With all the anti-regulation sentiment expressed lately by candidates on the campaign trail and in a dozen and a half debates, you’d think small-business owners would be in agreement that government regulations are destroying their enterprises.

The hue and cry coming off the presidential campaign this year includes rhetoric that blames federal and local regulations for driving up costs, hindering investment, ruining small businesses, destroying jobs and placing a regulatory burden on the U.S. economy.

But is that the way main-street merchants see the issue? Not the ones I talk to in telephone interviews and personal interactions in my travels. The truth is, when it comes to government regulations, small-business owners say they’ve got much bigger fish to fry.

It's a boggling year for marketing, isn't it? New social-media platforms seem to be springing up like mushrooms, mobile is exploding. . . it's hard to know where to focus your marketing time and dollars.

Everywhere I turn lately, I've come across tips for how to do innovative marketing this year. So I've collected a short list of my favorite tips.

Here are eight ideas for giving your marketing effort a boost:

Have you been wondering how to get more work out of your staff? There's one easy way: Stop having meetings. Unnecessary meetings cost the U.S. economy $37 billion a year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics once estimated.

As Copyblogger's Sonia Simone recently commented, "When multiple times a month, I get an auto-reply saying 'I'm in an all-day meeting,' your company is broken."

Nobody loves to go to meetings, except maybe deadwood employees who're looking for a way to avoid their tasks. The basic fact is that while workers are in meetings, they are not accomplishing their work. 

Still, we can't kick the meeting habit. Despite all the statistics that show meetings are a colossal waste of time, they continue to be scheduled -- some three billion of them annually, by some estimates. And yet sometimes we need teams of people to coordinate what they're doing, or to plan something that needs to happen.

The good news is, there are ways to get this done while spending a lot less time in meetings. Here are seven suggestions:

Macon Phillips, the White House's director of New Media

Photo courtesy of The Associated Press

Want to reach millions of Americans instantly? Try using the hashtag #BarackObama in a tweet.

Even before Barack Obama was sworn in as the nation's 44th President, he was a big fan of social media. On Election Day in 2008, for instance, Obama had 380 percent more Facebook fans than his rival John McCain (R., Ariz.). So it's little wonder why today's White House has an entire staff dedicated to operating a YouTube channel, filtering photos on Instagram, crowdsourcing petitions on We The People, hosting Q&As through Twitter and even hang outs with voters on Google+.

I spoke to Macon Phillips, the White House's director of New Media, to discuss why the current administration is all a buzz over social media. Here's how his team is using social tools to engage with the public in the digital age:

Even though a pair of controversial anti-piracy bills were recently sidelined in Congress, online businesses' battle against restrictive legislation is far from over. Current incarnations of other proposed bills still exist and pose equal threats to the free flow of information online.

Effectively tabled late last month, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) both aimed to punish "rogue" websites that publish or sell pirated content. But internet companies and some members of Congress argued that the bills could negatively affect the flow of information online.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. The following are a few issues entrepreneurs should be aware of that could influence the way online business is conducted in the future:

We all know that Facebook users tend to pass along what interests them to their friends. But a new survey suggests that more than 30,000 other Facebook members may wind up seeing it, too.

The average Facebook user in the survey from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project has 245 friends, and their average friend has 359 friends. We also know that the friend of a friend is usually a friend too, but only 12 percent of all possible connections between Facebook friends is present. The survey would lead us to believe the average user can reach 31,170 people through friends of friends.

This naturally bodes well for businesses that haven't made the leap yet to using Facebook to engage with customers, as well as those who are misinformed about the social utility's traction. After all, if their calculations are correct, that's a lot of potential awareness headed your way if you've got an active and appropriately targeted Facebook Page.

Customers participating in a cash mob at a salon in Painesville, Ohio

Corrections & Amplifications

You've probably heard of flash mobs -- groups of people who use social media to plan to appear in person at a chosen location at a particular time to sing a song, hold mock lightsaber battles or take some other random action. Fun, but frivolous.

Another iteration of this meet up is of much more interest to entrepreneurs. It is the cash mob -- a group of shoppers who agree to patronize a local business at a particular time and spend at least $20 apiece to support their hometown merchants.

Cash mobbers are usually advocates of the buy-local movement who don't like how big chains have emptied some downtowns. So they're voting with their dollars, mostly for small businesses.

Related: Chris Brogan on Social Media Starter Tips to Grow Your Business

Although these communal shopping events are oftentimes organized by individuals, cash mobs have been convened by companies looking to give back to their community. An example is candle company Scentsy, which celebrated its fifth anniversary by giving $100 to each of its 1,000 headquarters-based employees to spend in local shops in their home town of Meridian, Idaho.

Here are seven ways to get a cash mob to visit your shop:

While Apple may be a gem in the eyes of its customers, one of its newest features -- the iCloud -- is sorely lacking when it comes to applications for small-business users.

