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Deciding which online opportunities to embrace comes down to understanding your audience. "Go where your customers already are. Social media is not about being the first one into some new technology." If you don't know what social media your customers are using, check it out by searching for your company name on Facebook or others. P Read More

Let's face it: a growing number of people are using Twitter these days, spending a lot of time on Twitter, and still need to get things done on Twitter. If you want to spend a lot of time conversing with people on Twitter, that's great — but many people still need to get their tasks done. Let's take a look at how to do that. Why use Twitter Read More

Fifty-nine percent of recently surveyed companies executed a major market-segmentation initiative in the previous two years. Yet only 14% derived real value from the exercise. What's wrong with market segmentation? Read More

THE e-commerce bandwagon bypassed millions of carpenters, massage therapists, lawyers and other service providers, mostly because it is impossible to drop an appointment into a shopping cart without unleashing a scheduling nightmare. Now that a set of Internet start-up companies has emerged to help solve this problem, though, small businesses c Read More

Return Path's 2007 Holiday Email Survey has been released and the data suggests that consumers are becoming savvy inbox managers and businesses that continue to churn out unrefined email campaigns could find themselves labeled as spammers. Read More

Following declines in 2006, small-business hiring rose by 4.3 percent last year, even as labor costs went up, according to SurePayroll. Based on payroll data from more than 18,000 small businesses, salaries rose by 4.2 percent to an average $32,609, the Chicago-based payroll services firm reported. Read More

One month before the President submits his 2009 budget request to Congress, Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), Chairman and Ranking Member of the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, urged the Bush Administration to support America's small businesses by increasing funding for the Small Business Administration Read More

Small and midsize businesses are increasing their use of Web 2.0 tools as information sources, providing greater opportunities to marketers that are trying to reach this audience, according to a new study from market research company Bredin Business Information. It examined which online tools SMBs use, how they use them to receive business informa Read More

Forget Microsoft Office and Excel. Your next powerful business tool could be Facebook. Andy McAfee, a Harvard Business School professor and an expert on Web 2.0 technologies and their applications in business, argues that social networking software brings certain types of people together in a much more efficient (and potentially cheaper) way than Read More

Organizations are demanding ever-higher performance from their workforces. People are trying to comply, but the usual method--putting in longer hours--has backfired. They're getting exhausted, disengaged, and sick. And they're defecting to healthier job environments. Longer days at the office don't work because time is a limited resource. But p Read More