Project Rev and Small-business Marketing

I stumbled across a cool story yesterday in The New York Times' You're the Boss blog yesterday about something known as "Project Rev." Despite its semi-obnoxious name, which seems very "Do the Dew!" to me, Project Rev might actually be pretty cool.

The project chronicles nine small businesses, who have struggled with marketing themselves and take another swing at promoting their businesses. They are provided $5,000 in marketing products and services from a company called Deluxe, which I think is one of the project's sponsors, as well as access to "an experienced marketing advisor and a SCORE counselor for advice" (SCORE is another of the site's sponsors it seems). The business owners' progress is documented in a series of blogs and videos for each company, written by the owners, and is supplemented by blog posts from markets with SCORE/Deluxe and also a shared forum called "PartnerUp."