Punch Above Your Weight

How small companies use Pull Marketing Techniques

The collaboration between Brunel and HowtodoBusiness.com has been running for over 18 months. In that time we have carried out 2 separate research projects - Abandoned Heroes which was carried out with colleagues from Kingston and RHUL Universities and the current project which has focused on how small companies are using web 2.0 techniques to improve their marketing capabilities.

2 of us have written a paper - entitled Out on the Pull which focuses on how early adopter SMEs -the e-gazelles - are really making some headway in using these tools.

It's being delivered at The Academy of Marketing conference in July and at the Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0 conference in York at September. The links take you to the conference web-sites while the slides supporting the presentation can be downloaded here.

 

 

 

 

 

Out on the Pull: how small firms are making themselves sexy with new online promotion techniques

Abstract

In this paper we examine the range of online marketing tools that are now available to small businesses, and demonstrate how the sands are shifting from ‘push’ communications based on email, to an emphasis on ‘pull’ technologies such as RSS where customers can ensure that only selected communications are received. We draw upon the early results of an ongoing research project which is investigating how small firms use new technologies. Our research has identified a number of case studies from early adopters of these techniques and these examples are profiled throughout the paper.

We begin by discussing the problems faced by small businesses in promoting their products and services on limited budgets, and we then consider how new web-based technologies such as the Google search engine, RSS and blogs are transforming the online marketing landscape for the proactive firms in our study. We conclude from our analysis that the ‘early adopters’ profiled are starting to develop some fluency in how these tools can be used, and they are moving beyond the basics of outbound marketing, with some success, to include tools to attract business to them.

 

Introduction

In this paper we examine the range of online marketing tools that are now available to small businesses, and demonstrate how the sands are shifting from ‘push’ communications based on email, to an emphasis on ‘pull’ technologies such as RSS where customers can ensure that only selected communications are received. These changes are enabling ‘early adopter’ businesses to ‘punch above their weight’ in terms of their reputation and in their dealings with larger competitors and customers.

Our findings are based upon the early results of an ongoing research project which is investigating how small firms use new technologies. Our research has identified a number of case studies from early adopters of these techniques on which we will focus in this paper, and go on to draw some preliminary conclusions from our analysis of the data. More specifically, the analysis that we put forward is based on the following main strands of evidence:

 

Telephone survey	Completed by 400 SMEs in West London from the food, logistics, Internet and media sectors. There were 205 micro businesses, 140 companies between 10 & 49 employees and 33 companies between 50 and 249.
In depth interviews	30 detailed case studies compiled of ‘early adopter’ firms using Web 2.0 marketing techniques

 

We begin by discussing the problems faced by our small business case studies in promoting their products and services on limited budgets, and we then consider how new web-based technologies such as the Google search engine, RSS and blogs are transforming the online marketing landscape for the proactive firms in our study. We conclude from this analysis that the ‘early adopters’ profiled are starting to develop some fluency in how these tools can be used. In addition to allowing these businesses to ‘punch above their weight’ by appearing to be more dominant in their sector than they really are, competency in Web 2.0 marketing also offers these firms a skills advantage when competing with larger organisations whose managers are often prevented by their IT departments from dabbling in ‘amateur’ or ‘experimental’ web-based technologies.

 

Online marketing by small businesses

 

In general terms, the Internet provides leverage for small businesses because it has massively reduced the cost of marketing versus the traditional promotional mix. More specifically, it has created mechanisms whereby individuals can make use of other people’s connections to raise their own business profile in systematic ways. The gradual growth in understanding of how online marketing works has allowed ‘early adopter’ small organisations who understand the principles to ‘punch above their weight’ in a competitive environment. In our research we have interviewed owner managers from a number of these firms.

Small businesses tend to face some difficulty in that while they are delivering they can’t sell, and while they’re selling they can’t deliver. The way out of this dilemma is to create a marketing process that effectively automates the prospecting process so that a flow of warm, qualified leads is generated. This process usually needs to be carried out as inexpensively as possible. The Internet gives small businesses the opportunity to get much more leverage than was possible in earlier times, for example the website can be used as the ‘hub’ of a marketing ‘wheel’ which allows qualified sales and enquiries to be generated. However, customers do not easily find the web-site on their own – they have to be driven there. In essence, the business has to come to terms with the fundamentals of marketing, which is a matter of working out what the ‘story’ is that connects it with its key set of customers and then going about the business of telling it to them as part of an integrated marketing campaign.

