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http://neilmcintyre.ca
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Neil McIntyre will be a Chartered Accountant in early 2008. He has been working in public practice for a mid-size firm since graduating in early 2005. He performs financial statement audits and reviews for owner-managed businesses, co-operatives and non-profit organizations. He writes about innovation and technology in the accounting profession.
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Accounting firms are not marketing with blogs
Law firms continue to outpace accounting firms when it comes to harnessing the power of blogs to market their services to current and potential clients. A recent post by Michelle Golden asks the question “Isn’t Your Firm Blogging Yet?” and the answer apparently is no.
The post quotes this one from LexBlog founder Kevin O’Keefe, which brings to my attention that 53 of 200 AmLaw firms have a blog (or sometimes more than one). There is no comparable data for accounting firms, but Michelle maintains a pretty comprehensive list of accounting related blogs on her site, which includes my own.
(My views do not represent those of my accounting firm, but you can find my latest post on the BDO.ca home page as of this past weekend. In a sense, you can say BDO in Canada blogs.)
Seems like a good time to reprise an article I wrote about a year ago for Canadian accounting and finance industry publication The Bottom Line. It was titled "Blogs can be important marketing tools", but I don’t think the title was insistent enough because the message hasn’t been heeded within the profession it seems.
"Blogs are all about having more personal and meaningful conversations with an audience about a topic. When you’re an accountant or accounting firm, blogs are a way to reach people interested in your expertise, whether they’re fellow accountants interested in discussing the profession or potential clients looking for an accountant with an aptitude for technology and an ability to stay on top of the trends. "
This stuff still rings true, so take mine and Michelle’s and Kevin’s advice: Get started with your blog today.
Neil McIntyre
Interview for a job, get paid
The site is called NotchUp and allows employers to pay to interview job candidates who otherwise wouldn’t be looking for a new job.
Associated Press has the lowdown:
How it works: You plug in your industry, job, pay and experience into a calculator on the site to help you set your pay for an interview. (NotchUp recommends a range between $200 and $500.) Then you submit your profile to the site.
If a hiring company is interested in you, it deposits the money with NotchUp and talks to you. If you seem like a real, engaged candidate, NotchUp will transfer the money to your PayPal account once the interview is over.
Interesting twist on the usual way things are done, and potentially a great way for employers to snatch up quality candidates. No mention of course on whether accounting firms are using the service yet, but it’s probably only a matter of time.
Neil McIntyre
Facebook as the intranet
When I first heard about the company using Facebook as their intranet, I wasn’t sure what to think.
"Serena Software is really replacing its existing intranet with Facebook as a front end linked to a low-cost content management system behind the firewall. The firm is just over 800 employees but is still globally based (operations in 18 countries) with 35% of their employees working virtually. "
I could see how something like this would be valuable for a company like this, where employees need to work together from different locations towards a common goal. But what about in an accounting firm? On audits you’re working closely with audit team members in one location, at least in my experience, so it may not be as useful.
But the value of a system like Facebook is its emphasis on people, and facilitating document sharing and collaboration. Which is where the typical corporate intranet fails to serve its customers adequately:
Like many companies their existing intranet was a poor platform for document finding, much less sharing. As an aside when I speak on web 2.0, I often ask anyone in the audience who can more easily find stuff on their company intranet than the web to raise their hand. This is a question I learned from Andrew McAfee. He reported that no one has raised their hand to this question and I have found the same results.
My hand wouldn’t be raised either.
How would a company implement something like this? WorkBook:
"A secure enterprise overlay for Facebook. WorkBook allows employees to securely interact with their peers using the hugely-popular Facebook service. WorkBook combines all the capabilities of Facebook with all the controls of a corporate environment, including integration with existing enterprise security services and information sources. "
The picture is really worth a thousand words in this case, as it shows you just how WorkBook appears to users.
Andrew McAfee, a professor at Harvard Business School, blogs about WorkBook and addresses the security concerns and technical operation:
"Inside this [corporate] section were a number of standard Facebook features — friends, groups, Q&A, profiles, etc. — presented using the standard Facebook UI. But the data populating each of these were specific to [the company], came from the Worklight server installed at [the company], were encrypted as they traveled across the Internet, and did not pass through Facebook servers. "
I really like the idea, and the implementation is perfect because it doesn’t try to do too much. Facebook already exists and works well for its users. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. For corporate intranets usually designed and maintained by the IT department, less involvement on their part from a UI perspective is a big improvement.
What do you think? Could this be just the thing to push Facebook onto the intranet for many companies?
Neil McIntyre
BDO chooses blogging partner to head up international network
Jeremy Newman of BDO Stoy Hayward in the UK is a trailblazer as a managing partner who blogs regularly, primarily about the audit market in the UK. He’s recently won the job to be BDO International’s new CEO starting in October 2008.
