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We went on Jeffrey T. Meyer’s Good Beer Show podcast a month or so ago to talk about women and beer. My contention is that women DO drink craft beer, although my friend and Freetail Brewing Co. owner Scott Metzger said the recent Craft Brewers Conference in Boston had a panel on women and craft beer that addressed the great gender divide. While women represent 51 percent of the population, Metzger capitulated, they’re only 25 percent of craft beer drinkers.

This show is my representing for that 25 percent! We’re only going to grow. I think there’s a marketing and awareness gap here that can be easily remedied with some evangelism, starting here. (I was introduced to craft beer by women, BTW, in the Midwest. And they know more about it than any guy I’ve ever met.)

We drank Founders Cerise, Kentucky Breakfast Stout and Three Floyds Dark Lord (‘08). God Bless The Fickle Peach in Muncie, where we taped the show–and The Heorot, Founders and Three Floyds for that matter. And Belgian yeast. And enterprising craft brewers. And the Dark Lord. And …

The Chicago Trib did an article yesterday featuring a couple of random small businesses—a cruiseliner, a test preparation site, a real estate company and more—that have used social media to successfully drive their business.

Some highlights/lessons from the article:

Go where your customers are. The Scion Group, which owns and manages college housing, took its blogs to Facebook so they could reach their potential customers where they already play. Find out where your potential clients reside online by asking existing customers what types of social media they use (connecting off and online presences) and seeing where competitors and similar businesses in your field have successful online presences.

Don’t do it halfway! Posting events on social networks, blogging, having a Facebook profile won’t get you a lot of traction unless you have an integrated strategy for what you want to achieve, and actively work toward it every day. For example, PrepMe.com has a targeted, integrated social media presence to reach online clients: words of the day on Twitter, a Facebook crossword game, and Facebook group pages associated with high schools that use its services.

Be transparent. What does that mean? Being open, honest and responsive to online criticism. If someone complains about any aspect of your businesses, being online gives you the opportunity to acknowledge your shortcoming and make it right. Take advantage of that.

Recently, the amount of press on the explosive growth of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter has been overwhelming. What’s been really surprising? The demographic accounting for this massive growth: Baby Boomers are now dominating the social media scene, at least with respect to adoption rate. Facebook, once perceived as a college kid activity when it was restricted to college e-mail addresses, now has women over the age of 55 to thank for its most recent growth, according to Inside Facebook. In the past four months alone, this demographic has grown a staggering 175.3 percent. Additionally, the number of Facebook users over the age of 35 has nearly doubled in the past 60 days.

Similarly and to an even greater degree, Twitter has been the beneficiary from the surge in traffic from the middle-age demographic. Recent research from comScore discovered that 45 to 54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than the average Twitterer’s age to visit the site, which makes them the largest indexing age group. Overall, the average age of all 10 million twitterers is over the age of 35.

What does this mean for businesses? Social media, no longer a playground for the young, has reached a critical mass for use as an effective marketing tool. Coupled with the decline of print media, social media is now on the precipice of assuming its throne as king of reaching the masses. The onus is on businesses to come up with clever ways to effectively utilize these social media tools to bring customers back and reach new potential customers. And that’s where we come in. Let us create or refine your social media strategy and maximize these tools for you.

The New York Times reported last week that Yelp will, after six years of a user-driven approach to community business reviews, allow small business owners to respond to critiques they don’t think are fair or accurate.

Judging from the comments on the article, many business owners responded that they’ll eschew the “libelous” site altogether, citing a slew of “stupid” and “false” reviews that “should have been removed.” (Though their passionate responses here seem to contradict the promised refrain.)

Which just goes to show why businesses SHOULDN’T have a voice on this site. It’ll turn Yelp into a messy war zone, with most small businesses objecting to any criticism, petty or legitimate (and who is the best judge of that? Certainly not the businesses).

Indeed, many people think Yelp is too easy on outfits. FeedMeDrinkMe’s Renee Wilmeth posted an article a while back citing the amateur, easy-to-please palates of the majority of reviewers on Yelp. Indeed, the spirit of the site seems to reward favored small businesses more than to harpoon errant ones (though that does happen).

