With social media sites all the rage, a lot of companies have considered whether to start an online social-networking type of community.
The Online Marketer blog offers 21 questions to consider before starting a social network.
Among the questions are these two:
1. Can you invest the necessary resources to run a social network properly? Can you afford […]

MarketingSherpa is out with a special report on subscription-based B2B sites.
Subscription sites are in vogue these days, especially for B2B. I know of at least a dozen subscription-sites that cater primarily to small businesses, and I belong to a few myself.
The MarketingSherpa report covers a wide variety of issues relating to marketing B2B subscription […]

Reaching small-business owners, managers and decision-makers is notoriously hard to do. You know that, right?
There are lots of reasons for this — here are just a few:

The small business market is fragmented. For example, a time honored approach to reach SMBs is through industry organizations, chambers of commerce and similar affiliations they […]

Contests are a popular strategy today to reach small business owners.
A good contest can:

engage the hearts and minds of business owners
create goodwill toward your company
sometimes get a viral effect going
build brand recognition
be a source of PR and media attention

But if you are running a contest with an online component (as most contests these days seem […]

Only a relatively tiny percentage of entrepreneurs and small businesspeople use anything other than Google or perhaps Yahoo to perform searches for vendors and suppliers and important business research.
B2B search engines are not used nearly as much. However, they are worth looking into, to make sure you cover all the bases, as a recent […]

I often get asked, “How does one find small business blogs, so my company can reach out to the small business community?”
There are a number of techniques for identifying small business blogs that attract the audience you want to reach.
The technique I am going to cover today is called “Follow the Leader.” If you can […]

Jeremiah Owyang writes about the many challenges of a widget strategy.  He lists about 18 different problems with using widgets to market.  Among them:  high costs to create widgets; and low value to users.
His post is well thought out.  And I agree with a number of the points.
I would add this thought, however:  maybe we shouldn’t expect […]

The Internet can be treacherous if you are a vendor faced with a disgruntled customer. 
If a consumer doesn’t feel that his or her complaint has been satisfactorily dealt with — boom!  The entire dispute (at least the customer’s side of the story) ends up on the Web for the world to see.  Oh, and you can expect […]

Are you building a community of readers and customers and participants? 
That’s important, because a community is central to a strategy of reaching out to the small business market.  True, your ultimate goal has to be to sell your services and products to small businesses.  But to do that you first have to think about engaging them.  Engagement is not […]

A friend and colleague writes me wanting suggestions for a topic niche that is not already saturated, for a small business site. His company plans to start a blog for business owners and managers. They are trying to stake out territory on a topic that is not already covered thoroughly.
In fact, he raises a point I’ve been […]

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