Does your start-up, web or tech company have a product or service that’s geared for business? If so, you may be able to demo at the Business Smart Tools Conference on May 5!

Demonstrating companies will be invited to join the conference at no additional fee, but you must submit the following information for our consideration:

* Company name, URL and contact info
* A brief summary of your product / service
* An abbreviated business plan

Demos will benefit from both online and offline press, plus the opportunity to network with our social media-focused attendees and speakers. Whether you want feedback, business leads or increased visibility, drop us a line and see if your product or service is a match for the BST Conference!

Photo by Amit Gupta.

On the social media service Twitter, individuals post messages of less than 140 characters. If another user thinks that information is worth repeating, that person can “retweet” the original post themselves, usually with a nod to the user who first posted it. It’s the social media equivalent of the telephone game, although “copy-and-paste” reduces the risk of misquoting the original person’s statement.

Mashable contributor Dan Zarrella has been studying the hows and whys of “ReTweets,” and his findings are quite interesting. Perhaps the most surprising find is that retweets seem to gain momentum over time. That is, the more often a message is repeated by others, the greater its total number of retweets — which would seem to imply that people really like talking about what everyone else is ALREADY talking about. In this fashion, the original tweet begins to operate like a beach ball at a concert — it only takes one person to throw the ball into the crowd, but it takes each successive person bumping it back in the air to keep the ball (and the message) alive.

What makes something worth retweeting in the first place? Zarrella has his suspicions (and makes a great case for “politeness”), but he’s also running a survey to get firsthand feedback from Twitter users. He’ll summarize that data once it’s compiled. Meanwhile, look for people to become incredibly creative within their 140 character limits as they strive to keep their beach balls in the air.

Image by Brandi Tressler. If you enjoyed this article, consider following us on Twitter.

Twitter is a public instant messaging tool. It happens NOW. And because it doesn’t thread conversations together, or provide them with permanent landing pages, Twitter is a lot like Vegas — what happens on Twitter usually stays on Twitter (unless someone else blogs about it, or searches for it, later).

Blogs are more permanent. They provide one specific URL for each post AND for the comments to that post. This helps people who weren’t “there” catch up long after the conversation is over, and still add comments that may be relevant to the blog’s author.

But this isn’t an “either / or” situation; your business needs both.

Real-time tools like Twitter help you stay up-to-date with what people are talking about NOW. Hopefully, they’re talking positively about you (and you’re talking back). But if they’re expressing discontent, you can use the immediacy of the moment to engage them and help them solve their problems (without having to read about it a week later).

Long-term tools like blogs provide a context to your message, and help potential customers find valuable information about your services (and your ideas) without requiring them to be “there” with you at all times. (They also provide trustworthy SEO juice, compared to the fluctuating search value of tweets on most search engines.)

Learn the value of using both types of tools. Because you want people talking about you NOW, but you also want them to be raving about you LATER.

Image by jaboobie.

People are talking about you. No matter who you are or what you do, if you’re in the public eye, someone is talking about you. In a perfect world, they only have good things to say, but the hard truth is that at least some percentage of what’s said about you (or your company) at any given time will be bad.

Sometimes very bad.

This year, GoDaddy ran yet another oversexed Super Bowl ad, and some viewers were once again offended. But thanks to the instant “zeitgeist tracking” that happens using social media tools like Twitter, people were not only sharing their displeasure, but GoDaddy competitor Network Solutions was able to use all that negativity to their advantage, urging current GoDaddy customers to shift their hosting duties to Network Solutions as a (profitable) sign of protest.

And, as others noted, all of this happened right under GoDaddy’s nose, even though they employ someone named GoDaddyGuy to monitor their company’s reputation on Twitter. Whoops.

So what’s a company to do? How can you manage negative publicity when social media allows messaging to travel so wide and so quickly?

Join them.

When Dell was getting trashed by Jeff Jarvis due to their horrible customer service, they got the message and, as part of the solution, created a blog to better connect with their customers (and help stave off the ill effects of Jarvis’s negative tidal wave).

ComcastCares is how Comcast uses Twitter to answer customers’ questions (and manage customer expectations).

Ford’s one-man social media machine, Scott Monty, personally corrects and rebuts any misleading or misinformed Twitter discussions about Ford and their vehicles by providing links to relevant info and statistics.

Even public servants are getting into the game. When ticket-holding visitors were barred from attending the inauguration during the “Purple Tunnel of Doom” snafu, they used Facebook as a way to rally and demand satisfaction — and at least one official who’s taking responsibility for that mistake actually joined Facebook specifically to apologize to the group publicly.

It’ll be interesting to see how this GoDaddy “snafu” shakes out, since one undeniable side effect of all the negative publicity is that people are still, for better or worse, talking about GoDaddy. But since you can also never truly control what people will say about your brand, the next-best thing you can do is engage those people who feel negatively about your brand directly. Find out what’s causing their negative opinion. Is it a problem you can fix? Is it a case of misinformation, or under-information, that you can improve?

Instead of arguing about why you’re right, use these instances as opportunities to learn what you or your company could be doing better. Because the only thing worse than people talking badly about your company is people not talking about your company at all.

Image by neoliminal.