wombeat

Choosing the Best Marketing Tools For Your Small or Local Business

Online marketing...Email marketing...Blogs...Search engine optimization (or SEO)...Google Adwords...Yellowpages...LinkedIn...Facebook...MySpace...

Do any of these words cause you heartburn? Today, we are fortunate to have so many marketing options, but more options can mean more confusion. But how is a business owner supposed to evaluate which ones are right for their business or the most cost-effective?

WOMbeat! -- Putting Word-Of-Mouth (WOM) on Warp Speed

The good news keeps on coming...and we owe it all to you! Thanks to Idea Café and our winning their “Innovation & Originality Grant” in January, the interest level in WOMbeat! continues to rise. Just this past week, we learned that WOMbeat! founder, Linda Olson, was honored as one of the “Tampa Bay 100” by Tampa Bay CEO Magazine. You can read the full story here if you like.

WOMbeat! – Tapping Into the Power of LinkedIn for Small Business

Are you one of those business owners who continue to resist “the pressure” from well-meaning friends and peers to join LinkedIn? Maybe you actually signed up once, but are you having a hard time find any value in it? If this sounds like you, you are not alone…but you may be missing out on a very powerful tool. WOMbeat! owes much of its early growth to LinkedIn , so let me share a few of the pearls I found in Linkedin.

Never need to lookup a phone number again

WOMbeat! -- Helping Small Business Owners with Word-Of-Mouth (WOM)

So far, 2009 has been just an amazing year. After winning the Idea Café’s “Innovation & Originality Grant,” we continue to be blessed with so much good news and press. Not only did we make a guest appearance on the CEO Lounge (listen to the program here) in January, but we were also selected to present at Startup Riot 2009 last month in Atlanta, GA (the only company from Florida and the only female presenter selected!).

How Small Businesses Can Get Big Results from Social Media

For small business owners, the new world order of social media can seem intimidating, if not confusing, but that is no excuse not to explore it. When Social Media can offer very powerful marketing tools that are often extremely affordable, and in many cases FREE, how can you afford not to? We here at WOMbeat! have built social media into our overall strategy, and the payoffs have been tremendous from day one.

What is Social Media?

WOMbeat! - Putting the Idea Cafe grant win to work!

First of all, let me say how excited we here at WOMbeat! still are over the Idea Café “Innovation & Originality Grant” win. Not only did this win help us see a tremendous growth in traffic to our site, but we continue to get more coverage because of it. In fact, last week we were one of the guests on a talk-radio program called the Ceo Lounge. Listen for yourself here

WOMbeat! is the Winner of Idea Cafe's Innovation and Originality Grant

WOMbeat!, an online source of recommendations for local businesses from people you know and trust, and an enterprise sparked by a dream, is the winner of the latest Idea Cafe grant. Congratulations! WOMbeat! submitted their nomination in November, and during the month-long voting phase of the grant they emerged as the leader, with 25.66% of the votes. They are followed by another exceptional business, PALS with PAWZ, who got 20.86% of the votes.

Finalist Q&A: WOMbeat!


The WOMBeat! mascot.

The first finalist Q&A presentation is for WOMBeat!, an online source of recommendations for local businesses from people you know and trust.
Information from their grant application is available here. Read below for more, and if you have questions for our finalists don't hesitate to ask them in the comments section.

 

Idea Cafe: How did you come up with the idea for your business, and what were your influences and sources of motivation?

Linda Olson: To be completely honest, WOMbeat! was sparked by a dream. Literally, I was woken from a deep sleep and began writing down what I could remember. Some people dream of trips or romances, but I dream about new business ventures, and this one was much different from the rest.

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