I love talking to my friend Paul Chaney because he really gets both small business and small towns. He wrote a great book on the basics of social media for small business called The Digital Handshake. When I heard he had a new book coming out, this one on F-commerce, I invited him to tell…
At a recent event, a fellow small-town resident asked me, “Isn’t small towns dying just part of a natural progression?” I said no. Here’s why. We’ll always need small towns. Small towns combine natural resourcesand supporting businesses. 1. Our security depends on small towns. Our nation needs a secure food supply, reliable production of natural…
Since our book Small Town Rules was released by Que Publishing this spring, Barry Moltz and I have been sharing lots of videos, interviews, and guest posts all over the web on the ideas in it. Because I’m so close to this subject, I forget that you haven’t seen much of it here. I finally realized…
Every business, no matter how small your town is, has to compete with someone. What advantage will you play up to your customers? Red’s, a barbecue place in my hometown, is promoting its location. See, 14 miles away in another tiny town is a terrific barbecue place. So Red’s is basically saying, “don’t make the…
When small town entrepreneurs prosper, they help their community prosper. It’s one of my core beliefs, and it’s supported by some scholarly research. Charles M. Tolbert, Baylor University, looked at the effects of small business on their local community. His research shows that more locally-oriented business establishments are associated statistically with: higher average income levels less…
Educator Kevin Honeycutt of Inman, Kansas, (population 1300) is working with other locals to create a “New Billboard”: a combination QR code, Foursquare tour. If you can’t see the video, click through to Small Biz Survival. The basic idea is to draw in visitors from the highway, and use tools like QR codes and Foursquare…
“What do you consider a small town?” I get asked that quite a bit. The answer isn’t that simple. Places come in too many sizes to fall neatly into just three categories: big city, small town, suburb. What We Think In general, I think of small towns as being under 10,000 in population, and really…
You remember your small town back when there was a drugstore downtown, and lots of shops, and the theater was a happening place. You remember two hardware stores and independent gas stations. But it’s not like that anymore. You feel so sad when you think of what your town is now. Can you ever revive…
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