In celebration of National Small Business Week... For entrepreneurs, business owners, investors, and consultants, one of the most exciting prospects of

Every brand and business wants to know the secret of how to increase the number of fans to their Facebook fan page. While there is no one stop shop to success, there are some sure fire ways to grow your fan base organically.

Whether your company is just starting out, just starting to turn a profit or already on the verge of an acquisition, as an entrepreneur you’ll be constantly evaluating the tools that will help get your business to the next stage.

Capacity – especially to plan and execute effective marketing strategies – is a big challenge for every small business. In this post, I’ll offer 10 suggestions for how small businesses can supercharge their marketing efforts by leveraging social media.

You've probably heard about a hard-to-get, hugely new service called Google Wave. Lest ye forget, there are plenty of web-based collaboration tools that don't require learning a new way of speaking. Here are a few of our (mostly free) favorites.

How to develop a personal brand with social media via Ted Murphy!

Awesome Power Point via Tara Hunt and consumer perspective.

Using Twitter in education has been all the buzz recently. If you are ready to start using Twitter yourself and need a little help getting started or have already been using it and can use a little extra help, then these tutorials are just for you.

Take this opportunity to showcase accomplishments, strengths and talents. Reinforce what it is you stand for as well as what moves you. In many ways your profiles and the material you share online contribute to a digital resume, whether you agree or disagree. It’s there, right now, talking about you, without your direction. Opportunities that may have presented themselves to us never materialized because of our digital shadows. So, do something about it. Just don’t lose who you are in the process.

twibbon.com is the easiest way to promote awareness of your cause on twitter. Create a twibbon in 3 easy steps and soon all your supporters will be proudly wearing their twibbons on their twitter profile images.

I’ve noticed a strange trend lately.

For some reason, people seem to be equating social media with social networking. At the same time, they seem to be treating blogging as something other than social media. I find this very strange indeed.

The socialization of the Web and content publishing disrupted the balance and is now forcing a media renaissance that is transforming information distribution, human interaction and everything that orbits this nascent ecosystem.

Let me start today’s post with a confession: Like many people in the business world, I have abused the term “ROI” from time to time. Yes, I admit it, even I have used “ROI” as a relative term on a number of occasions in the past. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.

My goal is not to solve the issue for an individual campaign, but from a very strategic level - asking questions like "where is the company today and where does it want to get to?" then applying those answers to the selection of marketing opportunities. Let's start by defining the macro-level channels themselves, then examine how we'd reach the right conclusions.

One of the most anticipated days in the history of social networking site Facebook has finally come: the company announced today that it has begun making status messages, photos and videos visible to the public at large by default instead of being visible only to a user's approved friends.

The fan pages that are doing it right are the ones that are actively engaging with their fans. These pages have creative content, two-way communication, active discussion boards, videos and images, and a fun and casual tone to match the medium. Below are five mini case studies of brands that are doing everything right when it comes to Facebook fan pages, presented so that you can learn by example. Please share your favorite fan pages in the comments.