ReadWriteBiz

The folks at Flowtown have put together a quick reference guide to six different social media services. Called the SMB Social Media Cheat Sheet, it contains basic stats on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr and Digg. What, no LinkedIn? That is perhaps the biggest missing service, but otherwise the infographic, reproduced below, is worth bookmarking for those noobs in your company that are looking to learn more about each service.

If you are feeling a bit of a credit crunch around this time of year, it might be a good idea to check out the reviews of business credit cards on NextAdvisor.com here. The reviews site is trying to bulk up its business offerings, and now covers business VOIP services, some basic recommendations on cloud computing, online meeting providers and Web hosting services, in addition to its consumer offerings that it cut its teeth on such as best dating sites and diet programs.

We last wrote about them earlier this fall, looking at their reviews of online backup service providers. They add oodles of content each week, and their comparison charts are very well done, giving you the implications of features and pricing options for each service covered. All the content is free and well organized.

The latest semi-annual State of SMB IT report from Spiceworks was released last week. It contains some interesting mobile and cloud computing trends, culled from 1,300 users of the SaaS-based IT management software. They found that the "growth engine is well warmed up and on a path of continued growth and investment" for SMB-related IT spending. Budgets grew nine percent year over year, the largest increase in two years.

There are dozens, if not more, vendors offering Web conferencing services. They mostly fall into two price tiers: $50 or more per month, with various fees, and next to nothing that offer few features. The higher-priced spread is great on features but requires some setup, the low end can be quick to use but not very robust.

That middle ground is where YourOfficeAnywhere.com is trying to claim, and while I haven't used it for very long, it has some promise. For $10 per user per month, you get a combination of three separate services:

• A cloud-based file storage
• Web conferencing, including Web camera, screen sharing, audio conference bridge and whiteboarding
• Text chat, group messaging, and activity streams

If you can't afford big-time analytics price tags, you might want to take a look at the CaptureSMB service from 44Doors. The company announced this lower-priced SMB version today that is easy to use and set up campaign management tools. You can create individual micro-sites with a variety of tracking tools and automatically generate QR codes and short URLs to analyze your visitors' behavior and traffic patterns across mobile browsers and various social networks.

As anyone who's hired or been hired for a job in the last few years knows, social media is now a standard fixture of the recruiting process. We're constantly seeing data come out showing that sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook play an increasingly common role in hiring, and the numbers are only getting bigger.

About 89% of U.S. companies use social media for recruiting, according to new report and infograhic from JobVite, a company that makes social recruitment software. As one would suspect, LinkedIn is the biggest among social networking sites when it comes to finding and hiring new employees, a trend that's sure to continue ask LinkedIn rolls out its one-click job application button for employers.

Google Plus has been live for barely two weeks, but inevitably, online marketers and search engine optimization experts are curious about how the new social product might influence organic search rankings in the future.

Officially, there's no official indication of how Plus will affect SEO, but plenty of speculation and some obvious hints about where things may be headed.

It's not exactly breaking news that mobile technologies are changing the way we work and enabling employees to be productive regardless of their location. What's interesting is the pace at which they appear to be doing so.

71% of SMB's report that their employees use mobile technologies to work outside the office, according to a new survey published by Portfolio.com. On average, these mobile workers get about 50% of their work done outside the office thanks in large part to smart phones and tablets.

The Web has enabled a growing number of us to work remotely and even collaborate with one another from distant locations. While online meeting services like GoToMeeting, Fuze and WebEx are effective at letting us communicate with one another, they don't quite compare to the experience of actually being there.

What if you could go to the office without physically leaving your home? That's the idea behind telepresence robots, a few of which have become commercially available in the last year.

Accounting juggernaut Intuit has made some significant enhancements to its online accounting services and will announce today a series of new apps and partner supplying vendors. The Intuit Partner Platform and Intuit Anywhere SaaS solutions will make it easier for small businesses to extend their existing QuickBooks accounting software tools by federating user's identity across participating vendors.