I have attended a few business networking events recently and have been really quite surprised at how many, particularly smaller and startup, businesses see little value in utilising the power of social networks to promote their business.

One particular example was during a conversation with a person who runs a bed and breakfast in her home town – and she didn't really see the point of Twitter and other online things as, she said, they use up her valuable time and have little impact on her business.

After pondering this for a while I went back to the lady in question and learned a little more about her business – then used the internet to perform a few searches and sure enough other local bed and breakfasts were appearing in Google Search, and in forums. One in particular had a number of favourable comments on Twitter. I asked her the question, "If someone searches the internet looking for a short break would you rather your competitor get the call?" She promised she would think about it.

When using the internet to promote your business it is worth having a clear objective, a plan and understanding of what benefits you can get from each service. With this in mind let's take a quick look at each of the major providers and see what we come up with in the context of a local bed and breakfast.

The first thing to mention is that it pays to be consistent. Be consistent with your brand identity so that visitors can quickly realise they are on one of your sites. Also, ensure you always direct visitors back to your home web site – and make sure your contact information is up to date.

Blog: Create a blog to support your web site - it is really simple to do these days (For example, take a look at Wordpress.com and Blogger.com). Once you have a blog then make it your central dynamic hub, and use it to talk about your area of interest. Write regular articles about what is going on, and where, and if there is a specific event then make sure you give plenty of notice and write about it once it has happened. Ask people in your industry to write guest articles and offer to write guest articles for others.

Twitter: Twitter provides a mechanism for fast sharing of concepts, ideas, and trivia. By utilising Twitter and talking about the things that are important to you, such as events in your local area, local historic information, meet-ups, places to eat and visit, you can quickly build up a reputation as being someone who knows a thing or two – you may even learn something, too. Also, subscribe to similar services such as FriendFeed and Plurk to widen your audience.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a great place to connect with like-minded business people. While you can connect with peers in your own industry it often pays to think laterally as you can often get good referrals from people this way. For example, hook up with your service providers, food supplier, local photographers, writers, media and historians.

Facebook: Harness the power of crowd sourcing with Facebook. Create a page about your business and encourage others to leave their comments, photos, and stories about their experience. A word of mouth recommendation goes a long way and people do like to recommend things to friends.

Flickr:  Upload suitable images to Flickr and share them with others and encourage them to share them too – if a picture is worth a thousand words then use it to your advantage. Quirky, unusual, and refreshingly different images always catch the eye and online content providers are often looking for something to complement articles they write.

YouTube: Support your blog with video articles (copyright permitting!) and build a YouTube Channel where people can view all your video content, comment, and share it with others. Encourage willing customers to post video diaries of their experiences and share them in your channel. You don't have to worry about making mistakes or the video looking too unprofessional - a lot of the time that is what makes a video interesting.

Upcoming: When it comes to local events, sign up to a service such as Upcoming at Yahoo and create a profile then keep it updated with details of all the events relevant to your interest and business. Ensure you keep it updated if events change – this helps offer reassurance that you are a reliable source of information.

If you work in a small/medium enterprise (SME) when was the last time your company undertook any form of major technology refreshment for your telephone system? If your small/medium business has been established for five or more years, are you running VoIP? I would guess you are probably not.

Chances are, if you are working in an SME that has been established for some time, the notion of a unified communications platform is still a far off dream.

While we are often on the lookout for new ways to enhance performance, enable productivity, and save money, there are still some areas that even us in IT approach with caution – telephony being one of them. Tinkering with the "bread and butter" technical operations can be a no-go area for an SME – the last thing you may find anyone messing around with is the telecommunications systems, and for good reason - it's one of those areas that as long as it's working, everything is fine. Being able to take calls and make calls is often the absolute minimum requirement for a small company.

That is if the telephone system is even considered part of the information technology infrastructure in your business. Telephony may fall under the Finance or Office Administration team, which can make a technology refresh even more complicated as it may be driven more directly by available budgets and immediate costs than any technological benefits.

It's interesting then that I recently heard a sales person for a telecommunications company say that they really don't understand why small and medium-sized companies are wary of upgrading their telephone systems. It's because when everything else fails at work (and the internet connection is often one of the more frequent ones – especially during a power outage) the one thing that has to take priority is the telephone system – and who wants to be the one to tell the management team the telephone system is out of action?

One of the hardest things for a small business, or even an individual, when planning a new technology hardware purchase is getting hands-on time with a range of equipment from different manufacturers in order to make a fully informed decision.

Asking a large supplier or distributor to send over a range of evaluation units is often met with the question "How many are you looking to purchase?" If the answer is just one, say in the case of a server or laser printer, chances are you won't get very far. Some forward thinking suppliers have showrooms with a limited range of equipment on display but you incur cost visiting these sites (as you may need to visit multiple vendors), the range at any one site may be limited, and you may have to book well in advance.

It is unfortunate as few things beat seeing your intended purchase close up, and a touch-and feel experience with a range of evaluation units is even better for making the final selection. All too often we are stuck with reading specifications, reviews, news features, blog articles, and asking around if anyone has seen or heard of this latest device. These are all vital mechanisms to assist in the selection process and are as close as we often get to actually experiencing hardware prior to purchase.

