Good marketing can be the difference between the success and failure of a company. The need for good marketing information can be satisfied at one of the many marketing conferences taking place across the United States in 2015.

Summit Digital Marketing Conference
Location: Salt Lake City, UT
Dates: March 9 through 13, 2015

Digital marketing has become more prominent in recent years and the Summit has become the place where digital marketing experts make themselves available to business owners. For many years now, the Summit has been regarded as the one mandatory digital marketing conference that every business owner and marketing expert should attend.

Past Keynote Speakers Have Included:

• Robert Redford – Actor
• Yancey Strickler – Kickstarter
• Brad Brown – REI

Social Media Marketing World
Location: San Diego, CA
Dates: March 25 through 27, 2015

Social media has evolved over the years and plays a significant role in corporate marketing. At the Social Media Marketing World conference, marketing experts discuss new methods for using social media in expanding a company’s influence and customer base.

Past Keynote Speakers Have Included:

• Chris Brogan – Human Business Works
• Michael Hyatt – Author
• Jay Baer – Author

Content Marketing World
Location: Cleveland, OH
Dates: September 8 through 11, 2015

Internet content marketing is constantly changing and the annual Content Marketing World conference helps website owners and developers to keep up to date on the latest developments. Whether it is a debate about the value of good content or a discussion about Google’s latest changes, you will find it at this conference. Read more »

The amount of tech conferences in the United States has been growing for several years. In 2015, there will be a wide variety of tech conferences to choose from where you can meet new industry contacts, learn about the latest innovations and ask questions of the people making a difference in the tech community.

Fortune Brainstorm Tech 2015
Location: Aspen, CO
Dates: July 13 through 15, 2015

This is a conference that has continually brought together the brightest minds and most influential people in the tech community. From advice for tech entrepreneurs to the latest in business innovations, this conference is a mandatory event for tech professionals.

Some keynote speakers for past conferences have included:

• James Lee – JP Morgan & Chase Co
• Jim Breyer – Accel Partners
• Les Moonves – CBS Television

DeveloperWeek 2015
Location: San Francisco, CA
Dates: February 7 through 8, 2015

This is an annual tech event that regularly attracts over 4,000 attendees from around the world. It is a conference where tech job hunters can meet companies that are hiring and innovative technology developers can meet manufacturers for their latest ideas.

Keynote Speakers for 2015 Include:

• Doris Chen – Microsoft
• Brian Sullivan – Netflix
• Joshua Carr – IBM Read more »

Small businesses in the United States employ a large majority of American workers, which is just one of the reasons small business conferences in the United States are becoming more and more popular. Below you will find some of the top business conferences for SME’s for the coming year.

USASBE 2015

Location: Tampa, FL
Dates: January 22 through 25, 2015

The United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship holds its annual conference in Tampa, FL in 2015 and the organization looks to expand on the agenda from 2014. The group focuses on bringing together business innovators and small business owners who are looking to expand. This is also one of the more popular conferences for family-owned businesses as well.

Keynote Speakers for 2015 Include:

• Mary Jo Jackson
• David Rahn
• Jim Hart

Small Business Institute 2015 Conference
Location: St. Pete Beach, FL
Dates: February 12 through 14, 2015

This will be the 39th annual gathering of the members of the Small Business Institute and the goal this year will be to get more resources into the hands of small business owners. Some of the topics being covered are marketing, global entrepreneurship and accounting.

Past Keynote Speakers Include:

• William McDowell – East Carolina University
• Ron Cook – Rider University
• Nic Steele – Obsidian USA, LLC

America’s Small Business Summit 2015
Location: Washington, D.C.
Dates: June 8 through 10, 2015

The United States Chamber of Commerce puts on this annual event that brings together small business owners and some of the lawmakers who affect commerce. There are also speakers from the technology world, human resources and an array of speakers who can offer small business owners practical advice to grow their businesses.

Keynote Speakers in 2015 Include:

• Thomas Donohue – U.S. Chamber of Commerce
• Colin Powell – U.S. Military
• Bob Woodward – Journalist

Read more »

Networking is vital for any small or medium sized business. It provides business owners to build relationships and partnerships, as well as gain insights into best practices and emerging trends. Conferences are an ideal forum to learn about how to start or grow a business, as well as form new business relationships. The following are just some of the UK’s best small business conferences in 2015.

