Small Business Trends

David Siteman Garland, host of “The Rise To The Top” blog, Webcast and TV show on entrepreneurship, has written a book called Smarter, Faster, Cheaper Non-Boring Fluff-Free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business to describe a new way of building and growing your business that might just earn the name guerrilla. But it was Shane Gibson, with his book Guerrilla Social Media Marketing, co-written with Jay Conrad Levinson, who gave this marketing technique its name. Actually, we’re pretty sure guerrilla techniques are part of everything a successful modern startup entrepreneur needs to do to keep costs low and leverage growth on a whole new level. Here are Shane, David and plenty more giving their thoughts on a new small business movement. Enjoy!

Social Media

How to go guerrilla with your marketing campaign. Author and entrepreneur Shane Gibson talks about how to go guerrilla with social media marketing in part of a longer podcast interview in which he discusses why engaging customers is now critical and why the old boilerplate corporate response to customers just won’t work. Fuel Radio

A Shakespearean guide to managing online communities. Sixteenth-century Elizabethan England might not be the first place you’d normally seek inspiration for how to manage an online community. But then a good understanding of basic human nature can be an important part of interacting with people whether online or in the real world. Even if your online community is as small as a Facebook fan page or a single business blog, learn to interact with your customers in a more effective way. We think you’ll be pleased with the results. BizSugar Blog

Operations

Small business basics of managing a virtual team. Another aspect of online communications and online networks is the ease with which business functions can be delegated to an outsourced virtual team located anywhere in the world from where ever your small business may be located…even if that location is in your living room on your lap top computer. Social networking is allowing small businesses to operate at a completely different level now. Read more. Virtual Business Lifestyle

International entrepreneurship guerrilla style. A guerrilla approach goes way beyond just marketing your company. It also enters the realm of getting things done. A lot of guest blogger Christian Arno’s suggestions in this post also apply to creating a virtual company including tips for using a virtual office and outsourcing things like computer functions to the cloud. What are the limits of your global reach? Wayne Lieu Dot Com

Trends

Old news dressed as new news. Ever get the feeling some people just don’t get it? Irene Koehler does. There’s a moral to the story she tells in this post about a Twitter query sent to the DMV about a missing driver’s license. Instead of a helpful response, Koeler was asked to call the DMV where she was on the phone for 17 minutes before giving up. almost savvy

Building a social media empire. You don’t need much money to build a brand capable of generating half a million in revenue or more annually. Lewis Howes has built a powerful personal brand doing just that in a little more than two years starting with nothing more than a free LinkedIn account. A book deal and numerous live events and Webinars later, he talks with “Smarter, Faster, Cheaper…” author David Siteman Garland about how he did it. The Rise To The Top

Tips

Everything you wanted to know about Twitter but were afraid to ask. Though Sian Phillips posted this overview as an introduction to microblogging for newbies, we’ll venture to guess there are a fair number of folks out there who have been using Twitter for quite some time and still don’t know all the features. Take it away, Sian! Tweak Your Biz

Create an asset based marketing strategy. Sarah Mitchell has become a thought leader on the topic of using social media to transform your content into an asset for your business. In this post she gives three important ways in which social media changes the nature of content for your small business and can make it a continuing value well into the future. Thanks, Sarah. Global Copywriting

Self-development

On the importance of personality. For all of the benefits social media provides to build a strong business with relatively low cost through a combination of guerrilla marketing and flexible network building, there remain pitfalls of which every small business owner must be aware. Key among these is that social media is, well, social. And this means that your online personality will play a role. Laura Petrolino has this post on some personalities that may not be compatible with success in the social media space. 365 Days of Startups

Conclusion

Guerilla social media marketer attributes and tools. If some attributes and personalities don’t work with social media, what attributes do? Shane Gibson gives the answer in this portion of a podcast interview related to his book Guerrilla Social Media Marketing with co-author Jay Conrad Levinson. In the interview, Shane not only runs down the top ten key attributes of a social guerilla marketer but also gives an overview of some of the lesser-known tech tools…and answers the fateful question of whether social media is a waste of time. Fuel Radio