Small Business Labs

Why a Lot of Small Businesses Don't Need to Use Twitter

eMarketer reports that 9% of the adult (18+) US Internet population currently uses Twitter at least once a month. 

Their new forecast substantially lowers the Twitter use forecast they made last April.  Key quote from their press release:

“Twitter has continued to gain traction but at more moderate levels than we had expected,” Verna said. “Our updated figures put Twitter usage in a clearer perspective than published data showing hundreds of millions of Twitter accounts, or site traffic stats that include visitors who browse public tweets on Twitter.com but don’t actually use the microblogging service.”

In other words, the hype around Twitter exceeded the reality. 

Don't get me wrong.  9% of online users is over 16 million people.  That's a lot of people and Twitter is a great marketing tool if your customer base is using it.  It's also valuable for other tasks.  For example, we use Twitter almost every day for information discovery.

But it also means 91% of adult online users aren't using Twitter, so a lot of small businesses won't find their customers or prospects there. 

Our advice to small businesses on Twitter continues to be the same it's been since Twitter was launched:  learn about and experiment with Twitter, test it for a mix of business purposes, measure your results, and use it if you're getting a strong ROI relative to other uses of your time and money. 

Don't use it just because of the hype. 

Corporate Sites and the Explosion of Small Business Media

One of the more interesting trends we've been following over the last few years is the rapid growth of small business media coverage. 

The main reason for the jump in coverage is the growing popularity of small business, which is leading to a growing audience for small business content. 

The Internet and new media are, of course, another reason for the increased coverage.  New media has created the opportunity for entrepreneurs to create new online publishing companies.   

Some, like Small Business Trends, SmallbizTechnology and MyVenturePad focus entirely on small business.  So do hundreds if not thousands of lesser known small business sites. 

Others, like  AOL, Slate and the recently acquired by AOL Huffington Post are more broad based, but also cover small business.  I include in this category the tech focused sites with lots of small business coverage, like Mashable, Giga Om and Tech Crunch. 

Traditional media, in most cases, has also continued their small business coverage and in some cases, like the Christian Science Monitor, increased it. 

Adding to this is the small business publishing efforts of corporations that serve the small business market.  The largest site of this type is Open Forum, from American Express.  I'm only half-joking when I say everyone I know writes for them. 

Other companies with large content sites targeting small business includes Intuit, Network Solutions, Bank of America - the list goes on and on (and on).

Silicon Valley Watcher's Tom Foremski describes this trend as "every company is a media company" and the companies serving the small business space are aggressively pursuing this approach. 

The demand for small business content has reached the point where startups and new media agencies focused on generating small business content for 3rd parties are being formed.  GrowBiz Media, for example, writes articles on small business for corporations and government agencies. 

The growth of corporate sites has interesting business model implications for both traditional and new media companies - the biggest being corporate sites are seen as a marketing expense instead of a business that needs to generate a profit. 

We're not sure how this is going to turn out, but we'll keep tracking it. 

Disclosure:  normally we list any relationships we have with companies mentioned in our posts.  In this case, we've written for, worked with, or been quoted in articles done by pretty much everyone listed - and yes, we've contributed to Amex's Open Forum. 

Mobile World Congress Article Round-Up

The Mobile World Congress was held last week in Barcelona.  This is one of, if not the, biggest mobile tech show in the world attracting over 50,000 participants.  This event led to a flurry of articles and here are the ones I found most interesting:

 - CNET has a long article providing in-depth coverage of the Hot Trends at Mobile World Congress.  If you only want to read one article, scan this one. 

 - Pew's Generations and Their Gadgets report shows that 85% of adult Americans have a cell phone and 90% of all U.S. households have at least one cell phone.  I think we can call this ubiquity.  For those who don't want to read the report, CNET nicely summarizes it. 

 - Reuters yet again covers mobile payments, this time looking at the telcos and major banks.  Mobile payments has to be the most covered tech sector around. 

 - Mobile Commerce Daily reports on an Adobe survey showing that 62% of smartphone users have purchased physical goods with their mobile device in the last 6 months.  Good article with lots of interesting data. 

 - Pocket Gamer covers iPad competitors from a gamers point of view, but still does a nice job reviewing the new tablets. 

 - Mashable has a nice infographic on Mobile World Congress Buzz.   

Following the Revolution in the Muslim World

Like most small business owners, we don't have a lot of time to devote to keeping up with the events in the Middle East.  Because of this we've turned to Stratfor - a leading geopolitical risk firm - for this information. 

Their most recent article - Revolution and Muslim World - does a nice job of framing what is going on in that part of the world. 

Stratfor has both free and paid content.  Their primary target market is geopolitical risk professionals. 

We used to subscribe to the paid version, but it swamped us with information so we switched and now subscribe to their free newsletter.  The free version not only saves us money, but also better meets our needs. 

