You’ll want to highlight the following passage. It will revolutionize the way you think about Advertising & Marketing. It’s a profound, transformational statement sure to rock your world.

There are NO rules in Advertising & Marketing.

Absorb that deeply into your subconscious.

There are laws, which vary from industry to industry, and state to state, even country to country. But there are no rules. If someone is telling you there are rules, run. They’re after your wallet.

There are guidelines, rules...

It’s been just a month since our last update on new Facebook features and they’ve already made more changes. While it’s really great that Facebook continues to improve, it can be a little hard to keep up with everything they are up to. In case you missed the updates, here’s an overview of the latest Facebook release and features and how they will impact your small business.

Facebook Replies

The Facebook replies feature is a simple change, but one of the best ones that I’ve seen in a long time. At...

According to Twitter, there are 400 million Tweets a day and 200 million active users. But to those not utilizing it, the question is often how or why would it help a business. As Twitter continues to be a main platform for social media, the objective of today’s blog is to educate you about some of the compelling small business uses of Twitter. To get started with an account, I would recommend spending some time on Twitter’s support page to learn how to use it and the important terms and policies...

As I think any small business owner will agree with – the customer is the most important component of any small business. Without loyal customers or clients or patients, no company can maintain a long-term successful business. But what makes successful businesses stand apart from the rest? How can you make sure your business is set up to win customers and keep them?

1. Evaluate Your Business

The first thing any business should do is evaluate what it is like to be a customer of your business. Do...

Every year on April 22 we recognize Earth Day as a time to think about the environment. The first official Earth Day was held in 1970 at a time when many consider the modern environmental movement to have begun. Events will be held around the world today to plant trees, clean up trash and recycle items that may have otherwise ended up in landfills.

Earth Day also marks the fifth anniversary of Berry’s Think Yellow Go Green recycling program. The program was developed to encourage residents...

The annual Think Yellow Go Green recycling campaign sponsored by Berry and Hawaiian Telcom Yellow Pages has launched in the Hawaiian Islands of Hawaii, Kauai, Lanai, Maui and Molokai. The recycling program is in its fifth year and is run in partnership with local schools. The schools and students on each island compete to see who can collect the most outdated phone directories for recycling.

Think Yellow Go Green keeps directories out of landfills while offering schools the opportunity to win...

If you've ever voted on American Idol or received special offers from Redbox on your mobile phone, then you're already familiar with short codes. Short codes are special telephone numbers that can be used to address SMS (text) and MMS (multimedia) messages. Often times you are instructed a to text a command word to the short code which is then handled by an automated program. This program can do things like record your votes, sign you up for special deals, or collect your donation to a charity.

N...

We’re very excited to have officially hit the one year mark with the Berry Blog. The blog was launched in April 2012 as a resource for small businesses to learn more about advertising. We know that the number of marketing options, ranging from print solutions such as Yellow Pages advertising to digital solutions including SEM and SEO, can be overwhelming. We hope that the Berry Blog has become a trusted resource to help you stay up-to-date on how to most effectively promote your business. In...

CRM Associates has once again conducted their study of year‐over‐year print Yellow Pages call volumes. The study is based on over 35,000 ads that remained the same size in the same heading from 2011 to 2012. The analysis found that on average, advertisers received an increase of 8% in the number of calls received. This follows the trend in increased calls that has been seen since 2009. While calls increased overall in 2012, they were especially strong in smaller markets. Only markets with...

YP.com publishes a great Local Insights digital report each quarter that is full of valuable stats on how consumers are searching for small businesses across the YP.com network. The report is focused on identifying emerging trends in local advertising by analyzing YP.com's vast search database.

The quarterly report highlights the performance of the YP.com ad network, top search categories, top growth categories, local search by U.S. geography and detailed search data for featured...

