monthly memberships to customers who don’t want to bother with those frequent small purchases. They’ll more than likely be happy to pay a premium up front for unlimited access. Changing the password frequently in this scenario will further protect you from freeloaders.
For the second argument, the tech customer may indeed effectively reduce the “chatter” of people who come to talk business or about their gardens or whatever people conversate about at coffee shops. However, it’s possible that they’ll increase it. I often frequent coffeshops with friends so that we can work on projects together. In this case I’m talking more than I would be otherwise. That’s playing devil’s advocate though, my real argument is that your customers will decide what type of atmosphere they want to create….not you. Trying to control the actions of your customers is like trying to predict the stock market. There’s a science to coming close, but you’ll never succeed 100%.
In conclusion, from my vantage point, there’s few reasons left NOT to offer free Wifi, especially if you’re located in a smaller area like Lakewood, Colorado that isn’t so progressive when it comes to adopting new technology.
I had to share this, it’s from a conference a friend of mine attended. She shared the slides with me and for some reason I found this especially hilarious. It’s a timeline showing how social media measures up against the history of civilization. Click the image to see it larger.
This article discusses some interesting revenue model ideas for the Twitter team. In Ten Ways Twitter Could Appeal to Joe Average I touch upon ways that Twitter or it’s developers could bring ‘the average’ computer user into the Twitter fold.
I really like the Tiered Model idea of paying more to get rid of ads and for more features. This is the method Pownce, Flickr and other applications have taken and it seems to work well in both cases.
I’ve been using FriendFeed for about three months now, and I like it but I can’t help but feel a little underwhelmed. One of the big pluses for most people is that it decentralizes blog conversations allowing people to interject comments into your Lifestream. But it’s this very feature that makes me not like it as much as I might.
I’d really like to see a way for FriendFeed to pass comments to the service that the content is coming from. For instance, if I post a photo on Flickr, and no one comments on Flickr, but 50 people on FriendFeed start a conversation about it, I’d like those comments to be passed to the photos comment page on Flickr. Similarly a blog post that has several comments on my blog, should gain the interjections added from my friends on FriendFeed.
How This Would Work
The biggest question, of course, is how would all of this work? One option is to simply extend the functionality of the various APIs that FriendFeed uses to connect you to your social networks. FriendFeed would connect to the service and the user would approve it to use their account (think Flickr and Flickr Uploader). This would allow FriendFeed to read and write to the users account.
Tricky part is figuring out if the person on FriendFeed has an account on whatever the service is that your content exists on it. If the user doesn’t This could be solved by simply using a dummy FreindFeed account. For example on Flickr…
FriendFeed says:
@FFUser1 “nice photo, man!”
@FFUser2 “I like the shadows”
@FFUser3 “where was this taken?”
That would all be one comment when passed to your Flickr Account. Of course if the commenting user did have an account on Flickr, their comment could just be posted to the correct content using their account data which FriendFeed would have been given. These comments would be organized in the chronological order they were received, allowing them to maintain their context.
To add a layer of privacy, there could be a little option for users that says something like “Keep My Comment on FriendFeed”, for those people who don’t want their comment to passed through to the service the content comes from. For instance I’d do that If I were to comment on my own posts. And perhaps a global setting that would allow users to always have that box checked or unchecked.
FriendFeed, in fact, already does this with some services like Twitter (re: the above picture) but most of it’s other services are excluded which leads me to believe that it’s got more to do with each specific service’s APIs than for lack of the FriendFeed team’s trying.
Since there are hundreds of way to create a lifestream these days (Socialthing, Tumblr, pipes.yahoo.com, Facebook etc.) I feel like the ‘writing’ aspect would be a huge asset to the FriendFeed community.
In the past twelve months I’ve received as many serious job offers from various places around the country. There was the call from Microsoft’s XBox division looking for interactive audio developers, the start up web video company looking for a UI developer, the real estate company looking for a web and video expert, the software company looking for developers and many more. My current job came from a multi-millionaire film mogul who hired me based on the resume his staff found using Google.
