We haven’t forgotten about small businesses – we love the passion and drive that small business owners and employees have for taking on challenges and working towards their goals. We have a rich history with SMB’s. In fact, we recently launched the Better Business Hub in the United Kingdom designed exclusively for small businesses looking to improve their mobility and use of social media.

BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express was a revolutionary product that helped businesses get up and running with corporate email and manage BlackBerry smartphones – all for free.

For those businesses using BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express to manage BlackBerry smartphones, we’ll be continuing to support you and to support BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express with updates through to 2015; that’s a promise. But, the mobile landscape is changing – and we’ve heard that straight from our customers.

The Need for Multi-platform Management

Particularly if a Bring Your Own Device model is being adopted, as is the case in many small businesses, you’re likely beginning to see multiple devices being brought into the workplace. Tablets, BlackBerry, iOS and Android devices, and all manner of personally preferred mobile ware are making appearances that pose challenges to centralized management and connectivity to corporate email services.

The Addition of ActiveSync Functionality for BlackBerry 10 Devices

We’ve worked to help keep you prepared to tackle this changing mobile landscape in two particular ways. First, we’ve adopted Microsoft® ActiveSync protocols to allow connectivity of BlackBerry 10 smartphones and BlackBerry PlayBook tablets straight into your mail servers at no cost. No extra servers or software required. And, you get to manage the devices using the built-in ActiveSync policies. From my perspective, this actually makes things much easier.

Is ActiveSync with BlackBerry 10 secure? We’ve answered that question in a recent blog post from our Senior Director of Enterprise Product Management.

Say Goodbye to Server Licensing Costs

For those looking to step up their mobility management game and take on multi-platform smartphones and tablets, BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, launched this week, is the evolution of our enterprise mobility management innovation. Our portfolio of management products has been streamlined, and efforts poured into providing free and direct connectivity with ActiveSync, and the enterprise server option for staying on top of a diverse mobile landscape. To make it easier for our customers to adopt BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, we have removed the server component of the licensing and moved to a device license only model. BES 10 device licenses are very cost effective – only $99 USD per device with bulk discounts.

At the end of the day…

You have options. Your end users can connect their BlackBerry 10 devices either directly (for free) using ActiveSync or using BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 for enhanced management capabilities and behind the firewall application access without expensive VPN infrastructure. Try out BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 today at: http://www.blackberry.com/bes10

We’ve streamlined and consolidated our various management products into a solution set that has the capability to meet the needs of small and large businesses alike, with a strong focus on the changing mobile landscape and helping you to address future challenges. Both RIM and our customers are adapting, innovating, and moving forward.

Communication is crucial. We welcome your questions on these topics, as we know that they’re a concern for you. Share your thoughts in the comments below.

With the explosion of social media activity over the past few years, it has never been easier for businesses to get online, engage, and interact with their customers. From the rise of Twitter® and their 140 million active users to Facebook® now having over 1 billion users globally, the opportunity to connect and engage with prospects and customers in real-time makes social networking a key priority for many businesses.

To help businesses get started and get the right practical help, we’re pleased to announce the launch of our new Better Business Hub brought to you by BlackBerry®. It’s designed to spark inspiration and provide practical advice for helping small business professionals do better business and develop their own social media strategy. We think small businesses need the straight facts in order to maximize social media for their work. We’ll be packing the Hub full of best practice articles, videos, and case studies dealing with mobile social networking, social media, and business relationships.

With so many social networks available, the question many small business owners are now asking themselves is how do they decide which social networks to adopt, and how they should go about developing their company’s profile? To kick things off in the first of our video series, we caught up with Suzy Lloyd, Senior Manager for Social Media at BlackBerry, who has put together some top tips to describe what to consider when starting your business journey on social media.

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

Is your organization looking to leverage social media for business? What are your top tips for integrating social media in your business? Share in the comments below.

As you may be aware, the 2012 SMB Influencer program is in full swing for its second year running. Similar to last year, we have the privilege of sponsoring the initiative and working with Anita Campbell and Ramon Ray to remain active in the small and medium business community. The nomination and voting period for the top 100 SMB influencers of 2012 is now over (and the winners have been announced!), but the real fun is about to begin with the awards gala being held in New York City on October 17th.

