As an entrepreneur, small business person, or artist/musician looking to get themselves or their business more exposure, there’s no single tool greater than YouTube. I’m sure that you’re already familiar with YouTube for funny and silly videos, as well as other things, you’ve seen here or there, but the hidden benefit to YouTube is making your own video, and using it to bring a greater awareness to your work or business.

For instance, let’s say you own a dry cleaners. You might think that nobody could have any possible interest in the business of a dry cleaners on YouTube; you’d be wrong. The Web is filled with just this kind of stuff, these minor curiosities that folks would love to spend a few minutes watching while they’re eating their lunch.

Take this video, for example, with almost 76,000 views… what if you made this video, and promoted your company simply by including a small logo in the bottom corner, or having the people in the video wear shirts with your logo, boo-yaa! I guarantee business would increase:

Then there’s this one, which, Paula Berg from Southwest Airlines talked about at the Digital PR Next Summit I recently attended, and it made me laugh out loud. This is a video of a jet engine being washed, basically, three minutes of water being blown through a jet engine, almost 97,000 views:

Anyway, I think you get the point. YouTube can bring great awareness to your work whether you’re an entrepreneur, small business owner, artist or musician. Surf around YouTube, and look at folks in your business are using it. You’ll be amazed at what you’ll find.

It used to be that you would find special niche businesses with an exceptional online presence. This was especially true with record labels, niche book publishers, used book sellers, such as Powell’s and a variety of other businesses that found great growth opportunity through the interconnectedness of the Web when they couldn’t find sustainable means in their respective locale. However, things have begun to shift in recent years as energy and sustainability issues have become more and more of an issue.

Scientists, universities, and businesses alike are all investigating sustainable means for producing energy and/or just making less expensive and less environmentally toxic means of transport. However, on all accounts we’re a long way from the energy silver bullet. What’s happened because of this is that local has become the new exotic. As we move towards this emphasis on local goods and services, including locally grown food, locally made goods, local entertainment, stay-cations and the like, small business is faced with huge opportunity on the Web.

Historically only a precious small percentage of small, local, businesses have bothered with the most basic Web presence. The thing is as more and more folks are using iPhones, Blackberries, Twitter, Facebook, and Google to find family restaurants rather than national franchises, and small boutiques over big-box stores, or just trying to find something unique and different in their locale they’re turning to the Web. More and more, I’m telling small business owners and would-be small business owners to get their company online before you worry about the Yellow Pages and the like. Even a basic, professionally done Web presence is better than no Web presence at all, especially if you’re doing something truly local and truly unique to your community.

Try everything and don’t be afraid to fail. That’s sort of been the mission statement of my life. No matter what amount of suck and inconvenience has been thrown my way, and no matter how many times I’ve had to alter the plan. When you’re building something that you want to succeed whether it’s a business, a band, or a book club, you have to keep evaluating, improving and most importantly moving with failure (and it’s avoidance) foremost in your mind.

Some people will tell you that failure is a state of mind, and you can’t even consider it. I think that’s crap. Imagine you’re running towards a cliff, but you’re in a state of great joy and optimism, wouldn’t you rather maintain your joy and optimism and avoid going over the cliff’s edge to your death? Hell, maybe some wouldn’t, but I would and you probably would, too. So I think that you have to be mindful of failure, and through evaluation and improvement you move away from failure. But to say failure is just a state of mind, and dismiss it, much like a lot of folks only want to hear the bright side of things, is just foolish… and yes ignorance is bliss, but when you’re out there trying to make a go of something you don’t have the luxury of ignorance because you’ve made a decision that you’re going for it, because the status quo just isn’t working for you. To that I say right on!

Some of my regular readers may have noticed that the site has been changing over the last month or so. This really started with the merging of the Digital Imperative blog and my music/design site. I wanted to bring my career workinline with my creative and artistic work here at mattborghi .com. Since then I’ve been reading some of your comments, emails and past posts (of which this is post #90) and thinking about the editorial direction and content overall of The Digital Imperative. This week it became clear to me that while I might talk about Google, Twitter or Yahoo, or Web and Digital Strategy or communications, as well as posting videos or Mp3s of recent work at the core of my message is that of entrepreneurship. Whether you’re a corporate entrepreneur working inside the walls of a Fortune 500 company, the small business owner who’s reach is much more local than global or a Do-It-Yourself artist trying to gain a broader audience for your work — Entrepreneurship is an attitude.

It took me talking to a trusted colleague this week for that to become clear to me. We spent a good amount of time talking about what it means to be a small business and a small business owner. Entrepreneurship encompasses a series of soft skills, including ambition, persistence, organization, attitude and most importantly a belief in one’s self, but there are many other words that describe what an entrepreneur or entrepreneurship is.

I plan to spend more time talking about entrepreneurship and what it means to be an entrepreneur. Keeping in mind that my definition of an entrepreneur is looser than most. I define an entrepreneur as someone who works to put something together and is willing to take the risk for it.  This goes together with the newly-crafted editorial statement that I crafted for this site: The best investment you can make is in yourself.

So that’s the plan, and the direction I plan on taking with things. I’ll still be talking about social media, Web strategy, communications and the like because of course it’s absolutely the entrepreneurial spirit that drives one to undertake these things, especially as best practices are being written as we go. As always, I welcome your feedback, and look forward to the continued conversation.

Living in Michigan, with the highest unemployment rate in the country, we’re definitely experiencing some dark days. Every day, I’m grateful to have a job and skills to maintain employment especially as 1 in 4 of the people you meet don’t have a job, and haven’t had one for six months or more. Surely, this is as close to experiencing the Great Depression, that my grand parents told me about as a child, that I hope to come. However, amidst the despair there are signs of hope, and a lot of that hope resides with small business owners. Small businesses drive the economy, and it’s with that in mind that I wanted to share this interesting article on the small business equivalent of “open” business with this interesting CNN Money article called, Love a Local Business, Buy a Share…