The Mheda Journal

Earlier this week, the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council (SBE Council) released its 14^th annual Small Business Survival Index, rankings of each U.S. state according to their public policy climates for small business and entrepreneurship. South Dakota was named the most friendly state for small business and entrepreneurship, while New Jersey and the District of Columbia were the lowest-ranked.

The study’s author, Raymond J. Keating, says, “The Small Business Survival Index helps business owners and investors understand the public policy burdens placed on entrepreneurship and small business. These measures should matter to everyone because small businesses drive innovation, economic growth and job creation.”

The study accounts for factors such as taxes, regulatory costs, government spending, health care and energy costs, property rights, and more—36 such measures in all.  

The full report, “The Small Business Survival Index 2009: Ranking the Policy Environment for Entrepreneurship Across the Nation,” is available at http://www.sbecouncil.org. Read the SBE Council’s press release announcing the study for more details. The analysis also includes a cool interactive map. Green states are the top-ranked states, blue states are the middle-ranked states, and red states are the lowest-ranked.

MHEDA members in each state are probably aware of where they stand, but I think it’s interesting to see how each state compares to another.  I will be curious to see if, as the nation enters economic recovery, these rankings are an indicator of how recovery will occur. Is it correlated? Is it even relevant? Time will tell…but I found it interesting nonetheless.

A recent article on emarketer.com outlines, with plenty of helpful charts and graphs, the penetration of different social media within Inc. 500 companies. The results were pretty fascinating. According to the article, “Adoption and awareness continue to trend upward, with 91% of firms using at least one social media tool in 2009 and three-quarters describing as ‘very familiar’ with social networking.” More than one-half, 52%, of companies report using Twitter in 2009, a phenomenal growth rate.

The survey results discussed in the article suggest that new media like blogs, wikis, social networking, video and podcasting are not merely fads. These are trends and are here to stay. I’ll admit that I was one who was a holdout from getting too excited about sites like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter over the last few years. But the numbers are hard to ignore.

There are lots of MHEDA Members already using these social media sites already, but there are a lot more who aren’t. If you’re not there yet, you should be.

Read the emarketing.com article and charts in their entirety here.