Brian Solis is the author of the new book, The End of Business as Usual. He is also a principal analyst at Altimeter Group. AT&T has sponsored the following blog post.

The business landscape is shifting right under your company foundation as you read this.  How customers make decisions, how they discover, communicate, and share, how they influence and are influenced, is evolving. In fact, customer behavior is not only changing, it’s fragmenting.

Your business will now have to compete for the customers you know and additionally, a new breed of customers that you need to know.  And, to earn their attention and ultimately their loyalty, you will need to better understand the top technology trends and how they’re impacting customer behavior.

At the heart of this customer divide is technology. But this isn’t about the technology you know, such as PCs, laptops, iPods, ebook readers, DVRs, etc. This change in consumerism is the inevitable result of disruptive technology and how it has affected behavior and reshaped expectations.

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Small businesses need simple, productive, and cost efficient communications solutions to help run their businesses.  This can best be achieved by utilizing communications services that are “hosted” in the network and require a minimum amount of equipment at the business location.  This allows them to focus on their business, not on “business chores.”

Included with this post is an audio podcast prepared for a large group of sales people that work with small businesses.  It outlines the primary benefits to small business owners and why they would want to begin migrating many of their services, including their voice telephony, to the Cloud or Network based services.  The “hosted services” industry is growing 4-5 times faster than premises-based solutions.

Listen to the podcast here:

 The primary benefits are:

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Cheryl Burgess (@ckburgess) is a digital and social brand consultant, blogger, and speaker. Her knowledge of business strategy, passion for creative expression, and marketing technology helps businesses achieve the remarkable. AT&T has sponsored the following blog post.

As marketing dollars flow from traditional to social media, more small businesses are leveraging social platforms in order to drive traffic and increase visibility.  Nearly 60% of small businesses surveyed plan on spending as much or more in 2012 as they did in 2011 on online marketing efforts, according to the 2012 AT&T Small Business Technology Poll.  An interesting finding is that male business owners are more likely to rely on their company website for marketing than female owners (65% vs. 58%), while female business owners are more likely to rely on social media than their male counterparts (48% vs. 34%).

Location-Based Social Networks & Daily Deals

Small business owners are slowly gravitating towards location-based social channels such as Foursquare.  Since 2010, the amount of small businesses using these networks to establish their brand has nearly doubled from 5% to 9%.

This marks a significant jump, but the more telling statistic lies not in how many small business owners are using these platforms, but in how many actually think location-based services will help them.  In 2010, only 2% of small business owners using location-based social media thought it helped them get the word out. Today, that number now sits at a much more robust 25%.

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