Small Business Center

It’s time for another addition of our small business news roundup here at Small Business Trends. We hope you find these roundups useful and will visit some of the stories we’ve recommended being sure to let them know where you heard about their post or article.

Marketing

Is the idea of viral marketing a bit too contagious? Viral marketing may not be good for every business so keep in mind it’s a means not an end. Right Ideas/Bright Ideas

Getting personal with your marketing strategy. With all the buzz words out there in the marketing world, sometimes the best advice comes down to a very simple idea. Five Forces Group

It’s not just about the clicks. A look at how to improve sales through more focused online marketing campaigns. Web.com

Operations

Why should your customers trust you? The answer may have to do with how you operate your business everyday. Flying Pig Communications

Forbes puts small business owners on the couch. Another report looks at the mental outlook of the small business community. morebusiness.com

How to get more business. Some thoughts on bringing the new customers you need to you. Unique Insights

Startup

Date your business before you marry it. How can you be sure the business you’re planning is the right one for you? Open Forum Innovation

Is your business making Google nervous? How to create a startup that sells to the big boys for millions. The Huffington Post

You don’t need to go to heaven to meet an angel. How to find these special investors and what they can do to help your business. Youngentrepreneur.com

Policy

For solopreneurs, health care may be getting even more expensive. Health care reform may shift a disproportionately large burden onto the shoulders of the already struggling self-employed. National Association for the Self-Employed

Can risk really be managed? The recent meltdown contains lessons about economic uncertainty, but what can it teach business leaders for the future? The Economist

Why bigger is not always better. Finally government reformers may discover what small business owners and their customers have always known. Huffington Post

Tech

New tools allow a more customized approach to sales. Wouldn’t it be great if visitors could buy from you even after they’ve left your site? smallbiztechnology.com

How to make cool side-by-side interviews for your Website. A warning to PC users: This tutorial is for Mac’s. The Rise to The Top

Contests

Sugartone Sweet Business Blogging Contest. Two of the Net’s fastest growing small business communities join forces to promote great business blogging online with some really cool prizes. Bloggertone

Recently I blogged about President Obama’s proposal to help community banks lend more money to entrepreneurs. For many small business owners in the Great Recession, community banks have been a lifeline.

But that lifeline could be about to snap. The Congressional Oversight Panel, which monitors the financial bailout, just released a report on the state of commercial real estate lending—and the news is not good.

“There’s been an enormous bubble in commercial real estate, and it has to come down,” panel chair Elizabeth Warren told the Washington Post. “A mortgage crisis like the one that has devastated homeowners is enveloping the nation’s office and retail buildings,” the Post reports. The fallout will hit community banks hard.

In general, large, community banks haven’t been hurt by the residential real estate crisis. But community banks issued higher proportions of commercial mortgages than did the big banks. Some 3,000 community banks have disproportionate amounts of commercial loans relative to their assets, according to the oversight panel’s report. And, as Warren says, “Every dollar [community banks] lose in commercial real estate is a dollar they can’t use for small businesses.”

Commercial real estate mortgages have shorter terms than standard residential mortgages; according to the report, some $1.4 trillion in commercial real estate debt will come due in the next three years. And Warren says, half of all commercial real estate mortgages will be underwater by 2011.

Areas most at risk? South Florida, metropolitan New York and Washington, DC, lead the nation in the per capita value of commercial real estate currently in foreclosure, default or delinquency, according to research group Real Capital Analytics.

Responding to the problems many borrowers are already having refinancing commercial mortgages. President Obama has proposed expanding the SBA’s 504 loan program to temporarily support refinancing for owner-occupied commercial real estate loans. Currently, these loans cannot be used to refinance maturing debt.

The full report from the Congressional Oversight Panel is interesting reading.

Last summer Google made SMBs owners very happy by releasing a new business dashboard for sites that claimed their Google Business Listing. The addition put actionable data and stats directly into SMB owners’ hands so they could learn about the folks visiting their site and act on the information provided. Well, now it’s FourSquare’s turn to grown up. Yesterday everyone’s favorite location-based social network revealed new plans to provide SMBs owners a free dashboard and analytics tool to give them  important stats about the people who check-in and visit their establishment.  It’s FourSquare 2.0.

According to the New York Times, the analytics features have been available in alpha for a small number of businesses for a week now. The selected businesses are able to see, in real time, who has checked in to their businesses (on a daily, weekly, 30/60/90-day or all-time basis), when they arrived, the male-to-female ratio, what times are most active for certain customers, and they get the ability to offer instant promotions. FourSquare will also offer a Staff page so that employees can interact directly with customers using the site.  It makes things significantly more interactive for business owners, which may increase a Twitter-esque adoption.

Early shots of the dashboard look like this:

And that’s just the beginning.

According to FourSquare’s Tristan Walker, the social site plans to up the information they’ll be providing. Things slated to be added include correlations between check-ins and weather to help merchants offer better rainy day incentives and the ability to tie purchase information to check-ins.

