Selling to Small Businesses

Over at the Groundswell blog, Forrester has published some research suggesting that B2B decision-makers are extremely active participants in social sites.  They surveyed 1,200 IT (information technology) buyers and discovered: 91% of these technology decision-makers were Spectators — the highest number I’ve ever seen in a Social Technographics Profile. This means you can count on […]

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 Website Doctor raised an interesting discussion about startup costs. He pointed to a Paul Graham article, where Graham suggests that the costs of starting a business today are lower than 10 years ago: “… [E]veryone in the startup business knows by now: it has gotten much cheaper to start a startup. There are four […]

I am surprised — amazed even — at how quickly businesses of all sizes are jumping on board Twitter.com.  The uptake has accelerated in the past 6 months. Twitter has been around for 2 years, but I believe interest by businesses has grown much faster in Twitter than it did in blogs, MySpace, Facebook or any other social media I can […]