The economy might be down, but that won't stop AT&T from building out either its network or IBM's.

The continuous downturn of the economy is no longer surprising but this news I recently have read about is surprisingly amazing! Imagine, if other companies are very busy with cutting costs this company is even willing to spend $1 Billion? What? One Billion Dollars?

With a planned expenditure of $1 billion this year, AT&T intends to keep building out its global network -- as well as that of IBM -- while also delivering new services and network-based applications to businesses of all sizes.

Through an expanded agreement with IBM inked in 2007, AT&T and IBM are now teaming up on providing networking and computer-based services and applications to multinational corporations on a platform that increasingly integrates the global networks of both vendors. However, AT&T's $1 billion investment will also support many new services for customers of its own long-time global business network.

For the integrated services from AT&T and IBM, AT&T last year added on-the-ground and networking support in 48 countries and closed more than a dozen new contracts, AT&T said in a statement today.

Read more about this global news here.

Building Global Bonds With Your Customers

Laurel Delaney emphasized in her post --Building Global Bonds One Customer at a Time that our customers are our business! It is very important to build that relationship especially with keeping your customers loyal to you. Meeting with them once in a while is a good idea, but how about if you are doing business globally and your customers are miles and miles away from you. Well, Laurel's post which I cited above in the first statement really helps.

The relationship between you and your overseas customer shouldn’t end when a sale is made.

If anything, it requires more attention.

Once you’ve completed the initial export transaction, you must expect to provide a broad spectrum of “complimentary” services in order to encourage repeat business. In this article we’ll talk about the kind of follow-up “care and feeding” of customers that will keep them coming back.

Well, what are those tips? You have to read it here guys -- Building Global Bonds One Customer at a Time.

Ready. Set. Go Online And Be Found Now!

One easiest way to get global right now is getting online. But getting online isn't enough. You and your business should be visible and easily found in the internet searches. There are two ways to that. There are two main ways to help your site be highly visible on search engines, and you may want to use both:

1. Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.): Steps taken to get your site to rank highly in search results without paying search engine companies directly for placement. This is also called "organic search" because the results appear to come naturally or organically. SEO is done by carefully choosing the words, content, and design of your Web page to meet the needs of search engines.

2. Search Engine Marketing (S.E.M.): Paying for a listing of your website (or particular pages of your website) to appear at the time a user gets search engine results, typically at the top and side of other, nonpaid results. This is also referred to as "search engine advertising," "paid search," "sponsored listings," and more. SEM is done by carefully choosing which search words to be associated with — then there is a process of bidding to have your website ad placed near those words.

Even if you intend to hire others to do SEO or SEM for you (which may be likely), it helps to have at least a basic knowledge of search engine operations as you choose what to put on your website and where. And that is basic! Good luck!