Small Business Labs

October's Jobs Surprise and Small Business

October's job gain numbers came in a 166,000, much higher than economists were expecting which why those clever economists are calling it a "surprise".  One should never read too much into one month's job data, but it is surprising how resilient the economy is given the rising price of oil and the mortgage market problems.  Q3 GNP grew at a pretty brisk 3.9% and while most economists are expecting a slow down in Q4 and into next year, few are predicing negative economic growth or a recession.

The BLS has a set of slides that go into detail, but the highlights are:

• the economy added 166,000 jobs in October and has averaged 135,000 new jobs per month over the last year. 
• residential construction employment is down, as are jobs related to "credit intermediation".  However overall construction was flat due to increased hiring for commercial building. 
• Health care and food services employment continues to grow.  Without the growth in health care jobs total private employment would have fallen over the last year.

I've posted before on the growth of small business leading to increased overall economic stability, and I think small business continues to help keep our overall economy moving despite the economic shocks.

While we won't have government data on job growth by firm size for at least another year, my guess is the 2007 numbers will be similar to 2004 when small businesses added all the net new jobs in the US. 

Getting Customers to Answer Customer Questions

The user generated review company Bazaarvoice has released a new product called "Ask & Answer" that allows customers to answer other customer questions.  From their site:

"The Ask & Answer service is the first to encourage shoppers to post and respond to specific questions about products and services directly alongside standard product information."

I found their reasons why this is a good thing for online retailers very interesting.  They of course mentioned the high cost of support, increased customer satisfaction and increased word of mouth.  But they also focused on search engine results.  Quote on this from their site:

"Ask & Answer search engine optimized (SEO) landing pages effectively attract natural search traffic from Google, Yahoo!, and other leading search engines."

Their pitch is word of mouth and SEO.  It seems marketing may be coming down to simply those two activities.

Burnson Marstellar on E-fluentials and User Reviews

The big PR firm Burson-Marstellar released a study showing that online consumers are starting to become aware and concerned about biased or fake online reviews.  According to the survey 48% of e-fluentials are concerned about this.  It's not exactly clear who these folks are, but a description in the study press release says this group spends 21 hours a week online which leads me to believe they are advanced users.

I posted in the past on the growing influence user reviews have on online consumers.  It is good to see that online consumers are becoming more aware and concerned about the number of fake or paid for reviews.

SBA on Small Business Job Creation

The SBA recently updated their small business statistics recently. The update again highligths the importance of small business employment to the US economy. Small businesses (less than 500 employees) employ 50.9% of nations private non-farm workforce in 2004.

Net new job creation is even more slanted towards small business. From 2003 to 2004 companies with less than 20 employees created roughly 1.6 million net new jobs. Companies with 20 to 499 employees created around 275,000 net new jobs. Meanwhile, employment at companies with more than 500 employees shrank by 214,000.

The SBA is also reporting that over the last 20 years small businesses have created roughly 3 out of 4 net new private non-farm US jobs.