Figure 1 is derived from our analysis of the marketing activities carried out by the case study firms and it demonstrates how this strategy can be implemented. The process involves integrating the data from trial ‘pay per click’ campaigns to illustrate where the keyword flows are, and what words and phrases the customers and prospects associate with the products or services that the firm wants to offer. Once these key words are established they can be used to support a campaign which integrates face to face activity, written materials rich in keywords and the full gamut of on-line activities which in its simplest form is likely to include a web-site, email shots, e-zines and links from other sites with relevant content or offers.

 

 

Figure 1 - How firms are using the Internet to tell their ‘story’ effectively.

 

Our diagram also illustrates the use of PR (which the more sophisticated small businesses that we interviewed saw as a key plank in their marketing strategy) as well as the traditional brochure and direct mail activities. The website activity is split into two routes – one is for direct sales where products are involved. This may be a pure online business such as one of our case study businesses selling plants on the Internet, which focused its marketing largely on a combination of pay per click and PR. The other route, which was demonstrated by the service businesses, involved download of white papers to boost the credibility of the business by showcasing its expertise to potential customers. This was often carried out for free in exchange for permission to contact by email and make further offers. Our interviewees noted that the approach does require a suitable customer relationship management system (CRM) and some idea of an on-going communication strategy to make it work. Some firms used ‘autoresponders’ which are available inexpensively to take the drudgery out of this. Others preferred the flexibility that careful segmentation gave them. Selling services, however, tended to involve an element of face to face activity as well. While the aim of the online promotional activity was to generate a constant flow of warm leads, the opening and closing of the formal part of the sales process usually required face to face selling. It is no accident that many of the early adopters interviewed in our project were both effective on-line and accomplished off-line networkers.

Building on these general principles of online marketing that are practised in our case study firms, the research has demonstrated that there are a number of fundamental insights and technologies allowing technically literate individuals to take advantage of the tools of what has become known as Web 2.0 to make themselves appear larger, more competent and more important than their peers (and maybe than they really are). We will now examine some of these new marketing tools in more detail, integrating specific examples where relevant from our primary research.

 

Search engine optimisation

The fundamental insight in understanding of the Internet was the ‘small world’ discovery which proposed that everyone in the world was connected to everyone else in 6 jumps (Milgram 1967). The same is true of all pages on the Internet but the corresponding figure is 19 (Barbarasi 2002). However, not all of the individuals are connected equally – some are very much more densely connected than others. Watts and Strogatz (1998) discovered that introducing a few random links into an otherwise structured network caused a dramatic reduction in the degrees of connection needed to link all the members. Gladwell (2000) popularised the dynamics of how these small world connections operate and popularised the idea of the ‘ Dunbar number’. Anthropologist Robert Dunbar (1992) is quoted widely as stating that the human brain is only capable of handling a maximum of approximately 150 active social connections. It is theorised in evolutionary psychology that thisnumber may be some kind of limit on average human ability to recognise members and track emotional facts about all members of a group. The combination of random links and clustering allows considerable leverage can be achieved by small firm marketers who understand that they have to align themselves with the key node points in the relevant online network if they want to spread their messages and ideas as widely and cost-effectively as possible. The 2 nd most connected has half the connections of the leader, the 4 th has a quarter, the 10 th has a 10 th and so forth. This principle is built into the algorithm that Google uses to assign page rank which is a logarithmic index of how well connected and respected is the page from which a link to a website originates. Understanding the implications of these network effects in terms of the online visibility of a business is critical to the understanding of search engine optimisation.

For instance, one of our case study companies, www.howtodobusiness.com is in the business of offering marketing tools to small businesses, and its strategy for search engine optimisation is as follows. To boost its Google ranking position, the business owner writes articles for publication on Microsoft Academy which has a high page rank and Alexa Ranking (Amazon’s search engine). Google will see that there is a relevant link to HowtodoBusiness from a page with a good page-rank and a good Alexa Ranking, and so the site will gain an advantage in organic search over other pages that are not so well connected. This means that Google users looking for marketing tools will see the HowtodoBusiness website displayed more prominently in their search results than competing websites, and hence they are more likely to choose it over the competition. Google therefore operates by favouring pages that are connected to pages that it ranks highly because they have good content and lots of connections. This tends to promote a situation where there are a few massively popular sites, millions of ‘tiddlers’ and not much in between. This phenomenon was christened the ‘Long Tail’ in a widely cited article in Wired (Anderson 2004). It means that many can play but few can stand out much. Figure 2 sourced from Technorati demonstrates the long tail principle as applied to the blogosphere. It demonstrates the dramatic effect that being favoured and well linked to can have.

