Small businesses are showing signs of embracing social media - despite their notorious reluctance to move marketing endeavors online to any significant degree. The latter was captured in a recent Citigroup study that found most small businesses aren't leveraging the basic online tools readily available to them to help grow their businesses: namely, in the last year 37% of small businesses have not used a website for marketing or expanding their business and 84% have not used e-commerce to sell their products or services.
But then there is this separate study by AWeber Communications, which found that almost 70% of small business marketers are employing some sort of social media tactics and a majority (77% ) indicate that integrating email marketing and social media is either "very important" or "moderately important."
New Ad Tech
One reason for the discrepancy is not that small businesses don’t recognize the value of social media or online marketing - they just don’t have the resources available to available themselves of the high-end technologies and consulting fees. That is changing with the introduction of new technologies, some of which is still in the experimental stages. Chicago's Windy Citizen, for instance, was just awarded $250,000 in the Knight News Challenge to develop an idea that would work well for small businesses, Nieman Lab reports. The experiment, called NowSpots.com, is meant to provide an easy way for publishers to sell and serve real-time ads - specifically, spots that show the latest updates from businesses social media accounts. These would include tweets, Facebook updates, or photos posted to a Flickr account. Basically, the ads syndicate social media content from sponsors.
Auto Generating
NowSpots.com falls roughly in an emerging category of ad technology that is particularly well suited for small businesses: auto or self-generating ads. One example is PlaceLocal, a program developed by PaperG that builds display ads automatically by scouring the internet for references to a neighborhood restaurant, a grocery store or another local business, according to the New York Times. Then it combines the photographs it finds with reviews, customer comments and other text into a customized online ad for the business. It is aimed at small businesses beginning to advertise on the web sites of local newspapers or television stations.
Another example is a partnership between Internet Broadcasting and iPromote, an automated local display advertising platform. iPromote's technology is used to automatically scan a business' website for such content as images, text, logos, headlines and then create advertising packages which includes five different ad sizes.
