SMEs - not such small business after all?
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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It may be coincidence, but there does seem to have been a renewed flurry of interest recently around small businesses and their information management needs. Could be nothing of course – but you never know.

Take Sage, the purveyor of business software solutions. Releasing its half yearly results Sage reports a return to growth for its North American business – and notes an increase in business confidence in the small & medium sized enterprise (SME) sector, although it acknowledges that this varies by region and the outlook is still uncertain.

Commenting on Sage’s results, the Register newsletter takes its customary smart-ass tone. But it’s not above a bit of SME wooing itself, touting a new podcast that it says will bring small businesses up to date on security threats, help them understand the value of their data and show them some practical security steps they can take.

PR Newswire, too, is keen to help SMEs right now, with an enhanced version of its small business communications site PR Toolkit. Established almost 10 years ago to help firms promote their products and services, drive traffic to their websites and communicate dynamically with the media and their consumers, the Toolkit now also includes interactive webinars, how-to articles and premium access to specialist educational resources.

Incidentally it’s not alone among news agencies in offering practical PR help to firms. Last year Thomson Reuters launched what it called a complete web disclosure solution for regulatory news announcements – although as LiveWire reported, it also pointed out that this self publishing and analytical service would work for any kind of press release.

Back with the small firms, though, the other big development has been the arrival of all those daily deal databases. Groupon may be way in the lead so far – but as LiveWire recently pointed out, the model is easily replicated.

So it is now proving, with my LiveWire colleague Jan Knight recently reeling off a string of copycat services, notably in the business-to-business field. And now there are even more – three launches at least, in fact, right at the end of April.

On 26 April, Facebook announced that it was testing a feature called Deals on Facebook – initially in a small number of American cities – to help its members find offers from a number of deal providers. On the same day came ChoozOn, formed by a group of ex-Yahoo! marketing specialists, allowing members to create their own personal deal networks – and a day later Rapidbuyr, catering exclusively to small and mid-sized businesses, initially in at least 40 US cities.

Of course it’s easy to put two and two together and make five. But this is an awful lot of activity in a hitherto rather quiet sector.

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