Here’s what the Hangout YouTube dashboard looks like. Everybody was having dinner when I was experimenting so I haven’t actively had a hangout on YouTube with my Google+ friends yet.

These developments all bode well for Google and its Google+ fledgling social network. Now that I can hangout on YouTube,  Google+ has almost won me over — it’s something I love to do. If it were not for my recalcitrant  FaceBook friends I’d be spending way more time at Google+.

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A headline surfaced in US Today July 29 about a survey of 10,000 small business owners that found more than half plan to develop a social presence in the next three months. USA Today said:

At the same time, adoption of location-based services has grown rapidly — 32% of merchants familiar with Foursquare use it, compared with 25% in March. Twitter is gaining favor, too: 8% more merchants intend to use it now than in the first three months of the year. The University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business says social technology adoption rates in the U.S. doubled in the past year, to 24% from 12%.

The survey  was sponsored by MerchantsCircle and was conducted among  businesses it had brought online so it suffers from a biased sample.

Still the findings do support a trend. There are signs social media is gaining so much traction among small businesses that  it is influencing the investment patterns of the firms that invest in new technologies. At TechWeek in Chicago,  investor Dave McClure of 500Startups chided  young technology developers not to overlook that:  “You can sell things on the Internet!”

Yes. You can sell things on the Internet.

And then the investors at TechWeek gave $100,000 in capital to BabbaCo, which uses social media and neighborhood retail to SELL things on the Internet.

So for your small business, social media is most importantly a customer acquisition technique. Building community is about connecting with the audience of your customers.  They are not interested in pushing your “brand”, but if they like what you do and what you are selling to them, they will tell their friends and keep coming back.

Social media is way to keep that happy conversation going and spreading to new people. And social media is an inexpensive way to reward the loyalty of your customers.

Google+ has yet to say how it will interact with businesses like yours, but its presence has given a heads up to Facebook to clarify the tools it offers to business.

This week, Facebook  created one page that offers downloads and tools as guidance for your social marketing technique. Check it out. If you’re not yet online it’s a great place to get started.

But if you’re already online and need to start thinking strategically, you can always contact the brain trust at  435 Digital.

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The judges at TechWeek in Chicago also found BabbaCo investment worthy.  They awarded founder Jessica Kim $100,000 to help grow BabbaCo through the next phase.

BabbaCo’s business is a series of products for baby that  Kim has been inventing since her daughter was born four years ago.

Unlike many of the apps and gizmos on sale to investors at Tech Week, Kim’s product is physical and it is manufactured. But Kim won the award as much for her artful  branding through Twitter, Facebook and YouTube social media  channels. In fact, she introduces her new products through the BabbaCo Facebook page. Kim is also artful at selling her simple, functional and super cute blankets, baby mats and other gizmos through events at participating local retailers.

I like the local retail combined with the web connection.  It’s all about community building. And everything Kim does feels authentic.  She states her case for her products persuasively. It doesn’t feel like a push. Take a look. Let me know whether you agree.

Kim says she was totally surprised that she won the TechWeek prize, outshining 4 other finalists.

“I was on the panel speaking about women entrepreneurs [a SPARK], and a friend said  “You have to leave.” Kim says. “I thought I had done something wrong, so I asked,  ‘What do you mean, what did I say?’ ”

Nothing wrong. She just needed to leave the panel and collect her $100,000 check from the judges.

The current BabbaCo site reflects only a few of her products, which are all geared to moms, dads and their kids five and younger.  But Kim has a new line that will be sold monthly by box for $29.99.

“ The new line is a box of new products that comes to your house geared to two-to-five year olds,” she says. “It’s interactive. There’s a digital component to every aspect of the box.”

Kim says BabbaCo will be releasing the line in the next few weeks to a beta group of “Babba” moms. Follow Kim on Twitter to learn about the special sign-up.

“Like it or not, moms are attached more to their mobile than to their baby now,” she says, laughing. So, that means each box will have a mobile aspect and a community aspect as well.

Kim was studying anthropology at Brown University when she started her first business — specialty baked goods  called Jessica’s Wonders, which she grew to $3.5 million in revenue before it was bought by an investor.

Kim says her anthropology background is all about closely observing, which is what inspired her first baby products. As she developed more products she employed her highly attuned listening skills in conversations with her Babba Moms to get feedback, improve and co-create.

This iterative development was the main theme of TechWeek. Time and time again we heard stories of the cycle that’s enabled by the social web where product meets customers and success is co-created through feedback loops.

TechWeek and the TechWeek Expo were held for the first time in Chicago this year. It’s a convention, trade show and innovation space where Fortune 100 companies exhibit their newest tech products alongside early-stage start-ups. More than 1,000 people attended.

Events  like TechWeek help me keep tabs on what’s coming up in social media, so I can name a trend when I see it and understand how it can be useful for business.  If you enjoy that kind of thing, you can watch videos recorded at Techweek. Here’s sampling of a few other start-ups I talked with at TechWeek.

