Are you looking for ideas on how to leverage social media for your business? You’ve got your Facebook Fan Page, LinkedIn Profile, Twitter account and YouTube Channel. But how do you make the most of all these social networking resources?

No worries. We’ve gone out and asked some experts to share the latest and greatest Social Media Do’s and Don’ts for small business. These aren’t last year’s tips; they are new and improved. We promise you’ll find a new twist on how to get your investment in social media to pay off.

Read through our list; then add some of your own (see bottom of this post for instructions).

“Innovation can be defined as coming up with ideas that bring value to your customers and then bringing those ideas to life.” says Robert Tucker, author of Driving Growth through Innovation. Sounds like the type of employee that every company would want to not only find but hire. Before you run off in search of your next Thomas Edison read on.

The October issue of INC. Guidebook offers up some good advice regarding finding innovators. I have creatively added my outside-the-box thoughts to the points that were made.

• Decide which kind of creativity counts – Hiring for creativity starts with deciding how much of it you can tolerate. Many companies find it difficult to integrate true outside-the-box thinkers, true innovators.
• Breadth of Creativity vs. Depth of Creativity – Understand the difference between the two. Breadth of creativity is ad agency, IDEO, Disney Imangineers whereas depth of creativity is looking for better ways, process improvements within one’s own job or department that when implemented add value to your customers.

Europe has a new plan aiming to ensure that science will get the continent's economy humming again. The Innovation Union, adopted yesterday by the European Commission, is a new attack on one of Europe's intractable problems: Research is plentiful and of relatively high quality, but it doesn't as often as desired result in products and services that create jobs and wealth for the 27 member states of the European Union.

The Innovation Union document is billed as the "flagship" of the Europe 2020 plan for economic growth. High in aspirations, the plan proposes a wide range of measures—from bolstering funding for science and radically simplifying the European Unions's own funding procedures to removing barriers to international collaboration.

According to Wikipedia, the odds of being struck by lightning over the course of a lifetime are about 1 in 3,000.

Assuming that lightning strikes are independent events, the chances of getting struck by lightning 7 times in one lifetime are about 1 in about 2.2 trillion trillion (that second trillion is not a typo, the number is really that big). Despite incomprehensibly long odds, this is exactly what happened to a man named Roy Sullivan between the years of 1942 and 1977.

Granted, Sullivan was a Park Ranger in Virginia and spent quite a bit of time outdoors, but my point is that the world is a very big place and highly improbable events happen all the time. The law of large numbers says that with a big enough sample, many highly improbable events are bound to occur, like when a woman won the New Jersey lottery twice in a span of four months (odds are about one in 17 trillion). Or like when a college student coded a web site that now has over 500 million users and is worth upwards of 20 billion dollars. The name of this (former) college student is Mark Zuckerberg and the company is, of course, Facebook.

For sheer audacity, Tesla wins.

Transitioning from a few megalomaniacal entrepreneurs and investors armed with a PowerPoint to a public company with a shipment record and ownership of a few million feet of factory space is an absolutely breathtaking feat, by any standard.

The firm is now confronted by an arguably even bigger set of challenges: moving from being a boutique luxury supplier to a mass production company.

Mobility and the technology that enables it is helping shape what the future work force will look like. Far from the spacefaring Everyman envisioned by science fiction writers, the employee of the future will be firmly rooted not in outer space but in cyber-space.

Riding the subway or traveling by plane offers proof enough that people are tethered to their mobile devices. David Morton, director of mobile strategies at the University of Washington, studies the mobile device phenomenon. Morton monitors mobile device use on the campus network and posts findings on the Freshly Mobile website. The gadgets people love are growing ever more essential.

Mark Suster is one of those unique venture capitalists in that he has experience as an entrepreneur prior to joining the VC world (or the "dark side" as he calls it). Twice, in fact. That's why he calls his blog "Both Sides of the Table," because he has literally sat at both sides of the negotiating table. It's this experience as both an entrepreneur and a VC that provides him a fresh perspective on startups and the investment market, so what does Suster think are the most important factors to securing investment? Apparently, it comes down to four M's.

The first M Suster suggests is "momentum," which is almost synonymous with "traction." Investors want to see early growth - either in terms of users, deals or any number of metrics - that will likely continue or accelerate after an investment. This is why developing an early relationship with an investor is key, so they can see your growth over time, and not be forced to make a decision based on a snapshot in time.

Production of biomaterials will grow faster than biofuels and increasing biofuel capacity is highly reliant on technology from innovative startups. These are some of the conclusions in a report just issued by Lux research on the biofuel and biomaterial markets.

Biomaterials can be used instead of plastics and polymers currently produced from petroleum, but at current capacity the materials can replace a mere 1 percent of plastics. Lux research expects this market to grow by a minimum of 17.7 percent per year, driven by big corporations. Petroleum is used in a bewildering array of products and packaging, but fluctuations in oil prices make it difficult for companies to predict the cost of materials. Bio-based fibers for textiles and acetate, used for things like pens and toothbrushes, dominate the bio-based materials scene, accounting for 39 percent and 24 percent of the current $10.7 billion market.

Startups aren’t for the weak of heart. There are inevitable ups and downs that every entrepreneur faces. Part of your challenge is not getting carried away during times of success and not getting despondent during your setbacks.Photo via Flickr by malisonian

When you find yourself in a startup funk, it’s frequently a period of indecision or uncertainty, where planning and meetings seem to take up a lion’s share of your time. The fear of making the wrong decision can lead to startup paralysis and can kill your company. Here are five ways to snap out of it by prioritizing action.

