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The Global Neighbourhoods blog scratches the surface on the relationship between the high cost of travel (local and long-distance), and keeping up with your customers and business partners. This seems pretty obvious to social media evangelist-types, but I don’t feel shy about hammering the point home to small business folks who have yet to take advantage of social media opportunities.

Businesses will increasingly use social media to get closer with customers. This, of course, is already happening and happening at a pretty fast rate. But I think the trend is about to accelerate. Because it is getting too expensive and inconvenient to meet face-to-face in the real world, there will be more efforts to bring the conversation to the next best place, in the form of virtual communities.

From the article Social Media & the Cost of Fuel, Global Neighborhoods Blog

Unlike old media (tv, radio, newspapers, magazines), social media is a better servant of small business than it is of giant corporations, because Social media is the Great Equalizer. Here’s one reason why– General Motor’s Facebook page or Twitter tweet looks the same and has the same potential reach as Joe’s Pizza’s Facebook page or Twitter tweet. There is a democratic leveling of the playing field here that can raise tiny players to star status (and back again, if you’re not prepared) in a matter of hours.
In what other time in history has this been possible? Will this opportunity exist forever, or will regulation or GiantCo bring dull hierarchal order to this Wild West? Beats me, but why not take advantage of this fun, cheap (and by “cheap”, I mean “free”) marketing opportunity? Investigate further, even if you don’t think social media marketing is right for your kind of business.
Thanks to Duct Tape Marketing!

Although this little piece was written with an emphasis on medium-to-large business, the principles are, if anything, even more applicable to small business, whose promotion budgets are often quite small.

Normalization is happening, A checkbox for ’social media’ on every announcement, product launch, product development and support will be using these tools. Social media tools to listen, converse, collect knowledge, and build new products will integrate across the customer cycle.

Read the article “The Five Questions Companies Ask About Social Media” from Web Strategy by Jeremiah.

… and a new breed of organization techie.  Skip this one if you are still struggling with basic concepts, but it appears to be a little peek into the future of small-business IT-guy-dom.

A good I.T. person, though, knows how to interpret “user-speak” and present them with the tools they need even if they didn’t know how to ask for them in our language. If anything, they’re going to be more likely to say something like: “Sending out an email newsletter seems outdated - I wish there was a better way to communicate with our customers,” or “I wish there was an easier way to keep up with the industry news,” or “Wow, how many different versions of this documentation is saved on our intranet, anyway?” The old I.T. guy might mumble and turn their head, but the I.T. 2.0 guy knows to say “Blog! RSS! Wikis!” instead.

Read the whole story on RWW here.