Jeremy has been emphatic about getting the message out about audit choice and pushing BDO further into the market for large public company work.
A post he made about trusting people not to waste time on Facebook while at work, and being against the trend to ban it in workplaces, was quoted by yours truly in a post I made a short while ago that caused partners in my office sit up and take notice.
I wonder when others high up in accounting firms will join Jeremy and make blogging part of their regular routine. Communication skills are going to be key to his success in the new role, but judging by his blog, BDO will be in good hands.
Neil McIntyre
Using RSS to keep up with your favourite sites
If you want to keep up with this blog but don’t want to have to remember to check back on a regular basis, one option available to you is the RSS feed.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.
To take advantage of this technology, you’ll need a feed reader. The software is either web-based, which has the benefit of being able to be accessed anywhere in a browser, or client software, which arguably has more features. Google Reader and Bloglines are two of the most popular web-based options, and on the client side, RSS support is built into Microsoft Outlook 2007, Internet Explorer 7, and Mozilla Thunderbird, to name but a few.
The technology lends itself well to the typical email software layout, as blog posts or articles appear in feed reader software much like an email — the sender is the site itself, the subject is the headline, and the message is the body of the article.
I personally use Google Reader to read my favourite blogs. It features typical Google simplicity and an interface very similar to Gmail. I have a feeling, however, that RSS is really going to take off in the mainstream now that it is in Microsoft Office, in Outlook 2007. Up until this point, you needed one of several plugins to read RSS feeds in Outlook 2003. In 2007, the technology is baked right in.
As far as my feeds go, you can subscribe the RSS feed using a reader, or you can have the RSS feed delivered as email. There is also a feed just for the comments on this blog.
Neil McIntyre
Using wikis or blogs to manage knowledge in firms
A recent article on WebCPA confused and inspired me:
Accounting firms need to become more intelligent businesses by better leveraging the time and knowledge of their professional staff, according to a survey…
[…]
Firms with a formal knowledge management program benefited from its implementation.
Hmm… Intelligence, good. Leveraging knowledge, check. Formal knowledge management program, bingo! Wait a minute, “formal”? Why must it be formal? With all the tools kicking around these days like wikis and blogs, does knowledge management really need to be formal anymore? Was that ever the best way to manage knowledge?
I think it becomes formal, informally. Wikis are self-organizing, and great at managing knowledge bases. Look at Wikipedia — better at organizing the world’s information than Google.
Wikis aren’t great at building community or starting conversations, however. This is where blogs shine. As for knowledge management specifically, blog posts are tagged, categorized, and searchable.
By formal, what they must really mean is traditional, hierarchical, top-down, autocratic systems that mean well but end up stifling the creativity of those they were meant to help. We really don’t need any more of that in accounting firms!
So, firms: Set your knowledge (and knowledge workers) free. If it organizes itself automatically in wiki or blog form, it’s yours forever.
Neil McIntyre
Banning Facebook sends the wrong message
Jeremy Newman, the Managing Director of BDO Stoy Hayward in the UK, provides real leadership and an inspiration across the pond to me and no doubt others who read about his management style and philosophy. He writes about workplaces banning Facebook, which is very popular right now here in Toronto among employers.
"I am not sure how effective this will be at increasing staff productivity - which is presumably the intended effect. To be consistent I guess they also need to ban personal telephone calls and emails during office hours. Personally I prefer to trust people."
That’s a breath of fresh air coming from someone in his position. I would expect the employees of Stoy Hayward appreciate being treated like responsible adults. From the comments, by “russell”:
"Rather than banning things companies should look to understand what makes it such a powerful medium and explore opportunities to engage with employees through such social networking sites. "
He’s on the mark with the sentiment, which some businesses have already taken to heart. Especially in the profession, where potential employees are already users, keen on new technology, especially when it helps them meet people and build relationships, and looking for something to differentiate between what are essentially different flavours of vanilla.
Banning any site sends existing employees the wrong message, and failing to leverage the social network will hinder the growth of the firm when it comes to attracting the top young minds entering the profession.
Neil McIntyre
Firm using Facebook to recruit in Toronto
I’ve grown a bit tired of Facebook lately. I think it’s because what originally was a torrent of friend additions has gradually slowed to a trickle. (I meet lots of new people through my job but I doubt they want the auditor on their Facebook!)
It seems I’m not the only one who is questioning the system, but for other reasons. The lack of openness is leading some to compare it to AOL.
But despite our misgivings, the beast continues to grow. My city, Toronto, is apparently the “capital of Facebook”:
As a city, we have more members than New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco combined. Thirteen per cent of Torontonians have signed up. We not only have more members than any other city – 670,038 as of this week – we have more groups within the site talking about the goings on of our town.
