Everyone Works at Home at software company Chorus

[The] company, Chorus, which provides clinical, practice management and financial software for health care providers, has gone virtual.  Chorus closed its Hasbrouck Heights headquarters in early June and its other office, in Stafford, Texas (outside of Houston), in early July. Now all of the company’s 35 employees and full-time consultants work at home, and for the most part, they love it.

…The company decided to close its offices to save money and spare employees the hassle and rising cost of commuting and because it had the necessary technology to support such a move. President and CEO A.J. Schreiber says Chorus can continue to serve customers while simultaneously saving $400,000 a year simply by closing its 15,000 square feet of office space. Sure, breaking leases and telecom contracts is costing the company money, but the long-term savings far outweigh those short-term costs, says Schreiber. “We wouldn’t have done this if it would have had a negative impact on our ability to serve customers,” he adds.

Here’s more (and nicely practical) advice on this topic (a topic one didn’t need to worry about much not that long ago…)

How to Defend Your Online Reputation: Five Tips
It’s not what other people think of you that matters. It’s what they can find out about you on the Web that will affect your ability to get a job or promotion, rent an apartment, buy a house, be accepted into the school of your choice, or find the love of your life.

A very thought provoking discussion started on CIO.com:

How Do You Manage Your Social Networking Identity? | Advice and Opinion

They (CIO Mag) had an article on the topic, too:

Facebook Users get a Crash Course in Reputation Management

As more professionals sign up for Facebook, the site’s earliest users are finding they must reevaluate how they manage their profiles and the information posted to them, according to experts in online identity and reputation management.

Social Media Will Change Your Business

Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later

Editor’s note: When we published “Blogs Will Change Your Business” in May, 2005, Twittering was an activity dominated by small birds. Truth is, we didn’t see MySpace coming. Facebook was still an Ivy League sensation. Despite the onrush of technology, however, thousands of visitors are still downloading the original cover story.

So we decided to update it. Over the past month, we’ve been calling many of the original sources and asking the Blogspotting community to help revise the 2005 report. We’ve placed fixes and updates into more than 20 notes; to view them, click on the blue icons. If you see more details to fix, please leave comments. The role of blogs in business is clearly an ongoing story.

First, the headline. Blogs were the heart of the story in 2005. But they’re just one of the tools millions can use today to lift their voices in electronic communities and create their own media. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace, video sites like YouTube, mini blog engines like Twitter—they’ve all emerged in the last three years, and all are nourished by users.