Small Business Summit in NYC

I attended the Small Business Summit in NY yesterday. Met many great people and had an opportunity to be on a Panel with Michael Shultz (Microsoft) and Harry Brooks (Network Solutions) moderated by Brent Leary (CRM Essentials and Business Technology Radio). I Had a chance to express some of my thoughts about how web-based social media and collaboration tools create opportunities for people to "keep and nurture loyal customers" (that was the official title - though we covered a wider set of concepts). Also got some great reminders about what small business focus on every day - and in particular, the importance of the search and ads side of the web. That stuff is highest on the small businesses "need to know, need to improve" list in most cases. More coverage of the conference can be found here.

There were a couple of points made during and after our panel which probably warrant more instruction and link or two for those of you who couldn't understand my babbling and happen to find me here... Here's two I can think of - but ping me here if there were others.

Create a Form on Google Docs
I suggested that you "Poll your customers and get their opinions directly and immediately [into a spreadsheet]"... Here's a link to the Google Docs Help Center on that topic. I'm also going to post a quick how-to here on my blog soon, since so many people have asked me for detailed instructions and a sample. (look for that soon)
[Update Feb 5: Here's that "Creating Forms" web tip post]

Use YouTube to collect videos about your product or service
I mentioned how you can create a channel on YouTube to collect videos about a specific topic, which could be useful for prospective customers, particularly when current customers have created those videos. We did that on the Google Docs team - we created the Google Docs Community channel. It's good for customers, for discovery and for the video creators who want more views/exposure.