The President restates his commitment to small business as key to economic recovery — from the Recovery Act to Financial Stability to Health Reform — and pledges more to come. October 24, 2009. (Public Domain)

In the field of search engine ranking, the most interesting thing about Internet is the fact that that it soberly levels the playing field for both the small entrepreneurs as well as the large corporation. In case of SEO, it offers all small business owners some extremely convenient benefits over the big corporations.

Therefore, if huge corporations are making use of popular, expensive SEO tricks  article marketing, blogging, onsite SEO, directory and paid listings, pay per click, shopping comparison site listings, advertising and more to get more visitors to their website, even small business houses have enough scope to beat them out! Let us now throw light on two such most important facts, where small business houses get an edge over big organizations.

Sluggish growth of large corporations: The larger they get, the slower they become. It may not be the direct reason but it is surely an important one. And the main reason behind their slow growth is their bureaucracy which ultimately makes the ability of decision making terribly slower. For every single decision, they have to go through number of positions which not only delays the matter but also provide enough scope for apprehensions.

On the other hand, small owners perform every task on their own. All they have to do is properly monitor what is going on around the Internet and react to market changes much smartly and quickly. They sharply make use of Google alerts on a number of topics, subscribe to industry newsletters, subscribe to seo, ppc, email marketing, and Internet Marketing newsletters, and more. These techniques largely help them keeping on top of what is fresh both in their industry and on the web.

Huge Corporations hire college graduates:  In order to have a huge SEO team, many big organizations get freshers, who are just out from college and block up their web marketing departments. Most often, these interns are inexperienced and posses no concrete knowledge about Internet Marketing and SEO. In fact, at times, they also hire students who learned web designing or marketing, who need special training courses to learn the game. But unfortunately, even hiring people experienced in offline or traditional marketing is not much of use because Internet Marketing is all together a different concept.

Here also, small corporations get an added advantage. These business owners study and practice everything on their own. They gain all qualitative knowledge about SEO and Internet Marketing online and beat all the intricacies of complex SEO tricks. In fact, it has been noticed that most of the Internet Marketing and SEO Gurus are self-taught. Besides these two main features, some of the other huge problems attached with big companies are ridiculously limited budgets, huge legal formalities, use of outdated SEO techniques and no market research.

As new ways to advertise and market products in the social sphere continue to proliferate, it’s important to keep track of what is performing best for brands. According to a new study from psychological research firm Psychster, sharable items increase both engagement and purchase intent. 

And while it may be hard for branded content to assimilate completely into the social world, matching advertising to its surroundings is still a great way to increase performance in the space.

With a study commissioned by Allrecipes.com, Psychster found that letting consumers participate with branded experiences in social media increased their likelihood to recommend brands to friends as well as purchase products from brands.

Psychster tested mockups of seven types of ads on both Facebook and AllRecipes. They included banner ads,
newsletters, branded profiles with a reciprocal logo, branded profiles
without reciprocal logo, “give widgets,” “get widgets” and sponsored
content. They then created a video of consumers interacting with the mockups. In total, the ads were shown to 478 Allrecipes users and 681 Facebook users.

Sponsored content, which is most likely traditional advertising, resulted in the most engagement, but lowest purchase intent. Corporate profiles on social
networks resulted in greater purchase intent, but that multiplied when users could fan a page or add logos to their own profiles.

Sharable widgets were more engaging than traditional banner ads, but did not increase intent to purchase. Newsletters and banner ads were the most recognized kinds of ads, but banner ads increased the chances of recommending a brand to a friend, as well as purchase intent.

According to the study:

“Not surprisingly, once people purchase products from a brand, they report liking the brand more.  But the reverse is also true – when people declare publicly that they like a brand (by putting a logo on their profile for all of their friends to see) they are more likely to buy from it.”

But context is still an important factor. Brands reported getting better results when their advertising and branding was surrounded by relevant content.

