SmartBiz.com Podcast

We write a lot about social media and social marketing at SmartBiz, but sometimes I worry that it's too removed from reality -- and also WAY too much work for the payoff for most small businesses.

Well check out this story from fellow small biz site Duct Tape Marketing. It tells the story of Jason Brown, 23 year old co-founder of Brown Lures.

Yep, fishing lures.

According to the site:

Brown credits his blog with changing the way people find him, he created a podcast that gives him great "fishing stories" and loyalty from guides up and down the Gulf coast, he uses RSS and content tagging to automatically produce fresh blog content, and email marketing to blow his competition away at trade shows.

Said Brown: "We have been running waiting lists for products for about a year now, and no one has any clue how we are doing it without spending big advertising money. I love this stuff . . ."

There's a nice podcast on the Duct Tape Marketing site with Jason...check it out there.

The life of a small business executive is jam-packed with meetings, many of the face-to-face variety, which enable the entrepreneur to make valuable connections with clients and vendors.

Wireless communications technology -- particularly text messaging -- is key to reaching today's younger demographic. In this podcast, Jeff Reid, Director of Customer Technology Marketing at UPS, and Robert Wolfe, Co-founder of Moosejaw, speak with Dana Gardner of Interarbor Solutions about the increasingly important role of wireless shipment tracking for small businesses.

"Do you know where your stuff is?" and, most importantly, "Do your customers know where their stuff is?" In this podcast, Stephanie Callaway, director of customer technology marketing at UPS; Jim Rice, director of the Integrated Supply Chain Management Program at MIT; and several small businesses speak with Dana Gardner of Interarbor Solutions about supply chain visibility.

Founded with a vision of providing small to mid-sized businesses with the same powerful business tools used by large enterprises, BlueTie is democratizing technology by making its flagship collaboration suite - which includes email, calendaring, and sharing - available to small businesses at no charge, and to larger organizations at a fraction of the cost of its peers.

Tired of lugging around your laptop? GoToMyPC is a secure Web-based service that lets you and your employees access your PCs from anywhere in the world. We discussed the benefits of the service with Jason Randall, director of product management at the developer of GoToMyPC, Citrix Online.

Few things are more crucial to a business than its phone service. According to Packet8's Dave Immethun, there are many benefits awaiting companies willing to make the switch from traditional PBX service to VoIP, from lowering costs to streamlining business processes to improving quality. In this podcast, Immethun and SmartBiz Contributing Editor Jennifer Bosavage discuss the ins and outs of VoIP, and delve into what exactly a small business should look for in a provider.

Perhaps nothing is more important to an organization than data protection. According to Michael Parker, the group manager for product marketing in Symantec's Data Management Group, data protection cuts a wide path: It includes backing up and restoring discreet pieces of data in a timely fashion—and doing the same for the underlying IT systems. In this podcast, Parker and SmartBiz Editorial Director Carl Weinschenk discuss this complex sector, which touches on just about everything an organization does. The bottom line is simple: Small businesses must offer robust data protection or risk being left behind.