Yesterday we launched our fifth-annual Think Yellow Go Green recycling campaign in Lincoln, NE. Berry is the publisher of the Windstream Yellow Pages in Lincoln and encourages all residents to recycle their outdated directories. Directories can be recycled from April 4 through May 2 and full details can be found at ThinkYellowGoGreen.com.

In addition to directory drop-off, Berry partners with the Cornhusker Council Boy Scouts for door-to-door directory collection in many neighborhoods. Faculty...

How many new daily deal sites have you seen this week? Chances are the numbers are down considerably from this time last year. There were weeks when I’d hear about two or three new sites – some local, some national, some vertically focused – but the pace of start-ups has slowed to a trickle. The reasons are fairly obvious, but let’s take a look.

The term “deal fatigue” is now not only fairly well known, but it’s also easily defined by most consumers. There are just too many offers coming...

We’ve come to expect that just as soon as we get used to Facebook’s newest features and layout that there will be changes coming. This has been a busy year so far for Facebook as they’ve announced several changes that are in the works. We want to make sure you stay in the loop, so here’s a summary of the changes and what they mean for your small business marketing plans.

News Feed Gets a Makeover

Facebook’s biggest announcement this month was the new look for its news feed that it plans to begin...

There is no more enduring or powerful source of new business than referral. Let me say it again. As a business you simply cannot have a more motivated prospect arrive at your doorstep than someone sent there by a raving fan. Business people know this, but it’s surprising how inconsistently they act in deliberate ways to nurture and develop referrals. I’ll get to the basic things all businesses should do to promote referrals in a bit. With all this talk about reviews though, it probably makes...

Bee, bee bumble bee, I see something you don’t see and the image is ... all about your business. 

In today’s culture consumers expect visual communication and therefore small- and medium-sized businesses must follow suit. With the announcement last week of the release of the new look for Facebook Timeline, users will have the option to filter and see only photos from friends and pages they like. Visual marketing is more important now than ever before.

Wikipedia refers to the concept of “visual...

Courtesy of InternetServiceProviders.org, the following graphic is a not-so-subtle reminder that the web is an enormous universe that dominates personal interaction and makes businesses hum. We all know it is big, but when quantified like this, it is mind-boggling. Here are a few noteworthy stats of what is occurring right now on the Internet.

• 1,622 tweets per second
• 694,445 Google searches per minute
• 99 years worth of YouTube videos posted each day

Specifically, when looking at implications for...

Let’s say that you decide to take up a new sport as an adult. Your goal is not just to “get in shape” but to actually get good enough to be competitive. You sign up for classes, make gains, get better, get more enthusiastic and then one day you start hitting a wall. Instead of moving forward, learning new skills and improving, you find yourself having to almost re-learn the most basic things you learned in your first lessons and losing, pretty regularly, to others in your class that you used to...

As social beings, we like to talk. As a small business owner, you would like to stay in business, and to do so, you'll need to make our chatty nature work to your advantage. You want your customers talking for you, and one of the best places to do that is on the internet. Below are some ways you can get people talking.

What's Your Story? - People love a good story, and you should be telling yours. You probably won't get much traction from telling people how you started your business, as...

It has become popular to refer to the Yellow Pages as a relic of the past, but do you know the facts? In this three part series we’ll de-bunk three commons myths about the Yellow Pages.

Myth #1 – Consumers Only Use the Internet to Find Local Businesses

Myth #2  – Only “Older People” use the Yellow Pages

Myth #3 – Yellow Pages Advertising Won’t Make Your Phone Ring

Given the common misconception that very few people use the Yellow Pages, it’s easy to understand why a small business owner might...

Hawaiian Telcom Yellow Pages and Berry kicked off our annual Think Yellow, Go Green directory recycling campaign on the island of Oahu in January. Each weekend during the month residents were encouraged to bring their outdated directories to various drop-off locations throughout the island for recycling. Members of the Lokahi Giving Project assisted with the recycling effort and staffed the drop-off locations.

“For the last several years, the success of Think Yellow, Go Green is a direct result of...