Sign up for the OCEC Newsletter.

Invite a Friend

	Welcome to the Orange County Entrepreneur Community website!
	Sponsored by: OPEN from American Express & Meetup.com

We are pleased to announce that we are the only business networking group in Orange County that is sponsored by OPEN from American Express. With the help of Meetup.com, we are one of 34 groups across the country that have been exclusively selected to be sponsored by OPEN. You can read more about the sponsorship on the American Express website by clicking the OPEN logo above.
TeleSeminar with Seth Godin - April 9th Click here to read a recent article about the sponsorship
Inside The Entrepreneurial Mind: The Business of Technology Because of our sponsorship, we had the exclusive opportunity to be invited into the NBC Universal Studio inside the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It was a fantastic interview with the expert panel talking on topics like social networking, crowd sourcing and radical transparency.

Other news about American Express Services for Small Buisinesses

Yahoo! has partnered with American Express’ OPEN Savings program for small business (SMBs), offering 5% off on search marketing and other SMB services from Yahoo!

Through this partnership, business owners can use their Small Business ard to automatically reduce their costs of doing business with Yahoo! Search Marketing and Yahoo! Small Business services. Small business Card members will receive a 5% discount on Yahoo! Search Marketing’s online advertising and promotion services in addition to Yahoo! Small Business’s comprehensive, easy o use services, including Web site hosting, e-commerce, business e-mail, and domain name registration.

This is great as potential channel for Yahoo! — Amex is underutilized as a channel to SMBs for online marketing services — but the company doesn’t yet have the right product for this market. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to be promoting its simplified “local listings” product here. (I can’t remember if this is being phased out or otherwise integrated with Panama.)

Regardless, self-service search marketing is still too complicated for most SMBs. Yahoo! should either establish a simplified “DIFM” product internally or partner with a local SEM that can deliver this for the company.