Recently, I’ve seen a rash of comments on various social media networks that talk about the mysterious “recovery” that few small businesses are seeing the effects of. 248creative has seen some pretty exponential growth over the past couple quarters, so this started my mind wandering. Is this feeling really as prevalent as it seems when you look over entrepreneurial forums or is that just a vocal minority? After talking to a few more people, I’ve gained some perspective on some of the problems that many small business owners seem to be going through and this is what I’ve come up with…
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One of the most underestimated tools online is the Google Insight engine. Make sure you take a minute to see if there’s a way you can leverage this great free tool in your business.

On April 13th, 2010, the social juggernaut twitter.com announced its first attempt at monetization with the promoted tweet platform. Initially launched in 2006, Twitter has built a worldwide membership of over 75 million users (22 million or so of which are actually active). The problem, however, has always been how to make the service generate revenue.

With the announcement of promoted tweets, Twitter thinks it has the answer. The system will initially be available to only a select group of national brands, including Starbucks, Virgin, Sony and 7 other internationally recognized brands.

The response to the launch has been generally positive, although questions are being raised as to why it was so restricted to such a small initial base of corporate advertisers. One has to ask, considering Twitter is such an edge technology with most of its user base as early adopters and technophiles, why it took such a conventional approach with this launch. It seems like a much more appropriate first run of the service would be open to a larger advertising community. Allowing access to smaller companies would introduce considerably more diversity to the promoted tweet landscape and generate more results that had much less of a “spammy” feel.

Regardless, this development should be lucrative for both Twitter and their advertisers… what do you think?