• CRM Lowdown is a blog about customer relationship management topics. Some of the posts are about CRM software applications, but others are about the general attitude and mindset of managing customer relationships. Craig Cullen writes the CRM Lowdown blog.
  
  This is a perfect example of the increasing niche-ification of blogs. Once it used to be enough to write about business on your general blog (2001 - 2002). Then you had to start a "business blog" (2003 - 2004). Today if you want to stand out, you have to start a blog on a specific business niche (2005 - 2006).
  
  CRM Lowdown is also part of another growing trend, the blog network. Blog networks are individual blogs under common umbrella management. In this case the network is BizNicheMedia, which appears to have 15 sites about niche business topics.



• Buzzoodle is an online tool that helps companies create and manage buzz and word of mouth marketing. If you've been hearing more about "word of mouth" marketing, there's a reason. Recently I heard an executive from American Greetings speak. When asked what had changed about marketing compared with 10 or 20 years ago, the first thing she said was "word of mouth is much more important today than it used to be."
  
  Buzzoodle is the brainchild of Ron McDaniel, an entrepreneur I know here in Ohio. Ron also has a blog (but of course!) called Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing. Blogs are great for newly introduced products like Buzzoodle, because they help explain them and how to use them, in plain everyday language.



• SearchSMB is a specialized IT search engine for small and midsize businesses. It offers resources about such information technology issues as "white papers on small biz security, disaster recovery, outsourcing and more."



• Blogs: A Global Conversation is a master's thesis by James Torio, a graduate student in Advertising Design at Syracuse University, New York. You can download it in PDF format. Small Business Trends is mentioned in it. James also writes a blog, called EveryHuman.



• StopFakes.gov/smallbusiness is a new website of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The site is designed for small businesses, to help them understand and protect their intellectual property rights.
  
  As compared with the main website for the USPTO, this site does provide some additional information in an easier-to-understand format. Right now, however, the site is not as useful as it could be for small businesses -- just not enough of the right information. Let's hope the site is just a first start and that we can look forward to improvements.



• Business.gov is the "Official Business Link to the U.S. Government." Color me impressed. If you were expecting a mere portal, with links to government programs, regulations and laws, and all very bureaucratic-like -- think again. Business.gov is a great example of how much some of the U.S. government's websites have improved over the past 12 - 18 months.
  
  This site has a great collection of resources, tips and advice on running a business. The focus is implicitly on small business.
  
  Everything is nicely organized and easy to scan quickly to find what you need. Even the design is impressive -- very 2005-ish, with the colored background and white centered content area.

The talk was recorded and turned into a podcast. Listen to the podcast here (MP3 file, approximately 55 minutes -- he speaks about the rise of the entrepreneurial class about 23 minutes into the recording).

"Between reading the RSS aggregator news and the time I choose a story, it's probably three to four hours, and after that, let's say it's an additional one hour and a half to two hours or more to finally publish it. So overall, it's probably about six hours, yeah."

"Even for me, if a story is already covered by, I don't know, twenty magazines in the world, to me it is not a good enough subject. I want to have a subject which is not completely original but at least which is not covered broadly by the press. So, it is probably for this reason that in the last two years I have been Slashdotted between two and eight times per month (!!!), and yes, I do acknowledge that this is a good thing... though there are also lots of Slashdot haters which come after you after they discover you that way."

"We help pet lovers looking for pet health insurance to learn more about the products and companies currently selling policies. Pet insurance can be a complicated product, just like human health insurance, and we are helping people understand what questions they need to be asking themselves and the pet insurance companies, and showing them some of the options that are available. This information is not available anywhere else."

"We are definitely getting stronger traffic numbers on both our blog and website and I am getting a number of inquiries every week from people asking about our policies -- too bad we can't sell them anything right now! In particular though, people are beginning to use the phone number posted on my blog. ...I am always open to chatting with people about pet insurance, entrepreneurship, women business owners, anything that's on anyone's minds. Those are generally very interesting phone calls and they get me in touch with people I would never have been able to connect with otherwise."