The event serves to honor the SMB champions for their contributions to the community, but also represents a fantastic networking opportunity. This year it’s being held in the Javits Center (Hall 1A) from 5:30pm to 9pm. Check out the details below and grab your ticket today:

October 17, 2012 at 5:30pm
Javits Center, Hall 1A, New York City

Our own Bryan Lee, Sr. Director in our B2B & IT channel sales group at Research In Motion® (RIM®), will be helping with the awards and discussing mobility in business at the gala. I’ll be there too to capture all of the action, so stay tuned on the Inside BlackBerry® for Business Blog to see a recap after the event!

BlackBerry Solutions for Small Businesses

The SMB community holds so much enthusiasm and energy, and we love to be involved to help mobilize workers and keep business owners completely connected wherever they may be. It can be challenging to keep track of all of the details and to manage and unify mobile devices within a small organization. We’ve got a few great tools that can help:

BlackBerry smartphones and BlackBerry PlayBook tablets

When it comes to the device in your hand, it’s important that you have access to information, contacts, email, BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™), and a ton of fantastic business apps that can help keep you on top of your work and available to colleagues and customers. When your smartphone works together with your BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet, BlackBerry devices become the ultimate productivity and communications tool at work and at home.

BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express

There comes a point in time during the growth of a business where it’s important to begin unifying and managing the mobile devices being used for work. For businesses using BlackBerry® 5, BlackBerry® 6, and BlackBerry® 7 OS smartphones, BlackBerry® Enterprise Server Express is a fantastic (and free) option for connecting devices to your mail server, utilizing security controls, remotely protecting devices, and much more.

BlackBerry Mobile Fusion

Many small businesses use a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategy to help cut costs. When you have a mix of BlackBerry, iOS, and Android™ devices at work in your business, managing all of them doesn’t need to be a challenge. BlackBerry® Mobile Fusion allows you to extend to these smartphones and tablets the security and management capabilities that RIM has offered for years. Deploying BlackBerry Mobile Fusion is also a step towards the upcoming BlackBerry® Enterprise Service 10, which will provide a complete and unified solution for enterprise mobility management. Find more BlackBerry solutions for SMBs here.

See you in New York!

Check out the wrap up of last year’s event to learn more. Register at www.smbinfluencer.com for this year’s event, and we’ll see you on the 17th.

Does your BlackBerry smartphone or BlackBerry PlayBook tablet help you in your small business? Share in the comments below.

Hi, I’m Dan Sloshberg, Regional Manager for Small Medium Business Marketing in Europe, Middle East and Africa. I work on helping to promote our BlackBerry® solutions for those who are looking to start or grow their business.

Following on from our last post on mobile social networking for SMBs, we’ve put together this great new video, showcasing some examples of how smart small business can use mobile social networking to connect and engage with their customers and find and attract new customers.

Starting or growing a business can be tough and a lot of hard work. Engaging on social networks from your smartphone or tablet is a powerful and efficient form of communicating and connecting with customers and prospects. If done right, not only can it be highly effective but is also a very low cost marketing strategy. See how you can use some simple social tactics to attract and keep more customers wherever your day takes you – and all from your BlackBerry smartphone.

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

Does your business use social networking to engage with customers? Share your tips and advice for using social networking on a smartphone or tablet in the comments below.

Sunday July 15th is the last day to submit nominations for the 2012 SMB Influencer Awards, so make sure you head over to www.smbinfluencer.com to get recognized! You can nominate yourself or your business, as well as any other business, app, solution, or individual that has positively influenced the North American SMB community. All you need to do is fill out a brief form, upload a photo or logo, and submit for review.

What are the Small Business Influencer Awards?

The SMB Influencer Awards seek to recognize top influencers in the small business market through a period of nominations, a panel of judges, and community input. The program is on its second year after a fantastic and successful debut in 2011.

