Selling to Small Businesses

The downturn in the advertising industry claims another victim. The Pajamas Media ad network, which placed ads mainly on political blogs, is closing effective April 1, 2009. According to Instapundit, the business model wasn’t working: YEAH, the PJM ad-network model isn’t working. I don’t have much to do with the PJM business side, but online [...]

Neat visual case study about American Express OPEN’s social media approach at the OPEN Forum – the following presentation by VizEdu does a nice job capturing it:  The idea is to provide information and strike up a conversation with small business owners, on a special conversational site that American Express OPEN has set up (separate and apart [...]

Kinko’s, acquired by FedEx a few years back, was rebranded as FedEx Office in 2008.  As a media backgrounder points out, the name is a play on the idea of FedEx Office being the Back Office for America’s Small Businesses. It’s kind of a bland name.  Kinko’s was such a … distinctive …. name that you didn’t [...]

Upon checking into my hotel room at the Rio in Las Vegas, where I am attending the Affiliate Summit for a few days, I received what appeared to be a typical hotel room key — plastic, about the size of a credit card. When I arrived at my door, I examined the key more closely [...]

The ADP Small Business Report shows that the job losses among small businesses were steep during December 2008.  Small businesses lost 281.000 jobs during December.  Note that small businesses have not lost as many jobs as larger companies. As the above chart shows, in December some 693,000 jobs were lost at all company sizes.  Roughly 60% of the [...]

On December 31, 2008 Dell announced it was organizing itself globally around 4 customer segments, instead of regionally.  CEO Michael Dell says the reorg is to respond better to customer needs which are “increasingly being defined by how they use technology rather than where they use it.” The company has 4 business groups, as it [...]