"I'd been sending out an email newsletter to thousands of subscribers every week for the past two and a half years. People are bombarded with emails, with more and more emails going into the spam folder. I want my information to be read. I felt a blog was the next step beyond email because it enables me to deliver information to my subscribers and listeners without having to email them."

"People should make sure they are getting the right service for the size of company they are. They should not have to shell out for blanket coverage. It's about striking a balance," said a [Federation of Small Businesses] spokesman.

I once worked at a place with only four employees that outsourced its ablution services. In other words, we had somebody come and collect the used hand towels and replace them with fresh ones. It would've been infinitely cheaper to buy new every week.

The company I'm currently associated with is often on the receiving end of much outsourcing. Yes, it's cheaper for the firms wishing to outsource as they don't have a dedicated workforce to pay on an ongoing basis. But, this is still an example of outsourcing of expertise. Subcontracting is also as old as the hills in the world of manufacturing.

It doesn't matter whether you outsource to your next building, next town, city, country or half way across the world - we all outsource if we don't have the in-house capabilty to deal with certain aspects of our business - whether it be a temporary peak in work we can't handle or certain things we don't have the expertise or inclination to do ourselves.

Business owners need to recognize the forces of change around them, and adapt to changes in the marketplace. "Small businesses are lousy at external focus. We are good at internal focus," says Steve. "Big businesses are just the opposite."

"Getting into Wal-Mart is an entrepreneur's equivalent of making it to Broadway. Even a short run on the shelves there can help transform an invention from niche product to household name. And while Wal-Mart certainly isn't the only retail path to commercial success, nor the right outlet for every product, for mass-market merchandise at a certain price point no other bricks-and-mortar retailer reaches so many shoppers. Today the company has 5,300 outlets world-wide, and gets more than 138 million customers a week."

"Take a look at this chart and I want to highlight the huge monster spike in open interest in crude contracts. We will see some powerful moves in the crude markets in the coming weeks as the speculators are really getting active. MAN IT'S FUN!!"

• Search Engines as TV Networks Jockeying for Audience -- 127 Million Americans use search engines, yet most of the activity is concentrated in a few search engines. Marketing Sherpa likens this to the domination of 3 TV networks in the 1970's. One interesting factoid is that the Ask Jeeves search engine has tripled its market share since last year, although it is still a mere fraction of Google's share. I wonder how much of that might be related to its acquisition of Bloglines, the popular RSS search engine.



• SEO Still a Tiny Portion of Total Search Marketing Spend -- Most companies are pouring money into paid search (pay per click). A far smaller percentage goes to optimizing web pages so that they show up better in the organic search results. The reason? Search optimization is considered too complex and so apparently executives find it easier to ignore SEO. Sounds to me like an opportunity for the SEO firms to improve their marketing messages.



• Search Marketing - A New Application for Press Releases -- The very reason that press releases are "dead" when it comes to getting media attention, is why they are great for search marketing. Because press releases get indexed in major search engines, media isn't interested in simply regurgitating them and has dropped them like a stone. However, press releases show up promptly and prominently in the search engines and bring Web traffic, if not media eyeballs.

• Be Excellent, the blog of Six Disciplines Corporation, has a new format. Skip Reardon, the Marketing Director of Six Disciplines, writes the blog. Part of the blog's purpose is to be a companion to the Six Disciplines book and methodology.
  
  But Skip has broadened the subject matter. He is writing about a variety of small business topics culled from different sources, not just about the book. I especially like his "Bottomline" summary paragraph at the end of each post, in which he emphasizes his point. He is planning to move to a more robust blogging software, because Blogger does not support categories, which are absolutely essential for a business blog.



