Golden Practices Blog

Policies for Emerging Technologies

This topic keeps coming up. People have differing comfort levels with newish technologies and therefore have very different tolerance levels for others using it.

True that some people just don't "get it" when it comes to being polite. The cell-phone screamers and mid-conversation texters or email-checkers come to mind.

The common reaction seems to be "We need a company policy for [fill in technology here]?"

For everything from listening to ipods (wrote "iPods Are Not the Enemy") and blogging ("Blogging Policies" post) to streaming video watching at work or accessing facebook, business leaders want policies. Especially accounting and law types. We want to control it!

I've written an article that was just published in Practical Accountant and WebCPA, but it applies across many industries. It's called, "Charting a Firm's Social Media & Communications Policy" and I hope you'll check it out. 

Basically it explores a facilitated session I led with managing partners to explore how to deal with emerging technology urging them to take the time to fully understand it... hopefully BEFORE cranking out a policy banning or stifling its use.

I just read lawyer Jay Shepherd's blog post on Gruntled Employees called Does Your Company Need a Smartphone Policy and he raises some of the same issues and links to three other terrific posts. My favorite is A Two-Word Corporate Blogging Policy.

Something you'll find in my article, above, is that getting the partners/owners on the same page about your policy approach, in order to make policies that make sense, requires giving them the opportunity to hash through what REALLY concerns them, and dealing with those concerns, rather than jumping to policy FIRST.

CPA Bloggers of Note!

Boy, have things changed.

A year ago in June, we had about 35 practice blogs by accountants on our Accounting Blog List. Now, there are 95. January 1 there were 65. There is some now some momentum.

30 were built and launched during "busy season" which is amazing enough because back when I entered accounting marketing in the early 90s, CPAs took a marketing hiatus for the first four months of each year. Not so anymore.

Still only 22 "industry sector" blogs so if you are mulling over starting one, the playing field is very wide open for you to own your space.

This isn't about numbers, though, it's about results. I've mentioned some blogger success stories before but a couple exciting new ones have come to be known recently.

Scott Heintzelman, The Exuberant Accountant

Scott launched his blog a year ago. He learned about the potential for CPAs in this interesting medium a year earlier when he attended a meeting of IGAF Worldwide, his firm's international association where I happened to be speaking. Scott was fired up!

I remember talking to him at dinner and I could almost see the wheels spinning: "I've got to do this...how can I make this happen..." (He's in a bigger firm, McKonly Asbury, where I imagine he was thinking that not all his partners would likely be on board with this wacky concept). But his firm acquiesced and his terrific marketing director Jim Rodgers, helped him breathe life into the blog, aptly named if you know Scott!

Corresponding with him when he first started it, Scott had some questions about approaches to his post writing and other normal concerns (am I doing this right? are people really gonna subscribe to my blog?).  Some early blog comments from friends and strangers served to encourage him on his journey. It wasn't long before Scott was invited to join the AccountingWEB Bloggers Crew.

It's a year later. Scott emailed me a week or so ago about the first (known) 100% blog-driven referral he received. Here's what he said:

I had never met this gentlemen prior to our meeting, but his quote to me at breakfast was that he felt like he knew me and what I stood for because of the blog. The power of the blog is that it allows me to leverage my time and “ping” many folks at one time (it expands my reach). They in turn get to develop like and trust with me (and our firm), without me being present.

And, as beautiful luck would have it, Scott's blog--along with a few other great accounting blogs including another firm I mentioned in the prior success story link above, Mercer & Hole--were just picked up in Entrepreneur in a story "Accounting Blogs" by Peter Renton.

Paul Neiffer, Farm CPA Today

Another blogger of note is Paul Neiffer. Paul contacted us (through this blog, in fact) late in 2008 and officially went live with his blog in Feb 2009. He had a nice little backlog of posts when he launched and has been going to town on it since then.

Paul grew up in a farm business and gets his own tractor time each year still though he doesn't have a farm in Washington where he practices accounting. This CPA completely got it that his posts needn't (actually shouldn't) all be about debits and credits. You will get to know Paul's genuinely helpful, thoughtful personality in a handful of posts.

Because his blog is sector specific, his audience will appreciate and find relevant anything that farmers care about. This makes for a much more interesting read and Paul is proving to be a natural at delivering great content in a friendly way.

After just 3-4 months, and as a direct result of blogging, Paul has been sought out to write the tax chapter of a farming book and he is developing an alliance with a farm organization that he merely admired from afar when we first spoke.

I'm so proud of both of these guys as well as Mercer & Hole's SME blog team, Tom Selling of The Accounting Onion, Key Bell of Don't Mess With Taxes, and the folks at The Accounting Coach, too, for their great work with their blogs which are leading them to wonderful successes.