Figure 2 – The long tail principle as applied to the blogosphere(www.technorati.com )

 

Another of our case study firms, www.plants4presents.com, has made good use of these search engine optimisation techniques by using Google Adwords to establish the optimum keywords for the business. A modest spend of around £5 per day drove pay per click traffic to the website, and it also enabled the owner to establish exactly which words and phrases the target customers were actually using to find the site. These words were then fed back into the titles, headlines, body copy of the site and into the anchor text of links on other peoples sites, autosignatures on blogs and emails, thereby maximising the chances of the site being found via organic search rather than having to be paid for through pay per click.

 

Online networking

There is academic consensus on the importance of creating efficient networks for establishing a business and its ongoing growth and success (Deakins and Freel 2003, Wilson and Stokes 2004). Researchers argue that the ‘network success hypothesis’ (Bruderl and Preisendorfer 1998) underpins business success as individuals are able to access resources at a reduced rate through networks, and at times gain access to resources that might otherwise not be available to them (Witt 2004). Networking can also aid the development of a firm’s credibility, expand the customer base and supplier contacts, highlight access to resources and available funding, encourage innovation and help develop strategic partnerships. It extends the reach of the business through enhancing survivability and by supplementing the entrepreneur’s own business resources to improve the likelihood of success (Zontanos and Anderson 2004).

With the rise in usage of the Internet, many business networks are now being formed and carried out wholly in cyberspace, making geographical location far less important for effective business networking than before. With Internet sites developing rapidly in the field of networking, and other related technologies such as e-mail and VOIP creating easy, fast and low-cost methods of maintaining and developing new contacts on a world-wide basis, online networking is an area that is impacting upon small businesses quite significantly. Thus teleconferencing facilities have reduced the need for travel to meet face to face, and new VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) software such as Skype make phone calls world-wide nominally free to users who are all subscribed to the same service.

Figure 3 has been derived from our analysis of the online networking activities of our early adopter case study firms. It builds on the basic online marketing activity we documented that was illustrated in Figure 1.

 

 

Figure 3 – The incorporation of online networking into the marketing mix

 

As you can see, for these firms in our sample, the basic model is amplified by pod-casting, video clips and the use of online social networks which facilitate the introduction to blogging, marketplace advertising and the use of embedded audio and video clips. They enable participants to join clubs, hold discussions and build quite a sophisticated online presence, for subscriptions which are often free or at worst quite modest. Many of our case study firms belonged to Ecademy (www.ecademy.com), which is an online networking platform with 100,000 members around the world. It uniquely combines a substantial off-line face to face networking component with its online offer. The most sophisticated social networking sites incorporate software to hold online discussions and meetings, allowing many people to login without having to move from their desk. Internet networking maintenance can be easier than face-to-face or telephone interaction due to the online tools that are accessible any time of day and night; web pages, e-mail and chat rooms. These technologies provide instant access to a diverse network of individuals globally which allows networks to be broadened and strengthened, thereby overcoming many of the limitations of traditional face-to-face networking such as small network size and lack of diversity.

So for the right type of knowledge business there is a real opportunity with online networking. For example, from our early adopter cases, Westhaven Logistics has built a presence in the Ecademy environment to enhance the development of the business towards import-export by using some of the more advanced technologies available to build a core group of collaborators. The Video Internet company has made effective use of online and offline networking techniques and Actors Inc offered show reels and on-line presence for Actors on its site. It facilitates agents casting and offers Skype as a core part of its offer, and it is just a 2 man business. HowtodoBusiness has generated 4000 ‘opt in’ e-mail addresses over a 2 year period for a ‘pay per click’ spend of £3200. Currently, about half of the ad-words budget is paid for by sales of created products, while the entire budget was covered by 1 consultancy order obtained.

 

Blogs

Another particularly important issue to emerge from our research was the extent to which these online networks, with an ethos of mutual support amongst their members, act as ‘Web 2.0 incubators’ in which participants learn to make their on-line presence more attractive, and go through the process of learning to blog, a process which has been described as the on-line equivalent of PR. A number of companies who seem to be following this route were to be found in our sample. For example, Personal Chef largely promoted herself through Ecademy and is a well-known - if sometimes rather an eccentric - blogger. London Cakes have a very limited IT infrastructure but this has not stopped them from developing their Internet offering with some unusual added value services such as an effective sequential email campaign to promote specialist cakes for Valentine’s Day.

