More and more small businesses are leveraging communications and data sharing technologies to get work done among a remotely distributed workforce. And some are using it to do away altogether with the office.

Kevin Kuske, chief anthropologist and general manager for the business furniture company turnstone, says it’s not necessary for every startup to invest precious capital to buy furniture and sign a lease. “Join an incubator or shared workspace or work in a network of spaces,” Kuske recommends. “You don’t have to own the space. Work in coffee shops, a public park, or libraries,” he suggests.

What’s more, he says, “that movement across different locations is good for your health and mental state; no type of work is ideally done in the same space.”

When Carey Albertine and Saira Rao started In This Together Media, a children’s book publisher, both wanted the flexibility that working from home offered for their young families in Hoboken, NJ, and suburban Connecticut. As the company has

Showing how advertising and marketing dollars translate directly to revenues is a challenge for any business, so it’s no surprise that 60 percent of small business owners reported in a recent survey that they cannot prove a return on investment from their social media efforts. What is notable is that nearly 40 percent say they can, and of those, nearly a third reported returns of $2,000 or more.

The small business community Manta, which conducted the online survey of more than 1,200 small business owners during the last week of March, reports that “with the potential to generate a compelling return on investment, social media involvement is trending upward in the small business community.”

More than one-third of business owners surveyed indicated that their primary goal in using social media is to acquire and engage with new customers, and most dedicate just one employee to the effort.

Still, asked where they would spend the majority of their business dollars in Q2 2013, more than a

In This Together Media founders Albertine and Rao

One year before Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book pointed out to the world that girls who demonstrate leadership skills on the playground get labeled “bossy,” Carey Albertine and Saira Rao started a company to tackle that problem at its root.

The two women had plenty of leadership skills of their own. Albertine holds an MBA and worked as an executive recruiter, and Rao was an attorney and published author. But as new mothers, they lamented the dearth of media that didn’t present girls as “tomboys, princesses, super-chicks, sex objects, or vampires,” Rao says.

Friends since their University of Virginia undergraduate days, the duo thought of parlaying early-career broadcast experience into producing a children’s TV show about “real, bold, complex, and interesting” girl characters. But market research convinced them that book publishing was where they could have a greater impact. Disruptive technologies were opening the industry to new entrants, the e-book market was booming, and their

Mixbook founders Aryk Grosz, left, and Andrew Laffoon

To “fail fast” is a maxim of the social media startup world: If you’re not going to hit it big, get out before losing too much money. But Andrew Laffoon and Aryk Grosz were in no rush when they started Mixbook. Grosz was still in college, and Laffoon had just graduated.

The two University of California, Berkeley, engineering students had gotten interested in entrepreneurship while taking a course with professor Jon Burgstone, who sold his own internet software company for $1.1 billion in 2000. When Laffoon and Grosz met him, Burgstone was hatching plans to create the Berkeley Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. They joined the first class of the new program.

Five years later, their web-based custom photobook business is also its first success story. Mixbook employs 60 people and generates $25 million in annual revenues, its founders say. It is headquartered in Palo Alto offices that were once home to Groupon and Box.com.

But Grosz, now 28, and Laffoon, 30, say that if they had

When we defined the 5 traits of the worst bosses here last month, we hit a nerve. Among the more than 3,000 readers who commented, many said things like, “This describes my boss, but what can I do about it?” After all, as tempting as it is some days, it’s just not practical for most of us to up and quit when a boss is making us miserable.

For answers on how to handle a less-than-stellar supervisor, we went back to Michelle Benjamin, CEO and founder of Benjamin Enterprises and an expert in helping companies improve their management cultures. Benjamin’s spinoff TalentReady grooms middle managers for leadership positions as they climb the ranks, so her forté is to help rising stars get beyond bad bosses, as well as to avoid becoming them.

Here are 7 steps to survival with a bad boss—some of them a bit of tough love for employees—derived from our conversation with Michelle Benjamin.

1. Look in the mirror. It might not be what you want to hear, but Benjamin suggests any employee facing bad

Transparency, one of the biggest buzzwords in business right now, is about conducting business in an open and forthright way, and it is driven by recent trends in technology, society and financial markets.

The last 15 years have brought scandals, bailouts, accidents and financial crises that have shaken Americans’ trust in businesses. Enron. Adelphia. Lehman Brothers. AIG. Bernie Madoff. The BP oil spill.

But the newest trend in business is transparency, and it’s helping companies rebuild and maintain trust with customers and partners.

Internal transparency to track progress

Some businesses find that increasing financial transparency within the company can improve the bottom line. For example, Eric Holtzclaw, CEO and founder of marketing and product-strategy firm Laddering Works, began sharing specific dollar amounts for budgets to many employees within his organization, even though he was originally reluctant to do so.

“I had to learn through trial and error,” Holtzclaw says in a

Infographic: Radius. Click on image to enlarge.

What if there were March Madness playoffs for small businesses? We asked Darren Waddell, VP of Marketing at Radius, to show us what his bracket would look like. Waddell dove into the massive Radius databank, which indexes information about small businesses all over the country. Based on aggregated customer ratings available from sources such as Yelp, Citysearch, Open Table, and others, Waddell ranked the performance of small businesses in each of the college towns that host teams that made it into the NCAA Sweet 16. Since some rating systems use 4 stars and others 5, Waddell normalized for that.

The scores aren’t necessarily predictors of profitability, Waddell points out. “They’re more about performance—the business patrons’ satisfaction with customer service, the quality of the product or craftsmanship, and the trustworthiness of the business,” he says.

With 6 percent of its businesses getting 4 and 5 star ratings, Michigan’s Ann Arbor is top-ranked for happy customers—making it the