Poor Digital Hygiene is Costing Your Business
Digital hygiene refers to the security and organization of sensitive digital information. Without a plan to manage this information, your poor digital hygiene is likely costing your business time and money.
At Baylii, we like to think of digital hygiene as a skill set that takes time and effort to develop. In a perfect world, we’d all be blazing through projects with complete confidence that as soon as we’re prompted to enter a password online, we'd get it right the first time. More realistically, we spend minutes each day looking for where to log in or how to reset a password. As a result, projects get derailed faster than you can say “select all images with traffic lights."
As a marketing agency, we handle a lot of sensitive information on behalf of our clients and have learned a thing or two on how proper digital hygiene increases a team’s efficiency on a daily basis. Every click saved is a second earned, right? So, here are four tips to improve your digital hygiene.
Use a Password Manager
Don’t be fooled: login credentials include far more than just a username and password. Our favorite password manager, Elepass, offers a free version of their platform and one handy feature is the ability to leave notes.
Here are the credentials we recommend tracking in a password manager.
- Usernames - Don’t rely on your memory. Specify whether your username is an email address or otherwise.
- Passwords - Save your old passwords! Some accounts prompt you to enter an old password as part of the password reset process.
- Login URL - To save clicks, bookmark the exact URL where you log in
- Security Questions & Answers - Document these so your team can have access as needed.
- Two-factor Authentication - Set up two-factor authentication so that verification codes go to an email address your team can access. This way, they (not you!) can go through the inevitable verification process that will be triggered by logging in with an unrecognized device (or a change in the air, depending on the platform.)
- Account Recovery - Some accounts require a backup email address for the purpose of recovering your account. Whichever email address you choose, be sure to have the password to that account because you will in all likelihood need to log in for a verification code or link.
- Account ID - When relevant, note your account ID for when you need to contact customer service.
Clean Up Pre-existing Accounts
Take your Facebook business page, for example. Go check out and see who is an admin on your page and make sure to remove users who no longer need access (or are with your company!)
Bookmark Go-to URLS on your Browser
Are there certain websites that you visit all the time? How about certain pages on certain websites? What about specific Google documents or folders on Google Drive? Bookmark them! Most browsers allow you to organize your bookmarked pages into separate folders, too.
Avoid Using Google or Facebook to Sign In
Sometimes websites will let you choose to sign in with your Google (Gmail) or Facebook credentials. While this can save time initially, it complicates the process for team members who may need to access that same website since they won’t (or shouldn’t) have access to these types of personal accounts.
Most importantly, relying on a single-sign on for multiple accounts puts you at a huge security risk if your Google or Facebook credentials are compromised. Best practices? Create a username and unique password for different accounts.
If you can slog through all of these steps, then you are on your way to not having to slog so much through life. Cheers to squeaky clean digital hygiene! 🍾
A byproduct of working with Baylii is that we often help our clients become more efficient in their day-to-day operations. We can’t help ourselves: we ooze efficiency. If you want to learn more about how you could save time in your day-to-day operations, give us a call!