According to Weil (2006) a blog differs from online diaries or web pages in that it is more collaboratively constructed, interactive, frequently updated and written in a conversational voice. Blogs can be created by small businesses to present information to customers and stakeholders and build a relationship with them. However, they need to change their traditional controlled, one-way communication and be open to learning, listening, and asking people what they think. They should come across as passionate and authentic and be able to acknowledge their mistakes. A blog is not ‘company speak’, instead it is like a window through which a company allows its customers to see inside. Furthermore, blogs have to speak the ‘language’ of the target audience.

Crucially, businesses need to have something useful to say because customers can choose what they want to read, what they want to talk about and with whom they want to build up a relationship. The reality of today’s marketplace is that customers have a choice, and they can certainly choose to ignore you! Thus businesses have to give their customers something real, new and exciting enough either in their own blog or in other blogs related to the company or its products. If they are compelling enough, ideas and messages can spread like viruses do (Scoble and Israel, 2006; Gladwell, 2000). A blog with quality content will naturally have a greater attraction for readers and thus a greater effectiveness as a vehicle for spreading the intended promotional messages. Blogs can therefore be regarded as a viral marketing tool, but with the huge advantage that they provide multi-directional communication. Traditional viral marketing campaigns, using contests, games or video clips as content are one-way instruments which might spread well for a certain period of time but ultimately lose their impact as no real relationship becomes formed (Wright 2006).

Increasingly, the virtual world is being monitored by search and tracking sites looking for keywords being mentioned in blog postings. Some of our early adopter businesses (for example HowtodoBusiness and Plants for Presents) were also monitoring blogs as an effective ongoing process of market research, allowing them to see what people are talking about, what trends are developing and obtaining real-time feedback, in addition to writing their own blogs.

 

RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

Email marketing increasingly has to cope with the resentment of individuals against intrusive marketing, and the rising tide of legislation against unsolicited marketing that applies in both European and US jurisdictions. While people can easily throw unwanted junk mail away it is more difficult to avoid insistent emails or telephone calls. The tools available are unsatisfactory – there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of perfectly respectable emails being caught in company spam filters and not delivered, and the defences against intrusive telephone calls are largely all or nothing. So, rather than risk their messages being perceived as spam, some of our early adopter companies are looking at ways that enable their story to be picked up only by people who are interested in what they have to offer or say.

One of the key tools for achieving this is the RSS feed which essentially takes the form of a headline and a body of text. According to the BBC, itself a good example of RSS in action, an RSS feed is a stream of updated information sourced from a blog or website, which lets an RSS Reader know that an update has happened. RSS readers are now available in all the major Internet browsers and search engines such as Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN. When the RSS reader sees an update (for which it is constantly scanning), it takes the headline, or the headline and some of the content, or the headline and ALL of the content and displays it. Once the feed is set up, there is a direct, permanent, updated connection to a source of content. It means that people can choose to stay in touch with anyone who interests them and who is making relevant communication available to them. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm#whatisrss for more detail on this topic.

From the point of view of the small business, the activities of our early adopters demonstrate that the crucial task is to move the company mindset from collecting potential customers’ email addresses and then following up with emails and e-zines, to encouraging prospective customers to sign up to a blog via an RSS feed. Subscribers will then be automatically notified of anything that the marketer may choose to post - about events that are being run, free downloads, workshops, new products, relevant observations and worthwhile links that they will find interesting

In his recent e-book Flipping the Funnel (2006), Seth Godin outlines his strategy of creating a platform to allow your advocates to tell your story for you. He has created a platform to allow others to build this structure in an online network called Squidoo (www.squidoo.com). This is a content aggregation tool which allows participants to build a ‘lens’ so that they can focus their expertise and build credibility with prospective customers. It is essentially an additional one page site which can be used to drive traffic back to the main company website. There are two innovative aspects to this. One is that it is designed to pick up RSS feeds from, for example, special interest clubs on a networking platform like Ecademy. This is very important for the small ‘knowledge economy’ business wanting to broadcast its ideas. The second is that the firm is able to create an HQ lens under which other lenses can be aggregated. As well as using this to build an ‘empire’ of knowledge, the cunning marketer can create a template to sit under his headquarters, to be made available to customers and other advocates to tell the ‘story’ for them. This is a more sophisticated approach to viral marketing than the current fashion for creating trivial games and circulating them around the world’s email networks.

