The top 10 blogs for small to mid-sized businesses

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Blog search engine Technorati recently revised its blog ranking algorithms and created categories for the rankings.

The list of the top 10 blogs for small business provides an excellent resource for attendees of our SME Technology Summit in Sydney on 1 December, where there will be deep insights into all of the topics covered by these blogs.

Many of these blogs are for businesses of all sizes, but all of them provide valuable insights for small to mid-sized businesses. Check them out!

1. Online Marketing Blog

https://www.toprankblog.com

sbtech1

Covers digital marketing topics, focusing on social media, online PR and search engine marketing. A broad team of writers brings diverse perspectives to bear.

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Speaking at Future Forum – creating the future of the enterprise

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I first met Mark McCrindle when we were both part of a small team of futures thinkers engaged by a major bank for its innovation program. His company McCrindle Research provides a variety of research services focused on generational change. They also organize the Future Forum, an annual event run in several Australia cities which pulls together insights on key trends across all domains into a compact one-day session.

I will be speaking at the Sydney event on November 6, talking about Enterprise 2.0 and how to create the future of the enterprise, including how organizations can leverage social media for competitive advantage. A video overview of the event is below, full information and agenda here, and you can register here.

Future Forum Australia 2009 from David Birley on Vimeo.

Five reasons why Turkey is one of the hottest Internet markets in the world

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Last week I gave the opening keynote at IPZ2009 Interactive Marketing Summit in Istanbul. Here are my slides for my keynote on the Future of Interactive Marketing.

It was a fantastic event, the fourth annual IPZ conference organized by Günseli Özen Ocako?lu and Hakan Senbir of Marketing & Management Institute, which publishes a range of leading magazines including Marketing Türkiye.

In preparing for my keynote and during my visit I discovered many fascinating things I did not know about the Turkish online market. It is in fact one of the hottest and fastest-growing Internet markets in the world.

As it happens I have a very deep interest in language-defined online markets, such as Japanese, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Korean. Each of these markets – some within national borders and others spanning countries – has very different characteristics across all facets including which types of social media are used, which are dominant players, and the most successful business models. I have written about this before in the context of blogging languages and global media strategies, and will be doing further analysis of country markets soon.

Here are five facts that illustrate how exciting the Turkish online market is.

1. Turkey is the third largest country in the world on Facebook

facebookcountries_Nov09.jpg

Source: CheckFacebook

Coming from almost nothing two years ago, Turkey now has close to 14 million Facebook users, overtaking France and Canada earlier this year to be the third largest country on Facebook after the US and UK. Facebook does not dominate social networking in other high population countries such as Brazil, Russia and Japan, so Turkey with a population of 72 million and a very rapid uptake of online services ranks close to the top of the list.

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Business Today: Interview on how business can use social media

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Yesterday I was interviewed on the Business Today program on the Australia Network, ABC TV’s international network which broadcasts across Asia.

The interview can also be viewed along with other material in Business Today’s archives.

Key points covered in the interview include:

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What are the most useful social media tools for small business?

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Most business owners recognise that there are many social media tools that can help them run their businesses more effectively. The problem is sorting through the plethora of tools that are available today to work out what to use, and how to use it.

Mashable has come out with a useful list of 10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Business, mentioning:

1. Google Apps for Domains

Online email, calendar and office software

2. LinkedIn

Professional social network

3. Basecamp

Online project management tool

4. Facebook

Social network with fan pages, apps and other tools

5. Twitter

Micro-blogging for relationship building

6. Get Satisfaction

Customer self-support forums

7. MailChimp

Web-based mailing list manager

8. UserVoice

Tracking customer feedback

9. YouTube

Hosted videos for marketing, education and advertising

10. Monitter

Monitor Twitter for relevant conversations and comments

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ABC TV Interview: How business can create value with Twitter

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ABC TV ran a segment a few days ago on how companies are using Twitter to create value, including an interview with me on how businesses can use Twitter effectively.

This should be a topic of particular interest to small and mid-sized companies. If you are interested in learning more, SME Tech Summit in Sydney on 1 December will include specific in-detail coverage of how your company can use Twitter (as well as other social media tools) to build your success.

