Stephen O’Donnell, CEO, S1NED Inc.

By Stephen O’Donnell

As a child I noticed how small businesses relied on personal relationships and trust to thrive. The local butcher, banker, and physician knew instinctively that what they needed to do to be successful: win the respect of their local community.

Today, as business has globalized, the need for close connections between merchant and customer is even more important. 

The new main street is rapidly transforming. Businesses hoping to not just survive the change, but thrive, will aggressively turn to a strategy that exploits mobile and social technologies – solutions that enable them to interact with customers both directly and indirectly via smart phones and tablets. In this space of social and mobile, small and medium businesses (SMBs) can create new ways to succeed. 

And the time is now. Consumers are looking to online influencers – trusted digital friends, bloggers, so-called experts, and simply other consumers – for guidance on what to buy and where to go. How we communicate with them and what we learn from them is critical. In many respects, word of mouth has become the new currency in the highly-connected world of social media.