Given the recession, and the proliferation of small and medium sized businesses, I spoke to Duncan Egan recently, the Senior Director of Marketing for Taleo, an on-demand talent management solution company. Egan knows tons about small and medium sized businesses and told me the social media tools he finds most effective are Ning, Twitter and Facebook. He tells me that Ning is great community site platform and discusses how to use Facebook and Twitter so they leverage each other.

As an investor in early stage companies, Pascal Levensohn, founder LEVP, is looking hard at doing new deals today in spite of the recession. Levensohn tells Marketing Voices what an entrepreneur needs to do to get a VC’s attention.

In these recessionary times, marketers are looking for ways to get brand connection but not spend lots of money doing it. Fliqz, offers a plug and play video solution and is a good company to check out. Benjamin Wayne the CEO and I discussed how video is the third form of media and marketers need to understand how to use it. Short is best: no more than 90 seconds due to attention span and interest. Some statistics: The Nielsen Company says that TV, internet and mobile use is increasing and online, TV and mobile viewing for the average American is 154 hours a month!