In case you hadn't heard the news, the economy is not so hot at the moment. But what are you supposed to do about that? Unless you have a time machine on hand, you are for a while going to be peddling your wares to a consumer who has rarely been less open to purchasing them.

But even economic bad times present an opportunity that the savvy marketer can exploit, says the Brooks Group. The central insight of a recent blogpost there is that the economic downtimes can be a boon to the seller that figures out how to take advantage of conditions that, in a normal situation, are decided disadvantages. Think of the lean times as a sieve, or filter, in which companies with poor fundamentals that good times propped up may not make it to the other side, but in which those businesses that are run they way they should be will not just survive, but even prosper.

-Build on existing customer loyalty with gifts, exclusive offerings, and the like.. They may be buying less overall, but you can coax them to buy more from you.
-Advertise your expertise. If people have less money to spend, they'll want to be extra-sure that what money they do spend is being spent as wisely as possible.
-Double-down on reliability. Being a trustworthy partner in a business relationship--no matter the goods or services being exchanged--is of course always of paramount concern. But it's even more important during downturns, when customers will have absolutely minimal patience for delays, screw-ups, and the like.

Whether this is just a temporary downturn or a broader...let's just call it "r-word" (it rhymes with "secession"), there are always buyers. Will you be the one they buy from?

There was a fascinating article published yesterday on our partner site, Slate, about the new world of tech start-ups. Takeaway: innovations in open-source software, cloud computing, and other things that may be broadly grouped under the "Web 2.0" rubric have lowered overhead so dramatically that tech start-ups can survive for much longer, and in much less hospitable times, than ever before. But the article has lessons on lowering operating costs for just about any small business that relies heavily on computers--which is to say, for just about any small business.

The article begins by bemoaning the current situation, in which fewer larger companies are willing to buy start-ups--the author notes that Google's proposed buy-out of Digg just went south. But no matter: these small Silicon Valley start-ups can get by because their costs are ever moving towards zero due to vastly shrinking computing costs.

"But strangely, no one's panicking. Despite the doldrums, despite the fact that tech may not get out of this slump for several quarters, startups and venture capital executives are barely breaking a sweat. Here's why: In the last 18 months, new developments in open-source software and cloud computing have made it cheaper to run a Web company than anyone thought possible. Just a few years ago, startups had to build their own IT services and administrative software, and the costs would soar into the millions. Today, tech leaders can just rent prepackaged software from Microsoft. Operating costs have plunged so low that companies vested with just a few million bucks can easily afford to wait until the good times roll around once more."

But you don't have to be Digg, or some even smaller company that makes applications for Facebook or the iPhone, to get in on the cost-saving action. Cartier is now on MySpace; cheaper alternatives to Microsoft's software suite abound. What are you waiting for? Lower your expenses, improve your computing, and be a part of the Web 2.0 revolution.

Earlier this week, we noted "The Mojave Experiment," Microsoft's new, unorthodox ad campaign for its Vista operating system. We argued that while the campaign certainly breaks new ground in a refreshing way, in that it acknowledges the Vista-hating phenomenon head-on, it risks backfiring. Apparently, we were not alone.

"By glossing over real concerns of Vista users and reviewers, which led to the negative perception of the OS in the first place, Microsoft may be doing itself a disservice," writes a BetaNews author. "Instead of responding to legitimate problems, the Redmond company is essentially telling the world that complaints about Vista have no merit."

Popular tech blog Gizmodo notes that the people in the Mojave video are clearly not the tech-savviest (no offense!). "This is a video of people clueless about what Vista looks like in the first place," the blog says. "No Gizmodo readers would fall for such a ruse."

Even a PC World writer who called Mojave a "marketing home run" isn't convinced of the campaign's overall effectiveness, writing, "Good marketing is about appealing to people's emotions, which Mojave does through embarrassment. 'I was wrong' isn't the best way to sell a product, although it has some pull here because Vista perceptions are so negative."

In the end, how you feel about Mojave (the ad campaign) may depend on how you feel about Vista (the OS)--some hard "truth in advertising". If you're predisposed to like Vista, Mojave is pure, sweet vindication. But if you're predisposed to dislike Vista, Mojave is a distraction from the real issues, namely, all of Vista's problems. In the end, Mojave may end up being a brilliant sermon heard only by the choir.

One thing's for sure: in BetaNews's words, "Mojave is drawing a great deal of skepticism across the Web. Rather than the focus centering on message of the marketing campaign, attention is on the approach behind the campaign." That can't be exactly what Microsoft wants.

