So just how important is microenterprise or microbusiness to our local economy anyhow?
Association for Enterprise Opportunity (AEO) and
Washington State Microenterprise Association have each put together some stats for our state. For the AEO study, they considered a microbusiness to be one with 4 or fewer employees, not including the owner. For the WSMA figures, they considered a microenterprise to be a business with 5 or fewer employees, that requires $35,000 or less in initial capital and doesn't have access to traditional commercial loans. Now for a few of our numbers - Washington state, let's see if you're surprised ....
Intuitively we "know" that rural communities adopt, use and respond to social media differently than urban areas. But just what are those differences? Unless you're an insider at Facebook, Google, LinkedIn or MySpace, it's hard to find useful data. However, we were able to locate one paper, written in 2008 mind you, where more than 3,000 rural and urban social media (MySpace) users, 340,000 online friendships and 200,000 interpersonal messages were analyzed. Entitled "The Network in the Garden: An Empirical Analysis of Social Media in Rural Life", authors Eric Gilbert, Karrie Karahalios and Christian Sandvig from the University of Illinois shared a few interesting conclusions.
If your business isn't using social media - you're missing the boat. The infographic below paints a pretty convincing picture of why you need to get with the social media program!
Jody Lawrence-Turner of The Spokesman Review recently profiled Bear Naked Adventures LLC and POMDO in her August 9, 2011 article found
here.
The
Washington State Microenterprise Association is hosting regional meetings again this year to bring stakeholders and practitioners together to discuss support to small business and access to capital. This year they will be including a conversation about the connections between asset and wealth building and enterprise development. Table discussions will include micro and small business lending and client tracking to better capture needs and outcome of services. The Northeast Region one is from 10am - 4pm on August 18th in Chewelah, WA.
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