New York SBDC Research Network

From eMarketer : An April 2017 survey by Campaigner, an email marketing platform, explored consumer interactions with brands. More than half of US digital buyers said they followed a brand on Facebook, which was significantly higher compared with any other social platform. It was even more common among millennials: Fully 65% of this cohort said they followed a brand on Facebook. But social networks are not necessarily the top choice for interacting with brands. As a whole, only a quarter (24%) of digital buyers in the survey said they preferred “to interact with their favorite brands” via social media. Instead, in-store and in-person communication was the most commonly cited channel (65%), followed by company websites (58%) and email (44%). Respondents could site multiple choices.

From the Small Business Administration : Many of you are familiar with etiquette when it comes to dining. However, did you know that there was a thing such as business etiquette? Similar to dining etiquette, these unwritten rules of behavior can help you not only close the deal, but also leave a great impression on potential partners/customers. From web communication to interpersonal communication, being aware of unwritten rules can help you represent yourself as professionally as possible. So in honor of National Business Etiquette Week (June 4th – 10th), we would like to highlight 6 unwritten rules that will help you excel in all business settings as a small business leader.

Courtesy of: Wasp Barcode Technologies For the third year, Wasp Barcode Technologies conducted a survey to identify how small business owners felt about their growth, confidence in the economy, employment, technology use, marketing tactics, and government impact. The State of Small Business Report research is based on a random online sample of 1,127 U.S. small business owners/managers with companies with five to 499 employees. The anonymous survey was conducted via the Internet by Survey Monkey from November 10-18, 2016. The survey has a margin of error of +/- 2.9 at the 95% level of confidence. Sikora Associates provided statistical analysis.

Study Conducted by America's SBDC Reveals Insights into the Entrepreneurial Mindsets of Different Generations of Americans America's SBDC partnered with the Center for Generational Kinetics to better understand how different generations view and approach entrepreneurship. The findings reinforced previously held beliefs such as a strong entrepreneurial inclination among millennials, while challenging preconceived notions about their motivations for starting a business. Generational Perceptions Small Businesses play a huge role in the lives of Americans. One-third of Americans (34 percent), have worked in a small business in the past and nearly a quarter (24 percent) of both Millennials and Gen X own or have owned a small business. The study found that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well with 41 percent of Americans saying they would quit their job and start a business in the next 6 months if they had the tools and resources they needed. This number is higher fo

From ThomasNet : Your supply chain is similar to a line of standing dominos, if one piece goes down, it could cause a chain reaction and take all the other pieces down with it. If you have a supplier or manufacturer in your supply chain that goes bankrupt or consistently delivers late, you could have a serious disruption on your hands. It makes sense that you’d want to take the necessary precautions when choosing new businesses to add to your supply chain, in order to try and avoid the domino effect. But, you can’t exactly predict the future, so you’re often taking the risk that a key component to your operations may fall flat. There are a few ways, however, that you can assess a potential supplier or manufacturer and decide in advance if it seems stable enough to add to your supply chain. By analyzing a business’s credit report, you can use data and predictive scoring to help you decide which companies you want to partner with.

From the Library of Congress : The following is a guest post by Brad Greenberg, counsel in the U.S. Copyright Office, Office of Policy and International Affairs. Copyright law and new technologies have a long history, arguably dating back to the Gutenberg Press in the 15th century—more than 200 years before passage of the matriarch of copyright statutes, Britain’s Statute of Anne. New technologies provide new tools for creative expression and new vehicles for sharing those works. But sometimes they also disrupt existing copyright regimes—as seen with player pianos (late 1800s), radio (1920s and 1930s), cable television (1960s and 1970s), photocopying (1970s), home video cassette recorders (1970s and 1980s), and, of course, digital downloading and streaming technology (today). Emerging technologies continue to raise novel questions for copyright, particularly with a copyright system built around a law now more than forty years old. Is a poem written by a computer entitled to copyr

WannaCry: What can you do to protect your business? By Matthew Wall and Mark Ward Technology of Business, BBC News 19 May 2017   From the section Business There's been a lot in the news over the past week or two about the WannaCry cyber-attacks and what companies, in particular, are doing about the risk.   As well as keeping antivirus, firewall, application and OS software up-to-date, backing up key data regularly to offline hard drives should be a top priority, most cyber experts agree. This is because  data breaches and cyber-attacks  are inevitable these days. The bad news is that the average cost of a data breach globally stands at $4m (£3.1m), according to SailPoint, an identity management firm. This article from the BBC discusses what attacks mean for business and what steps can be taken.                       And this from Department of Homeland Security for what to do before, during and after: Cyber Incident  ... ·