Did you attend the #BBSMBchat Twitter chat?

On Monday, July 9th we held our second annual #BBSMBchat on Twitter® with hundreds of dedicated and enthusiastic small business owners and experts. The chat had record participation, coming close to 1,000 tweets published within the one-hour event. Our very own @BlackBerry4Biz played host, welcoming special guests Anita Campbell and Ramon Ray, co-founders of the SMB Influencer Awards.

Anita Campbell is the CEO of Small Business Trends, a news, tips, and advice site reaching over 4 million small business owners. Ramon Ray is an Editor and Technology Evangelist, as the founder of Small Biz Technology. We’re very excited to be working with both Anita and Ramon, and to seeing them this fall at the awards gala in New York City.

Learn More

For more information, head over to www.smbinfluencer.com, and keep an eye on the Inside BlackBerry for Business Blog as important dates approach and the program unfolds.

Are you a small business owner? We’d love to hear about how BlackBerry® solutions have helped you start and grow your business – share your story in the comments below!

This year, Research In Motion® (RIM®) sponsored the 2012 SMB 150 awards coordinated by SMB Nation. These are the second annual SMB 150 awards, which seek to recognize top performing small and medium-sized business technology partners based on both community voting and a panel of judges. The awards have come to a close and the winners have been announced on the SMB 150 website.

It’s been our pleasure to work and partner with small business communities to solve challenges around mobility, and to help businesses grow and succeed. Last Wednesday, Bryan Lee, Senior Director, Enterprise Accounts and I attended the awards gala for the 2012 SMB 150 awards and we were very excited to meet this year’s winners, including international winners who traveled all the way from Brazil, the U.K. and Australia to receive their awards. We enjoyed chatting with the winners and attendees in person to explore their unique perspectives on small business and technology. My most memorable moment of the evening was when one of the award recipients’ accepted his award from a remote location via BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet video conference.

My personal favorite tool that we’ve put together is the SmartBuilder for BlackBerry. SmartBuilder pieces together a personalized mobile solution set based on your business needs, which you can input by taking a short survey within the tool. We’ve had fantastic feedback and are often working to improve our offerings for the SMB community, so please share what the specific challenges and successes have been for your business this year!

Also worth taking a look at in order to take your SMB to the next level are the following:

• BlackBerry® Enterprise Server Express (free)
• BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablets to save costs and enable a mobile office
• BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™) for both internal communication and Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• BlackBerry® Business Cloud Services to help integrate your Microsoft® Office 365 service and your BlackBerry smartphones

How has your SMB leveraged BlackBerry smartphones, tablets, or services to help grow your business and handle communication, collaboration, or CRM? Share in the comments below!

For entrepreneurs who start a new business, one of the keys to success is finding the right channel for selling products. For Windy Dana, who designs, manufactures and sells her own jewelry in Indonesia, that channel is BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™).

“In Jakarta, BlackBerry® smartphones are a ‘vital’ communications tool,” said Dana, the founder and owner of the popular blogstore, Antyk Butyk. “When I contact people in Indonesia, they always ask me for my BlackBerry PIN rather than for my phone number or email address. Everyone here uses BBM.”

Dana moved back to Indonesia from Australia, where she got a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s degree in multimedia studies, and she quickly learned that road traffic in Jakarta was so busy and slow that it made selling jewelry in person difficult. So, she started marketing her jewelry through BBM, using the app’s Groups feature.

BBM is an easy-to-use, chat-style app that makes free-flowing conversations between multiple users—up to 30 per group—easy and fast in near real-time. In addition, it allows users to send pictures, broadcast messages and record voice notes, making it easy for Dana to share her designs and products with her BBM Groups within seconds.

“What’s great about BBM Groups is that everyone in the group can see the information in real-time and answer questions, so the group becomes a self-running community where other members help eachother out by answering questions and sharing information, which makes my job much easier.”

For Dana, BBM isn’t just a communications tool – it’s also a valuable business and operational tool. Dana uses her BlackBerry smartphone and BBM as the centerpieces of her business, using them for client and internal communication, marketing, lead generation and even customer service.