Comments made during the program include:

* Experts say Twitter is here to stay

* Twitter has become a legitimate business tool

* When you don’t have much money to spend, Twitter can be an excellent way to promote your business

* You need to be conversational and human to engage your customers

* There are ways that companies in any industry to use Twitter

* It is hard to do properly, and you do need to be consistent if you start

* Twitter is here to stay as part of companies’ branding strategy

Tech23: SaaS/ In the cloud panel: Angusta, IPScape, MyCosm, Tagmotion

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A few quick notes about the four companies presenting on the SaaS/ In the Cloud panel at Tech23 (for background on the event see my post from this morning). A very impressive line-up.

Angusta Systems. Uses combinatorial algorithms to help banks manage their physical cash inventory – a solid niche apparently worth over $100 million in value to each of the big Australian banks.

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Tech23 showcases the rising tide of outstanding Australian tech

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I’m at Tech23, probably the biggest and best showcase so far of Australian upcoming tech companies. After creating the list of Top Web 2.0 Apps in Australia list last year and in 2007 and organizing the associated Web 2.0 in Australia events, I had originally envisaged that we would organize a broad information technology showcase event this year. However this did not manage to fit into our very packed priority list, and as it happens others are taking on the task of bringing attention to the best of emerging Australian tech. Rachel Slattery of SlatteryIT, who has long been running events for Australia’s tech community, has done a great job in creating Tech23.

Frankly, one of the challenges in running tech showcases in Australia is finding a sufficiently deep and broad pool of excellent early-stage companies. Overall I have been very encouraged by the pace at which new companies have emerged over the last two years, though there is still further to go. There were some great companies at Tech23, but I imagine that it would be harder to find another 23 hot emerging companies. By the time this event runs next year, and hopefully other tech showcases emerge, the signs are that the pool will be considerably deeper.

Unfortunately I am not able to spend the whole day at the event, but below are some quick notes from some of the more interesting companies that I managed to catch this morning. [UPDATE:] See also my notes from the SaaS/ In the Cloud panel and presentations.

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The immense value of expertise location will help drive enterprise social media

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I have been interested in the field of expertise location for over a decade, from back when knowledge managers were building ‘corporate yellow pages’ and other tools to find the best expertise in the organization.

Unless a large organization can bring the most relevant expertise within the firm to bear on the problems and issues at hand, it really has no reason to exist. A smaller more nimble organization could do as good a job with lower costs.

I have written about expertise location frequently over the last years, both in looking at how enhancing organizational networks can generate greater revenues and efficiency, and how social technologies can support effective expertise location, including on the role of enterprise social network software and several years ago about the use of blogs to support expertise location.

expertiselocation.gif

Today the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article called Who Knows What? describing the issue of expertise location and explaining how blogs, wikis, social networks, and tagging can support finding the most relevant knowledge in the organization.

This is hardly new stuff, but large organizations are now reaching the point where they understand that social media are important organizational tools, and have begun implementing some of these tools. This means there is in many cases the breadth of uptake required for effective expertise location.

In large, geographically distributed, professional organizations, expertise location can be a ‘killer app’ which provides immense return on the implementation of social computing. We have reached the point at which this could get real traction.

These issues are also addressed in detail in my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0.

[Hattip to @ariegoldshlager]

Keynote presentation on Future of Interactive Marketing at IPZ09 in Istanbul

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For those who were at the fantastic IPZ09 Interactive Marketing Summit in Istanbul this week, apologies for the delay in posting my keynote slides – the hotel bandwidth wasn’t adequate to upload them and I’m only just back at home.

For those who weren’t at IPZ09, note that these slides were designed to accompany my keynote and not to be useful by themselves. However they may still be of interest.

The slides can also be downloaded as a pps file, which includes the movies but not the animations of all the frameworks as I explained their implications for marketers. See here for the Social Media Strategy Framework in English and Turkish.

The Future of Interactive Marketing: Ross Dawson's keynote at IPZ09 in Istanbul

View more presentations from rossdawson.

I’ll be writing more soon about what I covered in my keynote and my (very favorable) impressions of the Turkish digital market.