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Jan
3
The Small Business Owner as Person of the Year
January 3, 2007 | Anita Campbell
By now you have probably heard about or read Lev Grossman’s beautifully articulated piece in Time magazine, in which the Time Person of the Year is “you.”
Yes, it’s the time of everyman:
But look at 2006 … and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.
In a way, the same story of everyman, of you, applies to the small business market.
If individuals are empowered and collaborating on a scale never seen before, the same could be said to be fundamentally altering the ranks of small business owners. I know as a small business owner myself, never have I experienced so much radical change affecting the way I do business, as I have since the advent of social media the last few years.
Small businesses are still faced with mountains of challenges — believe me, it is not easy. But in many senses we have more power than ever. It is easier, faster and cheaper to start a small business today in the United States. Small businesses have more low-cost or free technology tools thanks to the Web than ever before. Sometimes it feels as if vendors are in competition to see which of them can roll out new free products and services faster.
Thanks to the Web, again, more low-cost marketing options, such as Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing and eBay to name a few, are available than ever before.
Society’s attitudes have changed subtly, too, as the sense of collaboration and mutual-support among small businesses grows. It’s hot to be a small business and as a result the ranks of small businesses are growing. With changing demographics even the retired and the Baby Boomers are starting and running small businesses for the first time in their lives.
Yes, the story of community and collaboration and empowerment through the Web is as much the story of small business as it is the story of “you.” If the Web makes the small contributions of many individuals matter, in the same way it makes the millions of small businesses “matter,” too.
Comments
1 Comment so far
Anita, this really is some good reading…a hat tip to you.