Now some of these offers I wasn’t qualified for, some I didn’t want, some didn’t pay enough, and some only went as far as an interview. However, what is important is that I’m getting highly sought after solicitations without ever even trying. They come unexpectedly from recruiters, hiring managers, secretaries, and personal assistants from all over the country. The salary ranges are usually between $40k and $60k per year which is not amazing but well above the national average of $36,764 [Wikipedia].
The conversation is always the same:
Caller: “Mr. Gos?”
Me: “Yes?”
Caller: “I’m calling from NAME OF COMPANY. Is this a good time?”
Me: “Yes. What’s this about?”
Caller: “We found your resume online and we’d like to talk to you about a potential job offer. Are you currently available for a contract or full time position?”
Me: “Maybe, what are the details?”
And so it goes…
How is this happening? If you take a look at my resume it’s fairly unassuming. I do have a lot of experience working with the web, media and interactive audio but less experience as a hardcore programmer. To my credit, I’ve held some lofty positions. I went to art school, but mainly taught myself all the new media, software and programming languages that have help to build my career.
The simple fact is that simply putting your resume online these days will increase your odds of being considered for many jobs. My own resume is everywhere online, at SimplyHired.com, at Monster.com, at LinkedIn.com, CareerBuilder.com, Doostang.com, etc. Beyond that, I’ve placed it online as XHTML and marked it up with meta keywords so as to improve it’s chances of being found and indexed by search engines.
While people who work as designers and programmers know many of these tricks, it’s the people who work in other fields who may want to consider this approach. It doesn’t matter if you work in the medical field, engineering, real estate, or journalism, the internet is your biggest ally for exposure. In my post “Using Web 2.0 Apps to Find a Job” I talked about some ways to use things like Yahoo Pipes to help your job hunt. This post then is the antithesis, “How to Use the Web to Get Recruiters to Hunt You”, if you will.
Over Do It
As I mentioned, my resume is posted on more big job sites than I can remember. This improves my chances with recruiters and employers who are turning to the internet for candidates. Spend a week or so flooding the internet with your resume, if your resume keeps coming up in searches then you’re that much more likely to get noticed.
Diversify Your Skills
Assuming you went to college, you have certain skills that are inherent to your job. But learning new skills is critical, if only so you can put them on your resume to differ yourself from the next guy. If you’re in Public Health you may want to take Business or Management courses, if you’re in Software learn a few new languages, etc. Your new skills will increase your odds now by opening up to a whole new world of people who need people with both your old and/or your new skills.
Embrace New Media
Putting a simple HTML resume together is not hard. You can do it yourself using Google Pages, or you can hire a web designer to do it for virtually nothing. Consider adding a video resume to sites like YouTube, starting a blog and joining social networks like Facebook. What’s the point? All of this ’social networking’ is simply meant to drive traffic to your resume and help get you noticed. If your resume is an island on the internet that very few people ever visit, it won’t rank very highly in search engines. By joining various social networks and linking them to your resume, you improve your odds even more. For instance if your blog is incredibly popular, then a resume posted in your ‘About’ section will be too.
Update Frequently
Stale is boring. Stale on the internet is virtually non-existent! To remain relevant you need to constantly improve. every few months or so update your resume, change the wording, add some new information, remove things that seem to be working against you. This will keep your resume fresh and keep it up-to-date. Also, adding new words will change the way it’s indexed by search engines like Google.
Track It
I use products like Statcounter and GoogleAnalytics to track the visitors to my resume. This allows me to profile the people profiling me. At the very least it helps me see where they are and help[s me guess who they might work for. You can also see big spikes in traffic, for instance if you’ve just gone on an interview and the potential employer starts forwarding your resume around the office for others to make their final decisions.
This is the information age and that’s defined by an abundance of data, technology, availability and accessibility. While there are no guarantees, putting your resume online will expose you to a whole new world of people who you didn’t even know were looking for you!
