Stephen Bury, senior product manager, Microsoft Office Division

“The Microsoft Office Division approaches small-business marketing as an opportunity to discuss with professionals how they can take advantage of enterprise-grade productivity solutions to be more successful. We use social and community to establish a relationship with small-business professionals and focus our content strategy on showing how our solutions can help them think more about their business challenges and less about their IT infrastructure. A big part of our success is in creating a vibrant, helpful community where professionals can interact with peers, industry experts and Microsoft employees for timely, accurate and objective information.”

Steve Pacheco, director of advertising, FedEx Corp.

“Our most recent campaign is "We Understand,' which is meant to be empathetic to our small-business customers. At the end of the day, the small-business owner probably has more skin in the game than anyone else. For example, they don't have a dedicated supply-chain specialist, so we want to show them how we can help them do that. In the campaign, we feature small businesses, such as AAAAA auto repair, and talk about how FedEx can help them. We've also retooled our website [www.fedex.com/weunderstand] to give small businesses an opportunity to jump in to solutions stories.”

Scott Roen, VP-digital marketing and innovation, American Express OPEN

Scott Roen

“We have spent a lot of time this year building out more social integration and mobilizing the information and connections we have [on www.OPENForum.com]. We have pretty deep integration now from a social standpoint, including sharing tools and the ability to log in [to OPENForum.com] via LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, as well as producing content out through LinkedIn, on Flipboard and many other social distribution channels. The mobile front has been very important as well. The small-business segment doesn't tend to sit in the office. They are out and about, meeting with customers, partners and employees; so we need to make sure we have a good experience on the Android, iPhone, iPad and other tablets.”

Jay Matsueda, director of marketing, Fulham North America

“As a leading global supplier of energy-efficient lighting systems and components, Fulham markets to our relatively smaller customers around the world in a variety of ways. We attend all kinds of niche trade shows, reach out with basic social media, establish special incentive programs using branded giveaway items [T-shirts, cups, POP displays], advertise in trade pubs and blitz releases out about new products, particularly in emerging areas such as LED, EHID [electronic high-intensity discharge], induction and photo-luminescent lighting. Especially now, businesses large and small are willing to invest in money-saving technology; we want OEMs, distributors and ESCOs [energy service companies] to think of Fulham first.”