Look Who is Appearing On The American Express OPEN Forum


As many of you know, I write for a number of online publications, one of them being the American Express OPEN Forum blogs. Not long ago, they gave me the go-ahead to open up that opportunity to the small business experts who contribute here at Small Business Trends.

That means it’s not just me writing articles at the OPEN Forum — now the Expert community from here is publishing over there, too.

Recent Submissions by the Community

We’ve had this program in place since August.  Well over a dozen community contributions are published there to date. Here are some recent articles of the Small Business Trends experts published at the OPEN Forum (in no particular order):

  • Laurel Delaney – McDonald’s: Local Footprint, Global Reach.
  • Brent Leary – What CNN Can Teach Entrepreneurs About Social Media
  • Dawn Rivers Baker – Making Life Difficult for the Self Employed
  • Joel Libava – I Don’t Like My Franchise. Now What Do I Do?
  • Ivana Taylor – Me to Customer: Don’t Let the Screen Door Hit You.
  • Steve King – The End Of Online Auctions?
  • Ramon Ray – Develop the Knack for Business Growth
  • Deborah Brown – Crying Babies Trump Whiny Managers
  • Zane Safrit – Small Businesses, Tear Down Those Walls
  • Scott Shane – Entrepreneurs with Poor Credit Face Crunch
  • Mark Anderson – Drowning in Red Ink, Er . Let’s Call it Maroon

Please show your support by reading the Experts’ articles.  If you like an article, click on the little black button “Yes” underneath the article title indicating you found it useful.   That will tell us which topics you want more of.

A big thank-you to all of the small business experts for lending their time, expertise and valuable contributions. And many thanks to American Express OPEN for being so welcoming of multiple voices.

6 Comments ▼

Anita Campbell Anita Campbell is the Founder, CEO and Publisher of Small Business Trends and has been following trends in small businesses since 2003. She is the owner of BizSugar, a social media site for small businesses.

6 Reactions
  1. There’s so much good stuff over there. I’ve been following for a while now and the contributions cover such a wide variety of topics. And I think it’s great that they are encourange and embracing the community of small business experts here as well. It’ll be exciting to see who else joins the ranks . . .

  2. I agree with Chris. I’ve found a lot of useful articles over there the past few weeks. I especially enjoyed Laurel’s recent McDonalds article. It was interesting to see how a large company adjusts their products to meet the needs of international markets.

  3. Congrats for taking it way BIGGER, Anita. You and the expert group do such a fine job here that it will be fun to keep up over there.

    One thought, which is not totally related, but which I also think is hot on small biz owners minds is — weathering the current economic storm. I know you’ve written about it, shared about it. I had an idea on this front for creative financing.

    I follow Jim Bruene at Netbanker, http://netbanker.com, and he covers banking/financial technology and one of the areas he’s profiled a bunch is Peer-to-Peer lending. He calls it Person-to-Person lending. P2P Lending. He’s written some awesome posts about how consumers are using these new web2.0 services and i think there could be something for the small biz owner looking to cover a small project or need, but sees existing credit lines shrinking. I think it would be worth some exploration to see if it could apply or be useful. I would enjoy a continued discussion around creative financing and recession-busting ideas…

    Just my .008 cents now that the crisis has reduced my two cents…
    TJ

  4. Plenty of good stuff over there. I am interested in global trade, so Laurel Delaney’s article, McDonald’s: Local Footprint, Global Reach, looks very interesting.

  5. thank you anita for all you do for small enterprises. I am glad to have had the privilege of working with you and i will send you email about writing for OPen forum.

  6. I agree Martin. There are really a lot of good stuff there. I never missed to vote for SmallBizTrends experts in that forum.