We were covered in the New York Times today as part of a story about how small businesses use blogs to connect with their customers. One reason to check out the story is for the picture of my dog, Eggs. He’s in the lead photo with me.

The other reason is to find out the answer to the question: Should small businesses blog?

Our answer is absolutely! Small businesses thrive on community. We write for our customers because so much of our business comes from word of mouth. We write our experiences for other small businesses as a thank you for all the advice we’ve received from people who came before us. We write about software tips and our own open source contributions because our software wouldn’t be possible without the open source contributions of others.

The article covers some other great reasons for small businesses to blog. sweetriot blogs to make connections with their partners (what a larger business would call customers and vendors). You should buy some of their yummy chocolates. David Harlow, a health care consultant, blogs to market his services. The blog has ended being a source for many trade articles and that helps spread his name. Denali Flavors started a Free Money Finance blog where their MooseTracks ice cream could be the sole advertiser.

Update: I’ve written more about my experiences while running a small business at my personal blog, Stubbleblog.

We just added Twitter to our conference offering as a way for conference organizers to communicate with attendees and for attendees to connect with each other. Attendees can now add their twitterings to their profile, add someone as a twitter friend, and get messages from conference organizers. For those who don’t know, Twitter is a simple way for people to share short messages and it works extremely well on mobile phones. Of our recent conferences, about 25% of attendees already had a Twitter account.

Here’s a couple of reasons to use Twitter at your conference:

Stronger relationships. Attendees who have Twitter accounts can include their Twitterings right on their CrowdVine profile. That’s a nice way to see what each attendee is up to, but we think the key feature is the link to add the person as a friend on Twitter. For conferences, we’re totally focused on helping people making strong connections. We think it’s a big deal when we can help two people meet, but the meeting becomes much more powerful when it converts in to a permanent relationship.

News blasts. Set up a Twitter account for your conference and then use it to send out news. Good things to send are speaker announcements, travel info, and session changes. It’s a good method for sending out info because it gives attendees several options for receiving: web, text message (great while the conference is going on), RSS, and instant messenger.

Live Backchannel. Attendees can see what other people at the conference are twittering. Some of the most common and helpful chatter is about which sessions are good, which are bad, and where people are gathering after hours.

I nominated us for Best Boot Strapped company for The Crunchies (an award ceremony run by TechCrunch). I’m not sure we are a bootstrapped company, but I’d still appreciate it if you nominated us as well:

Are we a bootstrapped company? The TechCrunch criteria is that we took less than $100k in investment. That’s true–we didn’t take any investment. The first half of this year was funded by me doing consulting work. I wrote a book, did some corporate training, wrote some articles for Salesforce, and recorded a screencast. It definitely felt like bootstrapping.

However, since August we’ve been entirely funded by our customers. Some companies think of this as a bootstrapping technique. I think of it as a business model. I don’t think we’re a bootstrapped company anymore–I think we’re a small business. (But please, don’t let that stop you from voting for us above)

It’s not just semantics to me, and it probably shouldn’t be to our customers. I meet a lot of people who call themselves founders and call their companies startups. Founder puts all the value on having the idea rather than on executing or finishing. Startup tells you how long they plan to be around, at the start but not down the road when you need them. I’d rather call myself owner and my company a business.

Here’s a great article by David Spark:

How to “Web 2.0-Enable” your Live Event

The gist is that there’s a whole new world of online tools “to improve physical logistics, distribute information, connect people, and enhance face-to-face conversations.”

It’s a good primer, and even if you’ve heard of most of them you probably haven’t seen them all in one place.