Business Improvement and Social media

Lions, Tigers, Bears & Content Shock & SMB Survival
Small to Medium Sized Businesses are overwhelmed. The clearest message we've received during our first six months creating our Startup Factory funded startup called Curagami is a clear protest. "Overwhelmed" is the most common adjective SMBs use to describe their situation.

Not hard to see why SMBs are feeling overwhelmed. Tactics that used to insure consistent yearly growth are sick. Tactics are drying up faster than ever.

SMB Marketing Tactics Costing More, Getting Less:

* Yellow Pages (near death).
* Print ads (near death).

* Val-u-pak coupons (near death).

* Coupons of any kind (losing relevance with smartphone users)..

* Groupons (blows brands up almost beyond repair).
* Email marketing (sick due to social / mobile web).
* Social Media Marketing (sick and getting sicker fast).
* Content Marketing.(content shock sick).

* Ecommerce (too many stores, same offerings).
* PPC (paying more to get less).
* Retargeting (cat out of bag, so sick efficacy declining).
* Video Marketing (steep learning curve, expensive).
* Viral Marketing (everyone has that cold now & hit or miss).
* Cause Marketing (not as unique as once was & live or die with partner).

* Celebrity Marketing (expensive and live or die with branded celeb).

* SEO (don't even get us started, all but gone, baby, gone).

3 Rays of Hope

1. Content Curation
Discussed by Scoop.it CEO @Guillaume Decugisin Social Media Publishing Is Dead As We Know It ( http://blog.scoop.it/2014/06/18/social-media-publishing-is-dead-as-we-know-it/ ).

2. Community
Banding and binding tribes of contributors, advocates and supporters to your cause.

3. Friends of Friends marketing.
Reaching new customers via WOM (Word-of-Mouth) supplied by fans, brand advocates and social marketing Sherpas willing to sacrifice and help your cause.

Curagami (http://wwww.curagami.com ) is focused on helping SMBs create sustainable community via the Friends-of-Friends marketing community generates.  

Am Scooping Guillaume's post to use in our Curagami board meeting tomorrow and we are working on 3 cool ideas:

* Curagami SMB Survival Guide - one page "action focused" recommendations on the tapestry of marketing tools and tactics needed to know where online "success" lives these days.

* Curagami $25,000 SMB Survival Contest - Help in seo, content marketing and community building to make this holiday online selling season great.

* Curagmai SMB Survival School - 1 day training to support SMBs at the American Tobacco Campus in Durham, NC.

Content curation is all the rage right now. But finding all this great content is time consuming. Fortunately for content marketers, there's an incredibly powerful social media tool that doubles as...