SBSC and the Small Business Summit

Just under five months ago, I had the pleasure of standing in front of a full house audience in our Kodiak room here at the Microsoft Conference Center during the keynote address of SMB Nation and announce to everyone that we were working on a way to allow SBSC Partners to show the Small Business Summit directly from their websites. The feedback since then has been amazing and now here we are, just days away from the kickoff of the Small Business Summit on Monday, and I wanted to let you know about even more ways that SBSC is being woven into and talked about through the Summit.

1) Small Business Center – This is the main website for Microsoft small business customers and also where we house the information and a lot of the demand generation for the Summit. As I am sure you have noticed, we have SBSC all over the Small Business Center from the logo, to the Partner finder, to the How to buy section, etc. There will be many references back to the Small Business Center in the Summit to help bring small businesses to the site to learn more about small business solutions and the SBSC Partners to help deploy them.

2) The SBSC Small Business Summit player – As mentioned earlier, this is the player created for our SBSC Partners to use on their websites to host the Microsoft Small Business Summit themselves. The entire frame around the player itself has the SBSC logo as well as SBSC taglines to promote the use of Microsoft Small Business Specialists

3) We’ve Gotta Guy – This was another announcement I made during the SMB Nation keynote address. The We’ve Gotta Guy campaign is designed to inform small business owners that having “a guy” (or “a gal”) to do your business IT systems is not the way to go. You really should employ the assistance of a professional to do this, and that professional should be a Microsoft Small Business Specialist. During this year’s Small Business Summit, you will see “We’ve Gotta Guy” commercials to further get this message out to our small business customers. For instance, be sure to be watching Tuesday morning between 9:30 & 10:00 am PST to see one of them.

4) SBSC success stories – Throughout the Small Business Summit, we will be showing some small business case studies that include Microsoft Small Business Specialists as the ones who help bring the solution to life for the clients. Again, another way to show the value of SSBC Partners and what they offer to small businesses.

We are looking forward to another fantastic Microsoft Small Business Summit again this year as in years past and I personally am very energized about the even stronger integration and partnership with our SBSC Partners to help bring this Summit to small business clients everywhere this year. I know the Small Business Team has been working incredibly hard for quite a long time on putting the Small Business Summit together from a content, speaker, presentation, technical, and more perspective. As always, we would love to hear your comments and feedback throughout this year’s Summit, so be sure to let us know what you think.

Thank you and have a wonderful day,

Eric Ligman
Microsoft US Senior Manager
Small Business Community Engagement
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights

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