Good Question.

I run into this one alot. Believe it or not, the answer is very simple: Communication.

Small to large businesses can use the communication power of a blog (a contraction of weblog) to reach out to their customers and post information about their company, services or general items of interest as well as encourage consumer input and conversations. One reason Drift has a blog is to allow our employees to post helpful information that we’ve run across as well as help educate readers on issues that can help their business. We believe that it is important to share the knowledge we’ve gained through experience and help save others time, money and potentially costly mistakes.

The Benefits of a Blog

As a business, your website helps communicate information about your company and services. A Blog is a valuable tool that can increase the power of your website.

Speak directly to consumers: post information about a particular subject and have consumers come right back with suggestions or complaints—or kudos. By keeping your ear to the ground, your company is able to hear what’s being said about it and, if necessary, speak up with a correction.

Be the professional: establish expertise in industry or subject area, and personalize your company by giving it a human voice. By showing consumers you are a reliable source of knowledge in your field, you help generate confidence in your service or product.

Increase visibility: by generating fresh content, you blog will help your business appear higher in search engine rankings. Having a blog is an effective and affordable way to streamline creating and updating your company’s professional web page.

For a more detailed anaylsis, click here to read the Harvard Business School’s post about Company Blogs. It is a great article about the power of company blogs and how to get the most out of them.

Stay Ahead of the Curve

With the seemingly limitless power of the internet, it is imperitive for companies to take advantage of technology in order to stay ahead of the curve. Either by setting yourself apart from your competition, or just keeping up with it, a blog is going to help connect your business to consumers in a way that makes them feel at ease with your service and expertise. That, in my opinion, can only be a good thing.

We were was recently contacted by a business associate who asked us to look at a company’s website for them. It seems that the company’s website was distributing a virus (several trojan horse ones in fact) via its home page. After typing the web site address into my browser bar, my virus protection program AVG (which provides a good free virus checker here) blocked my access and brought up the kind of red flag you never want to see when searching the web. The message read: “This website has been reported as an attack site and has been blocked based on your security preferences.” If you clicked for more advanced information you received this:

“What happened when Google visited this site?

Of the 1 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 1 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 07/02/2008, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 07/02/2008.

Malicious software includes 6 trojan(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 1 new processes on the target machine.

Malicious software is hosted on 1 domain(s), including (IP address changed to protect our viewers)”

Whoa!

Now, we contacted the owner of the website right away. They were not aware that their website was doing anything like this. In fact, they had just canceled their website with their current provider entirely. After a bit of research, it turned out that someone else had purchased their domain when they cancelled and had left the existing website up and running but installed the malicious scripts.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much more we could do as an uninvolved party. We were just helping out someone we didn’t even know. So we made the company aware of the virus and advised them to double check access to their old FTP (perhaps they could delete the content off of the site; however if the person hosting the site is up to no good it is of a high probability that they had already backed up the information), we knew that it was a long shot but we thought it a first good step. Furthermore we advised them to possibly seek legal council. The dangers of someone’s machine being damaged by a site purporting to be your company… we don’t even want to think about that.

Remember to have all of your website information backed up to a hard file somewhere. Also remember to keep your backups at a different place than your primary business location. An online backup with a reputable company can be good but in a pinch a safe-deposit box at your local bank also works. It is also a good idea to change your site passwords (FTP, domain and hosting account, etc.) every 90 days, just to make sure the people who have access to your site are the people you want to have access to your site.

Set your passwords as something random and not the birthdays of your children. Easy passwords are easily cracked. Lastly never use the most popular of passwords for anything you use online. That password non grata is of course “password.”

Make sure that all of your companies employees are using computers with current up-to-date virus and anti-phishing programs. This will help to minimize the chance that your companies data will be swiped by a nefarious program or website.

I have been looking for a decent CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) system lately, in order to better protect my and my client’s contact forms. There is a wide variety to choose from - various PHP solutions, to hidden CSS fields. Not quite satisfied with any of the options (many have validation issues and large databases full of rotating graphics) I turned to a more and more familar site online: reCAPTCHA.

reCAPTCHA is an online initiave that combines developer’s efforts to protect contact forms with an attempt to more easily digitize books. “About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.”

Pretty sweet, huh?

Read more about reCAPTCHA’s efforts here and sign up for an account. It is FREE and easy to set-up - you just need a little PHP knowledge for most programs, but it supports WordPress, MediaWiki and more. If you need some assistance with the PHP set-up, here is a good tutorial.