Open Forum consistently offers great articles and advice for small businesses on marketing, including this excellent article on basic Twitter tips. In summary, the article covers a few basic ideas you should be aware of before setting off onto your Twitter path:

1. DO have a personality, talk like a person, share stories.
2. DO NOT get carried away or tweet too far off topic.
3. DO share links, photos, and videos.
4. DO NOT spend too much time retweeting customers saying nice things about you. Many people simply unfollow those accounts.
5. DO engage with customers over customer service concerns — only if you think you can provide sufficient, consistent, and excellent care.
6. DO NOT negotiate or try to service an unhappy customer in public. There’s generally no reason for the rest of the world to see you discussing an issue they’re having with your service.

(photo: 7son75)

One of the biggest issues for small business with a web 2.0 strategy is finding a way to unite them all and simplify the updating process.

Hootsuite is more than a twitter client.  In the video below, I’ll go over why I love Hootsuite so much and how I leverage it to not only update all my statuses on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but to also keep track of click throughs and trends.

The Groundswell is one of the most influential books regarding marketing in the world of web 2.0. The Groundswell offers tremendous insight into the "why to" with a focus on relationships instead of the technologies.

This episode's book is Tribes by Seth Godin which argues that smart innovators find or assemble a movement of similarly minded individuals and get the tribe excited by a new product, service or message,

This inagural episode's book is Trust Agents by Chris Brogan. This book talks about what's going on in all of the social media and how to be positioned in the right places and use all the social media tools to get you to where you want to be.