In a small business you may still have to convince the board to spend the money, even for a relatively small purchase, and going in with just paperwork and hearsay doesn't really do you justice as the, often token, technology boardroom member sets about grilling you as to "why this particular device?".

It's with this in mind that shows like the upcoming Gadget Show Live event, or even the Consumer Electronic Show (recently held in Las Vegas), and others, can be vital opportunities for getting close to a wide range of equipment. Unfortunately, my funds didn't stretch to a trip to Las Vegas but the Gadget Show Live event being held in Birmingham between 7-11 April 2010 (the opening has recently been extended due to high demand) is geographically quite close so I have planned to spend several days there.

Exhibitors at the Gadget Show Live event this year include MSI Computer (UK), Linksys, Iomega, Nvidia, Olympus, Panasonic, Packard Bell, Sanyo, Revo, Solar Technology, TomTom, The Open University, Canon, Elonex, Nikon, and many more. Try and get representatives from all of these exhibitors onto your site for a "show and tell" day and you might just struggle.It's not just the ability to visit these vendors in one place though – these shows often give a fascinating insight into upcoming technologies and ideas you may not be aware of, or had time to look at before. You may rethink your project altogether based on a visit to a large event like this and at the very least you will be much better armed for that board-convincing meeting. The show this year has a Future Tech Zone where you can take a look into future technologies such as that popular topic – augmented reality.

It looks like it's going to be a busy show this year but if you want a huge range of equipment under one roof, in a location that is pretty accessible in the UK, it should be well worth a visit. If you see me wandering around with bags full of literature, don't forget to say hello!

I am typing this article using Microsoft Word 2010 beta, which is handy as this article is about Microsoft Word 2010 beta. Usually I would use Microsoft Live Writer for articles as it generally fits my purpose better, and Word sometimes, with the best of intentions, just gets in the way – especially with the amount of mark-up it likes to put in saved html files and its super cleverness at looking over my shoulder telling me all the grammatical errors I have made.

Having used Office 2010 beta for a few weeks I am feeling pleasantly surprised by it – it's even got me looking around and trying things I might never have tried before. For the everyday user, who uses say less than 25% of the full feature set, one version of a product like Word is really much like another but lift the lid and that's where the fun or administrative nightmare, as we sometimes call it, starts.

One of the coolest features has got to be the screenshot feature, available from the Ribbon bar, which lets you take a snapshot image of just about any window under Windows control and paste it into the document you are writing (each available window is shown as a small thumbnail). Not only that but the Screen clipping option allows you to pick out just part of the screen you are after – admittedly it's a small thing but one that makes a big difference in productivity. Incidentally, if you have images with a contrasting
background you want to remove you could head into Format then select Background Remover – it's not perfect but it gives it a shot. You can also right-click the image in Word and save it directly in a variety of different formats.

However, I can comfortably work on my file in Web Layout mode, which also shows the word count (not that I've ever let that stop me!), and I can then save the edited page as a html web page, using the filtered

option, which strips out all the Office-specific mark up and leaves a very lean html file – with just the formatting style sheet in place in the header section.

Mind you, it would be useful to be able to strip this out too – but a simple cut does the job just as easily. This facility has been around since Word 2003 but it's only with version 2010 that I have managed to muster enough gusto to explore it.

My feeling so far about Office 2010 is that it seems to have stopped getting in the way and started helping you be a little more productive.

Have you downloaded Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Beta yet? I have been running it a short while and have to say it's pretty impressive so far, the interface feels simpler yet slicker and the whole package feels a lot quicker (the application start up does feel a tad slower but from there on it feels quicker) and there are lots of nice little touches to help make you more productive.

Outlook has a new Quicksteps area in the toolbar offering fast access to typical functions including Move To, Team E-Mail, Task Completion, and Reply & Delete. The Rule area has a new simplified look (with an Advanced option adding more conditions) and on the main screen there is now an Ignore option (which lets you ignore all future threads to a message), and a Clean Up function. Junk email management is also on the toolbar instead of being buried in an option somewhere.

Outlook 2010 has a Text Messaging Connector allowing you to connect up to your Outlook Mobile Service hosting provider, you just need to provide your service provider web address, user ID and password. If you don't have a service provider yet, a link leads to a selection including the usual suspects of Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-Mobile.

One word of warning, it's worth scanning through your existing Outlook add-ins (under the Developer tab) as they may not be compatible with Outlook 2010. I experienced difficulty with at least one until I disabled it.

In Word and Excel the Smart Art function has more options added offering new ways to visualise data (Hexagon function, Alternating flow, Funnel, and Half Circle Organization Chart, for example). Excel 2010 in particular has a raft of new visualisation tools on offer giving new ways of looking at your long lists of data.

All of the applications can now save and share files online using SkyDrive, which when set up (needs a Windows Live ID – it will be interesting to see if there are some back-end Active Directory connectors available), offers an online storage location (giving up to 25GB), where you can view and, soon, even edit (with basic editing tools) your online files when on the move.

You can read more details about my first impressions of Office 2010 in this article – Working With Office Professional 2010 Beta – which talks about the new Screenshot feature, some of Excel's new data visualisation tools and the new SkyDrive feature.