What does this mean? The value of Facebook to its members increases exponentially as more people join, and for Torontonians, the value of a Facebook account is much higher than it would be for someone from, say, Saskatoon (29,475 members).
I wrote about Facebook before and compared it to LinkedIn. In the post I linked to some accounting-specific Facebook groups, including one I’ll mention again today: Ernst & Young Toronto.
I searched Facebook for groups for Toronto accountants, and the search turned up nothing very good other than the above group. Why are no more accounting firms in Toronto taking advantage of the massive percentage of the population using the site?
Recruiters are taking advantage of the clustering of Toronto accountants, as this screen grab from the Chartered Accountants of Canada group shows.
How long before firms in Toronto realize the recruiting potential of Facebook, as Ernst & Young has?
Neil McIntyre
Google improves Analytics and now I’m in on it!
This weekend was the first long weekend of the summer here in Canada. On Fridays before long weekends at my firm we get the afternoons off, so around 1pm everyone clears out and gets an early start on the rest of the cubicle dwellers around the Greater Toronto Area.
I took the opportunity to do a little shopping for a new mouse at Future Shop. My old mouse had for whatever reason stopped functioning properly. For the record, Microsoft mice have failed on me twice now, so I went with Logitech this time.
I also decided to splurge on a year’s subscription to Flickr, since it was so reasonably priced at about $25 USD. I hit the limit on the free account a while back. It’s useful as a blogger because I use it to host images I want to use in blog posts, such as the one in this post, and it doesn’t use up my bandwidth.
But I digress. Point is, when I got home from shopping, unwrapped and plugged in my shiny new mouse and by chance decided to check out my site statistics, I noticed that Google had upgraded my Analytics account to their new beta!
The whole package is still freely available to anyone who has a Google account and a website. The graphics have been tweaked, but it’s the functionality improvements where the new Analytics really impresses. For example, the geographical breakdown now allows you to drill down from a map of the globe down to a specific US state or Canadian province.
Unsurprisingly, most of my traffic comes from Toronto and the surrounding area. Most of my US traffic originates from the most populous states: California, New York and Texas. It’s also interesting to see the browser and operating system breakdown of my visitors. Most still use Internet Explorer despite its deficiencies, but 31% using Firefox on all operating systems is above average:
The title of this post refers to the phasing-in of the new Analytics. Google announced the new version a few weeks ago but has been moving everyone over on a relaxed time frame, assumably to catch any bugs or glitches otherwise missed. So I’ve known for a while what was coming, but didn’t know when!
Google has also put together a video tour of the new features.
Neil McIntyre
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Facebook vs. LinkedIn for accounting professionals
Which nascent social network does it better for work-related connections?
Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them.
LinkedIn is an online network of experienced professionals from around the world, representing 130 industries.
By their own definitions, these two utilities target slightly different types of users. Facebook of course began at Harvard and then expanded to other universities and colleges, and then opened itself up to everyone else. LinkedIn is open to everyone, but is tightly focused on where you work or have worked, not where you live or went to school.
Because of LinkedIn’s focus, it’s easy to connect with current and former colleagues. You fill in your details and LinkedIn does the rest, providing a list of people registered on the site who have the same employer(s) listed.
On Facebook, where you live, where you went to school, and where you work are called “networks”. I’m in the Toronto and Brock University networks. But the problem with Facebook is that it is limited in terms of workplace networks.
Right now, my firm isn’t on Facebook, so I can’t join that particular network since it doesn’t exist. Facebook does provide a way to suggest new networks, but so far the suggestion I’ve made to add my firm has gone ignored.
The problem for me (and no doubt others) with LinkedIn is that there just isn’t as many people I know on it as Facebook. I have over a hundred friends on Facebook, and I have 3 “connections” on LinkedIn. Clearly for me Facebook is the better tool.
And there are ways to network using Facebook even if your employer isn’t available. Anyone can start a group on Facebook for any reason (no matter how spurious), and there are many related to jobs. For instance:
- Ernst & Young Careers
- Ernst & Young Toronto
- Deloitte.
- KPMG
As well, there are groups aimed at the profession:
- Chartered Accountants of Ontario
- Charted Accountants of Canada
I think what’s interesting about these groups is they’re started and populated by the young people in those firms. As they progress within their firms and take on more responsibility for things like hiring, Facebook may become even more important for job seekers.
Both networks provide value to their users, that much is clear. I wish I had more contacts on LinkedIn, so that the value of the site to me was higher, but that will just take time. As more of my colleagues learn about LinkedIn, it will grow.
As far as features go, LinkedIn trumps Facebook. But for pure numbers and flexibility, Facebook wins out.
Neil McIntyre
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