What FourSquare is really doing is taking everything up a notch. Over the past year, SMB owners have learned to use Twitter as a medium to reach out and connect with customers. We’ve used it to have real conversations, to find people talking about our brands and to encourage them to come visit our store or Web site. However, with the new analytics from FourSquare, we actually have an ability to track users and tie them to specific actions. It’s a much more interesting conversation when you can identify a former “regular”, and look at their behavior to see they haven’t been in the store for weeks.  Knowing this means you can use the Staff pages to then interact with that specific customer and give them an incentive to come back in.  It’s as much about retaining customers as it is attracting them with new deals.

And whether you’re a FourSquare user or not, yesterday’s announcement is something you should be aware of because it signals that location wars are very much upon us.

On the heels of FourSquare’s launch Twitter announced it will be turning on geolocation for tweets and Facebook will also allow users to share their location. With everyone going in the same direction, it’s probably a sign you should be paying attention. We understand social media, now what can you do to make it more locally-focused and to connect with your current customers. FourSquare is giving SMB owners a great way to look into the habits and actions of people who frequent them, and so are many of the other social networking sites. The more data you can use, the smarter decisions you can make.  Start figuring out how you can use it.

As part of their mission to bring value to small business owners, Yelp is introducing the Yelp for Your Business webinar series that will offer advice on how SMBs can market their businesses using the site. It’s a smart move for both Yelp and its users. And even better, the first one kicks off this evening!

Appropriately, the first Yelp webinar will help small business owners learn how they can use the free tools on Yelp to promote their business, which I think is an area where many SMB owners could use a refresher. Back in August, I wrote a post about how to get the most out of Yelp, which touched on some of the lesser known features that Yelp offers specifically for small business owners through Yelp for Business. They included things like the Yelp dashboard, real analytics and how to get more from your Yelp profile. Today’s webinar should go into some more detail on those and hopefully touch on some of the new additions.

As a small business owner, it’s really important that you take the time to sniff out Yelp and learn about all the ways it can help your business. From allowing you to fight back against inaccurate reviews, manage positive ones, and now even track consumer patterns, they’re providing a whole lot of data and opportunity that SMB owners will want to be aware of. These webinars should give SMB owners a lot of insight both on what’s available to them and how to be leverage it. There’s nothing better than hearing “how tos” directly from the source to give you a competitive edge.

These webinars are also much needed for Yelp. Yelp’s been a beloved part of the local search community for some time, but new rumors about impropriety and extortion at the site are once again spreading. By opening up the window a little bit, they’ll give everyone a closer look at how the site works and increase the transparency inside Yelp. [Though, I personally find Yelp to be one of the more approach companies on the Web.]

As mentioned, the first webinar takes place will take place today at 6pm ET (3pm PT) and will be focused on all the free tools available through the site. If you’re a small business owner curious about why you should leverage Yelp, or if just want some tips on how to get started online, I’d encourage you to check out the new webinar series. To get more info on today’s webinar or to register, head to the webinar site.

Facebook has been getting a heck of a lot of buzz lately as the social networking site continues to add value for brands and small business owners. Late last week they improved local ad opportunities for SMBs and just yesterday they announced a partnership with Eventbrite to help business owners monetize events advertised on the site. The combination helps to make Facebook an even more attractive marketing channel for SMBs to utilize.

If you didn’t catch yesterday’s announcement, Facebook has partnered with Eventbrite (instead of competing with it) to allow small business owners to sell tickets and/or register to events directly through their Facebook Event page. Previously, attendees were directed offsite in order to do so. Allowing the registration process to happen on Facebook itself should be a welcome improvement to both businesses and users.

Yesterday a page went up on facebook.eventbrite.com to announce the new feature. [The page has since been removed.]

Collect money for your event with Eventbrite

Eventbrite is partnering with Facebook to enable you to collect money for your event. Your attendees pay with credit card and Eventbrite collects the money on your behalf and sends you a check when your event is over. We charge a small service fee for every ticket sold. 5.5% + $.99c, which attendees pay, costing you nothing.

Eventbrite has helped event organizers around the world sell over 10 million tickets. We’re excited to help you sell your and put some delightful cash in your pocket.

The announcement offers SMB owners a great way to market new events and create visibility. To date, many small business owners have been utilizing the Facebook Events feature to spread word of mouth regarding physical events they were holding, product release dates, giveaways/contest, new promotions, etc. But there wasn’t a way to capture that attention directly on the site or to provide a compelling call to action to get people to register and hook them. Now that they can register directly from the site, even when money is exchanging hands, there is.

I really like the news of the integration because I think it helps to strengthen the Facebook marketing platform for SMBs by allowing them to tie in everything else they’re doing on the site. For example, with the new roll out SMBs can easily:

1. Create a Facebook Event to market something upcoming
2. Use Facebook’s highly targeted advertising platform to promote the Event to the right people.
3. Use the new Eventbrite partnership to close the conversion immediately

Facebook’s allowing SMBs owners to create a perfect storm of marketing where everything is done more powerfully and in one centralized location. Facebook advertising converts exceptionally well because of how targeted and personal the ads can be. Taking that power and combining it with increased functionality is a win for everyone.

If you’re interested in getting more acquainted with Facebook as a marketing channel, I was at SMX West last week and covered a great session about Free Ways To Market On Facebook. The speakers presented some pretty great information on how to use Facebook Groups/Fan pages, what makes stories pop in your News Feed and some of the best ways to market on the site. It may be worth a read.