Sen. Barack Obama is set to break all fundraising records, and even Sen. John McCain looks likely to hold his own in that department. More broadly, the 2008 election features the first-ever African-American candidate and the first campaign with no sitting president or vice president running in 40 years. Excitement has not run this high in at least a generation. How can you capitalize on this quadrennial exercise in democracy?

Certainly media outlets big and small are hoping for a bump, the New York Times reports. So far, the only clear winners appear to be cable news channels as well as a few outliers such as Politico. The Web-based politics news source has harnessed a few new features of how people like to get their political news--constant updates; an emphasis on video; cultivated personalities for specific writers--in order to up its pageviews massively. The lesson seems to be: look not just at the fact that people are paying attention, but also how they are paying attention.

And also who is paying attention. An article at Entrepreneur.com shows small businesses that cater to the booming demographic of politically-minded people under 30 with clever, at times edgy political satire as well as hip, politically-oriented t-shirts.

But, you say, I don't make t-shirts or have a news Website. Probably true. But the presidential campaign is, in addition to a crucial event for the country, an all-encompassing pop cultural moment: a common point of reference that will touch and energize more people than just about anything else. Wherever there is something so big, so dominant, there is a business niche. It's your job to find yours.

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson called me yesterday to ask what he could do to provide unlimited financial security to my small business.

“Michael,” he said solemnly, “Cedarcrest Capital is too important to fail. How about we open up the Federal Reserve discount window to smooth over any rough patches you might have, like we did for Bear Stearns, and Fannie and Freddie, and like we'll probably do for other banks and brokerages? Would that be something you’d be interested in?” I was about to decline politely when…

…my alarm clock woke me up.

Instead, last week, I hosted two auditors from the New York State Department of Labor. It was a delightful visit, like having laser hair removed from my back, follicle by follicle. Or so I imagine. I’ll describe that in more detail in a future posting. (The auditors' visit, not laser hair removal.)

In the meantime, as a small business owner, I can’t help but be a little resentful when I read about what the government is doing to make up for massive financial errors made by large businesses. I’m bothered by the asymmetrical risk borne by large company owners versus that borne by small company owners. It’s one thing to see these “heads they win, tails I lose” types of bailouts, which may utilize my tax dollars but is an at least arguable course of action; it’s quite another when these bailouts exclude small companies from government care.

I’m not looking for government support, but I am looking for consistency of treatment for success or failure regardless of a company’s size. Is that so much to ask for?

You know an Internet meme has made it when it makes its way into print; and you know it is fully crystallized when the New York Times deems it worthy of its august pages. Please welcome Microsoft's Mojave Experiment, its unique and unliked ad campaign, to that club.

The Times weighs in today, and unsurprisingly, it focuses not on the campaign's efficacy--and certainly not on Vista itself--but rather on the (overwhelmingly negative) blogger and Internet reaction to the campaign. The ploy is “a clever test that demonstrates nothing,” Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield tells the paper.

The paper does give the pro-Mojave forces a chance to defend the campaign, with an officer at the branding firm that conducted the test calling it "a fair representation of the operating system."

Still, the article spends most of the time discussing the campaign, not Vista; and, where it does discuss Vista, it's mostly a rehashing of everyone's complaints.

It is getting ever-more difficult to argue that this is benefiting Microsoft and Vista. Pretty soon, the Mojave Experiment will likely be declared a failure.

Why do most companies struggle just to meet last year’s revenue numbers? Why do more than 500,000 U.S. businesses fail each year? Growth is a universal and perennial problem. Yet as central as growth usually is, rising energy prices and generally poor conditions have made it more essential and more difficult in 2008 than ever before.

Take manufacturing giant Proctor & Gamble, whose head of global supply, Keith Harrison, told the Financial Times in June: “It’s the toughest operating environment, clearly, that I’ve ever been in.” FT defined P&G’s situation in this eye-popping way: “P&G has forecast that its material and energy costs will increase by $2 billion in the fiscal year starting July 1.” In other words: P&G must either generate $2 billion more in revenue or cut $2 billion in costs just to stay even with this single line-item expense. That’s a mind-bogglingly steep challenge.

The central problem, which faces every business in the world today, is that no company is competing locally or nationally any more. Instead, your business, no matter its size or type, is now competing for products, people, technology, services, delivery, and finance with the businesses, mouths, governments, and cartels of other developed nations as well as powerful emerging economies.

