As I continue on my journey with Kutenda, I’ve had to take my enterprise marketer blinders off. We speak to lots of small business people about making it easier to connect with prospects and customers using online marketing. Many of them don’t know the first thing about it, and are still spending money with Yellow Pages because it used to work. But do they care about social media?

No, and yes. Frankly, even with companies reaching out to them to engage them in social media — and even with the critical mass now on Twitter and Facebook — we get very few questions about whether the Kutenda Online Marketing Suite includes some social media (it doesn’t).  The vast majority of the people we speak with think social media is fun (if they think of it at all), but they are looking for a way to streamline sales automation and lead generation. Social media is not streamlined, it takes a commitment, people hours and effort to see results. Its not a cure-all for connecting with customers and prospects. As far as helping a small business be more methodical and automated with marketing, social media just doesn’t cut it.

The bottom line is that the small business market has been largely left out of the Internet marketing revolution, because of the knowledge gap — the education and training needed to really do a good job at online lead generation. The people who are good at it – the consultants and search marketing firms — simply can’t afford to serve smaller businesses, because the margins suck. That’s actually one of the reasons behind Kutenda, because we want to give small businesses the tools they need to be successful with online marketing, at a price point for the SMB market.

So does small business care about social media? Certainly not as much as big business does.