1.       What do you think is the most challenging aspect of raising capital for a small business?
You first need to convince the lender/investor that you have a real business that is something more than just an idea. That you have a plan for making money (or more money), that you are reliable and have good values. How will the business make or grow profits? Are you controlling costs? What are the barriers to entry? What is your reputation? Do you live within your means? If you have cheated on your taxes, you will cheat on your investors.

READ the rest of the interview at Grow Smart Business…

IN THE MEAN TIME….

Register for the GrowSmartBusiness Webinar at www.growsmartbusiness.com/webinar.

Find out YOUR marketing and finance score by taking the survey – your results will be benchmarked against the Small Business Success Index.

Recently, I wrote the post “Don’t Get Your Business Card Thrown Out” which was a follow up of “Business Card FAIL” on my old blog, Venture Files. Soon afterward I was contacted by Vicki Elmer, a writer for the Washington Post and we had a great discussion about business cards and if there were any tricks and tips I had for networkers. It just came out yesterday in the post and here is the full article:

A Winning Card by Vicki Elmer

No matter how much you’re on Twitter or Digg, or work LinkedIn, your business card still matters.

At a networking event, “it’s a physical exchange” that says “I’m giving a small slice of myself,” said Steven Fisher, community and blog manager for Network Solutions in Herndon.

Among his tips: “Be cool but be relevant to your audience.” They expect certain things from you — whether you’re a marketer or engineer — and your card should reflect those. He said too many cards are overloaded or “don’t have relevance or impact.” Use a sentence or bullet points to “clearly articulate your services, what you do.”

People with multiple roles — the consultant who’s also a musician and artist — should create separate cards for each, Fisher said. “It gives you focus. And it gives people comfort in what you do.”

Fisher uses two business card tricks at events. Because he intentionally doesn’t list his cell phone on his personal cards, he can write it down. Or he will make a note on the back of his card — a Web site he’s mentioned or the topic they discussed. “It makes the card worthwhile.”

So as you can see the article had a few more of my secret tips that might give you the winning business card and add to your successful networking technique. Adding the cell phone or putting a note on the card you give someone really personalizes it and makes them feel (which I am believe you are being sincere here) that you care and want to keep in touch with them in the future.

At Network Solutions we’ve found that the blog is only a small part of the bigger equation. And it encompasses much more than just marketing. We are using social media to provide better customer service, tech support, product feedback & public relations.

Our Blog

On this blog we provide:

- info on products

- clarification & answer commonly asked questions

- up-to-date customer service info

- resources for our products

- information on events & interviews with industry leaders

and overall the most valuable is to communicate with customers

Twitter

@NetSolCares provides personalized customer service on Twitter. We have a number of blog posts about our Twitter success stories.

Web at Large

We are using the latest technology for listening to what our customers are saying. Google alerts & Radian6 provide us with links to blogs, forums, and articles. These are opportunities for our social media team to provide personalized customer service, tech support & public relations. We answer questions & provide clarification. It also provides product feedback. We get ideas on what types of information & resources our customers want & need.

Resources & Community

Network Solutions has a Learning Center that has many resources related to our products & in reference to establishing a presence online. We have recently launched MySolutionSpot.com that offers small business owners a place to share their success stories & network with others. There are also a number of great resources to browse.

And the exciting news is that our team is growing! Network Solutions is committed to using innovative ways of reaching out to our customers online.

This is part 1 of 3 in the recap of the event.

Lionel Menchaca, Digital Media Manager and Chief Blogger, Direct2Dell

Lionel is a Fortune 50 blogger and is a rock star in the blogging world. He spearheaded the blog and social media effort at Dell 2 years ago. He has been there for 15 years starting in tech support.

He started the blog with as a tech support type of blog and the big challenge was the support issues people had with Dell. Started to look at the difference between supporting one customer and talking to a large audience at once.

His mantra from companies looking to leverage social media is “People want to connect with other people, not a corporation”.

Digg-style features and ideas voting from the broader public to have Dell actually take those recommendations and do something with them.

Microblogging is the next step in our strategy to create discussions in a whole new way.

Strategy for us now is to have our people active on IdeaStorm and touching other blogs and the rest of the blogosphere. We are working to blend these things to make it easier for customers to engage. It is right now the tech-savvy user and we want to bring this to a more mainstream audience.

Washington Post Local Business Editor Dan Beyers

The trend over the next 10 years is that it will all be sent over the Internet in some format. Don Graham, Publisher, is a huge social media junkie and recently they had an intern lunch and he asked for people for Facebook app ideas, which impressed most people because of how the paper is perceived as an old media dinosaur. WPI has 60 blogs that cover every topic under the sun, even an obituary blog….

His strategy is that you should stick to your niche, write quality content, create a new model of audience engagement and that the online content is one big database and we have to unleash it in new and exciting ways.

Our mission is to inform the world and we must move the way the future is going. There is a discussion raging in the publishing world that the print side of the business should move to the non-profit model for posterity and keeps the media alive for the record.

The newspaper still makes more money in ad revenue than the online right now but we are in a transition period where that will be changing. The online advertising revenues are for national campaigns where the print thrives on the local ads.

The difference between the blogs and the traditional articles is that the blogs must be read by a second person and fact checked which is less than the traditional article review process.

Each blogger is responsible for moderating their blog’s comments and it may take a bit longer to review than we would like. It is a good exercise because we are interacting with the audience that people see as extremely important.

Blogs in elections – from a newspaper standpoint, we can deliver content faster which is great. We are also looking to move to tags to make the content more accessible and easily searchable. We are trying to prove that editor driven blogging works to free up the journalists for “higher altitude blogging”.

NEXT TIME IN PART 2

In part 2 we will continue the recap and cover the presentations by Maggie Fox, CEO of Social Media Group and Jeremy Pepper of Pop! PR Jots.