Photo from Flickr by Ben Sheldon

What were the top 10 Web 2.0 tools for small business in 2010? What are your favourite Web 2.0 tools?

If you run, or work in, a small business, please share your favourite Web 2.0 tools. These may be tools you use for promoting your business, tools that help your efficiency or tools that you just can’t live without in your business.

Click here to go to the survey where you can mark your favourite Web 2.0 tools.

Please complete by 31 December and I’ll collate the results to come up with the Top 10 tools for 2010 – and share them with everyone. You can see the emerging results here.

If you’d like to add a tip I’ll also collate those – with acknowledgement. Just tell us who you & your business are (and give your website a plug!).

In August I have the pleasure of presenting a series of breakfasts and workshops for International Customer Service Professionals (ICSP) in Brisbane (10th), Sydney (11th) & Melbourne (12th).

The breakfast presentation will address the topic : How can Social Media benefit our business?

A recent Nielsen report found that 70% of all Australian businesses intend to use social media in the coming year. Is your business one of them? Although 26.5% of Australian businesses now have a Facebook presence (17% on Twitter, 10% on YouTube and 5% on MySpace), the Nielsen study revealed a high level of concern about ownership and control issues around these social media platforms and their impact on customer relationships. Should you be concerned?

This presentation will address social media in terms that you can easily understand and apply to your business. It will cover:

• What social media tools you could be using to boost your business.
• How you can use social media to your advantage.
• How some businesses are using social media.
• How you design a social media strategy.

Panel members will also share their enormous breadth of experience in deploying social media within their business – warts and all….

Click here for more information and registration.

This Event will also be followed by a 2 hr Workshop: Designing a Social Media Strategy

You’ll learn about a variety of social media tools including how to design a social media strategy using the most appropriate tools for YOUR business. This workshop will focus on the use of social media to build brand awareness, communicate with customers and market your products/services. At the completion of the workshop you will have:

• an overview of the most popular social media tools
• understand how to use social media to engage with your customers
• know how to build trust and reputation for your brand
• have a 5-step planning process for HOW to use social media in your business
• begin planning your social media strategy

Click here for more information and registration.

You can join the on-going discussion by clicking the ‘Reply to topic’ button on the WNA Facebook page.

My videoconference blog that I referred to is here. I’ve included links below to my online presences so you can see what these spaces look like.

Set up your own Facebook profile and link to others as well as join groups and start your own groups. My Facebook page is here.

LinkedIn is similar to Facebook – but a little more business oriented. My LinkedIn profile is here.

If you want to reach the teen/early twenties market then go to MySpace and Bebo (I don’t play in these spaces).

Why not set up your own social networking site using Ning? Here’s a Ning site I set up for Web 2 tools in business.

With Twitter you have 140 characters to speak to the world. See my tweets here.

Slideshare is a free website where you can upload your slide presentations. My Slideshare space is here.

You can upload your own videos to YouTube and also use it to collect good videos about your industry and share with others. My YouTube channel is here.

Ustream allows you to broadcast your own TV show via the Internet.

At Flickr you can upload & store photos. You can refer people to your photo stream and/or link to the photos from other websites. Here’s a flickr page I set up for conference photos.

Store your favourite websites at delicious and share them with the world – or keep them private. Here’s my delicious links – you’ll see a lot in the tag eLearning.

Scribd is a place to share your articles. You can see mine here.

Netvibes will organise your life for you. Use it to go and check all the blogs & websites you want to keep track of. Here’s a tour of Netvibes that explains how it all works.

Google provides many great free tools. We use Google Docs to work on shared documents. See the whole range of Google tools here.

I’ve written about Blogs in a previous post. If you want a simple blog use Blogger – or WordPress for more sophistication. This blog operates on WordPress.

I’ve written about Wikis in a previous post. My favourite wiki tool is PBWorks but also good are Wikispaces, Wetpaint and Google Sites.

Enjoy!

You can write your blog without any web programming skills. It’s just a matter of choosing a template, start writing, and then hit the ‘publish’ button to make your thoughts public.

This video explains blogs in simple terms.

Why use a blog?

Though blogs are typically thought of as personal journals, there is no limit to what topics may be covered in a blog. You can use a blog for your business. A blog gives you a voice to the world and raises your profile to a broad market. Become an expert in your industry by posting relevant and useful information. If you keep giving something that is seen as being useful, people will keep reading.

I helped a colleague set up a blog two years ago and she now has over 25,000 readers. Imagine having that audience to market your products and services to! The trick to capitalising on this is having your blog linked back to your other web presences – think of it as cross promoting. Plan your blog as part of your overall marketing and promotions strategy.

Some blogging tips

Here are a few tips that I’ve found useful for maintaining a dynamic business blog:

• Blog at least once a week – but not more than three times a week. Less than one post a week and people may lose interest – more than three can be too much information.
• If you can’t blog for a while, post a message on your blog to say you’re away and when you’ll start blogging again. If people arrive on your blog and find you haven’t posted for a few weeks they’ll probably dismiss you and won’t come back.
• Share ideas and resources from a variety of places – don’t just push your own barrow. It carries more weight if you write a post about your own products and services intermittently.
• Link to other blogs – this raises your profile and usually brings return links from those blogs.
• Make sure you have some way of tracking the visitors to your blog. There are a variety of free services you can add to your blog to do this.

Get started with blogging

The best news of all is that blogs are free to set up. It’s easy to get started, just register for an account, follow the prompts and you’ll be blogging in about three steps. Two services that I recommend are Blogger (quick and easy to set up) and WordPress (more complex but with many more features in it). This blog uses WordPress.

Web 2.0 has been described as a state of mind, an attitude, a new business model, the next generation of Web-based software and services, a set of development principles, a revolution! Web 2.0 is about participation, sharing, remixing, communicating and facilitating community, all which is built upon trust.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, maintains that Web 2.0 is just an extension of the original ideals of the Web and it does not warrant a special label . When asked in an interview about the common explanation that Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making information available; and Web 2.0 is about connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration, Berners-Lee replied:

Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is, of course, a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.

With greater access to broadband services and Web 2.0 applications, new forms of relationships and patterns of communicating and learning have emerged.

This blog will be discussing Web 2.0 tools and how you can use them to boost your business.

Here’s a great video about how Web 2.0 is changing the way we operate:

And here’s another with facts & figures & a little more technical information: