Make a Dazzling First Impression Online

Studies reveal it only takes people between 7 to 17 seconds to form a first impression of someone they’ve just met. 55% of that opinion is based on physical appearance.

You meet and get to know an incalculable number of people in your lifetime—friends, coworkers, managers, business partners, acquaintances, and so on—but for each of them there’s only one first meeting. As the saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

With statistics like these, it’s no surprise that countless articles and guides have been put together for making a favorable first impression in person. Dress professionally, look groomed, smile, stand up straight, be friendly and confident, ask them about themselves—the advice goes on for quite some time.

But what about if you’re meeting someone online for the first time, when they don’t see your face or your body language?

One solution is to use branding.

Branding means you can add your company logo, color scheme, and more when you work with others online! With YouDazzle, you can customize your web meetings and data rooms with your brand of choice.

Branded data rooms, with your logo at the top!

How can brands help you make a great first impression?

• It’s the first thing your audience sees. Thus, it’s part of their first impression of you!
• It reinforces your image as a professional. Using the same logo consistently lets people see right away the company or image you represent.
• It’s effortless! After you set a custom brand for your data room, you’re set—no more work required on your part!

Upload as many brands as you need, all customized to your liking!

You can upload an unlimited number of brands with a name, logo, and background color. Any data rooms you have, you can then customize with any brand you have.

You might use your company logo, product name, or any image or title you want to represent yourself.

Your brand also appears in all your web meetings.

Now, whenever you share content, collaborate, or meet with clients, customers, and more for the first time online, they’re sure to be impressed. Make dazzling first impressions, all through your data rooms and web meetings.

Making Work Actually Work

“[O]ur attraction to a world of infinite possibility, information and complexity is here to stay. The challenge is how to participate productively in this new and turbulent world, and not be paralyzed by it.” –David Allen, “When Office Technology Overwhelms, Get Organized,” The New York Times, 3/18/12

Well-known business consultant David Allen contributed a fascinating column this past weekend to The New York Times, which addresses the conundrum he describes in the quote above. Basically, Allen is writing about what we all feel: technology has made our lives easier but in doing so has also piled a lot more management headaches on us and added job responsibilities onto our shoulders. So, the challenge is, how do we make technology really work for us?

Allen has a lot of great organizational tips, including a simple one that many people ignore at their peril: if something will only take 2 minutes, do it right away. Also, he notes that we need to make lists not just for the sake of list making but to actually get something accomplished.

There’s where we really think secure online data rooms can help. If we are able to organize our files online in an actual system, then we can achieve a few goals straight away:

• We can send people after information found in a clear, centralized place rather than having to create endless email chains trying to get data to people.
• We can track what data is actually being used via analytics and then we can avoid wasting time on data that no one is even bothering to look at.
• We can invite others to contribute to our data rooms, cutting down on work cycles and making work collaborative again.

As Allen says, “To be successful in the new world of work, we need to create a structure for capturing, clarifying and organizing all the forces that assail us; and to ensure time and space for thinking, reflecting and decision making.”

Now, data rooms are just one small step towards this overall goal, but wouldn’t it be nice to clear your desk and clear your mind by putting everything in one organized place and then seeing what gets used when? Not only will you feel a sense of accomplishment when things get done—a sense we rarely get in this modern work world—but you can avoid doing work that no one even uses. Now, isn’t that a novel concept.

So, go and get your list started. As Allen says, organize by priority and don’t let the most recent thing become tops just because it is top of mind. And remember to add a bit of free time to that list because once you get your data room up and running, you might even have time to do something for yourself for a change. (Just don’t tell your boss…or your spouse!)

Collaboration: That Loaded Term

There are certain terms that have become passé in the tech space, words that have lost all meaning in their over-use, words such as best-of-breed or cutting-edge (or our personal favorite, bleeding-edge, whatever the heck that is). But a few years ago would you ever imagine that an innocent term like collaboration could become so loaded?

In today’s world of all things social, collaboration has started to signify everything from editing photo books as a group to creating budgets as a team. Everyone and their brother claims they have a solution that will let you work together in ways never before dreamed possible.

Consider this definition from Wikipedia:

“Due to the complexity of today’s business environment, collaboration in technology encompasses a broad range of tools that enable groups of people to work together including social networking, instant messaging, team spaces, web sharing, audio conferencing, video, and telephony. Broadly defined, any technology that facilitates linking of two or more humans to work together can be considered a collaborative tool. Wikipedia, Blogs, even Twitter are collaborative tools. Many large companies are developing enterprise collaboration strategies and standardizing on a collaboration platform to allow their employees, customers and partners to intelligently connect and interact.”

If everything from Wikipedia itself to Twitter are collaborative tools, how can you possibly decide what tool is best for your business? Well, we at YouDazzle wanted to offer some simple criteria: present and share, keep your information central and accessible on all your devices.

How can you apply this to your business in a simple way? Deploy a simple solution that combines web meetings, screen sharing and online file sharing:

Present and share—creating Cloud-based data rooms where you can share files is a simple, organized way that you can present information and see what people are viewing when, accessing analytics that will help you give your partners, colleagues and customers what they need to best do their jobs. Add to this a web meeting solution that doesn’t require any downloads or other fuss, as well as some co-browsing features and you have an easy way to communicate, present and share.

Keep it centralized—having an online space where you can store all of your files in an orderly way, including tracking revisions, makes all the difference in the world. Forget about complicated platforms as they just mean more IT support headaches and endless passwords, create a branded data room that can build your image while controlling your content.

Accessible—having that online data room means that you can share documents, track projects and involve people as needed all from one simple place. Best of all, with a Cloud-based solution you are fully mobile, you can accomplish collaboration from anywhere, meaning you have way more options than ever before.

See, once you get past the hype, not everything has to be coined “collaboration .”  After all, people are looking for an easy way to share and present information without all the complexities.  And if that isn’t best-of-breed, I just don’t know what is!