Welcome to GlitzMarketing.com, the web site and online home base for Small Business Marketing Consultant, Jody Bossert. "Home base?" you ask. Well, yes. As an avid baseball player well into my thirties now, and given that this is my first blog post here, this seemed like a fun and appropriate metaphor to kick things off with.

Company web sites are no longer the one-stop shop for information relating to their brand. With the launch of the Web 2.0 concept in recent years, the way consumers interact with brands on the web has changed dramatically. Their ability to communicate with each other has evolved to the point where businesses can no longer spoonfeed their brand to the public, but rather they must utilize careful brand management to "suggest" where they might like to position themselves. With advances in social networking, not only can consumers now have their say, but they do so with the confidence that there's finally a world of active listeners out there as well.

A blogger might post an in-depth review of a community theater production on their Wordpress or Blogger site. A restaurant-goer might praise the service, but comment on the freshness of the salmon on a seafood restaurant's profile on a business guide such as Yelp or CitySearch. A bored mother might use her cell phone to post her frustration for the long wait in the lobby at a children's clinic in a Facebook or Twitter status post. A teenager might encounter a bug in their cheeseburger and use their camera to instantly snap a picture and post it to Flickr or take a video and post it to YouTube. All of these strategies could then, in turn, generate hundreds if not thousands of comments from others.

"Home base, Jody? The baseball metaphor?" I know, I know, I'm getting to it!

With company information, comparisons, reviews, and more readily available in the farthest reaches of the Internet, the Internet itself has essentially become every company's web site, while a company's actual web site has become more of a "home base". You rarely start there anymore. The typical situation plays out something like this. First you step into the batters box, rip a line drive, and tear off towards first base where a friend posts on Facebook about their cool new Flip mini-camcorder, for example. You then take off towards second base searching for the term, ultimately finding CrunchGear.com's Flip Review blog post where they indicate that it's a decent product for novice users, plus the reader comments below the article are promising too. "Well, I'm novice," you think, "but let me compare the product to others to see what that really means." So you bolt for third base, continuing your search, and land on CamcorderCrunch.com's Camcorder Ratings page where you're able to compare the features of all of the mini-camcorders on the market side-by-side. Although the user ratings don't have the Flip rated all that high, you're confident that the feature set and price point are perfect for you. The world has spoken. You're now ready to hear from the company themselves, so you confidently slide into home base - the company's official web site.

Now that shoppers are becoming more and more savvy, you may ask yourself, "How can I manage the buzz on the base paths?" Simple! You just need to stay a step ahead with a keen focus on brand management making sure your image and messages are consistent and positive throughout the web and beyond. Okay, not so simple. Large businesses employ numerous, dedicated resources to this cause, yet small businesses simply don't have the budget.

That's where Glitz Marketing comes in.

Small businesses need an affordable marketing resource that can see the big picture, the whole game, from their box seats overlooking home base. Someone who can then come down from the stands, enter the game as the catcher, and become instantly familiar with the competition so as to call the right pitches, such as strategic press releases or social networking promotions. Someone who can then deliver the pitches for strikes with well-written copy and quality graphics. Someone who can be an assistant coach, recommending business strategies such as customer tracking and process management to assure the team performs at the same consistently high level so that once they're in the door, new customers become old customers, not ex-customers. And finally, someone who isn't going to demand a multi-million dollar signing bonus or long term contract.

Glitz Marketing will provide hands-on brand and reputation management, a comprehensive marketing strategy, for less than you might spend on one simple advertisement.