ReadWriteWeb

For small businesses, setting up social media profiles, blogs and any other online presence is a trivial matter that takes mere minutes to complete. But how does one effectively pull it all together into one centralized hub?

Central.ly is a tool for creating one-page business profiles that can include a number of third party "apps" linking to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and, of course, a company's own Website. Think of it like About.me or Flavors.me, but for businesses rather than individuals. Indeed, the back-end interface will look very familiar to users of About.me.

Douglas Rushkoff spoke at Pivot, a conference on branding, last year and recently linked to a video of his talk. It's worth watching if you're involved in social CRM or any other sort of social business.

For the first approximately 20 minutes of the talk, Rushkoff rants about the corporatization of the Internet and summarizes his book Life Inc. He explains the origins of the modern corporation during the mercantilist period of European economic development, and how branding came about as a means to put a friendly face on mass production. But during the final 10 minutes, Rushkoff gives some practical advice to companies trying to make sense of the social Web.

When startups fail and are forced to shut down, often times one of the co-founders will offer a short blog post about what happened and why the company wasn't able to succeed. Not everyone does however, as reveling in your own failure isn't the most fun thing to do. In the case of the failed individual journalism platform NewsTilt, co-founder Paul Biggar penned a 7,000 word essay last week that painstakingly details how and why his company ultimately failed, providing a must-read set of lessons for any entrepreneur.

With the ability to reach billions of people for the price of a few keystrokes and clicks, the Web has become the way many of us make our first impressions. These days, I might know a person from their blog or Twitter account before I ever know them in real-life. If they made poor personal branding choices, perhaps I'll never want to actually meet them. Effectively constructing an online brand isn't easy, but thankfully one of the experts in the subject, Loïc Le Meur, founder of Seesmic and LeWeb, is launching his own video series to help set the foundation.

As the social Web expands, it becomes continually easier for large corporations to communicate with their customers wherever they spend their time online. Facebook and Twitter have attracted big brands because that's where the customers are, but failing to use these services to their own unique potential is just as easy as setting up an account. Some new stats released by digital agency 360i second this notion - showing that brands on Twitter are failing to truly grasp the essence of the popular micro-blogging service.

While this week's entry in the Weekend Reading series is an established book from 2008, it is still a highly touted read for aspiring entrepreneurs with little time and resources that are looking to get a business started. The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur: The Tell-It-Like-It-Is Guide to Cleaning Up in Business, Even If You Are At the End of Your Roll, by Mike Michalowicz is an entertaining hard-edged read mixed with valuable business lessons from an experienced entrepreneur.

Tuesday night, ReadWriteWeb announced that we would be taking a new approach to how we use social media to communicate with our readers. Instead of blasting out automated content on Google Buzz as we do with our Twitter and Facebook accounts, we will be using Buzz to interact on a new level by discussing anything and everything in Buzz's forum-esque threads. I described it last night in a Buzz comment as "a better version of forums meets a less frantic chat room," and many positive comments seem to be welcoming this new form of engagement. This also got me thinking about how startups, small businesses and entrepreneurs can take advantage of Buzz.

If you've been following our Weekend Reading series on Fridays for the last few weeks, you've noticed that we've been discussing the importance of personal branding for entrepreneurs. But branding is not only an important facet for individuals; for startups, branding is an essential step toward building a successful business. Mint founder Aaron Patzer, who speaks Tuesday at the Future of Web Apps Conference in Miami, Florida, recently discussed with CNET's Caroline McCarthy how he believes Mint's branding helped it become a breakout success.

Late last night, AOL revealed a sneak peek at their new branding campaign for their soon-to-be standalone content-focused business. The rebranding effort will officially launch on December 10th when AOL begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company from Time Warner, its current owner. The new logos - yes, there are more than one - feature a lowercase "aol" on top of various colorful images that range from an orange goldfish to a green scribble. The odd designs are definitely different than AOL's "running man" or "triangle with swoosh" logos of years past - logos that became synonymous with the service that a large part of America once used to go online. But are the new logos any good? Or do they look more like the joke that AOL hopes it's not becoming?

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The concept of personal branding online has become a part of many conversations about social media and social networking recently. The popularity of social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and various smaller niche sites has continued to skyrocket, offering individuals a chance to create a more robust online presence. The age of anonymity online has all but ended, and individuals should seek to gain further control of their online identities.