AMI-Partners Announces Date of 2010 SMB Social Media Awards

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, New York-based AMI-Partners announced that it has scheduled the presentation of its first annual Small and Medium Business Social Media Marketing Awards for Thursday, November 11^th, at the Harvard Club, in New York. AMI analysts will celebrate Information Communications and Technology (ICT) providers that effectively use social media to inform the purchase process of small and medium businesses (SMBs).

?AMI made a decision to recognize those efforts leading to quantifiable business value.?

?Since we?ve announced these awards over the summer, our clients have been very excited by the prospect of having their SMB social media efforts recognized,? said Jacqueline Atkinson, AMI?s Social Media Research Manager. ?Social media has become one of the hottest topics among ICT marketing and sales professionals. The potential to use general social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to acquire and retain SMB customers has generated enormous buzz in the industry. Buzz aside, AMI designed these awards to recognize social media efforts that result in tangible, measurable business value.?

The awards were announced in June, 2010, through social media sites, AMI press releases, AMI?s web site, and direct outreach to ICT suppliers selling to SMBs in the US; ICT companies were invited to participate. At the same time, AMI completed its 2010 US SMB Social Media and Marketing Optimization survey. The survey results indicated additional participants; as a result, AMI included these ?buyer nominated? awards candidates.

The awards will recognize SMB social media marketing in five categories:

1.		Direct revenue ? quantifiable SMB sales via social media sites
2.	Advertisement	Demand generation ? success in developing actionable leads from social media sites
3.		Customer advocacy ? demonstrated increase in customer advocacy through providing value-added business advice and tools on social media sites
4.		Community development ? quantifiable customer retention through the creation of social media user communities
5.		Brand awareness ? Use of social media to quantifiably increase SMB brand awareness, resulting in increased overall engagement

Award winners will be chosen according to a systematic methodology, to include the results from the AMI Social Media and Market Optimization survey; detailed interviews by AMI social media analyst with awards nominees; and scoring by a panel of AMI social media and marketing analysts. ?Marketers attempting to use social media in the SMB space have tried numerous ways to harness its power,? according to Ms. Atkinson. ?AMI made a decision to recognize those efforts leading to quantifiable business value.?

The awards announcements will take place on the morning of Thursday, November 11^th, at the Harvard Club of New York. AMI analysts will share some of the findings of its recent social media and marketing research, followed by the award announcements and presentations. Details on this event can be found at SMB Social Media ? A Critical Tool for ICT Marketers.

AMI has recently released a series of marketing and go-to-market related studies called AMI?s SMB Marketing Optimization Series. This series includes two studies focused on social media, AMI?s SMB Social Media Best Practices Report and SMB Social Media Usage; AMI?s SMB Marketing Optimization Report, which analyses best marketing practices to SMBs; and AMI?s Small Business Marketing Spending and Programs Report, which analyses marketing priorities for small businesses.

For more information about these studies, AMI-Partners, or our global SMB research, please call 212-944-5100, e-mail ask_ami@amipartners.com, or visit our website (www.ami-partners.com).

About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.

AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence ? with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and ?go-to-market? solutions. Led by Andy Bose, the firm has built a world-class management team with deep experience cutting across IT, telecommunications and business services sectors in established and emerging markets.

AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and Internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 25 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.