Back in the day; back when we still did telephone interviews, mall intercepts, and door to door product placements, i.e. before the Internet, it used to take weeks, sometimes months, to get results from marketing research projects.

To test a package, for example, we would contract with a field service that had a mall facility and recruit shoppers to compare the package designs and tell us about their preferences. Generally it would take two to three weeks to get the artwork and approvals from the client, two weeks to actually conduct the interviewing, a week to have the questionnaires coded and tabulated, then another week to prepare the final report and present it to the client.

We all know that small businesses should create their own Facebook Pages to help customers find them and engage with them online. Now there is a great set of guidelines from MenuPlatform that is specific to restaurant owners. It is well worth your time to take a closer look, even if you aren't concerned with this particular type of business.

Technology may be enabling an increasingly mobile, untethered workforce, but many people still need productive, office-like environments in which to get things done. If working from home or a coffee shop just doesn't cut it, there's always the option of coworking.

Coworking, for those who aren't familiar, is the growing trend of freelancers and mobile workers coming together in a shared space that looks and feels much like a traditional office. It got started in San Francisco a few years back and there are now over 400 coworking spaces in the world.

By now you know that using social media is an essential part of running any-sized business, but how do you take those first baby steps towards learning about various services such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others? The mailing list provider Constant Contact has put together an excellent site called the Social Media Quickstarter here that is chock full of tutorials and step-by-step directions, along with blog entries on best practices, suggestions, a few podcasts, and other instructional materials.

The Google Plus team is still plugging away at the creation of brand pages for companies, and the service is still being rolled out to consumers, but that doesn't mean businesses can't start taking advantage of it.

Officially, you're not supposed to set up a profile on Plus to represent a brand, even though a few companies have already done so. If you want to be daring and pull a Mashable, you can try, but we can't promise smaller brands won't get shut down for going against Google's wishes.

Alfred Poor has written a very lively and informative little book with a lousy title. Called Power Marketing for Small Business, it is chock full of tips and suggestions on how anyone can get started marketing their small business by using online videos. This is a more big-picture kind of effort, but the steps are so clearly laid out that anyone can leverage Poor's experience and get started.

Poor runs his own freelance consulting practice. For 20 years he wrote articles for PC Magazine and many other tech pubs and now runs HDTVprofessor.com, a resource site for buying and learning more about HDTV.

We have written before about MindTouch.com, the open source alternative to Sharepoint and Salesforce discussion and collaboration tool.

As Facebook approaches the 700 million user mark, it's easy to take for granted that pretty much everybody you know is a member of the social networking behemoth's site.

Although the total number of Facebook users continues to climb, many people simply don't want to have a profile on the site, whether because of concerns over privacy, information overload or their marriage-crippling Farmville addiction.

One of the mostly unrealized applications of Web technology is to allow small businesses to kick the tires of products they want to purchase, by putting up live product demos. Given the proliferation of Web interfaces on many products, you would think this would be a no-brainer; and while lots of companies have put up canned video screencaptures showing one or two products, no one has taken the time and effort to let customers test drive their complete product line to the extent that Sonicwall has with its Live Demo site.

The New York Times is breaking up with the bot that automatically tweets every article that goes up on the newspaper's website. Instead, New York Times content will be curated by a team of social media editors who are much more interactive and collaborative online, @replying users and retweeting interesting non-New York Times content.

An interesting question emerges on how people, companies and publishers should be using the social space to build their brands, especially those focused on content. A Twitter bot is simple and it gets all the links to your content into the open, more or less like a 140-character RSS reader. Mobile applications like Flipboard and Zite use those Twitter streams to populate their feeds so there is incentive to just let a bot get all of the content out in one place. Is there a perfect mix between bot and human that works best in social media?