Small Business Saturday this year was, well, small.

It didn’t have bargain hunters pitching tents on Friday night waiting for the stores to open. It didn’t warrant breathless press releases chronicling the day’s shopping records. And it didn’t have any unfortunate pepper-spray incidents.

Mind you, it’s a good thing Small Business Saturday didn’t have those things—well, an announcement of a record-breaking day wouldn’t have been bad. But this year’s event, only the second one since it’s debut in 2010, lacked something, if my personal experience is any indication.

I live in the East Village of Manhattan, an area full of creative small retailers and restaurants that operate without much in the way of big-name competition. But when I went looking for merchants taking part, I discovered only a handful in my neighborhood and another small bunch to the south in the Lower East Side.

And those deals? Discounts on baked goods at a cupcake shop and a vegan bakery. A free nonalcoholic drink with the purchase of lunch at a Vietnamese sandwich shop. A table of 50-percent-off items at a gift shop, though last week the place had the same unwanted stuff at a 40 percent discount. A men’s clothing store that offered $40 off full-priced dress shirts that retailed at about $200, while a women’s shop gave 15 percent off purchases of more than $200.

None of those offers were bad, but none had enough of a pull to bring in curious shoppers who otherwise may not have visited these stores. It's difficult to tell if my experience was shared by many others. Accounts over the weekend on news sites and in blogs tended to focus on the positive, and I have no doubt that for some small merchants who took part, the day was a success.

But I suggest something more needs to happen next year to ensure Small Business Saturday takes off. Here’s how:

• Don’t hang it all on American Express. The credit-card company created Small Business Saturday and was the primary national sponsor. While it was great to see AmEx spots on TV touting the day, and it was good PR for the company to offer $100 in Facebook ads to participating merchants and a $25 credit for card holders, the entire effort comes off sounding more like an ad for American Express. There were other sponsors: FedEx spent $1 million on a Facebook promotion to give $25 gift cards to 30,000 people. But if AmEx could have partnered with a rival like MasterCard, the entire reach of the effort would have magnified.
• Do a better job of identifying participants. All the general promotion in advance won’t mean anything if you don’t know where to go for the deals. And barring some local media outlets’ listings, there wasn’t any central spot online to visit to find out who was offering what specials. The Small Business Saturday website, which was the work of American Express, had no such functionality.
• Add more of an entrepreneurial flare to the whole shebang. Small Business Saturday was described before this past Saturday as an “event” and a “movement.” It didn’t feel like either of those things. Here, shopkeepers and restaurateurs on a particular street could have seized the day by teaming together to hold block parties. Or they could have come up with some creative gimmicks to get folks in the door. Merchants on Manhattan’s Lower East Side did both: Most of the Small Business Saturday promotions I found happened to be on the same one-block stretch of Orchard Street. One, the men’s shop By Robert James, offered free hot toddies, while another, the women’s boutique Cloak & Dagger, had wine and tea.

Small Business Saturday is a great concept. It’s a way to draw attention to those merchants who can’t compete with the $200 flat-screen TV offers that the big box retailers use to lure in shoppers. For 2012, what it needs is a real effort to make it about the unique offerings of American small businesses and entrepreneurs and less about the marketing opportunity of big-name friends like American Express.