Bizjama

People hate meetings that waste time. Many meetings don’t start on time. They’re unfocused. And they last too long.

But workplace meetings are here to stay. Managers and experts say it’s important to make them more efficient. Here are 10 tips to help you run effective and productive meetings.

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From GoDaddy (twice), to Chapstick, Lowe’s, LA Fitness, Timothy’s Coffee, PayPal, Fontaine Santé, Red Cross, McDonald’s, and the list goes on… This past year has seen a massively wide range of social media crises – both big and small, successful and disastrous.

As more and more social media crises break out online, you’d think we’d be seeing brands getting progressively better at handling and resolving them. You’d think! Instead, it seems that brands are continuing to tie in their lack of better judgement, and lack of a response strategy.

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Success is a combination of thinking right and doing right, according to Sarika Bhattacharyya. Here are her 10 best success secrets for women entrepreneurs.

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Many entrepreneurs are recognizing that offering video clips on their websites, or on dedicated YouTube channels, is a smart marketing idea. The segments might present compelling interviews, as you are doing, or feature the business owner talking about the company’s mission or history, or demonstrating a new product or service.

Whatever the content, including video on your site draws viewers in and can keep them engaged—if it is compelling enough. It personalizes your company for customers and potential partners and makes you stand out, giving you an advantage over competitors. Be aware that the average video posted online loses 20 percent of viewers in the first 10 seconds and 60 percent by the two-minute mark, according to a 2010 study by video analytics researcher Visible Measures.

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A study of more than 3,000 marketers done by Social Media Examiner last year showed 68 percent of small businesses use blog posts already as part of their social-media strategy. After all, if you’re going to be tweeting and updating your status on LinkedIn and all, it’s helpful if you can link back to some tasty piece of content on your site. Blogging makes that easy to do.

But that doesn’t mean blogging is right for your small business, as the blog Reputation Capital pointed out earlier this week. Here are a few reasons you might want to hold off on blogging at your business.

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One of the biggest expenses for small businesses is offering health care benefits to employees. You can offer health care to employees of your small business by purchasing a group health insurance policy. If you are a business with under 50 people than you can obtain a small group plan. However, the cost of a group health insurance plan can be expensive. This means that you may need to find way to lower your office insurance costs.

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Two years ago last week, the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United decision, paving the way for unlimited corporate spending in elections. In 2012, the decision’s affects are more apparent than ever; the Republican presidential nominee may very well be chosen by a Super PAC, rather than everyday citizens. But the full scope of the damage caused by this decision is only just beginning to be felt, especially at the local level. Among the victims of mega-corporate power will not only be everyday citizens and their elections, but also small businesses in our country.

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When you ponder all the different trends driving small-business technology decisions, for me, the common denominator comes down to this question: Does the technology you are considering enable you and your team to get the job done job from any place, at any time, no matter which computing device they happen to have at hand?

If you think about it, the drive toward mobility is behind some of the hottest trends in small-business technology today — a theme that was sounded often during my Webcast last Friday with my fellow ZDNet SMB technology champions Josh Gingold and David Gewirtz.

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Jobs. What’s more important to an economy (and a household for that matter) than for people to be working? Of course there’s many factors but no matter who you are, employment and jobs are right up there at the top of the list of what is needed for a healthy and vibrant economy. That’s why I am rejoicing at today’s jobs report.

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I’ve been on both sides of the small business SEO coin.

I’ve been an SEO. Having done the intensive SEO work I know the value of good SEO and why it comes at such a premium. SEO is labor-intensive and ever-evolving, but extremely effective when executed well.

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