According to a recent survey from office services firm Regus, SMB’s are increasingly successful at customer acquisition via social networks. Bigger firms, despite a generally larger marketing budget, are not quite as successful in social acquisition. While customer service and interaction remains the main function, more and more companies utilize social networks for acquisition and retention. Because of its sizeable business opportunities, social marketing will continue to grow. Read the full article on emarketer.

image: courtesy of emarketer

UpMo is a next-generation career management and advancement platform that accelerates professionals to their career goals…

it facilitates job hunting, networking, and career management, and is designed for professionals trying to maintain career control. Take a look: UpMo

There are a lot of myths around multitasking and how productive people are who try to accomplish work by doing several things simultaneously. It is often mistaken as something that you need to be capable of when for example applying for a project.

A simple answer that shows you how multitasking can slow down your effectiveness while working can be found in a quick test. You will be surprised how little is needed to show that sticking to one task and move on to the next after can save you time. Move on to the Test!

as we all know, many jobs are found through networking. therefore, many businesspeople are on the lookout for tools to improve their networking skills. the number of business apps is increasing day by day and smartphones are becoming a portable toolkit for business professionals everywhere.

5 useful iphone apps:

• meet people with happening
• exchange information using linkedin
• meet in the middle using meetme
• organize business cards with worldcardmobile
• manage relationships with contactsjournal

TED (technology, entertainment, design) is a non-profit foundation that is best known for its annual conferences, in which lectures or ted-talks are devoted to one mission: “spreading ideas”. founded as a one-off event in 1984, ted-talks have grown in popularity and now cover a wide range of topics (science and culture). Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Bill Gates or Richard Dawkins are just some of the prominent figures who have given ted-talks.

curious: when “ted-talking”, the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers are challenged to limit their speeches to 18 minutes. the best talks and performances from TED and partners are available on ted.com official website or the ted youtube channel.

click the link for upcoming and ongoing tedx events.

not surprisingly, the u.s. is still far ahead of germany and the rest of the world in terms of entrepreneurship. this interesting chart, produced by grasshopper, compares the u.s. portion of gdp (gross domestic product) that comes from entrepreneurship against that of major european countries.

entrepreneural activity in the u.s. (as a percentage of gdp) lies at 11.3%, compared to 6.3% in germany for example. also worth mentioning is how “would-be” entrepreneurs perceive starting a new business in the current economy: according to the data provided, entrepreneurs in the u.s. feel far more optimistic about starting a new business in the near future and foster much less fear of failure.

in addition, the graphic depicts the percentage of enterprises by size, native vs. foreign-born self-employed and the overall difficulty entrepreneurs face when starting a new business.

image by theeducatedentrepreneur.com

check out the full size infographic here.

Newest studies (by White Horse) have shown that in the B2B section almost 60% of the companies do not make use of social media frequently. This contact support is either used only on a basic level (45%) or not performed at all (14%).

B2B businesses do not put any interest (36%) in social media opportunities or due to lack of education (almost a quarter) do not try to establish a regular social media presence. The B2C sector however is a lot more engaged in social media presences like social networks, mobile applications or company blogs.

Reasons for this are more traditional views and attitudes of the Business-to-Business marketers as well as the perception of irrelevance. You can look at some more results, descriptions and explanations of the social media significance here.



Batching all the similar tasks you have to handle in a certain period can be a very useful support to get work done more easily.

In other words you can work smarter if you do tasks that aim in the same direction at a specific time of the day respectively of the week. This means for example that you do your customer support at a certain block of time and then go on to the next. This keeps you into the subject and you don’t have to switch between them during the day again. Some more points are elaborated here.

The number of open projects for freelancers in U.K. is rising constantly. Almost a quarter of the five million freelancers in the country are in this business no longer than two years. Half of those 1.2 million have been their own boss for even less than a year. The number seems to be rising since beginning of the recession 2008.

Also in America more people start employing their selves which gets obvious when looking at numbers from the U.S. market.

source: moneyexpert, odesk

project-related work requires very different talents and capabilities. the lack of such capacity creates inefficiencies. by utilizing a community of people with similar issues and needs, these inefficiencies can be minimized through collaboration. co-working spaces enable efficient teamwork by bringing people together in a shared working environment. this interesting post on mashable gives a great overview of why co-working makes so much sense for businesses…

image by mashable

why co-working makes sense for small businesses