Whenever I'm out and meeting new people, I usually ask - How's your business doing with it's online marketing?

In almost every case, the response is negative; it seems that small businesses (for the most part) have been left out of the movement to upgrade their sites to embrace web services and Web 2.0.

This isn't that surprising; web services and upgrades to your website to support XML and other technically challenging publishing models is not easy nor is it inexpensive. Larger firms have not experienced technology stagnation as much as smaller companies because they depend more on on partners and vendors who have pushed for deeper value chain integration. This has caused entire industries to keep pace with XML and open source standards.

Small businesses are typically under no such pressure so they stagnate. Another cause for technology stagnation in small businesses is the belief that since they built their own site with HTML, they shouldn't have any trouble re-building with more HTML. This is a fallacy for many reasons - a big reason is that search engines don't index just HTML - they also love XML, a different publishing format that provides the ability to add meaning to content, not just the content itself. Since search recommendations depend on deriving meaning from content resources, we can expect the demand for XML in addition to (and sometimes instead of) HTML.

Small business consultants are partly to blame as well; few have XML knowledge or the capacity to help their clients embrace these technologies, so they stick with vanilla HTML because well, it works, the small business person thinks it works, and everyone is happy. This is an incomplete version of reality. The bottom line -

"If your business content isn't being published in XML, you are risking becoming invisible to customers online."

My interest in this problem has been ongoing for almost a decade (XML 1.0 became a global standard exactly 10 years ago his week). How do small companies stay abreast with technologies that are relatively complex and sustain rapid changes to meet competitive threats and open doors to new sales opportunities?

Get a comprehensive assessment of your online marketing strategy from a consultant that has a strong track record with open standards computing and web services. You can usually know if this is the case by asking them for specific blog posts about XML and web services. If they've never written about these subjects, they probably can't help transition into the present - a web where integration, XML, and agility play a huge role.