A hot topic was group messaging apps, which allow you to select a group of people you want to talk with immediately, send them a message and when one replies, alert everyone. These could prove to be significant for building neighborhood businesses.  One CEO I talked with was [above left] Rene Pinnell, co-creator of Forecast, which allows you to let your friends know what you are doing in the near future so they can join you. Watch a video.

Pinnell’s company is called Hurricane Party, which connects people instantly in  real life and was a hit at South by South West this year.

Another topic was digital book publishing.

Demibooks says it is:

bringing the publishing world a user-friendly, affordable way to create interactive books for the iPad, right on the device itself. Demibooks™ Composer is an iPad-based software platform and authoring tool (patent pending) for book apps. Authors and publishers can heighten the experience and enjoyment of reading by transforming a book into an animated, visually-engaging book app.

Rafiq Ahmed, formerly of Motorola and [above middle] Andrew Skinner,  a creative technologist, have created this app that allows you to write a book on  your Ipad. If you watch this video, you’ll see that the app is a bit like a fluid, full color Etch-a-Sketch.

Self publishing is big on the iPad – who knew?

And last, I talked with PreScouter, a network that will allow corporate research and development labs to connect with reasearch emerging from universities.

PreScouter connects you to cutting-edge academic research relevant to whatever it is you’re working on. It’s like hiring a private investigator to scout out new opportunities from academia.

I thought that was a pretty cool idea and universities looking to connect their expertise might want to check out PreScouter.

PreScouter is a product of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. [above far right] Dinesh Ganesarajah, founding partner, and Ashish Basuray, a nanoscientist.

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In the year 2000 – when I first came across it — Craigslist was an earnest site providing a deceptively simple service — free classified ads online—  that was extremely useful to most everyone. Today, Craigslist is the 9th most popular website in the United States. As much as it is loved, it is also vilified. Some blame Craigslist for newspapers’ lost profits and decimation of  the revenue model for news. If only it were that simple.  If Craigslist hadn’t brought free classifieds online,  some other web service  would have. Personally, I credit Craig Newmark and Craigslist for setting a kind and gentle tone for the  Internet. For him the Internet has always been about social change.

Today Craig can be found on Twitter with nearly 39,000 followers, Facebook with more than 120,000 and on his CraigConnects site. He converses constantly with his followers, chatting about the birds and other wildlife he sees on his deck in San Francisco’s beautiful Cole Valley.  Craig’s current focus focus is on craigconnects, which he says is his “initiative to link up everyone on the planet using the Internet to bear witness to good efforts and encourage the same behavior in others.”

He will be speaking at 11 a.m. today at Chicago’s TechWeek at Merchandise Mart.

Q. Do you see the pressure from social media to change the culture of businesses as leading to lasting change or a new type of organization? What would that organization look like?

A. I do see that in large organizations, those with 150 or more people or more, that’s the Dunbar number. Currently, to get ahead in a large hierarchy, you tell your boss what he or she wants to hear, and then she or he tells her or his boss what they want to hear. That means that real company knowledge and possible improvements never make it to the top. However, social media tech can be used by line workers to combine knowledge and improve business businesses. In such situations, the boss has to back this up, and that often proves difficult.

I’m currently seeing the Department of Veterans Affairs using such methods to better serve vets and also provide better return for the taxpayer dollar.

Q. 435 Digital is all about increasing the capacity of smaller and local businesses to operate efficiently online to reach their customers and grow their businesses. What kind of tools do you see developing as an alternative to traditional advertising for local business? What other services do you see emerging?

A. I like the use of social media, where friends can help friends make better product choices, and that includes Twitter, Foursquare, Google+, Facebook, etc. Also, importantly, there are user review systems, like Amazon or Consumer Reports, which help.

The big problem is that sometimes such systems can be gamed, that’s already a problem. I feel that that might only be fixed with lots of reviewers, constant vigilance, and networks of fact-checking.

Q. You like to say trust is the new black, what are your thoughts for how local businesses can best translate the trust they have built on the ground into trust online? Services like Yelp might be part of the answer, but what else do you see?

A. I’d say that organizations just need to be straight with people in all presences, offline and online. Maximum transparency is good, within obvious limits.  (There’s always stuff you can’t talk about, like customer private info.)

It helps to speak in plain language, and to get to the point, and then stop.

Q. You recently successfully launched a veteran’s initiative through craigconnects, and community building is another area that you plan to encourage under craigconnects.  How do you plan to use the tools of the social web to encourage us to take more responsibility for our communities and neighborhoods.  What new tools are you excited about?

A. We’re still planning that, but probably soon two areas:

• networks of factchecking so that we can get trustworthy, reliable info.
• use of nonprofit rating services to help us select good nonprofits to help and how to find bogus ones to avoid.  We’re working with GuideStar, charity Navigator, and GreatNonprofits.org.

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