Last year about this time I wrote a post from OPENForum titled 5 Trends That Will Shape Small Business in 2010 – I’m thinking I pretty much nailed them, which on the surface might seem easy because small business are often late to jump on trends. The tricky thing about understanding small business though is that when they do jump on a trend it’s often in ways that run counter to what the mainstream media reports.
Small business don’t care about a trend so they can get out in front of something, they care about things that seems obvious, practical and worth the scant bit of time they might be able to allocate to it. If you’re trying to sell to or understand small business, take a look a look at this year’s 5 Trends That Will Shape Small Business in 2011.
Here’s a quick look at what they are, but you’ll have to go read the entire piece to get the full view from a small business vantage.
1) Social simply is
2) Mobile finally lands
3) O2O becomes strategy
4) Networked referral automation
5) Apps over Web
One of the biggest challenges small businesses face is time – there’s never enough to get it all done.
Join me today at 2pm ET for a Tweetchat surrounding the live broadcast of OPENForum’s Q and A with 
For this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visited with Jessica Mah, the twenty something co-founder and chief architect of 
As a marketing or even simple communication tool voice mail is pretty dead. The telephone, a form of communication that has received only minor tweaks in the last 100 years, just doesn’t provide much to like these days. My perfect telephone would have a status feature, like IM, and transcribe all calls and responses and store them via email.