Moreover, this new state of affairs is not a short-term technical correction, but an unprecedented, permanent shift. In the same issue of the FT, Robert Hormats and Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs International underscored burgeoning global demand: “Since 2001, the US share of world GDP fell from 34% to 28%,” they wrote, while the sum of Brazil, Russia, India and China’s GDP rose from 8% to 16%.

In sum: historic overhead structures are just that - history. They have been invalidated by sustained and unprecedented global demand for every commodity - from oil to rice to paper, from skilled labor to capital, from delivery to technology.

To overcome this destruction of your overhead structure your business must start growing immediately and grow at a much higher rate than any time in history.

If business leaders want and need to grow, why aren’t more businesses growing? There are three simple reasons:

1. Self-delusion – “This is just a temporary revenue problem – we’ll bounce back next month – surely next year will be better.”
2. Procrastination – “I’m going to create a growth plan next month – well, it’ll have to be next year because I’m just too busy now.”
3. Lack of know-how – “Truth is, and I hate to admit it, I simply don’t know how to get started – I need an easy-to-use blueprint for growth.”

If you need an easy-to-use and quick-to-implement strategic growth process, you’ve come to the right place.

These four steps, when defined in brief, insightful plain language statements, will enable you to kick-start your business’s growth:

1. WHO is my Core Customer?
2. WHAT is my Uncommon Offering:
3. HOW can I differentiate my business, so more customers will buy from me – not my competitors?
4. OWN IT! How can I use my imagination vs. my money to make my Uncommon Offering well known to my Core Customers with little or no investment in infrastructure or advertising?

Want the longer version? To learn more about creating the Growth Discovery Process for your business, read my book cover-to-cover. Click here now to order THE INSIDE ADVANTAGE, The Strategy That Unlocks the Hidden Growth in Your Business. (McGraw-Hill, November, 2007).

The new challenges your company faces may be daunting, but they’re also surmountable. The key is to find your Inside Advantage, and start growing your business.

Here's a cute, fun video from MSNBC on the licensing expo:

It is fascinating how the handbag maker, while fully standing behind the quality of his product, nonetheless knows that he needs a more marketable brand--and that's all slapping an Elvis picture on a bag is--in order to sell.

Also noteworthy how effective it seems this conference is for generating referrals and drumming up business.

We came across this paean to Gmail, Google's entirely-online email server, by a ReadWriteWeb columnist, and we can only second what he says about Gmail's Spam-stopping, search function (it is Google, after all!), and mobility. We'd add that its use of "conversations" rather than individual missives, its bare-bones simple template, and its Gchat instant-message software make it the email provider to be beat.

But Gmail's real value might be not the mail itself but the attendant Google software suite that accompanies it. You can have posts from your favorite blogs delivered to you via Google's great RSS reader (click here to get ours!). You can receive articles about your favorite company or celebrity via Google Alerts. And you can do your word processing on Google Docs, Google's increasingly formidable answer to Microsoft Office, which allows you to share documents and spreadsheets with anyone you choose (in fact, in a decidedly un-Microsoft-ian display of generosity and openness, you can even share Google Docs with non-Gmail users).

Google may be the most important soldier in the Web 2.0 revolution we wrote about last week. Gmail, Google Docs, and the like are classic ways to cloud compute--to access your emails, personal information, important documents, and the like from anywhere, anytime, and to give others access to some of them in turn. Google's software isn't perfect--until it gets word count and a variety of other basic features, its word processor will be no match for Word--but give it time.

Oh, and did we mention how it's all free, as well as completely, totally tech-idiot-proof? There goes some overhead costs, as well as hours of agita dealing with tech support. Owners of big businesses ought to be positively jealous at how disporportionately Google's offerings benefit small business owners.

So if you're not on Gmail, you may want to consider switching over. But regardless of whether it becomes your primary email address, you'll want to register a user name with Google at the very least so that you can begin to explore and take advantage of Google 2.0. (Oh, and bizboxonslate@gmail.com is taken.)

You want to pay your employees what they've earned, and you want to do it in accordance with all the relevant rules, of course. But does it have to be so difficult? For those born without the number-crunching gene, fortunately, there is software. We recently found out about Intuit's online application (yes, that's right, it's all done online--cloud computing anyone?).

How do you handle your payroll? Know of any other good helpers? Email us at bizboxonslate@gmail.com, or tell us in the comments.

After a week of writing about The Mojave Experiment, Microsoft's bizarre, unorthodox, probably unsuccessful ad campaign, we're done. Except to link to this article about it that appeared on our sister site Slate yesterday. There: done.