Psychster’s CEO David Evans told MediaPost:

“No ad type was so engaging that it overcame
the advantage found by matching the brand to the Web site. It is widely believed that ads are at an advantage when the
brand relates to the site on which it appears … Our findings
replicated this effect, such that the soup brand performed better on
Allrecipes than it did on Facebook.”

Image: Psychster

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In the midst of the global economic crisis, many small businesses are on the brink of closing down if not enough capital infusion is found. It is now even more difficult to get small business loans from banks, though. Ironically, the exact reasons why small businesses need such small business loans – the fact that business has slowed down and profitability has plummeted – are the same reasons why banks turn them down for loans.

Small businesses now have to be more resourceful in finding alternatives to small business loans.

Government Grants and Contracts Instead of Small Business Loans

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act signed by President Obama in February 2009 caused the pumping of billions of dollars for the revitalization of the economy. Because of it, there are plenty of government grants and contracts available to small businesses. These can be alternatives to small business loans.

But how can small businesses avail of the stimulus program?

The Association of Procurement Technical Assistance Centers (APTAC) has the responsibility for helping small businesses obtain and perform federal, state and local government contracts. It has Procurement Technical Assistance Centers (PTAC) throughout the country, ready to help small business owners to get registered and find opportunities in the area of government grants and contracts. Counselors assist small businesses in filling out bids, proposals and quotations.

The PTAC holds seminars teaching small business owners all the ins and outs of government legalese, including acronyms and registries. A one-day seminar with PTAC covers what small business owners may take months to learn on their own.

The PTAC then helps small businesses with Central Contractor Registration (CCR), a requirement for doing business with the federal government. This registration can be so complicated that some companies take two days to do it when the PTAC counselor can help them get through it in 15 minutes.

Local PTACs will be of help in acquiring state and municipal contracts.

Other resources that small business owners should consult include the Small Business Administration (SBA) which also coordinates with the APTAC; the General Services Administration (GSA) which acts as the government’s purchasing department and provides information on becoming an approved vendor; the Federal Business Opportunities website (fbo.gov) where federal contract opportunities currently available are posted; and the Small Business Innovation Research website (sbir.gov) where grant and funded research opportunities for small businesses are listed.

Cash Advances from Credit Card Services Instead of Small Business Loans

Another alternative to small business loans are cash advances from credit card services. This option is much easier than winning government grants and contracts.

Most small businesses are already availing of credit card services that enable them to accept payments by credit cards or debit cards. This is practically a requirement to doing business these days, with people hardly paying cash for goods and services. Many small business owners do not know that they could avail of cash advances from these credit card services, though, and that such advances can actually equal small business loans.

The amount that a small business can borrow is based on its average monthly income from credit card sales. This is so because the cash advance does not require collateral and future sales receivables from credit cards stand as the collateral. Payment will also be done through automatic deductions from those future credit card sales. There will be no set monthly amortizations. Instead, a certain percentage of the sales will be allotted as payment. The small business owner, therefore, need not worry over where to find cash for loan payments.

Cash advances from credit card services are the best bet of small business owners as alternatives to small business loans.

For the last 10 years, David Rogers has been the executive director
of Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand
Leadership, focusing on branding
issues for researchers and executives. Three years ago, the Center began the BRITE conference, an event focusing on how technology is
transforming brand building. His latest book, “The Network is Your Customer: 5 Strategies
to Thrive in a Digital Age,” will be out this fall. 

This year’s BRITE conference begins Wednesday. I caught up with David to discuss what he’s got on deck at Columbia this week, and how brands should work with technology today.

How did the BRITE Conference get started?
It started in 2008, to center on global brand leadership and how innovation and technology are changing the ways that we build great brands. We bring together smart people and emerging trends. It’s a mix of marketers, entrepreneurs and big thinkers in the space. It’s a different blend of thinkers and doers that comes together than during your typical conference. As an academic institution, we combine leading edge practices with new thinking. We don’t have a product to push. It’s about building a community.

