Amid all the headlines about the multi-million television advertisements during this year's Super Bowl, I spotted one which may not have been on your radar.

Entrepreneurial organisation the Kauffman Foundation got in on the act and broadcast a commercial.

So amid the Dannon Oikos Greek Yoghurt craziness and the Ferris Bueller revival was the message below for people to consider a career running their own business.

Dan Martin: Editor's Blog

We’ve heard and talked about ‘web 2.0’ for a few years now – and the latest tranche of buzzwords appearing on the web now focus around ‘social enterprise 2.0’  or often just ‘Enterprise 2.0’.

Call it what you will – effectively, the sentiment is about how businesses are embracing ‘social media’ platforms and social interactions with customers, (think intelligent and continuous CRM) to enhance their entire business processes. 

From customer experience, through to internal marketing – ‘Enterprise 2.0’ is the description of a truly end-to-end digital experience.

Reading a recent case study about the impact of Enterprise 2.0 – the CEO of Burberry, Angela Ahrendts, when explaining their customer-centric vision, says it all really:

Carvill on Marketing

With so many ways to communicate in today’s world we really cannot be lazy when it comes to keeping in touch with prospects and customers. The trouble is many SME’s do not have regular communication channels set up or have the resources in place to keep on top of this kind of initiative and as a result continue operating ‘business as usual’.

But how important is it? Well just imagine this – one or more of your competitors might be communicating regularly with your clients keeping them abreast on how they can supply them, how they can help them and why they are a better option for them while you assume that your clients are happy with the service you are providing and then wham you have lost them. Not necessarily because of quality, price or customer support but simply because your competitor has done a better job of making them feel important.

The Sales Formula

Many of us will recall the smart snippet from the strict school teacher or austere Aunt; 'Two ears, two eyes and one mouth - so use them accordingly!'. And I have to say, in the world of social media, this couldn't be more applicable.

Just last week I met with a business who were very pround of the fact that they had acquired over 2000 followers on Twitter. When I enquired a little further into their social media activity, I was surprised to learn that not only were they not tracking their own brands and company name, but they weren't actually doing any 'active' listening at all. 

Apart from @mentions (where someone mentions your Twitter name directly and you are then alerted to this) - they were not 'listening' in. Therefore, the majority of their Twitter activity wasn't actually 'conversation' but rather just pushing out links.  

With conversational marketing, it's far better to respond than merely to be pushing out potentially irrelevant messaging. So many organisations push traditional promotional messages down these highly conversational social platforms. It can get to look a bit spammy - so heed the advice in this short video blog.

Carvill on Marketing

A top girls’ school is planning a “failure week” to teach pupils to embrace risk, build resilience and learn from their mistakes! The idea of the failure festival at Wimbledon High School, which is ranked 34th in The Sunday Times’s independent schools league table, is to help girls – and their parents - cope with pressure to succeed all the time, both academically and socially.

Apparently the emphasis will be on the value of ‘having a go’, rather than playing it safe and perhaps achieving less. The headmistress, Heather Hanbury, said she wanted to show “it is completely acceptable and completely normal not to succeed at times in life.”

Compete Or Get Beat!

The Libralato Engine, Anti-Business Culture & A Country Struggling To Make It

There’s a guy in Manchester who is trying to commercialise a radical type of engine.

Wow – what a crazy thing to be trying to do! Is he a crank?

Well, no, actually he’s not; although most people passionate about invention tend to be labelled cranks until and unless they have a decisive breakthrough – and only then do they become heroes. So, yes, perhaps he is – if that’s what it takes on the road to possibly becoming a hero.

The media is full of stories at the moment about anti-business sentiment, as our excessive hoards of over-paid and largely idle politicians vie to condemn bankers’ bonuses.

It’s an easy diversionary target for our pampered politicos at a time when swathes of their over-governed but under-led constituents experience real hardship.

But it’s the tip of an enterprise-chilling iceberg which goes much deeper, should any other of those of you who may have tried to commercialise a radical engine design recently will have experienced.

Funding Enterprise: freeing-up money to help grow great British businesses

 In my experience most business owners would not describe themselves as rain makers. I’m sure many business owners have from time to time wished they could outsource their marketing and selling to someone else, and let them get on with delivering their business service/product - i.e. the reason they started the business in the first place. However, the smaller the business the greater the need for every employee, to play their part in the business development.

The Effective Joined Up Networker

The one thing that is most common in holding people back in life is doubt.

Doubt is a form of negative thinking. These negative thoughts stem from past experiences of your own or others you know of, from your analytical brain trying to predict the future and your own belief system.

Doubt is a form of fear and as I have explained in a previous post, FEAR is an acronym for False Expectations Appearing Real. 

We all face doubt every day and most of the time it is running below the surface preventing us from taking the necessary action we are capable of.

It may creep in when you set yourself a new goal or when you do something you have not done before. We face these situations all the time so doubt really does have an active presence in our day to day lives.

Doubt doesn’t like sleep!

So how do the best performers cope with doubt? How do they overcome it?

Personal Excellence

Hosted business email is about more than just employees having access to work email wherever they are. Hosting business email in the cloud offers significant cost reductions and workflow improvements (with their own cost benefits) over running an on-site server.

Initial costs

The cost benefits of hosted business email are apparent right from the start. Rather than having to make a capital outlay for a physical server, and the office space to store it, as well as hiring a third party to install the server (or take time out of in-house IT staff to do so), hosted business email outsources installation costs to the hosting company.

Simple Online Marketing

Despite what marketing people passionately believe most people don’t think about brands, they just get on with their lives. The coffee they buy, the supermarket they go to and petrol station they visit happen almost by accident. In Britain today we are too busy to think through these everyday inconsequential purchases, focused on saving time, not forgetting something or rushing from place to place on a tight deadline. So do brands matter and if so why and how?  Consumer Choice

Let’s start with the basics, the consumer has choices, endless choices if they choose to use them, but in many everyday cases as in my examples above, the consumer sacrifices those choices for simple expedience.

Do you have a vision or are you just a dreamer?