Shell's Energy Scenarios to 2050

Shell Oil is famous in forecasting circles for their use of scenario planning in Shell's strategic planning process.  And as a former energy economist (I got better), I still look forward to their annual energy forecasts. 

This year's forecast looks out to 2050 and has several scenarios around energy production and consumption.  The key charts - their baseline energy demand and production forecasts to 2030 are below.  The key points, I think, are:

1. Rising energy demand from non-OECD (developing) countries
2. A slight decline in energy demand from the OECD countries
3. The growing role of natural gas
4. The growing role of coal
5. How little renewables contribute - even in 2030

 

  

 

Small Businesses Emerging From Recession

The latest economic news and surveys show that the small business economy is finally recovering from the Great Recession.  Key indicators include a strong, positive uptick in small business sentiment surveys and stronger projected growth in the overall economy.

(Click here for a WSJ article on Citibank's sentiment survey, here for an article in Small Business Trends that covers multiple sentiment surveys, and here for a NY Times article on the Fed upping their 2010 GDP forecast.)

The overall economy has been out of recession and growing for over a year, but it's been a two-speed economic recovery with large corporations leading the way and small businesses lagging and mired in the downturn.   

Even as recently as last fall the small business sector was still in recession.  But at that time we felt things would pick up in early 2010.  It appears that forecast was correct. 

Even better news is we see the small business economy continuing to accelerate and more small businesses benefiting from the improving economy over the next year. 

The Top 50 Blogs for Small Business Owners

The Online Accounting Degree blog published their list of The Top 50 Blogs for Small Business Owners. 

Smallbizlabs made the list and is pleased to be listed between two of the top small business blogs around - Pam Slim's Escape from Cubicle Nation and Guy Kawasaki's How to Change the World. 

The goal of this list is to get the bloggers mentioned in the list to do what I'm doing - post on it on our blogs.  This creates links to the Online Accounting Degree site, which helps their search engine results.  If you visit their blog, you will see they do lots of lists like this. 

Smallbizlabs gets offers almost every week from folks willing to pay us for links to their sites.  We don't do this.  It's not that we think this wrong per se, but in our case there are too many potential conflicts of interest with our core research and forecasting business. 

But the clever folks at The Online Accounting Degree blog have figured out a way around this.  They create content interesting enough for us (and others) to post and tweet about. 

The Emerging Project Economy

Over at the MBO Partners Consulting Blog, Jay Lash's essay The Way Work Gets Done in the Emerging "Project Economy" examines the shift to project-based work. 

Key quote on companies shifting to project-based work:

"Instead of building a large and expensive management infrastructure that previously comprised most growing corporations, work is now sliced and diced into bits of work called “projects.” Projects can be outsourced, traded, and performed anywhere, by any number of resources, many of whom may not be employees. Technology enables endless configurations of contributors to collaborate and produce work output."

This is a fundamental change in how work is done - and it is clearly happening.  Lash covers potential implications for both companies and workers in his essay.  It is well worth reading. 

ComScore's 2010 State of the Web

Market researcher ComScore recently released their 2010 U.S. Digital Review of the Year.  It is full of interesting data and insights on the Internet and social media usage.  The report is easy to read and free, so I urge you to get a copy if the topic interests you. 

The report has too much information for a summary, but a couple of items jumped out at me:

1.  Ecommerce recovered from the Great Recession in 2010 and posted a 9% increase overall to $227.6 billion.  The holiday season was even stronger, posting a 12% gain. 

2.  Facebook continues to take over the web.  Facebook now accounts for 12.3 percent of time
spent online in the U.S., compared to 7.2 percent a year ago.  It also accounts for 10% of all pageviews. 

We often ask clients what their Facebook strategy is.  It amazes us how the often the answer is they don't have one. 

Our Facebook advice to small businesses remains the same.  You don't have to be on Facebook.  But you do need to understand Facebook well enough to make an informed decision about whether or not to use ti. 

BTW, we've found most small businesses that evaluate Facebook as a business tool end up using it.   

A Watershed Quarter: Smartphones Outsell PCs

According to IDC via an article in ReadWriteWeb, global smartphones sales exceeded global PC sales for the first time in the 4th quarter of 2010.

If Joe Biden were a techie, he would likely say "this is a big ******* deal!"

100.9 million smartphones were shipped in Q4 2010, an increase of 87% compared to Q4 2009.  PC sales were up 5.5% year over year, with 92.1 million units shipped in Q4 of 2010.

PCs still outsold smartphones for the total year, with 346 million PC shipped in 2010 versus 302 million smartphones. 

But smartphones will easily outsell PCs in 2011, and if you add in other mobile computing devices like tablets it becomes clear just how much the world is shifting to mobile computing.