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Trying to imagine how 140 characters could possibly do anything for your business? Well luckily, Gary Vaynerchuk, wine connoisseur and host of the popular Wine Library TV recently carried out an experiment that pitted traditional forms of advertising against Twitter. In the battle among traditional billboard, direct mail, and social media marketing, Twitter reigned supreme.

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.

Google didn’t take long to unveil its plans to crush the yet-to-be released fact engine, Wolfram|Alpha. Yesterday, at Searchology, Google showcased new features for the world’s most popular search engine, some of which are available today but one of which is specifically designed to clobber Wolfram|Alpha before it gets its land legs.

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. (more…)

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.

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.

There isn’t a whole lot out there on Twittering for businesses who are selling to consumers, whether they’re boutiques, restaurants or Fortune 500 companies. The way B2C outlet owners should utilize Twitter varies with their services, but there are some general guidelines most can follow to generate business from the explosive social network, which grew almost 1700 percent from February 2008 to February 2009.

1. Know your audience.

Twittering from the hip is like thrashing in a swimming pool when you really want to swim—especially if you want to move beyond networking to driving sales. Start with who you know—the consumers, that is.

Use the search tool to look for people in your area who are tweeting about phrases or services that speak to your offerings, and follow them in hopes that they’ll follow you. Having a targeted audience makes it more likely that your enticing tweets will send them scurrying to your store.

2. Turn your offline customers into online ones.

When you’re collecting e-mail addresses for your Web or blog updates, collect Twitter handles, too (and Facebook URLs, while you’re at it). Or have an in-store Twitter handle party for a weekend where you collect all the identities you can. This can help turn biweekly customers into people that visit you every few days.

3. Don’t just spew into the Twittersphere. Sell.

Random thoughts often make their way onto Twitter, and that’s fine. But the majority of your tweets should drive followers directly to your store. If you are a restaurant with 500 followers in your area, and you start tweeting your lunch specials at 9:30 — 10:30 a.m., you can bet on getting direct business from that.

4. Search for—and plug into—trends.

Twitter is, above all else, an information goldmine—If you know how to filter it. Simply hitting the search button shows you several “trending topics” people are talking about. Want to make a kitchy, timely event that’ll draw customers and possibly magazine editors? Theme it according to the trends—“AIG Bonus Return Bust”; “SXSW in Indianapolis Music Festival,” etc. (Not sure if the latter would be legal, but you get the idea.)

5. Combine and conquer.

Have a couple of competitors in the same area that are on Twitter? Get together with them to offer your collective guests Twitter-specific coupons. Send the tweets out several times a day with the handles of all participants (@your store name @participant store No. 1 @participant store No. 2, etc.) and a TinyUrl to the printable coupon. All the links will show up prominently, and you’ll probably get your competitors’ clients to discover your own Twitter presence.

6. Use plugins.

There are literally hundreds of plugins that help you filter and extend Twitter’s results and capabilities. The Web Pitch has a great list of the “Top 100 Twitter Tools.” Try TwtQpon to create savvy looking coupons on Twitter; track click-through rates with Twittertise. There are also tons of plugins on this list and beyond that help organize and prioritize your tweets.

7. Follow the right people.

Your followers should be your potential customers. You should be following them, of course. But keep tabs on your competitions’ traction, too. And if you know the Twitter handles of some local editors and station producers, you might engage them and land some free press.

8. Be consistent.

This is the hardest part. Once you start tweeting, you have to do it regularly. If you start sending out promotions and specials, make it at the same time of day every weekday, or on the one day of the week you want the special to run. Driving business through Twitter takes time and dedication.

Of course, if you’re too busy, you can always let us do it.

We target specific businesses who are already on an upward trajectory. We just help them reach critical mass and go viral.

“But who in the world is growing these days?” you ask. Simple: craft breweries. Inexpensive gourmet eateries. (I love it! I’m a food writer!)

Don’t believe me? Articles abound on the craft beer growth phenomenon. This AP report references Mount Carmel Brewing Company in Cincinnati, who just starting selling 6-packs in January 2009. When it was time to restock their stores, they were shocked to find that their brews had all been bought up. They project 3,000 barrels in 2010, up from 1,000 last year.

Andy Crouch’s popular Beerscribe blog summarized a 5 percent increase in craft beer sales and a general downtrending for macrobrewers in 2008.

As for food—if it wasn’t wildly apparent from Top Chef’s ratings, America is taking comfort in gourmet during this time of economic hardship. But they’re making it as frugal as possible, cooking at home and indulging in small, inexpensive treats like Whoopie or Moon Pies and, yes, craft beer.

Who is poised for growth locally? My bet is places like Gourmet Frank’s, an upscale Chicago-style hot dog hawker set to open in Indianapolis’ Broad Ripple in about two weeks (the original location is in Palo Alto, CA, but I’ve intercepted a manager who said this one won’t be quite the same). And, of course, Brugge Brasserie, which gets so packed on weekends (even at 10 p.m.!) they’ve started sending downstairs diners to the newly built upstairs bar to dine.

The biggest problem for businesses like these right now are not necessarily attracting local customers (although social media will certainly speed that up for Frank’s) but raising awareness in ways other than regular marketing and advertising campaigns. Print media are losing market share and readers by the boatload as consumers flock to the Web to research and find goods and services.

If Brugge Brasserie wants to penetrate the national market—raise awareness and distribution—a space-spanning, SEO-amping, connection-making campaign involving a blog integrated with meaningful updates, Twitter, and Facebook is the way to do it. That goes for any of the small businesses on this page.