But what about Vista, the real, all-too-real operating system itself? This was the subject of the comments we received on our original post. "At the end of the day, Microsoft needs to examine how to make its operating systems more reliable and secure," wrote one commenter. "Those are the things that the marketplace wants, not another gewgaw that will demand a computer upgrade to operate properly." Another was more blunt: "Microsoft doesn't have a branding issue with Vista. The issue they have is that it's junk." (And as for the one who smelled conspiracy in our "glowing write-up": are you sure you actually read the post? "Glowing" is probably not the single best adjective.)

We want to hear from you. Many of the complaints surrounding Vista concern the ease (or, more materially, lack thereof) with which users can set it up and use it on the most basic level, with the ur-complaint being that it is well nigh impossible to link a Vista computer to a printer. (For a good laugh, see here.) Such tech-difficulty naturally hits small businesses harder than large ones, which are more likely to have legions of tech guys at everyone's beck and call.

Has this been your experience? To be blunt about it: are small business owners best off upgrading to Vista, or staying put? Or should they be making the move to that other company--you know, the one with the apple logo?

Sharon McLoone, the small business blogger at our sister site Washingtonpost.com, has a great post today on this survey just released by the National Association for the Self-Employed. The survey's finding? The recent streak of sky-high energy costs have adversely affected most very small businesses--a striking 95% of their respondents, in fact.

Small business owners pointed specifically to the costs of transportation related to their jobs as the main way in which energy prices are affecting them. But as McLoone points out, citing the testimony of a Virginia florist, it is also affecting owners of businesses that involve delivering goods as well as businesses who rely upon the delivery of goods--so we're talking pretty much about everyone here.

Not to be too obsessed with our own hobbyhorses, but...you know what cuts down on transportation costs? Cloud computing. Every day that you or any one of your employees is working from home is a day you're not spending money on gas to commute, electricity to turn on the lights and the air conditioning, and Lord knows what else. Just sayin'.

Times small business columnist Paul Brown turned in another great piece yesterday, this time on how to hold meetings. And his advice should be cheering to owners and employees alike: Step one is to try not to!

Before calling the meeting, ask yourself a number of questions to determine whether the meeting truly is necessary.
-Do you know exactly, if broadly, want you want the meeting to produce?
-Is the meeting likely to generate a decision? (You'll frequently find that not only is it not, but that it is in fact guaranteed not to!)
-Does the benefit of holding the meeting outweigh the costs in terms of lost work-time, whatever money is needed for it, and--let's face it--the blow to morale?
-Is the meeting being held for a specific occasion, or has it become such a regular occurence its very regularity is more or less the meeting's justification at this point?

That's a nice filter. But every once in a while, an occasion will arise in which a meeting is called for--so call one. And do the following:
-Set a specific theme. Just as you've established beforehand what the meeting is supposed to produce, make sure everything in the meeting is geared towards that objective. And don't keep it a secret: let the participants know exactly why they are there. Don't be shy, and don't be afraid to be explicit in explaining this.
-Have a liberal policy on participants' coming late/leaving early. You otherwise want employees who are self-starters and have something of an independent streak. There's no sense discouraging such behavior with rigid start- and end-times.
-You are invited; your phone and computer are not. Have them turn 'em off. Period. (Yes, this means you have to turn yours off too.)
-Take notes and revisit them. Not you literally; and your minutes need not be formal. But there should be a fairly detailed record of the proceedings, with an emphasis on their content, so that you can follow up on what was discussed.

Less and more useful meetings: everyone should be able to get behind that goal.

We've been such cloud computing and Google triumphalists recently that the interests of fairness behoove us to supply a counter-example. Gizmodo runs the positively Kafka-esque story of a Google customer named Nick--a customer who, unlike most, has actually paid Google (for extra space; at a basic level, Google's online software really does tend to be free)--and who one day found himself (shudder!) locked out of his Google account!!!

"When he emailed Google to find out what in the hell was going on, he got this less-than-promising reply:

'Thank you for your report. We’ve completed our investigation. Because our investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very seriously. For this reason, we’re unable to reveal any further information about this account.'"

This is like The Shining-scary, we know.

The story did not have a sad ending: Nick haggled and emailed, and eventually got his account back and all his information along with it. Nor do we think that the story's moral is not that cloud computing is a poor idea, nor that Google--whose famed motto is "Don't be evil"--is bad.

But maybe this chilling tale is a sign that important stuff is still, even in 2008, very much worth backing up in some indestructible, physical location (even if it's an external hard drive kept somewhere exceptionally safe). And if something bad happens with your cloud-computied information, well then, to quote from another motto: "Don't panic".