By Gina Smith

ver the summer, Virgin America started a risky promotional campaign, encouraging passengers to use its free onboard Wi-Fi service to tweet good vibes about their flying experiences. The San Francisco-based airline identified 120 influential users on Twitter and offered them all free round-trip flights. The comments were overwhelmingly positive, as expected.

All Atwitter: With his Twitter outburst against referees, entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban prompted the NBA to write a new policy about tweeting before, during, and after games. Credit: R. Blake Ramick

But in the business of image making, one nasty post can ripple through the Twitterverse and spoil a whole day. The stakes in social media are higher than with traditional media relations, says Porter Gale, Virgin America’s vice president of marketing. The impact of both positive and negative statements “can easily be amplified because of followers and fans.”

On one recent day, for instance, a semifamous actress named Mackenzie Firgens thanked Virgin Atlantic for the “pretty view to Seattle” and linked her thousands of followers to a picture she took out her window. Stacy Small, who goes by the handle EliteTravelGal, exclaimed: “totally luv my main cabin seat w power, wifi, tv, snax.” But a flier named Darrell Whitelaw snapped a picture of a broken seat that “needs to be fixed.” And AlisonEvents, a wedding and party planner, tweeted about “the worst flight on VirginAmerica”: “plane landed and fire trucks had to rescue us and drive us to the gate. Not awesome.”

The viral nature of social media can turn even the most random, off-the-cuff comment into a broadcast. In the airline world, the most famous example is the case of Kevin Smith, a Hollywood producer with more than a million followers on Twitter. Earlier this year, before the start of a Southwest flight, Smith was told that he was too large for his seat and was asked to vacate the aircraft. He repeatedly and profanely tweeted and blogged about his experience, criticizing Southwest in general for the “fat policy” and the pilot and flight attendant who spoke to him in particular. Even after Southwest apologized, the outrage on Twitter persisted for days.

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Erica Swallow

s part of the ongoing Mashable Awards, we’re taking a closer look at each of the nomination categories. This is “Best Social Media Service for Small Business.” Be sure to nominate your favorites and join us for the Gala in Las Vegas! Sponsorships are available. Please contact sponsorships@mashable.com for more information.

Throughout the year we’ve spoken to many small business owners, asking them about their best practices, recommendations and success stories in the social media space.

Pulling from their experiences, we’ve learned that choosing social platforms should be based on what type of content your company produces, where your audience is already active, what your goals are, and how you plan to add value for your business’s followers.

While every social platform isn’t fit for all businesses, there are quite a few standout services that can be utilized throughout many industries. Here are our top picks for social media services for small businesses — many of these may not be surprising, but that’s because the success stories we’ve heard have proven them over and over again.

Which social media services do you recommend for small businesses? Add your thoughts in the comments below.

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By Mitch Joel

It annoys many people when they follow you on Twitter and you do not follow them back. Too bad. Don’t do it.

The only people you should follow on Twitter are people who are immediately interesting to you or people who might become interesting to you. Ignore the rest. I know, this doesn’t sound very “social media,” but it’s true and it’s a needed commodity in a cluttered world (you can read more about why you should be a Twitter Snob right here: The Trouble With Twitter – Confessions Of A Twitter Snob and, if that doesn’t get you re-thinking your Twitter strategy, read this: The Dirty Little Secret Of The Twitter Elite). You may think that this reasoning is anti-Social Media or that by not following someone back, you will be insulting them, but if you read the Blog post, The Dirty Little Secret Of The Twitter Elite, you’ll understand that even though they may be following you back, they’re probably filtering you and/or ignoring you.

But, there’s a better reason to not follow back everyone who is following you on Twitter.

Here’s a real-life example: the other day, Alistair Croll recommended I check out Tim Carmody on Twitter. Tim has a cool Blog called, Snarkmarket, and is a contributor to Wired. He has 2,221 followers but only follows 414 people. I wasn’t immediately struck by Tim’s Twitter feed, so I looked at some of the people he was following and I could not believe the quality of people he is connected to. What really shocked me is how few of those people I was following. I hit the Twitter equivalent of pay-dirt.

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Jennifer Van Grove

With 500 million members and growing, Facebook offers brands and marketers direct contact to the largest pool of online users on the web. After all, social media is fast becoming more popular than e-mail on mobile devices and more convenient for news consumption than the daily paper.

In recent weeks and months, Facebook has introduced and improved a number of on-site tools that sage brands and businesses can use to better market themselves. Even the simplest of tools such as “Likes” and photos could serve as a catalyst for a viral network effect. Of course, there’s also opportunity to be had with more calculated efforts around Place Pages, Questions and the New Groups.

New as these conveniences may be, they’re still rich with opportunity. What follows is a look at how these tools, mixed with a little ingenuity, can be applied to your marketing purposes.

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