“BBM helps me to understand what my customers want, which I can see either by following the group discussions in BBM or by communicating directly with them for customer service.”
BBM is also very cost-effective for Dana’s business, since it uses very little data. She relies almost exclusively on her data plan and makes almost no use of voicemail, which makes her communications bills predictable and keeps them low.

This comes in especially handy when Dana organizes sales events, also known as “bazaars”, to showcase and sell her jewelry. She uses her BlackBerry smartphone to capture high-quality photos and videos and shares them with customers in a matter of seconds, attaching them to invitations to attend her bazaars.

And since BBM allows group members to sync their calendars with each other and send calendar invitations, Dana can keep her group members up to date and remind them of upcoming bazaars.
With the help of BBM and the BBM Group functionality, Dana has grown her Antyk Butyk business, and now employs five employees in total. Her employees help her with the production and delivery of the jewelry but Dana remains the one who sells and markets the products.

“I still design the jewelry myself and my staff helps me to make the quantity that our customers request. Marketing and communication with customers is still handled only by me.”

Dana’s business now is thriving and she is very thankful that BBM provides her with the tools she needs to run her business. She concluded: “Without BBM, I might already be out of business.”

Do you use BBM for business? Share in the comments below.

Marcy, our SMB expert and author of the “SMB Cloud Series” (be sure to check out her posts on Cloud Storage, The Mobile Web, and Accounting in the Cloud – stay tuned for more in the series!) steered the ship on the below video outlining how BlackBerry can help SMB’s stay connected to the social web.

[YouTube link for mobile viewing]

I won’t get into pages and pages of how businesses can use social media to drive value, but know that there is activity in the social media space around customer relationship management, content and engagement for brand awareness, a wide reach for communication, customer service and support, recruitment, and market insights for uses like product or service development (to name a few). Feel free to check out a whitepaper on Mobile Social Networking via Computerworld.

A Million Things to Do

Running a small or medium sized business clearly means taking on a variety of roles as an individual, and you may not yet be at the point where you can bring in a few social media managers, community managers, copywriters, and platform experts. For you (or whoever is heading up your social initiatives), staying connected and keeping tabs on multiple social channels can prove to be challenging and time-consuming. This is where we can help! BlackBerry software and operating systems on smartphones and tablets have become progressively social-friendly, and are now at the point where they can serve as your hub of communications to not only monitor, but also actively engage in social activities in pursuit of your business goals.

Consolidate your social media management into one place and take it with you on the go with social applications, including BlackBerry Social Feeds and a unified inbox, available for BlackBerry devices. Don’t forget to stay looped into our very own BlackBerry social communities too!

How does your business use social media? Share in the comments below.

I asked Brent a few questions about some of the things he is currently working on, namely the “Getting Down to Social Business” event he is hosting in Atlanta on February 3rd, 2012, as well as his annually published top “CRM-ish” list.

It seems as if there is a real merger between mobile, CRM and social media, especially for small businesses. Can you comment on how small businesses can take advantage of this to better market themselves and be responsive to their customers?

From a small business perspective, the integration of social media, smart mobile devices and CRM tools has been one of the most important developments of the last decade. One of the main competitive advantages that smaller companies have is their flexibility and nimbleness, which allows them to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. And as the integration of social/mobile and CRM accelerates, small businesses can leverage them to be even timelier in their response to current conditions. In fact, these tools coming together provide opportunities to create new business models and interaction points for better customer experiences – in a fraction of the time and cost than even just a few years ago. So it is truly critical for small businesses to embrace the combination of these services in order to find and keep more customers.

This means using apps on your BlackBerry® devices to stay connected with customers on social networks like Twitter® and Facebook®, as well as using BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™). But now, it also means creating content that looks great on BlackBerry smartphones and BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablets because more of their personal and business interactions are taking place there. Just remember: If you want to have customers eating out of the palm of your hand, you have to figure out how to get into the palm of their hand first.

Why would a business benefit from attending the “Getting Down to Social Business” event you are hosting in Atlanta on February 3rd, 2012? Will any materials from that event be made available in a format accessible for those that couldn’t be there in person?

