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There’s some good news about holiday retail sales this year. A new survey by Manta, an online community for small businesses, of some 1,000 small retailers found that nearly half (49 percent) are more optimistic about holiday sales this year compared to 2010.
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Social media is continuing to grow in importance in businesses’ marketing campaigns, reports the 2011 Chief Marketer Social Marketing Survey. Nearly three-fourths (73 percent) of respondents say their companies now use social media in their marketing campaigns, up from 64 percent who said so last y Read More

Are you selling business to business? Then you’ll be interested to hear some insights from the latest Enterprise Council on Small Business (ECSB) Executive Roundtable events.
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Does your small business have a Facebook page? If so, new findings of a study by ExactTarget, Subscribers, Fans and Followers: The Meaning of Like, has some interesting info about what users expect when they “like” your business on Facebook—and why they may not “like” you.
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The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) has concluded its 2011 fiscal year with the highest loan volume ever in the agency’s history. SBA Administrator Karen Mills said the loan growth continued a trend started in 2009 and that SBA-backed lending has reached pre-recession levels.
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Where do companies that sell BtoB get most of their leads? According to a 2011 National Marketing and Sales Study recently released by Demandbase and Focus, a business’s website is the second most important source of new sales leads, second only to personal connections/referrals. But for the most p Read More

Mobile marketing is the hottest buzzword around these days. With consumers using their smartphones to do just about everything, putting your marketing message in their pocket is clearly a good idea. But any time you’re talking about mobile, privacy issues raise their heads. While consumers have cle Read More

Despite qualms about a possible double-dip recession and lots of uncertain economic indicators, companies by and large aren’t planning to cut their IT budgets, InformationWeek reports.
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The small business hiring trend that started in October 2009 continued this past month. The most recent Intuit Small Business Employment Index found that small business employment grew by 0.3 percent in September, adding up to an annual growth rate of 3.3 percent. Hours worked and compensation incr Read More

With the news media abuzz about consumer outrage over new fees that Bank of America plans to charge customers to use their debit cards, retail industry lobbyists say the time is ripe to focus on a related issue: credit card interchange fees.
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