From tech tools to social media to online marketing, there are significant trends of which growing businesses need to be aware. bMighty spoke to small biz trend expert Anita Campbell about current tech trends to understand which are significant, which will help smaller businesses succeed, and which ones can be ignored for at least a little longer.
There is so much involved in running a smaller business and ensuring its growth. And there are so many trends -- from tech tools to social networking to online marketing -- for smaller businesses to know about to help them get to the size they want to be. But which of these trends are meaningful? Which of these trends have staying power? Which of these trends are worth a smaller business' investment of time and money? For the answers to these and other questions, bMighty turned to small biz trend expert Anita Campbell, editor in chief of Small Business Trends and the Small Business Trends newsletter and host of Small Business Trends Radio. Campbell explains why SaaS is the next great frontier for smaller businesses, why she isn't impressed with Google Docs, and why social media is here to stay.
bMighty: What are some of the tech trends that growing businesses should be aware of?
Anita Campbell: The march toward software as a service (SaaS) is accelerating in comparison with five years ago. Putting data online and relying on that was considered suspect. A lot of that has gone by the wayside. You rarely hear about that concern. Very small businesses are really gravitating toward SaaS, and even larger-size small and midsize businesses. I think more and more of our applications will shift to SaaS. This will free up IT people from having to do upgrades and installs because more and more of these applications will be set up with these Web accounts. IT will be doing other stuff that is higher level, value-added types of things. They won't be troubleshooting this and that anymore.
These things are never 100%, but instead of going to the IT department and bugging them, users will be able to go online, especially with the smaller applications. It's a productivity enhancer.
bMighty: Why are businesses less concerned about putting so much data on the Web?
Campbell: Look at the vendors -- they aren't fly-by-night operations. A giant like Intuit has QuickBooks online, Microsoft offers a suite of services, Google has a whole collection of services. Look at these companies, these are respectable behemoths. That alone gives people a sense of confidence.
bMighty: What are some of the tools you recommend for growing businesses?
Campbell: QuickBooks online definitely deserves a look. It's very important. Google Gmail is very useful, especially for backup e-mail or public e-mail in places that you don't want to use private e-mail. Google is now exploring enterprise versions of their software. Google Docs isn't the kind of SaaS businesses will use. It's too limited in functionality. If you're used to using Excel, spreadsheets of Google won't do it. It's like a power version of Microsoft Word. Google Docs won't have the features you need. When Microsoft comes out with a true online version of what they have, that will be it.
WordPress software for blogs is a powerful, world-class software -- even large corporations use it. Small and midsize businesses are using WordPress as a content management system to build their Web sites.
I also heard people talk about Joomla as a good content management system. Skype also used to be a good open source application and eBay stepped in, took it over and added features and support. It's a poster child for a large company stepping in and supporting it.
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Irfan View is image manipulation software. The help files are unintelligible, mainly because English is a second language for the creator. He does this as a community project but this is where, if someone would step in and take this great software program and add features, it would be a wonderful thing. I'd like to see that happen with other things. The free PDF conversion creator programs I use quite a bit, but there's not a lot of support and it can be frustrating for small and midsize businesses.
What eBay did with Skype is a great example. It's not expensive now, about $10 a month, but I would rather have that than a completely free application where I'm scratching my head for hours.
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