The focus of the event is on the need for companies to transition their approach to “social” away from a narrow, reactionary set of disconnected activities, to a full-fledged business culture strategically aligned to build long-lasting relationships with today’s empowered customer. So instead of thinking of social media as a “Hail Mary” pass or a silver bullet, we’ll be looking at how companies can integrate it throughout the business to create a consistent game plan for creating exceptional customer experiences that keep them around longer over time.

We will be recording the event and making the sessions available to view online. We’ll also make presentations slides available – check out the event web site for details.

Can you explain what the CRM-ish list is and who should be looking for it?

Back before social tools and sites were around, traditional CRM tools focused on three areas: sales force automation, marketing automation, and customer service. The avenues for engaging customers and prospects were limited to few important interaction channels. But now with the rise of social media – and smart devices like the phones and tablets RIM offers – the number of ways to engage customers has skyrocketed. A host of new applications and services are being created to help companies manage the growing number of ways to listen to customers, analyze what you hear, and create content to respond to them. Many of these only address certain aspects of customer interaction and not all the traditional areas. And while these new services are not CRM in the traditional sense, they are definitely related to the areas of sales, marketing and service – which is why I call them CRM-ish.

The CRM-ish list will be comprised of companies creating applications and services helping small businesses to more effectively find, catch and keep customers today. Some companies on the list will be traditional CRM companies, and some will be the newer breed looking to provide help in one or two important areas. But I think any small business looking to understand what kinds of services are available to them – that are made specifically for them – would gain from checking out the list of companies and services that will be included.

Look for the CRM-Ish List to be announced in early March 2012.

Any last thoughts or suggestions that you want to leave the BlackBerry community with?

Now is really a great time to dig in and understand how to best take advantage of tools and services available today that can help you find, catch and keep good customers. But you have to make sure your company is ready from an organizational culture standpoint. It’s not enough to ask people to “like us” or “follow us” – we have to give them great reasons to do so. And that may mean needing to change how we approach them – not just the technology we use to interact with them, but also what we say and how we say it. Using new technology to deliver old messages won’t get you very far today, so it’s important to match social behavior with social tools to really connect with today’s customer.

Lastly, really explore how you can maximize the use of your BlackBerry devices. There are a good number of business apps in BlackBerry® App World™ that can help you be more productive, more social and more responsive to the needs of your customers. Many of these services are free or very low in cost, which makes it even more important to see how they can assist you in building great customer relationships today.

Thanks for joining me Brent! To our readers: how do you use your BlackBerry device for social CRM? Answer in the comments below.

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of heading down to New York City to attend the 2011 Small Business Influencer awards event run by Anita Campbell and Ramon Ray, along with dozens of SMBs and SMB influencers from all types of industries who were in attendance. It was truly inspiring to be in the midst of so much energy and enthusiasm for small business! We were pleased to sponsor the event and honored to have Alan Panezic, VP of Enterprise Product Management & Marketing for Research In Motion® (RIM®), be invited to speak and hand out the awards to all of the 100 SMB influencer champions. Check out the video above to see Ramon Ray, one of the event organizers, interview Alan on stage to discuss how mobility impacts the work of SMB’s.

Over the past few months, small business owners and entrepreneurs submitted 520 nominations and cast around 125,000 votes to decide the 100 top SMB influencers in North America. It was our honour to present all 100 of the champions with their choice of a BlackBerry smartphone with BlackBerry® 7 OS to further support their businesses.

Each champion had the opportunity to say a few words on what it means to be an influencer as they received their award, and the responses were both inspiring and insightful. Small and medium businesses truly drive our economies and serve as examples of dreaming big and being passionate about your work. We look forward to working with this community in the future, as well as continuing to help SMBs with mobile solutions. For more information about the event, the competition itself, and to view a list of the champions, head over to www.smbinfluencer.com. Also, be sure to check out this attendee Q&A video from the awards ceremony:

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

What have been the major influences on your small business? Share yours in the comments!