Entrepreneurship

Social Networking: Blend With REAL Networking for Effectiveness

Entrepreneurship, Social Media /

The old adage It’s not what you know; it’s who you know may be seen as a tired cliche in many circles these days, with good reason. This is what you’d expect from overused analogies like this one.

Tired or not, it is still absolutely a fact. Thought leaders spend unbelievable time and effort trying to hammer home this message in an online context, wrapping words like social networking, social media, social graph, and other terms around it in hopes of getting the message across.

The problem? Well, there is a forest, and there are some trees, but are they one and the same? Not really…

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Marketing: 4 Scenarios for Hiring an Outside Consulting Resource

Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Small Business /

The past couple of years have changed things in our modern work world quite a bit. Generation X was raised to believe that, if we just get an education and land a corporate job, we’d have security for years to come. Think again my friends, because those days are long gone.

With our economy running on life support, the dollar in the tank, and fast-rising inflation, companies had to pinch pennies wherever possible to keep the ship afloat. The results have been widespread and severe…significant loss of jobs, budgets slashed to levels we haven’t seen in years, and even a slew of companies going belly up during the prolonged recession.

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Marketing to the “Inner Animal”

Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media /

It amazes me to see so much dry, ineffective marketing out there, much of it brought to market with large budgets and huge teams of professionals executing on it. And really, it’s quite easy to fall into groupthink when so many cooks are at play in the proverbial kitchen.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying you can’t execute effective marketing messaging, campaigns, etc. with a team-based approach. Quite the contrary, I’m actually saying a couple of things.

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Social Media: It CAN be measured too!

Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media /

If you keep up with the local Austin startup scene or even with new social media services as they pop up, then surely you saw the announcement from Spredfast about their Social Media Campaign Management Dashboard product. It would easy to dismiss this as just another hype-laden announcement about a new social media tool, but that would be rather short-sighted in this case.

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Social Media for B2B: It CAN be done

Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Small Business, Social Media /

This week, Return On Now has the privilege of sharing with you a guest post by Aaron Strout, CMO of Powered Inc. right here in Austin, TX. In addition to running marketing, he also serves as a key “social voice” for the company. In that capacity, Aaron continues with his speaking, blogging, podcasting, and social networking activities with an eye toward creating awareness and lead generation for the company. Aaron co-hosts the Quick-n-Dirty weekly podcast with Jennifer Leggio, he maintains a social media blog titled Citizen Marketer 2.1, and he is well-known as a thought leader in online and social media marketing.

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Small Business Social Funding: Preneuraholics.com

Entrepreneurship, Small Business, Social Media /

I recently learned of a cool new website via my ongoing social networking, and I was impressed enough with the idea to share with you here on Return On Now.

For those of you who interact with me on Twitter, surely you’ve seen the materials I’ve been sharing regarding the difficulty of getting your hands on financing or investment capital for your small business ventures. Credit markets have been squeezed to a pulp, it has been challenging to figure out how decisions are being made at the SBA, and angel investors and venture firms are being more cautious than we’ve seen in years when doling out funds. What’s an entrepreneur to do?

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Public Relations: 7 Steps to Selecting a PR Vendor

Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Public Relations /

Public Relations (PR) is one of the best ways to get some quick and potentially extensive exposure. But PR is much more than just crafting press releases and paying to post them to the business wire. Unless you are a larger company that can afford to keep dedicated PR resources in-house, you can do it yourself or bring in a PR vendor to manage it for you.

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The 10 Commandments of B2B Social Media

Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media /

Good morning, Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays. As I sit here awake early with my baby awaiting everyone else (who, by the way, are still sleeping), I decided to share a little holiday cheer by way of my 10 commandments of B2B Social Media.

B2C and P2P are the easiest forms of using social media for most, and we have plenty of materials available in the blogosphere about how to attack those areas. But what I see lacking is a breadth of content about B2B.

So let’s start simple…10 important tips for how to use social media correctly in B2B.

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