 

 

Figure 4 - Martin Bamford’s Squidoo lens

 

One of our interviewees who uses these tools effectively is Martin Bamford, an IFA based in Surrey. He has used Ecademy to promote his business and was one of the earliest to use Squidoo as a platform, as illustrated in Figure 4. He has also created a ‘Squidoo club’ on Ecademy. The key point is that this material can be easily created by small businesses with free blogging software and effectively fed to strategic points such as the web site front page using RSS where interested parties can pick up the feed and automatically receive any further words of wisdom or other communication that originate from that source. Some of the key spaces for amateurs to ‘dip their toes’ into the world of blogging are already RSS enabled in this way. In another example, the owner of HowtodoBusiness can pick up a blog discussion thread that is going on in an Ecademy club, and reproduces it in Squidoo as www.squidoo.com/howtodobusiness. This effectively means that he can make the same information appear in various different locations, all of which can be arranged to point back to the same source. This boosts traffic to the website and hence page rank and makes the business appear bigger and more influential than it actually is. As a bonus, HowtodoBusiness has links with the appropriate anchor text keywords embedded in the blog material that the owner posts on Ecademy, which also has the effect of improving its page rank. This is because Ecademy is itself well connected so there is a ‘halo effect’ that reflects back to the business’s own site.

 

Discussion

It is rare for the small businesses that we interviewed to have an integrated CRM/Sales methodology in place. Partly this is because in most of these organisations only the principal or other senior individual is involved in selling directly, or they find the offerings on the market too complex or ‘clunky’ for their needs. In general, most firms find that a little marketing goes a long way and because they are run holistically, it is more important to generate enough enquiries for the sales pipeline than to generate more enquiries than they can fulfil. The individuals we spoke to – like most owner managers - are consciously performing a balancing act with their companies every day of their lives.

Despite these difficult issues, we believe our research has quite clearly established that exposure to the currently evolving tools of the Internet means that small businesses can take for granted modalities and means of communication that are often denied to people operating in the corporate and public sector environments. Effective small business marketers are becoming immersed in a range of simple and affordable techniques which are leaving their corporate cousins behind - hampered as they are by the ‘protection’ of their IT departments. Most IT professionals are trained to build impervious protection systems for the integrity of the data of the organisations for which they work. This means that their default approach is to lock down and deny access to tools and new software unless a strong business case is made. This means that access to Skype, instant messaging, and blogging is off limits, and quite often even sound cards are not available, so that the joys of Youtube and viral marketing are denied to the workers in the corporate ant-heap.

We believe that this is starting to put larger organisations at something of a competitive disadvantage, while allowing more flexible small businesses to use the new tools as we have described above in order to ‘punch above their weight’. It also has the effect of limiting the effectiveness of how large corporate organisations can understand what is really going on in the Web 2.0 area, since being able to deploy these tools effectively requires a certain critical mass of understanding about how they operate. This poses certain educational issues for marketers in the corporate arena.

So far we have focused upon the new online marketing tools that our case study firms are adopting in order to grow their businesses. Moving on now to consider the ‘bigger picture’, our research has also indicated that there are two main routes that small businesses follow as they get bigger and have to deal with the issues of the ‘dawn of formality’ in terms of their IT infrastructure. These are illustrated in Figure 5.

 

 

Figure 5 – the route to growth for ‘new breed SMEs’ compared with traditional IT requirements

 

This matrix illustrates the level of IT skills versus the intensity of IT investment. We believe that some of our case study businesses will follow the traditional route of investing in a proper ‘in house’ network server at an early stage in their growth. Some lifestyle companies will be driven in that direction, probably by external pressures such as the demands of major customers, suppliers or other stakeholders. Pursuing this strategy tends to require a general upgrade in IT skills within the firm, together with an increasing reliance on IT vendors for more complex systems and specialist computing knowledge as the business grows. One of the reasons that some of these firms are avoiding investment in IT infrastructure, is not so much the cost of the equipment but the cost of purchasing technical support, combined with fear of what happens if the implementation hits problems. With technical support for a network installation running at £800 per day, this can be something of a blow for small organisation, particularly if it looks like becoming open-ended. The other fear is, of course, the sheer damage and loss of vital management time that a botched implementation might result in. This factor was mentioned as a major deterrent by most of our interviewees.