StartUp 2015

StartUp 2015 will bring together more than 500 aspiring and early stage entrepreneurs on 17th January at Somerset House in London. The free event includes workshops, drop-in sessions and networking opportunities, as well as keynote speeches from leading entrepreneurs and business experts. Speakers will include chef Skye Gyngell, social entrepreneur Melody Hossaini, Felipe Alviar-Baquero and Solomon Akhtar of Apprentice fame, and top entrepreneur Mary Portas. The conference is an opportunity to learn about how to get financing, form a company, build a brand, use social media, and more. Participants can also get feedback on their business ideas and get free advice from experts.

The Business Growth Show

The Business Growth Show will be staged at Edgbaston Cricket Ground in Birmingham on 12th March 2015. The free one day event is expected to attract thousands of businesses from across the UK. The national conference is an opportunity to get business advice, hear from industry speakers and experts, and get information about growing start-ups and SMEs.

Student Enterprise Conference

Organised in partnership with Santander and Liverpool John Moores University, the Student Enterprise Conference 2015 is the largest student enterprise conference in Europe. It is an initiative of NACUE, a membership organisation focused student entrepreneurship. The conference brings together students and graduates from across the UK to learn and network, as well as build entrepreneurial skills through practical workshops. The event will be staged from the 31st of January to the 1st of February 2015 at Liverpool John Moores University.

Elite Business Event National Conference and Exhibition

The 2015 Elite Business Event National Conference and Exhibition will be staged on the 18th and 19th of March at the Old Truman Brewery in Shoreditch, London. The event attracts more than 1,000 business owners, directors and professionals looking at how to create strategies that promote business growth. Organised by Elite Business Magazine, the free conference’s programme includes talks by professional speakers, thought leaders and industry experts. Topics look at barriers facing fast track start-ups and high growth small and medium sized businesses. Planned speakers include Jim Cregan, Shaa Wasmund, Richard Tyler, Derek Mills, Will King, Lara Morgan, Michelle Carvill, Ian Dormer, and Clive Rich.

The Great British Family Business

The Great British Family Business 2015 is a master class in family business. The event will be put on at One Great George Street in Westminster, London, on 19 March 2015. The programme features a wide range of speakers and topics related to family businesses, including a panel discussion with family firms. Scheduled speakers include Adrian Maxwell of cappuccino and espresso coffee machine maker Fracino, Derrick Potter of Potter Logistics, Christopher Nieper of clothing company David Nieper, Tony Fish of AMF Ventures, and Charlie Mullins of Pimlico Plumbers. Read more »

The Internet is continuing to change the way business is done and has truly transformed the nature of business in the country, giving even local companies the chance of a global presence on a level playing-field. Sites like Bizwiki can be a useful way for companies and non-profit organisations to provide information to local customers and obtain some free advertising, but can also provide a platform for companies to present themselves to a far wider audience.

The appearance of the Internet has brought about some wide-ranging changes to business practices and to the way consumers go about making their purchases. The scope of these changes is incredibly varied, so in this post we have summarised the key ways in which the Internet continues to transform business and the economy in the UK.

Opening up the possibility to participate in a truly global economy

According to historians, 5,000 years ago, three quarters of all trade and commerce took place within a 12-mile radius. As trains, steamships, and planes began to be used as part of the world’s distribution network, the possibility of reaching consumers on the other side of the world became more real.

However, the true global global commerce revolution did not appear until Internet technologies were applied to business. The development of e-commerce allows UK businesses to reach a potential customer base of millions of people, regardless of their size or location. In fact, e-commerce is currently Europe’s fastest-growing retail sub-sector, with the UK online market dominating the continent’s online sales. In 2013, online sales in the UK amounted to £38.8 billion, which represent a 16.8 per cent increase over the previous year.

Read more »

Since its launch in 2007, Bizwiki has been considered an important place for local businesses to be listed. This is not only for the traffic Bizwiki can drive to a business but also because Bizwiki provides business information to the ever popular Accessplace.com as well as several other local UK directories like TownPages.com and BritishServices.co.uk.

On yesterday’s Top UK Citation Sources for local businesses compiled by Smart Local, (click here) Bizwiki, Accessplace and TownPages.com take 3 of the top 30 slots.

We are of course grateful to the author of the list and honoured to be included, especially since it means we are keeping our place in the “top citation sources” lists for a fourth consecutive year.

In 2012 Nyagoslav Zhekov of NGS Marketing reviewed a number of published “top citation source” lists and assigned points to the sites based on how many times each was mentioned. Bizwiki.co.uk was ranked number 6 out of more than 30 UK local business sites. 

