10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs

Model Legal Documents What Are The NVCA Model Venture Capital Financing Documents? A "template" set of model legal documents for venture capital investments put together by a group of leading venture capital attorneys. The model venture capital financing documents consist of: HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi Defining Clear Goals As a standard formula, ROI is pretty basic, ROI = (X - Y) / Y, where X is your final value and Y is your starting value. In other words, if you invest $5 and get back $20, your ROI is (20 - 5) / 5 = 3 times your initial investment. 10 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips Ross Kimbarovsky is the co-founder of crowdSPRING, a community of 43,000+ graphic designers that helps small businesses from around the world with graphic design needs. You can follow Ross on Twitter @rosskimbarovsky and @crowdSPRING. Capacity - especially to plan and execute effective marketing strategies - is a big challenge for every small business. In this post, I'll offer 10 suggestions for how small businesses can supercharge their marketing efforts by leveraging social media. For each suggestion, I will discuss a basic strategy - for those who simply want to get their toes wet, as well as an advanced strategy - for those who want to spend a bit more time and go a bit deeper in their social media marketing efforts.

20+ Free Press Release Distribution Sites Following up on the advertising toolbox, you also need to let the media (oh if only there was a site about web 2.0 and social networking where you could get covered...) know about your new venture. We've gathered 20+ sites that will help you with getting your press release out in the world for free. And don't forget to check out our post where you can suggest future toolbox topics! 24-7PressRelease.com - Free release distribution with ad-support 1888PressRelease.com - Free distribution, paid services gives you better placement and permanent archiving. ClickPress.com - Distributs to sites like Google News and Topix.net, Gold level will also get you to sites like LexisNexis.

Winners of the 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards by Josh Bernoff This will go live just as I'm announcing the winners at the Forrester Consumer Forum. These awards are based on business performance, and with 140+ entries this year, they represent truly outstanding social technology applications. If you want to learn how to do social technology applications with real results, please click through and read these entries -- you're sure to learn a lot. This is a long post, since it includes all 13 winners and the finalists in each category. HOW TO: Start Marketing on Facebook The Social Media 101 Series is supported by Global Strategic Management Institute. GSMI's Social Media Strategies Series are the leading educational events for organizations looking to advance their online capabilities. Learn more. It's no secret: U.S. consumers continue to spend increasing amounts of time on Facebook.

270+ Tools for Running a Business Online Last August we featured a post with more than 230 online apps for running your business. Since there are hundreds of new apps coming on the market every year, we figured it was time for an update. This year we came up with more than 270 additional apps. Some are completely new since last year, others might have been overlooked, and still others made significant improvements that gained them a spot on the list. Accounting, Billing, Invoicing, Estimating & Contracts

view-all-whitepapers I hold a dual role within Publicis Groupe, serving as both active Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at VivaKi — a global leader in digital advertising solutions — and Chair for leading digital agencies DigitasLBi and Razorfish. At VivaKi, my team and I focus on incubating new ideas, approaches, partnerships and models for the next generation of data-driven marketing, storytelling, brand rethinking and the next two billion customers (China and India). In order to achieve these goals, I am responsible for Emerging Opportunities and Partnerships for VivaKi/Publicis Groupe. Emerging Opportunities includes co-creating the future with startups (VivaKi Ventures), media companies (The Pool) and brands (Finch 15).

Optimizing Emotional Engagement In Web Design Through Metrics - Smashing Magazine Advertisement Think about what keeps you coming back to your favorite store, your favorite person or even your favorite website. It’s not just a mindless buy-go, hug-go or click-go relationship. 5 Free Annotation and Collaboration Tools for Web Projects This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Specific, contextual feedback is crucial for teams collaborating online, which is why it's so important to make receiving it as fast, efficient and easy as possible. Asking for feedback can be tedious and is often done out of context, for example, via e-mail. However there are numerous tools available to make the task of gathering and giving feedback for web projects simpler and swifter. This article is interested in those that focus on annotation and are available freely to the widest possible audience. Here are five of the best free tools to annotate and collaborate on the web.