We think the person/social media strategist behind Bajillionhits.biz might have a slight crush on us, or at least our boss. In any case the second, “How Do You Pitch To An Angel” episode in Alex Blagg’s Stratocast series is some pretty hilarious stuff. Key takeaway: “I understand the code, I’m Twitter friends with Michael Arrington.” Also: “Give me your seed!”

If you encounter an official from the National Venture Capital Association, be careful asking the innocent question, “How’s it going?” Don’t expect the official to answer, “Oh you know, same-old, same-old.” Instead, you’ll likely get an earful.


Mark Heesen, president of the venture-capital trade group, and Emily Mendell, vice president of strategic affairs, weren’t shy about answering that question last week on the sidelines of the Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst Conference. While they appeared comfortable lounging in oversized chairs above the lobby of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, they are anything but relaxed when thinking about what lies ahead.

(LOS ANGELES) Oct. 7, 2010 – Cutting back on services and increasing taxes won't be enough to stabilize state and municipal finances, even when the economy fully recovers. According to a new report from the Milken Institute and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, it's going to require real paradigm shifts: a fundamental restructuring of budgets and the entire budgeting process, sustainable revenue generation, new efficiencies and federal/state partnerships.

Ensuring State and Municipal Solvency outlines the tremendous fiscal challenges facing states and municipalities, including long-term structural issues like unfunded pension and health-care obligations, and outlines several options to stabilize the situation.

"With everyone focused on the federal government's fiscal challenges, it's easy to ignore the fundamental structural imbalances in state and local budgets," said study co-author Robert Litan, vice president for research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation. "But these budgets directly impact businesses and entrepreneurs. They can't plan for the future without knowing what their tax liabilities will be and what services will still be around for them and their employees."

Startups and Hollywood are more alike than we give credit. After nearly 12 months at a Y-Combinator company in Silicon Valley, I find myself noticing an eerie resemblance between my previous life in the film industry in NY/LA.

This week's release of The Social Network, an interpretation of the rise of Facebook, and it's founder Mark Zuckerberg, is another corridor between these two worlds. It'd be easy to brush this film off as an opportunistic attraction produced by Hollywood's gluttony, if it weren't for the people behind the project. The team who made The Social Network, like the talent behind the real Facebook, are among the brightest individuals in the industry.

In 1980, the United States Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act--also known as the University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act--which was intended to help universities and national laboratories bring technology to the marketplace. Thirty years later, and with $30 billion spent annually by the federal government on research and development, "technology transfer" to industry lags behind. Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole had hoped to open the floodgates on pent-up entrepreneurial energy in universities and laboratories. The reality, though, looking at the connection between the academy and industry today, is that the gushing waters of innovation appear to be more of a slow trickle.

Why does technology transfer lag so far behind? George Mason University social scientist Edmund J. Zolnik recently surveyed postdocs in the Washington, DC, metropolitan region, and found that the DC-area population represented "one of the most highly skilled pools of human capital in the world," in "one of the best urban areas of the world for generating wealth." His findings were published in the International Journal of Knowledge-Based Development.

The European Commission is calling for a ‘collaboration revolution’ to get the public and private sectors working together, as the main plank of its new plan to promote innovation and so create jobs, solve the grand challenges and build an innovation culture to rival that in the US.

The focus for doing this will be European Innovation Partnerships, (EIP) each focused on a specific grand challenge, with concrete goals, driven by a board that will be chaired by one or more commissioners, with ministers from national governments, MEPs, and people from industry, academe and the public sector. Along with acting on the supply side to develop and introduce new products and services, EIPs will be able to act to bring down regulatory barriers, and so smooth the path to market and adoption.

O presidente da agência da Agência de Inovação Americana, Richard Bendis, defendeu esta quinta-feira que «os países pequenos tendem a ser mais inovadores porque são mais flexíveis», considerando que «Portugal e Espanha têm mais potencial para inovar».

No VI Encontro COTEC Europa, na Casa da Música, no Porto, o fundador e presidente da Innovation América afirmou que «o futuro da Europa reside nas pequenas e medias empresas (PME)», que «devem encontrar parceiros em todo o mundo, criando redes globais de inovação».

Madrid, 6 oct (EFE).- El Rey viaja hoy a Oporto para intervenir al día siguiente en la sesión de clausura del VI Encuentro Cotec Europa, en el que se presentará un gran proyecto para la mejora de la seguridad marítima en el sur de Europa con participación de grandes empresas de España, Italia y Portugal.

El presidente portugués, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, será el anfitrión de esta sexta edición de los encuentros Cotec Europa, a la que acudirá también el presidente italiano, Giorgio Napolitano, ya que los jefes de Estado de España, Portugal e Italia comparten la presidencia de honor de esta institución, creada para coordinar las actuaciones de las fundaciones nacionales ante la Comisión Europea.

Australian companies continue to increase their investment in research and development, but the growth rate has dropped dramatically, according to figures from the national Bureau of Statistics.

In the latest numbers available, companies pumped $16.86 billion into R&D in 2008-09. That’s a 13 percent increase over 2007-08.

However, the 2007-08 and 2006-07 R&D investment figures were 18 percent and 21 percent higher than their previous years, respectively. So even though the raw numbers are on the rise, it appears the world’s economic malaise gut-punched R&D as well.