How has technology changed brand building since you started at the Center for Global Leadership?
Over the last 10 years, both brand and practice have evolved. Before then, traditional branding was about logo and design. When we started the Center, it was very much thinking about customer experience and innovation and how they shape brands. What we saw over the last few years is that the space in which brands are created is very much influenced by digital media. Now we’re all living our lives within digital media. There’s not really a distinction between offline and online lives.

Every company, whether you’re designing shoes or you’re a B2B software company, you’re dealing with digital. If you’re going to create the right products and relationships with customers, you need to understand the dynamics of customer networks.

Can you talk a bit about how you define a customer network?
It’s the network of current and potential customers. My book, “The Network is Your Customer,” puts forward this idea, that businesses have to think of their customers as networks. The digital links between customers have transformed the relationship that people have with each other and with businesses. It used to be that if a company had a loyal customer, they’d want to get the customer from being aware to being interested to desiring and purchasing products. Now there’s an additional stage. You want the customer to not only become a purchaser, but an advocate. They go out and talk to others about their experiences. Now customer service can have much greater reach. The flip side of it is that if your customer has a bad experience they can share it with many more people than they once could.

Can companies always handle that bad word of mouth online? Or are there companies that shouldn’t be inolved in social media at all?
All media is social media at this point. I wouldn’t make a blanket rule. Maybe a government military contractor with high priorities of confidentiality shouldn’t use Twitter. But they would still be using social media within an intranet, to work more effectively with their partners, let’s say.

What about companies that deal with politically charged products?

I don’t think that question is any different than before the rise of digital media. That’s a communications challenge for the brand. There are ways of addressing that. No company is going to change all of its business practices to meet every wish of every person. A company needs to decide who it’ key stake holders are and advocate for them. That might mean a company like BP saying “We’re going to change some of our business practices.”

Other companies approach it in different ways. The one thing that doesn’t work as effectively anymore is just putting up some fluff. You can’t just buy a lot of ad space and expect your message to resonate. You have to have some actual actions to support your position. You can’t sustain the kind of two-facedness that you could to a degree in the past, just because the power was concentrated in those who could pay for mass media.

How do companies prevent flame wars?
One thing is you want to be monitoring what’s going on and what’s being said and the visibility. Not all flame wars are equal. Some will fizzle out, some will not. The ones that don’t fizzle out, people have strong reasons for getting involved in. It depends on how severe the crisis is and whether your customers are committed. With Toyota, for example, it would have been much worse if they didn’t have customers who had positive experiences with the company. There’s no single response.

Anything surprised you over last 10 years?
I don’t know that I’ve been surprised, but it’s been amazing to see how quickly the use of digtal media has changed so much of our lives that we almost don’t even think about it.  Even two years ago, niche phenomenon had not become part of our environment, the way that email has. But now we don’t even think about email. It’s sort of like speaking. Very rapidly, a lot of these new tools have been adopted.

I think very soon we’re going to see things that are about product and service. Like Makerbot, one of the companies that is speaking at BRITE this year. A lot of these technologies that seemed far out and fringe are really quickly becoming part of the assumed landscape. The pace of adoption has been amazing to see.

What happened in the past two years to accelerate things?
Impacts that have been inherent in the architecture of the intrnet for 40 years and the worldwide web for 15 years, have become incredibly prevalent in the last three years or so. People talk about Web 2.0, but it’s really just a qualitative shift. The idea of everyone having a voice on the internet was inherent in the structure of the web, even before everyone had it. But we reached a tipping point when the tools became sufficiently easy to use, and we’re starting to see the impact more. This is an actual transformation of our society.

So what comes next?
I think we now have enough of a body of knowledge to really see how our customer networks are transofrming business practice. It’s not just about marketing or PR, we’re starting to see how this is affecting everything. It’s not in the ghetto — the impact has really spread far and wide. That’s going to be really exciting to watch.

Follow David on Twitter @david_rogers.  He also blogs at www.davidrogers.biz.

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