• News.smallbusiness.com (great domain name!) offers news aggregation channels just for small business news. News.smallbusiness.com pulls news stories and blog posts from many sources. It aggregates them into a single page, with six categories: economy, finance, management, marketing, policy and technology. Naturally there are RSS feeds for the main channel and for each category. The end result is a resource specifically designed around "small business" news, rather than the broader business news which would contain content not relevant to the small business market. News.smallbusiness.com is run by Hammock Publishing, whose CEO, Rex Hammock, happens to be a blogger, too.



• Catapult is the entrepreneur's site of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This is a fun site with a fresh take on being an entrepreneur. At first glance it looks pretty standard. But when you delve into it, you realize someone there has a wickedly funny sense of humor. In fact, Rebecca Martin, a journalist with the site, tells me that treating business subjects with humor is one of their goals: "Aimed at under-35 entrepreneurial types, we like to keep things light-hearted and humorous." Read the Smart Fabrics article and tell me if you don't agree.



• Selling is Dead -- did you know that? That's the name of a new book by two authors from here in Northeast Ohio, USA, where I live and work. They have a blog as an online companion for the book, also called Selling is Dead. One of the posts caught my eye with these statistics: "50% of sales people do not meet their quotas"; and "3 out of 4 product launches fails to meet expectations." Those are wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee numbers. I haven't read this book yet, but just judging from some of the posts, I will probably recommend it to several early-stage, entrepreneur friends and colleagues. Sales is invariably the weakest part of any technology startup.



• Technorati Blog Finder: Ever since I wrote last week about the Small Business Blog Directory, readers have been sending me links to other directories. One of those is Technorati's Blog Finder. I certainly appreciate and thank Technorati for all the free services it provides (and I appreciate the thoughtful email I got from Technorati Feedback -- on a weekend, too!).
  
  Unfortunately Blog Finder falls short. The main problem is that if a blogger designates a blog as having posts under a certain keyword, then the blog gets listed for that keyword. Sounds logical, right? Except: that leads to the questionable situation where a pop culture or politics blog may devote very few of its posts to "business" but still ends up being categorized under business blogs. For instance, one of the top blogs listed as a business blog in Technorati's Blog Finder has 1464 posts, of which a mere 23 posts over five years are categorized as "business." Yet, it is listed under "business," ahead of other blogs with far more business content. While Technorati's Blog Finder may be useful for some purposes, you will not get a good picture of the business blog landscape from it.



• Google Blog Search: Speaking of blog search, just today Google introduced its own blog and RSS search engine. Search Engine Watch has a substantive post describing the features and how best to use it.

• Consider that fewer than 50% of small businesses have websites. With pay per call, you don't need a website, just someone manning the phone.



• Only a portion of small businesses have processes in place to effectively receive Internet leads and act on them in a timely fashion. Often it can be hard to find an email address or a contact form on a website. And when contact is finally made, sometimes it can take days for a small business to respond to emails -- if they are ever answered. Yet, virtually all small businesses are set up to handle telephone inquiries promptly.



• Pay-per-call can be locally-focused, and since the majority of small business is local in nature, it means that callers are going to be highly-targeted, well-qualified leads. I note that with the Ingenio system, you can even tell it what time of day for ads to run so that you are attracting calls during regular business hours.

"Everyone knows which industry dominates ... Detroit and Houston. But how many could name the capital of socks? Or medical imaging technology? Or firearms? These are among dozens of hidden capitals of vital U.S. industries, each populated by and dependent upon dozens of small companies that both compete and collaborate.

This idea of industry capitals, or "clusters," as academics call them, might seem like a quaint tourist draw for small towns, an excuse, say, for Gilroy, Calif., to throw its annual garlic festival. But they serve an important function in the economy. Overlapping businesses in the same region gain a number of advantages, drawing in more suppliers and customers along with financial institutions that understand the industry. Meanwhile, the labor pool grows to include more workers with special skills and experience."

