For those entrepreneurs considering taking on proven business models via franchising, this would be a good opportunity to do so.

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The sale is part of AT&T’s strategy to sell off shrinking parts of its business to focus on growing ones, in particular wireless. Revenue from the Yellow Pages business has shrunk 30 per cent in two years, as consumers turn to the Web instead of phone books.

Twitter is following in the footsteps of Google who recent launched Google+ brand pages.

List of Twitter features

Result: 35,000 hits in 24 hours.

Then CBS News/Techtalk contacted him and created an article on over-sharing information around the topic and quoted him.

Nice to see a positive example of an insight being spread around the Net.

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• You damage your brand with poor on-line reviews from one-time users of your service or product
• You can negatively impact your value proposition  with existing customers, who will now expect to pay less.
• If not careful, you will lose money on your discounted offer.

For more, read this New York Times article on deal sites

Bruce has a useful tool on his website – a free business assessment tool that can get a small business owner started down the path of thinking more strategically around the growth and how to manage it.

According to a study by Boston University and Harvard University, small businesses that run ‘daily deal’ promotions on Groupon are likely to see their ratings on Yelp drop thereafter.

The data gathered included over 56,000 reviews for 2,300+ merchants who ran 2,500 deals on Groupon. The analysis seems to show the two sides of the deal-of-the-day website – from one perspective, the number of reviews for the business on Yelp goes up because of the daily deals (which for some could be seen as a good thing).  However, the average rating scores from reviewers who reference daily deals are 10 per cent lower than scores coming from “business as usual” reviews.

There’s no explanation offered for why the customers using Groupon gave less positive reviews on Yelp, and the report leaves business owners pondering the question: is it worth running daily deals (expensive but can bring in new customers), if it’s at the expense of a lowered on-line reputation on user review sites like Yelp?

• Kia redesigned the seats for their Optima SX sedan after noticing complaints from consumers and automotive writers on the Internet.
• Ford invites consumers to submit their vehicle improvement ideas directly to the automaker via a website called thefordstory.com.
• Nissan (with three Twitter streams and Facebook pages for each of its vehicle brands) social media is becoming the de facto process to receive and resolve customer-service issues.

Rest of Article from Industry Week