While the use of blogging as a marketing and communications platform continues to grow for many organizations, you still might be facing this question from your boss — “Why are we doing this?” But there are many other tangible benefits of business blogging that might be more difficult to measure … but no less important. Here are 25 non-financial benefits of business blogging: Create a database of answers — Blog about customer questions. Marketing integration — Turn content from your blog into sales and marketing materials. MORE >>

count myself lucky to have witnessed the tail-end of the “MadMen” period of business culture. I was taken to many business lunches to drink at the all-men, all-white private business clubs that were in every major American city. Today, business is for everyone. But it was not that long ago that business was an elitist, blue-blooded sport. The reaction time in business has accelerated mightily. Russia (USSR) and Eastern Europe were closed markets. focused market and supply chain. It all started with something like this. Email. MORE >>

I recently received this excellent question from one of my students: Big global companies usually have a social media department but medium and small companies usually add this job for some marketing or PR manager in addition to his area of responsibility or hire some cheap employee or intern — with negative results. So how should a small business with limited resources realistically approach social media marketing? In fact, large brands are devoting a significant part of their marketing budget into these efforts. How do you make this transition? 2) Learn. MORE >>

Gartner predicts 80% of social business efforts will not achieve intended benefits through 2015. In practice, social business is a huge Babylonian confusion. In order to know how to succeed, it’s essential to speak a common – business – language and to ask ourselves a few simple questions to start with. Just look at other umbrella terms such as social media marketing or at the incapability within many organizations to properly measure across silos due to non-standardized metrics and Key Performance Indicators. What is social business anyway? MORE >>

commerce opportunity is evolving fast, but only 25% of B2B marketers are taking advantage of it, according to a 2012 Oracle study.  But with the new functionality now available, just about any business marketer can find ways to reduce selling expense and attract new customers by integrating e-commerce into their go-to-market strategies. Another example is Symantec, which created an online store specifically to serve its small-to-medium business customers in North America.  Business buyers are people, too.  'Photo credit: Wikipedia. MORE >>