• Virtual Reality Software -- Central Florida


• Light Aircraft -- Wichita, Kansas


• Orthopedic Surgery -- Birmingham, Alabama


• Weight-Loss Centers -- Durham, North Carolina


• Firearms -- Sturgis, South Dakota


• Cardiac Devices -- Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota


• Medical Imaging Technology -- Central Massachusetts


• Helicopters -- Phoenix

"I was having coffee with my friend Deborah last week (who has proven to be an endless source of inspiration for blogging ideas) and I told her that I had finally written off my old views of entreprenuership. You see, I was in b-school in 1998 and 1999, so I was indoctrinated with certain ideas that weren't necessarily true. For instance, I thought GE and Proctor and Gamble would soon be washed up has-beens. I thought everybody would soon do everything via the web. And when it came to entrepreneurship, I thought that you had an idea, or invented some new thing in your spare time, wrote a business plan, and VCs gave you money. I told Deborah that I didn't believe that anymore -- that so much 'conventional wisdom' about entrepreneurship was a lie. It just isn't what people think.

'So you're not drinking the kool-aid?' she asked. I just laughed. 'Not anymore.'"

It's been a long time coming, but this week sees a couple of interesting developments with regards to business blogging in the UK.

Today sees BBC Radio 4's Shop Talk dedicate a full half hour to business blogging and even dares to pick the brains of a couple of small business bloggers on the programme - Thomas Mahon of English Cut and Heather Platts of The Soap Blog. (Don't worry about missing the original broadcast as you can always listen to it again at a later date.)

Then, if you're so inclined, you can trot along to the Our Social World conference in Cambridge this coming Friday to gain a deeper insight of those new-fangled methods that enable you to communicate your business more effectively online.

Whilst business blogging has been embraced by some of the broadsheets, it hasn't received any real interest from the broadcast media and hasn't been the primary focus of a conference thus far.

Now I have a theory or three as to why we're dragging our feet over in the UK, but I'd be far more interested to hear your thoughts.

• The U.S. Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao, was on Fox News earlier today and announced various assistance programs for victims of Hurricane Katrina. Among them: 10,000 temporary cleanup jobs, and disaster unemployment insurance, covering employees and self-employed individuals. So even if you run your own single-person business you may be eligible for these special unemployment benefits if you are from an affected area.



• The Soap Blog is a blog of Eie Flud, a small company that makes and sells luxury handmade toiletries and natural botanical perfumes in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, U.K. In one recent post, Heather writes "From my dining room window I can see grazing, the very cows that within minutes provide the milk for these soaps - still warm and frothy and completely natural." Now that's something you don't read in a blog everyday -- go check out the Soap Blog.



• Speaking of business blogs, Denise O'Berry has started the Small Business Blog Directory as a great way to find small business blogs. It is relatively new but already has 264 small business blogs listed as of this writing.



• The U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy is now offering RSS feeds for news releases and announcements. Let's hope more government agencies and organizations serving small business start RSS feeds. Are you listening, NFIB?



• Psychotherapist-entrepreneur George Anderson, whose Notes from the World of Anger Management blog we reviewed earlier this year, has made the cover of the Los Angeles Times magazine. Congrats, George! And read our PowerBlog Review to see some of the innovative ways George uses a blog for public education and advocacy.

"I love to write and had been writing articles for publication for years. Blogging just sounded like a great extension of that. My goal is for this to be a place where small business owners come and find lots of valuable but simple tips."

• Zane Safrit -- Business Life


• Georgia Patrick -- Customers Count


• Dan Janal -- PR Leads


• Troy White -- Word Wealth


• Martin Jelsema -- Buzzworthy Branding


• Jill Konrath -- Selling To Big Companies


• Don The Idea Guy -- The Idea Department


• Mark Beck -- Internet Marketing Unleashed

• Donate personally. The Instapundit blog has a huge list of links to charities. Take your pick. Or you can give to the Red Cross by clicking on the donation banner above in this post.



• Ask employees to donate (also, they can consider skipping a 401K contribution or two).



• Pledge to donate a percentage of revenues from sales of some or all products sold.



• Add a line to your email signature suggesting that people donate with a link to a charity of your choice. It is a gentle reminder to everyone who gets your email.