His experiment was fairly simple: He created three different coupon codes that would give users free shipping on their orders. His billboard coupon resulted in 300 new customers and cost him $7,500. The direct mail brought in a very minimal 200 customers compared to the $15,000 it set him back. But his tweet generated 1,800 new customers at the low, low cost of $0. It doesn’t take a genius to do the math here, the results overwhelming speak for themselves.

The reason for the disparity is also simple. With a billboard, you’ll catch eyes but that doesn’t mean the people actually care about the board’s message. It’s a crap shoot. With mail or even e-mail marketing, people get annoyed when their mailboxes/inboxes are essentially spammed. Twitter is unique in that its users can broadcast a message to followers who have an interest in what they have to say or the products they have to offer. Once you build a group of followers, your stream is essentially permission-based marketing targeted to a large group of people in a very efficient manner, especially when you include links that drive users to your site.

Social media “experts” have been touting Twitter’s marketing power, but here it is for you in numbers thanks to Gary V. And if you don’t believe him, you can have a look at Dell’s $3 million in sales thanks solely to Twitter.

I know you’re saying to yourself, “yeah dude, just like every new Web technology that pops up … I’m sure they’ll be something new next week about which people will say the same.” This is the real deal though–at least if Google delivers on everything they promised in their demo. If any of their other projects, i.e. Gmail, are any indication, they will not let this fail. Since I doubt my ability to convey just how amazing this could be, I strongly encourage you to watch the demo below to understand its potential. (Lifehacker breaks it down nicely if you’re not inclined to watching an hour and a half video.)

In their own words, Google has described it as “e-mail, if it were invented today,” but it’s much more than that. It is a communication HUB. Think of any form of digital communication: e-mail, IM, Twitter, social networks, blogs, wikis, etc. Google Wave either improves on these or easily integrates with them so you have a central source for all your communication needs.

To start with the most familiar example, a singular “wave” acts much like a threaded e-mail. However, all replies to the wave can be seen in real time, similar to IM style, and can be integrated in-line with the related text within the email. All communication can take place in real time. We’ve seen the power of real time with Twitter; now Google Wave has captured this. An application programming interface (API) allows for easy integration with Twitter, social networks, and blogs.

The Wave demo includes “Twave,” a Twitter client for Google Wave enabling you to access Twitter through your Google Wave account. It also includes an example of a powerful API that integrates blog commenting: you can comment on your favorite blog and it will appear in your Google Wave account. Any replies to your comment can be seen on your account and anything you post through Google Wave will appear on the blog.

Wave will become the premier online collaboration tool. Communication is instant. Editing of a document can be done by multiple people at the same time and everyone can see what the others are doing. More importantly, its play-back feature allows you to see what has occurred during a “wave.” For example, if you are invited to a wave later or if you miss anything, you can see all the previous events in that wave and the order in which they happened by pressing the play button. It also offers inter-business collaboration. Not only can members of a business collaborate with other members of their company, but they can also easily collaborate with members of another business by simply adding them to the wave.

However, its most important feature and the reason why it will revolutionize how we communicate is the fact that it is open source. If you’re a Firefox user, you know the benefits of open source. This means anyone can develop for it, essentially making it a platform that can be built upon with innovative extensions. One of the more interesting ones demoed was the auto translate bot, which translates English to French on the fly. It allows for a conversation to take place in two different languages seamlessly, in real time, without any translation necessary by the participants.

Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun Times gives a great example of how it could dramatically ease the painstaking process of producing his column. By having himself, his editor, and a bot, which automatically sends his column to be published on the web, on a wave, his column can be altered much more quickly and collaboratively.

And just think, all of this available through any browser, meaning it will essentially be available to you anywhere with the advancement of smartphones. This will be huge.

Talk about other wineries!
You’re not going to engage a lot of people just talking about your winery. But you can keep them coming back to your page if you’re a genuinely good source of information on wine—especially a niche aspect you know well. Do you use sustainable wine practices? Have some especially cool wine packaging? Feature and focus on other wineries that do the same. Trade links so you reach a larger audience. And blog regularly on these chosen niche categories.

Don’t name your blog after your winery.
It sounds like a good idea, but … if people aren’t familiar with your winery, its name certainly isn’t going to get them to your blog. Like the most popular, name your wine blog something catchy, preferably something that will get searched a lot.

Use multimedia.
Don’t just blog. Do wine tasting videos, a la Gary Vaynerchuk’s infamous Wine Library TV (by the way, he’s a wine seller!). Wine is a sensual product—you don’t just want to read about it, you want to see it and virtually smell it. Video will go so much further than print tasting notes, which will give you a leg up on the competition.