In 2011 Bizwiki was featured as an “extra-important” site on LocalVisibilitySystems’ Top UK Local Business Directories list.

In the same year both Bizwiki.co.uk and Accessplace.com appeared on Bright Local’s Top 50 UK Citation Sources list.

And in 2010, Mike Blumenthal featured a guest post by Myles Anderson which jointly listed both Bizwiki.co.uk and Accessplace.com as number 8 in the Top 10 UK online business directories.

Both sites also appeared on Cylex UK’s 2010 list of 28 Online Business Directories.

We are happy to have received these commendations, and more importantly hope that our users continue to find Bizwiki to be a useful resource when searching for any local companies, business and charities.

In an effort to streamline the editing of records on Bizwiki and ensure that vital changes are actioned and go through to the live site fast, we are making some major changes to how records are submitted and reviewed.

The “Add / Edit a Record” functionality will soon be consolidated into the ‘Report an Error’ feature. This has the benefit to users of not requiring them to register for an account and log in to be able to request a fix or report an error with an existing business record, and will streamline the processing of records by editors by having only the important fixes come through to them.

We have had a great deal of success in adding and compiling business records using our fine-tuned Bizwiki Bot Spider, and new company records will be added to the site periodically at regular intervals. We will also be adding additional depth to existing records using the same technology, with human editors getting involved where required.

The result of this should be fewer features immediately available to users to add and edit records on the site, but a faster response rate to any required fixes and edits to existing records. We also anticipate the process of requesting important changes both being made easier for visitors, who will now be able to do so without any registration being required, and a reduced workload on our editors who put so much effort in to staying on top of it all.

This is a step in the evolution of the Bizwiki project, so while some users may miss some of the functionality that is being retired we hope that you will enjoy the faster response times, periodic automatic updates, and continue to use and benefit from the site.

The latest version of Bizwiki has just gone live –and it’s a record breaker!

This new update to the site was a colossal undertaking, combining updates submitted by many of the site’s users and manual changes made by the editorial team over the last few months with a huge update across all categories of business using the Bizwikibot spider. The result is not just more up-to-date company records, but a greater depth and breadth of business information is now available to our site’s users than ever.

A grand total of 4,936,758 existing businesses on Bizwiki have had their information edited and updated. This includes manually added content, address changes, telephone and contact detail updates and map location changes.

A remarkable 5,068,071 new businesses have been added to Bizwiki, in many cases completely with in-depth information. This means that the site is now larger and covers the country more comprehensively than ever.

1,367,582 of the old businesses on the site have been marked as obsolete and deleted. This includes businesses that have closed down over during the last couple of tumultuous years, but also companies that have transformed, been renamed or relaunched in new business categories.

There have been a number of dedicated people involved in these updates, changes and the reorganisation over the last six months, but the lion’s share of the credit has to go to our Chief Technical Architect Keith Hinde, who has really pulled out all the stops to make this happen.

And of course, we’d like to say a special thank you to all the many visitors who have helped by adding, editing and increasing the amount of useful information on the site. That especially applies to business owners and representatives who have pitched in to help improve the online profile of their own companies – nobody knows your business better than you, and on the behalf of the Bizwiki team I’d like to thank you for sharing your knowledge with all our site’s users.

Thanks!

Work is underway on a huge update of business records across the site.

This is a giant project involving changes and additions across hundreds of categories of business and hundreds of thousands of companies, and involves manually submitted entries added by our users and editors, updates from databases and detailed information gathered by our BizwikiBot spider.

We expect to have the new version rolled out across the site soon, and hope that it will help Bizwiki be an ever more useful resource for our many visitors and users.

Watch this space for more information!

We are pleased to announce a huge update of Bizwiki UK’s index of companies and information has been completed. Consisting of tens of thousands of user-edited records and new additions that have been hand-processed by our editorial team and more than quarter of a million records being updated or having additional information added to them by our BizwikBot spider, this is a major update and should result in even better depth of information across the site.

There is now the grand total of 1,412,330 businesses in the Bizwiki UK database, and thanks to the submissions our registered users and visitors are making this is a number that continues to grow.

A large part of the credit for the quality and depth of information in this update goes to Bizwiki’s Chief Technical Architect, Keith Hinde, who has been slaving away on this piece of work for more than half a year. On behalf of the site’s editors and users, thanks for your tireless efforts!

Thanks also to the  many users and editors who have continued to add high-quality and detailed information about the companies they know, helping make Bizwiki a useful and popular business resource for all our visitors.