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 […]

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 […]

Half of women surveyed said that blogs influence their decisions to purchase. That comes from a recent survey of roughly 6,000 women by BlogHer (the network of women bloggers) and Compass Partners.
The study has a number of findings, but the one about purchase decisions stood out to me. Here’s the chart that […]

Jennifer Laycock, Editor of Search Engine Guide, explains how they are marketing an upcoming conference using a homemade video on YouTube.  The video cost them just $148.  It took 18 hours of time (divided among 3 people) to create.  She writes:
It’s a short video, just a minute and a half, but it sums up the point of our show […]

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 […]

I’ve decided that for 2008 I will focus more effort on this site to compiling lists of resources and information kits. 
What do I mean by this? 
Well, I regularly get asked to identify resources for clients and entities that sell to small businesses.  Here are some examples of the resources I get asked for: 

small business events where you can be a […]

Entrepreneurship keeps attracting younger and younger people — including “millennials,” i.e., those twenty-somethings and teens born since 1980. Since entrepreneurs are consumers first and business owners second, you have to understand their thinking as consumers.
A recent article in Advertising Age offers a fascinating glimpse into millennials’ thinking and debunks certain assumptions we may make about […]

You might have heard the term, “virtual small business.”  But do you really understand what it means if your small business customers operate “virtually”?
One definition of a virtual business is a business that operates leanly, outsourcing to third parties whenever possible.  It may not have any full-time employees except the owner and possibly a few others. 
The headquarters will not […]

One thing that most small business owners say they need is more customers.
Your small business customers will love you forever if you can help them make a sale.  That’s one of the points I got from watching Donny Deutsch’s Big Idea show last night.
Called Destination Millions, this particular episode featured four successful entrepreneurs revealing their secrets for becoming […]

Nick Carr writes about the “bad ad fad.”  He’s referring to user-generated ads, pointing to a campaign by Heinz that he claims is backfiring.  The New York Times wrote about the campaign, which enables consumers to create and post video ads about Heinz ketchup, pickles and other products.
I agree that user-generated ad campaigns – besides being expensive and […]

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