Last week BizSugar held its first ever SmallBizFluence event, with experts sharing their knowledge and expertise on building successful online small businesses. And as part of the conference I had the pleasure of moderating a “fireside chat” with Claire O’Donnell, who leads the Selling Partner Communities and Small Business Empowerment organizations for Amazon.

Claire shared a number of ways Amazon is looking to assist small business sellers to increase their ability to sell more and grow their businesses while using the Amazon platform, especially during uncertain times live we’ve been facing the past couple of years.

There are many uncertainties small businesses are facing heading into this year’s holiday season. But one thing is very certain; consumers want to shop locally and with small businesses. That’s according to the results of a recently released report from Intuit’s QuickBooks Commerce small business shopping report.

To learn more about the insights coming from the report, and how they may impact the holiday shopping season, I recently had a LinkedIn Live conversation with Shilpa Reddy, VP and GM of Quickbooks Commerce at Intuit.

Amazon recently held its Accelerate event which focuses on helping sellers using Amazon’s platform with new programs and services to help them build relationships with customers and increase their sales and profitability. And I had the opportunity to speak with Dave Nadel, Amazon’s Director, Selling Partner Trust, to learn more about how the new tools and services announced during the event will help SMB sellers move to the next level selling on Amazon.

About this time every year I look forward to heading to Oracle NetSuite’s annual user conference, SuiteWorld, and speaking with its EVP and founder Evan Goldberg. But for the second year in the row we had to do our conversation virtually. And just like last year’s conversation, this year finds sellers trying to navigate a holiday season under a pandemic, we’re still doing that but with an even different situation with a worldwide logistics situation adding even more to the equation.

Like many of you I have a bunch of Google alerts set up on certain topics, with one of them being TikTok. I’m not even on really on TikTok, but I began tracking it a while back because all of the hype surrounding it, and then when a friend of mine told me about how his son had only been on it a couple months – doing a few videos making different things out of boxes - had over 60K followers - I got even more curious, which is why I did a conversation with him for this series not that long ago. By the way he’s now over 70K followers….

But then last month I got a series of Google alerts about something I hadn’t seen coming – that TikTok had surpassed YouTube in viewer time per user. And that really grabbed my attention, as I watch a bunch of YouTube videos for a variety of reasons. And with my interest growing in understanding the draw TikTok was having, my CRM Playaz co-host introduced me to, without a doubt, the most thorough and insightful series of posts on TikTok that is out on the web. And after reading them we both wanted to speak to their author, consumer and entertainment technology expert Eugene Wei, to dig in a bit more on what TikTok is doing and how they’re different than the other major social networking platforms.

Many of you who are into gaming or serious video editing know NVIDIA as creators of the leading graphics processing technology on the market. But NVIDIA is also a leader in the areas of artificial intelligence and deep learning; specifically in how these technologies can improve how we experience graphics, text and video synthesis, and conversational AI.

Some of their work was showcased in a series of videos they’ve put together called I AM AI which are a compelling look at what is (and what will be) available to us to improve how we experience the world – and each other. And recently I had the opportunity to have a LinkedIn Live conversation with Bryan Catanzaro, Vice President, Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA, to hear more about their work with AI to reimagine how we experience sights and sounds.

Before he became the President of the NHL’s San Jose Sharks, Jonathan Becher was one of the premiere marketing executives in the technology industry. And it’s safe to say he brought the visionary approach he developed at companies like SAP with him to the Sharks – which has paid off during the past 18 months as the pandemic disrupted the traditional fan experience.

Becher and the Sharks have been one of the more innovative teams in all of sports, which is why my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg and I were excited to catch up with Becher via LinkedIn Live to see what he and the Sharks have been up to, how they’ve been exploring ways to create more aligned fan experiences to the current situation with the pandemic, how lessons learned during the pandemic are being implemented in preparation for life after Covid, and to get his perspective on where he sees the puck going – so to speak – with how fans will experience content in the coming years, including how they become collaborators and creators with their favorite sports franchises.

Before the pandemic I was going to about 30 physical events a year. During the pandemic I haven’t gone to any, but I’ve gone to way more events virtually. And I can honestly say that in either form, events leave a lot to be desired. But at least physical events allowed you to actually see and be around people, which made up for some of the shortcomings of those events.

Jon Reed, ERP industry thought leader and co-founder of Diginomica, probably goes to more events than I do, along with putting on his own events. He’s been rating events for years, which is why I recently spent A Few Good Minutes with Jon to get his take on the current state of events, and what we should expect as things begin opening up.

The term content creator has gained a lot of attention lately, as companies need to constantly churn out attractive content in order to grab and hold the attention of the folks they’re looking to do business with long enough to turn views into revenue. But the traditional role content has played in the business model has changed significantly in the last couple of years, especially the last eighteen months with the pandemic.

During a recent episode of The CRM Playaz with my co-host Paul Greenberg, we spoke with two executives with Contentful, a leading content platform for digital-first businesses. Dina Apostolou - Vice President of Product Marketing, and Nicole France – Chief Evangelist, share with us how the role of content has evolved into a much more central role in the business, going beyond lead generation and SEO to helping to tell the complete story of the organization.

In a recent episode of Watching Amazon I got into a debate with my co-host John Lawson on whether a 1% conversion rate is considered to be a successful outcome. I’m not a marketer, so I’m thinking failing 99% of the time doesn’t sound all that great to me. I mean getting a hit in baseball 3 out of ten times can get you in the Hall of Fame, but 30% is a far cry from one percent. But, since this was a livestream convo, John was getting a lot of support from marketing technology expert and thought leader (and also my buddy) Anand Thaker, in saying that one percent can indeed be a successful outcome.