Work.com Small Business Community Blog

B2B in a World of Emerging Collaborative Technologies

B2B strategy is evolving as collaborative technologies become ubiquitous. Beyond technology changes, social change is driving new ways of doing business that involve collaboration and conversation with your vendors, suppliers, partners and customers, as thinkers such as Clay Shirky stress. Listening is a crucial part of business strategy - just ask people like Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.

There's so much to keep up with. A sampling of what crossed my screen today: B2B in a Web 2.0 World, Part 1: Digital Media Relations, and this summary of mobile social networking, which could be important for your business sooner than you think.

Tags: mobile social networking, B2B

Search Engine Land's Big List of Major B2B Search Engines

Search Engine Land just posted  a list of major B2B search engines. Moving beyond Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to a vertical search option can lead to a higher percentage of qualified traffic and conversions.

Tags: B2B Search, B2B, vertical search

Top 10 Twitter Tips

Interested in getting started with Twitter as you hear of companies such as Zappos and Dell using it to communicate with and listen to customers? Ellen Leanse, who has spent 25 years working with early-stage and established technology companies, has a great post on the top 10 Twitter tips that will help you get started engaging in conversation, tracking what people are saying, and developing a following.

Tags: twitter

Why Online Community is a Hot Topic for Business

Anita Campbell, a follower of small business trends, truly understands online community for business, and manifests that by her involvement in it. Her many hats include small business blogger, podcaster, columnist, and Work.com community leader. She just wrote a blog post on Small Biz Trends called Why Online Community is a Hot Topic. She says that online community is more and more important for business for the following reasons:

1. More content competition requires engaging people to get repeat visitors

2. It's risky to rely on search engines alone for traffic

3. Online networking is proven

Anita's Inc. column From Blogs to Online Communities provides more detail.

I definitely agree with Anita, and have many recent examples that "online networking is proven." For example, I was on Twitter and saw that Guy Kawasaki had sent out a tweet asking for a list of small business sites. I happened to have one on hand, and immediately sent it to him, and Guy ended up using many of the sites on my list including Work.com's daily feed on the small business section of his feed aggregator site Alltop.com. We have since seen much traffic from Alltop.com - and it all started with checking Twitter!

At the Online Community Business Forum 2008 in Santa Fe which I recently attended, someone raised the question: “Can you even talk about community these days as a separate thing? Isn’t the web one big community now?”

Tags: ocbf2008, anita campbell, small biz trends, online community, guy kawasaki

Web 2.0 Expo - What Businesses Need to Know

I just got back from Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, and there was a lot to learn about best practices for business 2.0. Let’s see…what I gleaned. The root of current rapid change is social, not technological. Businesses need to engage their customers and converse with them. Widgets, badges, presence, and interoperability are creating a distributed web – the web is becoming an open platform. Max Levchin of widget company Slide says they are “able to approach top-flight brand advertisers.” Advertisers are becoming publishers and entertainers. Tim O’Reilly says we’re moving into ambient computing, and says “let your customers into your back office” and “enterprises should understand that Web 2.0 is about turning themselves inside out.”

Tags: web2expo, web20expo

Eve Lopez - Work.com Associate Editor

In between her new gig as associate editor of Work.com and Business.com, Eve Lopez volunteers at orphanages in places like Ghana, Russia, and China. Many of her guides focus on the human side of business, such as Escaping Your Cubicle During the Work Day and Volunteer Opportunities for Your Business - a major theme being that it enhances the health of your business to care about the health of individuals and communities!

We're excited to see more guides in the future about how doing good helps you to do well.