Connect your events to your blog.
Have tastings? Of course you do. Trivia night? Promote your blog at these events, whether it’s telling people to leave a comment or register for a small coupon online, or just letting them know about its existence.

I love the illustrations on this site, and the idea. But I don’t think the IMA is going far enough with it. In the FAQ’s, it tells you there’s nowhere to send an idea for an art video, and you can’t upload one yourself. “But feel free to comment to your hearts content!” they chide. Um, somehow, I don’t think that’s enough. Can’t wait until they unleash this to be truly interactive.

Now available are additional search options that allow you to filter by video, forums, reviews and perhaps more importantly by time. Google is trying to duplicate Twitter’s ability to tap into live data to spread news faster than any other media outlet by allowing for filterable results by the past day, week or year. Although not quite up-to-the minute like Twitter, it’s close and will surely only get better. Additionally, Google has added the ability to change the format of results. You can now see images associated with a page link, more text or related searches. In an attempt to become more visual, the Wonder Wheel provides nodes related to your query, which you can click through to continually narrow your search or jump to a tangentially related search. Also, the timeline view gives a history behind your related search, which can be narrowed to any given month of any given year.

But the real potential Wolfram|Alpha killer is Google Squared, scheduled to launch by the end of May. Head over to Techcrunch to see it in action. Essentially it will construct a database of factual information based on your search organized into what Google labels “squares” aka an Excel spreadsheet. Eventually, each column will be filterable. The new feature does have issues with some searches. For example, in Techcrunch’s exclusive video, the search term “spaceships” returns links to a Corvette and a missile carrier.

But more importantly, Squared will parse data from the entire Web, pulling what it believes to be factual data from pages and organizing it in an easily navigable manner. Wolfram|Alpha will depend solely on its own databases, which house a measly 10 terabytes of data. So while Wolfram|Alpha focuses on separating what it believes to be the best information into a separate database to process results, Google is taking advantage of the vastly more amount of information on the Web to compile its answers to your search.

It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out. Based on the preliminary data, it seems Wolfram|Alpha will still serve a niche role at this point, but Google doesn’t seem too keen on allowing it to coexist.

It will serve as what many are calling an answer or fact engine or what Wolfram himself has labeled a “computational knowledge engine.” Built on the computational power of Mathematica, it’ll probably be a damn good one: Twine founder Nova Spivak described his experience with it “like plugging into an electronic brain.” Wolfram|Alpha computes answers rather than relying on keywords and other algorithms to select Web pages that may contain your search words, so engineers, scientists, geeks (myself included), and anyone else searching for facts will most likely find this to be an invaluable resource.

As one of the lucky few who have had a sneak peak, Gizmodo has already compared Wolfram|Alpha and Google in a head-to-head battle for search supremacy. Searching for “Aspirin Tylenol,” Wolfram|Alpha returned molecular diagrams for aspirin and acetaminophen and scientific data comparing their chemical properties, such as boiling points and vapor pressure. Google’s top hit was a link to a Wiki-answers page that asked “Can you take Aspirin and Tylenol together?” and other hits linked to their effects on the liver and increased risk of kidney failure. In another test, a search by Wolfram|Alpha for “Sydney New York” returned exact distances between the two in miles, kilometers, meters and nautical miles, with a map of the optimal flight path, and how long it would take to the make the trip by airplane, as a sound wave, as a light beam in fiber and as a light beam traveling in a vacuum. It also provided local times, elevations and populations for the two cities. Meanwhile, Google returned assistance for finding flights between Sydney and New York, a list of businesses in New York City that contain the word “Sydney” plotted on Google Maps, and links to the Chamber of Commerce for Sidney, a small town in upstate New York.

Clearly, Wolfram|Alpha sports some smarts that Google doesn’t have. However, can any search engine serve as a supplement to Google? A recent article by Wired makes an excellent point: although Google portrays itself as the doe-eyed philanthropist next door, it truly is the 800-pound gorilla that has squashed one rival search engine after another and holds over 70 percent of the market share. Will it allow Wolfram|Alpha to coexist? The article continues to claim that Google will duplicate the same technologies used by Wolfram|Alpha—after the federal probe as to whether they are a monopoly dies down.

But can they easily replicate the brainchild of a prodigy who published an article on particle physics at age 16 and received his Ph.D. in particle physics at 20? I doubt it. My guess: If Wolfram|Alpha is as revolutionary as it could be, Google will do as it has done with all potentially awesome technologies and just buy it. Then it will have no chance to be a killer, rival or supplement, and merely be a component.

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 …

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.

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.

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?