Yesterday marked the final day of Social Media Examiner's 2012 Social Media Success Summit - the annual three week firehose blast of the latest social media practices and content that many in the industry rely on to maintain their proficiency in all things social. If you're looking to stay on top of your social media game, I highly recommend the event, and while you count the days until next year's summit you can find all manner of good information here.

I've seen the data regarding small and medium sized businesses' marketing budgets and for businesses with under 25 employees it's pretty limited - between 55 and 62%, depending on which survey results you look at, of the companies surveyed indicate they spend less than $2,000 annually. What I've been hearing lately in conversations with a wide variety of business owners is that they know their budgets are small and ideally they would like to increase them but don't see a clear pathway in which to do it.

The Four Stages of Competence is a learning model attributed to Noel Burch at Gordon Training International in the early 70's. The basic premise is that as a person attempts to learn a new skill, they progress through each of the four stages prior to attaining some level of mastery of the skill. I first encountered this model in a sales training class for a marketing company I worked for in the late 80's and I remember thinking it had a pretty strong correlation to the level of awareness our prospect base had of the services and solutions we offered. That awareness, or lack thereof, extended to prospects' ability to objectively assess the root causes that made them solid candidates for our services.

Everyone has that local restaurant which serves up a whopping, all-you-can-eat buffet that, at or about the mid-way point of the meal, causes you to seriously reconsider the load you put on your plate. I'm talking about that button-popping, bench-splitting fully satiated point where even though your eyes are seriously scanning the dessert section your brain and stomach are in four-alarm overload mode. I think we've all been there at some point in our lives.

 It seems obvious, but one of the most overlooked aspects of achieving inbound marketing success is to have your website set up in a way where it serves as the central hub - the foundation - for all your marketing activities. For many businesses, the creation and launching of their site was most likely an exhaustive, time-consuming and expensive endeavor. For others, they may have had minor involvement because they opted to have a contracted resource build it using a basic, one-size-fits-all template.