How about this: Instead of diluting a consumer-driven Web site, Yelp or some other enterprising outfit should erect a site where small business owners have the choice to skewer bad reviews. They can pull them from Yelp, dailies, magazines, weeklies, TV shows, etc. Everything wrong with a review–misspellings, factual errors, obvious lapses in judgement, and presumptuous statements–could be flogged for all the world to see.

Don’t crash a party, small businesses. Start your own: Badreviews.com?

Read the article (and dissenting comments at the end): Fast Company’s Kitt Eaton spews some European WebTrends research saying only 2 percent of businesses use Twitter as a marketing tool.

Ideas why? It’s easy! You actually have to be original, authentic, transparent, imaginative et al. to engage followers you may or may not know. That’s a different approach for businesses and marketers alike, the latter of which are just used to pushing the slogans and specials they’ve thought up, without any feedback.

Moreover, Twitter is a tool to develop relationships–and that takes time.

For Diggnation and Twitterers everywhere, last week was a time to rejoice. Digg launched the DiggBar to rave reviews that claimed it exponentially simplified the task of submitting new stories and comments (excuse the slight exaggeration). By all accounts, it was the greatest thing since sliced bread (and the overused cliché). Popular technology news blog TechCrunch featured the story “DiggBar Keeps All Digg Homepage Traffic on Digg,” applauding the “brilliant move by Digg” and suggesting the Twitter crowd already loves it.

There are two disturbing realities to TechCrunch’s praise. First, they are correct: It is a smart move by Digg, but at the expense of all sites that are now linked with the short Digg URL. You see, Digg now cleverly and unobtrusively wraps all content of other sites within an iFrame, keeping viewers on Digg.com as opposed to the source of the original content. Without getting too technical, Digg is essentially cheating its way to increased traffic and ad revenue by keeping any content linked with the DiggBar and the short Digg URL within the Digg domain. As a consequence, the source link is replaced with the short Digg URL, which kills the Google ranking of the source site (no link juice) and passes on all the credit to Digg. Secondly, without this knowledge, many will be quick to adopt what is a convenient method of linking stories, as TechCrunch alludes. With the explosive growth of Twitter, this is a dangerous proposition: The spread of the short Digg URL could cause a decline in original source content links everywhere. All the while, Digg profits from the associated surge in traffic and ranking.

Additionally, what TechCrunch fails to mention is that the DiggBar also controls meta tags, filling in the meta description and keywords for the linked site with the default meta keywords “Digg, Digg.com, news, images, videos, vote, content.” Ultimately, this hurts the source site’s SEO, although meta tags aren’t as important for search engine optimization as they once were.

Seems a bit wrong, no? That’s because it is. Popular technology pundit John Gruber, writer of Daring Fireball, shares the sentiment and created a special version of his site for DiggBar users which offers some harsher words for Digg.

Boycott the DiggBar by doing the following:

1. Whenever you come across the DiggBar, promptly disable the toolbar by clicking the down arrow next to the large “X” on the right and activate “Always hide the toolbar.”

2. Whenever in need of a short URL, use one that employs the proper 301 redirect. Fortunately, there are a number of URL shortening services, namely bit.ly, tinyurl, is.gd, and piurl. My current favorite is is.gd which offers the shortest URLs I’ve seen for those in need of the extra characters for tweeting purposes. There happens to be a fantastic Firefox add-on that places its bookmark icon in your toolbar. It will shorten the URL of the page you’re currently viewing and place it on the clipboard so that you won’t have to navigate away from the page of interest. You can paste it wherever you’d like afterward.

3.  If you come across a short Digg URL, expand it to the source URL and if you need to shorten it, use one of the shortening services above.  This sounds like a pain but really it takes about five seconds.

4. If you are owner of a site, break out of the iFrame using JavaScript.

If you’re in the food business and haven’t heard about Kogi BBQ, L.A.’s roving Korean taco truck that commands hours-long lines and worldwide fans, you’re probably interested in their secret now. It only involves simple math: A bit of spot-on branding plus the perfect social media strategy equals 14,000 Twitter followers and a much-traversed blog; and coverage in the Los Angeles Times, LAist, Serious Eats, Yelp, and more, about a year after the truck’s debut.

