Every year Edelman releases its Trust Barometer report ( Executive Summary ) to measure consumer confidence in business and, if we’re taking a cue from Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, identify the biggest ‘trust agents’ helping them to make their decisions. This year the findings are getting some people wondering about the overall impact on social media. Social media has always “worked” because people trusted the advice and recommendations of people ‘like them’ over the cold marketing they were accustomed to. They trusted that their friends and people who valued the same things were better able to help them make decisions than the absent CEO or marketing department of a company. However, thanks to the flood of noise and the emergence of large, impersonal social networks, people are losing trust in social connections and those ‘like them’. Instead, they’re leaning more towards experts, with a strong rise in the transparent CEO. [click to enlarge.] What these findings tell me is that the huge growth in social networks and “fake friending” have caused consumers to trust these circles less. Trusting your Facebook friends was a lot more certain when your network was made up of everyone you went to high school with. Now, we friend brands and people we just barely know in order to not appear “rude” and grow inflated friend networks. Naturally that’s going to corrupt the circle. As a result, we’re looking more toward ‘experts’ to help us make decisions and, increasingly, toward the new CEO who has likely embraced the Social Web and become more open. How do you take advantage of both of these? You start blogging. Blogging as a small business owner allows you to make yourself an expert in your field and also allows you to take advantage of the perks of being a transparent CEO. By allowing your customers to see inside your organization and what you’re about, you allow them to trust what you’re doing and become better acquainted with your brand. You bring them into your story and your every day. And that’s what customers are looking for. In the Executive Summary for the report, it’s noted that this year’s finding proved that trust and transparency are MORE important to corporate reputation than the quality of products and services . Yes. It is more important that you are open with customers than how well the product actually performs. Chew on that for a moment, will you? If consumers are looking less at one another in order to build that trust…then it’s up to you as the small business owner to build it yourself by establishing yourself as an expert and letting people inside your organization. What better way to do that than with a blog?   If you need some blogging ideas , we can help you with that, too. The survey does cast an interesting picture on social media, in general. If more and more users are becoming distrustful of the medium then it’s going to be interesting to see how this will affect the medium as a whole. Will review sites start to fall out of favor and become more suspect? Will people be less accepting of marketers in social media? Interesting implications all around. From Small Business Trends Getting Bloggin’: Customers Trust Transparent Experts

Read the original here:
Getting Bloggin’: Customers Trust Transparent Experts

Popularity: 1% [?]

Editor’s Note:  We offer long term sponsors like American Express the opportunity to speak to you in their own voice. Any such post is clearly marked as sponsored, like this one.  We hope you find this information useful. Managing cash flow is often a challenge for small businesses, and in tight economic times many companies find themselves in a double bind: customers take longer to pay as they work to manage their own cash-flow, and at the same time suppliers demand payment more quickly, for the same reason. Negotiating hard on trade terms is a good first step in addressing this squeeze. Common trade terms are “net 30” or “net 60,” meaning that a business has 30 or 60 days from the invoice date to pay in full for the purchase. If you can persuade some of your vendors to accept more generous payment terms – or at least maintain the terms you already have – that can put more cash in your pocket. Sometimes suppliers will offer a discount on payments that are made right away, and if you selectively take advantage of this you can save money there too. The Plum Card® from American Express OPEN can give you similar benefits, while saving you the time and trouble of negotiating with suppliers.

Go here to see the original:
Sponsored Post – Benefits for Your Bottom Line: The Plum Card from American Express OPEN

Popularity: 1% [?]

This is part four (final) of Twitter series:  Everything You Wanted to Know About TweetChats But Were Afraid to Ask The first post outlined the pros and cons of offering a tweetchat .   In the second part we gave you details on how to prepare for your tweetchat . In the third part, we gave ideas for promoting a tweetchat . In this final part we share how to do follow-up for your tweetchat so that it will continue working for you. Marketing campaigns often underperform because of poor follow-up, and social media is no exception.  The content and connections generated from the tweetchat event are just the beginning of the value to be mined.  Look for opportunities to engage the contacts you make during your events.  Find other ways to promote the content provided by various panelists and audience members.

View original post here:
Follow-up for Your Tweetchat to Make it Continue Working for You

Popularity: 1% [?]

WorkingPoint is online business management software for small businesses.  It is an ambitious and  comprehensive offering that includes bookkeeping, invoicing, contact management, inventory management, a public marketing profile, and more. As a web-based software solution, you don’t load any software on your machine; it is all on the Internet. The main advantage of many of today’s software-as-a-service applications is they’re ready to use right now. Most of them require very little customization and often have templates specific for your business. In fact, even the registration form is simpler and faster to complete than standard software. WorkingPoint is no exception: They only require a company name, username, password, and your email to get started.

Read more from the original source: 
WorkingPoint: Bookkeeping, Invoicing and Contact Management in One

Popularity: 1% [?]

don’t think there’s a Web savvy small business owner that doesn’t know about Yelp . It’s one of the most powerful and authoritative review sites on the Web. However, I was curious to know if SMB owners were really taking full advantage of the site or if there were avenues they were missing out on. To find out, I decided to give Luther Lowe , the manager of Local Business Outreach, a call to see if there were any hidden Yelp gems he could tell me about. What he did was highlight the extremely powerful Yelp for Business Owners and three things SMB owners should be doing to maximize their Yelp payout

Here is the original:
Are You Getting The Most Out Of Yelp?

Popularity: 1% [?]

Guest Post by: Martijn Pater Please find below the summary of the White Paper “Co-creation’s 5 Guiding Principles or… what is successful co-creation made of?”. The complete paper can be found here.

Continued here:
CO-CREATION’S 5 GUIDING PRINCIPLES Or…. What Is Successful Co-creation Made of?

Popularity: 4% [?]

by: Dick Stroud This report has been produced by Age Wave with research from Harris Interactive. Well worth reading since it provides interesting contrasts as to how the recession has affected different generations – as shown in this example.

Read the original:
Retirement at the Tipping Point

Popularity: 3% [?]

by: Jonathan Salem Baskin Nielsen Online released a report in late April, in which it argued that usage rates for new Twitter users dropped precipitously after the first month, and that this meant its growth didn’t match the early adoption rates of Facebook or MySpace.

Go here to see the original:
Twitter, The Poetry of Love

Popularity: 4% [?]