However, our research has also indicated that we are seeing the emergence of a new breed of company (the ‘new breed SME’ in Figure 5) who will seek to use the tools of Web 2.0, flexible working and the judicious use of external hosted services to postpone having to put a server in; not only because of the cost but because of having to support a greater level of complexity in the business than is strictly operationally necessary. The profile of these firms that we have studied suggests that they are prepared to develop their own IT skills, supported by organisations such as Ecademy, and become ‘gifted amateurs’, using Web 2.0 marketing techniques discussed in this paper, ahead of their propensity to invest in additional hardware and technical support in the more traditional manner.

 

Conclusions

 

As noted earlier in the paper, in some of our case studies the online networking came first, and this experience provided the business owners with an introduction to and examples of the Web 2.0 approach which they subsequently adopted themselves. We believe that if our analysis were to be extended to the business services sector we would see a much larger prevalence of this particular pattern – ie advanced web-based marketing activity by gifted amateurs without the need for a server and other specialised equipment and knowledge. If this trend continues, there are clear implications for technology vendors seeking to encourage small firms to invest in expensive and complex IT ‘solutions’. The next phase of our research will test out these ideas more definitively across a broader range of market sectors.

Bringing together the activities undertaken by our early adopter case studies, the key to making a success of a Web 2.0 marketing communications strategy can be summarised as follows:

• Have interesting content – regularly refreshed
• Have the back up mechanisms available to turn other people’s interest into money
• Make sure that you create as many links as you can to appear as widely as you can and encourage referral back to your site
• Be prepared to engage with customers in their language and deal with the negative feedback in a proactive way as well as the positive
• Accept that promotional messages can no longer be ‘controlled’ along the lines of a traditional press release
• Avoid cluttering your customers’ inboxes with unwanted email. Instead provide the mechanism for them to ‘pull’ your content by RSS.

These are the initial steps on moving from a ‘push’ to a ‘pull’ marketing regime. Obviously it cannot work in isolation, and so it needs to be backed up by offline techniques like postcards, PR and on line advertising as well as whatever face to face marketing fits the business model. The ‘early adopters’ that we profiled are starting to develop some fluency in how these tools can be used, and are moving beyond the basics of outbound marketing, with some success, to include tools to attract business to them. We have shown that in addition to allowing these businesses to ‘punch above their weight’ by appearing to be more dominant in their sector than they really are (for example by effective search engine optimisation) competency in Web 2.0 marketing also offers these firms a skills advantage when competing with larger organisations whose managers are often prevented by their IT departments from dabbling in ‘amateur’ or ‘experimental’ web-based technologies. Based on the lessons learned from these positive experiences, we predict healthy growth in the numbers of small businesses ‘going out on the pull’.

 

References

Anderson, C. (2004) ‘The long tail’ Wired

Barabasi, A-L. (2003) Linked - How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life . Plume.

Bruderl, J. and Preisendorfer, P. (1998) ‘Network support and the success of newly founded businesses’ Small Business Economics, 10; 213 – 225

Deakins, D. & Freel, M. (2003) Entrepreneurship and Small Firms, 3rd Edition, Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill Education

Dunbar, R. (1992) ‘Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates,’ Journal of Human Evolution (1992), vol. 20, pp. 469-493.

Gladwell, M. (2000) The Tipping Point, New York: Little Brown

Godin, S. (2006) ‘Flipping the Funnel’www.sethgodin.typepad.com

Milgram ,S. (1967) ‘The Small World Problem’ Physiology Today 2 pp 60-67

Scoble, R. and Israel, S. (2006) ‘Naked Conversations: how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers’ New Jersey: John Wiley

Watts, D.J. and Strogatz, S.H. (1998) ‘Collective Dynamics of Small World Networks’ Nature 393 440-442

Weil, D. (2006) The Corporate Blogging New York: Penguin Group

Wilson, N.C. and Stokes, D. (2004) ‘Laments and serenades: relationship marketing and legitimation strategies for the cultural entrepreneur’ Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal Volume 7 No. 3, pp. 218-227

Witt, P. (2004) ‘Entrepreneurs networks and the success of start-ups’ Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 391 – 412.

Wright, J. (2006) Blog Marketing New York: McGraw-Hill

 

Zontanos, G. and Anderson, A. (2004) ‘Relationships, marketing and small business: an exploration of links in theory and practice’ Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal Volume 7 Number 3 2004 pp. 228-236