How the heck did they do it? Social media guru Mike Prasad, now with Girlgamer.com, walked us through the process.

Step 1: Start with Basic Branding

Prasad and Kogi cofounder Mark Manguera came up with the basics over a three-hour lunch. “We wanted to create an iconic food phenomenon,” Prasad says. They started with a name; something distinctive and short, but not too cultural to where it wouldn’t cross over to the main market. Like Pinkberry. “Gogi,” Korean for meat, was tossed around; Prasad heard “Kogi,” which he felt was more accessible. “The K stands for Korean,” he says.

Lesson 2: Choose the Correct Social Media Platforms

Prasad felt Kogi’s Korean tacos were an embodiment of L.A. street culture, the fusion and food found all along its windy, populated asphalt.

“We really wanted to leverage the brand and create a culture around the brand, and we couldn’t do that if we stayed in the same place all the time,” Prasad said. Twitter was the obvious social media tool to keep potential street eaters up to speed on where the truck would be. Sure, Kogi employees would blog scheduled stops for the week, but they also moved around a lot, both to where the crowd would take them and after cops might make them move.

“Twitter was like a game—find the Kogi truck,” Prasad says. “And it does help create [customer] ownership of the company.”

Lesson 3: Bridge the Gap

But Prasad didn’t believe in a “if you build it, they will come” approach. So he and the rest of Kogi’s gang hit the streets to “hustle.”

“You have to broadcast your message,” he says. “So we looked for ways to engage our audience. We came up with nightclubs. The first week was really full. Steve [Yoo, promoter] is one of the guys; he’d go in the club and hustle in the club: ‘hey, you gotta come check this out.’ He’d bribe the security guys at the door with tacos.

“I invited influential people to try the tacos—LAist, key people. They liked it and talked about it.”

Mommybloggers and Yelp reviews came next, spurred by Prasad’s plugging the truck to hungry bloggers just let out of late conferences.

Lesson 4: Shutup and Let it Go

Well, just kinda. When you base your marketing on interactive social media platforms, Prasad says, you have to be open to customer ownership and participation. The key is to hone it to the point where it benefits you and the customer.

“The brand has to be focused on its core value, but you have to be flexible enough to let it go and flow where the consumer base takes it,” he says. “If you try to control it too much, it backlashes. And if you don’t do it enough your company isn’t gonna sustain itself.”

Kogi seriously considers the taco and other menu selections customers request, or visiting a site—often, UCLA—where customers have asked and gathered a crowd. Several bands have already made their own Kogi theme songs, which the Taco Truck 2.0 happily showcases on its blog.

Social media marketing campaigns take elbow grease to bridge the gap between on and offline audiences. Don’t have time? Let us do it.

So many businesses post a happy hour, dinner, or other event on Facebook and expect a magic throng to materialize at their door. But without certain planning, precautions, and promotion on other channels (including in-person and word-of-mouth), your event is bound to bust. Never fear: heed these rules to optimize your Facebook invites.

1. Target the right guest list

If you’re gonna invite all of your fans to a, say, happy hour event, know that the ones who live states away probably aren’t going to attend. Better to target more local friends. Take it a step further—ask and leave comments on your (local) opinion leader friends’ pages—preferably, people who live or work near your businesses—to recruit some more people to the event.

2. Use the right social network

Speaking of location, maybe Facebook isn’t the place to post your happy hour event. Maybe it’s better on a place like a Ning social network for your area. Find a group that engenders a category your business falls into, and start an event there. Or start your own group: “Downtown happy hour fanatics.”

3. Give due time

Not too long of a lead, and not too little. A week and a half is good to do the necessary legwork.

4. Jazz it up

Make a short, funny video about your event. Plant it on your Facebook page and plug and link to it on your ancillary social media outlets (Twitter, Ning, opinion leader blogs on which you comment). Visual media is arresting and instantly explanatory.