Apple markets iCloud, its cloud-computing and file-syncing service, as a powerful content storage solution. But businesses can struggle to get serious productivity out of iCloud. And as an enticement for businesses looking to switch over to Apple products, iCloud doesn't begin to make the sale.

Here are three reasons you might want to skip the Apple iCloud for your business:

Baristas Coffee, a sort of Hooters on caffeine, caters to those who like their coffee hot and their servers hotter -- you know, customers who enjoy cheesecake with their java. Let's not be coy about it, though, because the attention-seeking Seattle franchise certainly isn't.

Baristas, which plans to open new shops nationwide, is developing its own reality TV series to promote its brand and holding auditions to cast what it refers to as "hot young girls as servers."

The company freely admits that it distinguishes itself from Starbucks and other competitors by hiring "attractive female baristas in entertaining costumes" at its drive-through shops in its home state, where it has six locations, and in Texas and Florida. Its website depicts women clad in fishnet stockings, bustiers and other skimpy garments, one of whom also appears to be wearing Minnie Mouse ears.

If it wasn't before, blogging is certainly the "it" marketing vehicle of the moment.

A study of more than 3,000 marketers done by Social Media Examiner last year showed 68 percent of small businesses use blog posts already as part of their social-media strategy. After all, if you're going to be tweeting and updating your status on LinkedIn and all, it's helpful if you can link back to some tasty piece of content on your site. Blogging makes that easy to do.

But that doesn't mean blogging is right for your small business, as the blog Reputation Capital pointed out earlier this week. Here are a few reasons you might want to hold off on blogging at your business:

Copyright © www.chefbigshake.com

Sometimes, a business owner gets a great opportunity. There's a lot of excitement, but then, it doesn't pan out. The difference between successful companies and flops is in what happens next.

That's what Nashville chef Shawn Davis learned recently. He was lucky enough to score a slot on the ABC reality-TV show Shark Tank last May. He asked the show's hard-nosed investors for a $200,000 investment in exchange for a 40 percent stake in his company, CBS Foods.

He was hoping to use the money to market a shrimp burger he had created. The burger was a local hit, but sales to that point were just $30,000. Davis, or "Chef Big Shake," needed money to market the burger more widely.

The Sharks weren't biting. Davis walked away empty-handed.

As you huddle around your TV this Sunday watching the Super Bowl -- and some really choice commercials -- you may also be thinking about starting a business. At least that's what the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation hopes.

For the first time, the Kansas City, Mo.-based nonprofit dedicated to supporting entrepreneurship is airing a commercial during the Super Bowl. The goal of the 30-second spot is inspire those thinking about entrepreneurship to take action.

"It is more important than ever to bring more people into the fold -- to get more people to try and start businesses," says Wendy Guillies, Kauffman's vice president of communications. The reason is simple, she says, hinting at the popular factoid: All the net new jobs created in the U.S. in the last 30 years were generated by companies that were less than five years old.

Facebook turns eight years old this Saturday and the world's largest social-networking utility gave itself an early birthday present: An initial public offering that could potentially raise $5 billion this spring.

Apparently everybody wants to attend the birthday bash because response to Wednesday's IPO filing crashed the Securities & Exchange Commission's website. But the most pertinent news is what's inside the just-released filing -- a deck of financial cards long held close to the chest of Facebook principals.

Here are a few of the more interesting factoids amid Facebook's disclosures:

If you've been greedily scanning the headlines about Facebook's IPO -- wondering whether the social networking giant's move to go public will serve as the spark venture capitalists need to launch a new flurry of funding -- you may be disappointed.

Facebook looks to be grossly overvalued. If the estimates are true and Facebook is worth $75 billion to $100 billion, Mark Zuckerberg's legacy, which reeled in $3.8 billion in 2011, would have a price-to-sales ratio of 19.7. (If you're not a stock trader, the price-to-sales ratio is determined by dividing the total value of a company's shares by its revenues. When this ratio is smaller, it's considered a better investment as the buyer is paying less for each unit of sales.) So in other words, Facebook's shares are 497 percent more expensive than Apple's and 294 percent costlier than Google's.

Make no mistake, the Facebook initial public offering will enrich its backers like the venture capital firms like Digital Sky Technologies and Greylock Partners. But for other VCs and entrepreneurs, the Facebook IPO will only mean something if it unleashes a fever for start-up investing that creates an insatiable appetite for more IPOs. But there are two reasons why a Facebook IPO will not lead to that outcome.

These days, it's easier to win the lottery than to score venture capital financing. So it's nice to see a few major corporations stepping up with contests for small businesses. Contests are emerging as a popular, fairly low-cost way for big companies to get people to connect with their brand in social media -- and entrepreneurs come out the winners. 

Three contests with substantial prizes are running right now. The main thing to know: Those with video storytelling skills have a definite leg-up here.

Here's a look at the competitions: