So what exactly is the opportunity that social media presents to small business? In this Solutions Stars Video segment, we’ve got 11 more viewpoints from experts in the field for you to consider: The Social Opportunity [6 mins, 24 secs]. Check out the video (and see the full series on available on Blip.tv):

Here are some quick recaps:

Brian Solis, Author of PR2.0, CEO Futureworks: Small businesses now have direct access to the people who can help them make their businesses grow, on a mass scale. Now, small businesses can be influential and become authorities, and build communities around them, based on their expertise.

Rohit Barghava, author, “Personality Not Included“: Small business owners understand the power of word of mouth marketing and customer referrals. It’s cheap, viral, and works.

Tim Ferriss, author, The 4-Hour Workweek: To get online, first get offline — go to conferences, meet people, have credible people online vouching for you — then connect with them online.

Steve Hall, Publisher, Editor, Adrants: Reach out to everyone in your industry, get to know them, and broaden your circle of social friends. Eventually, you’ll be able to use the network to help spread whatever you’re trying to spread.

Toby Bloomberg, CEO Bloomberg Marketing: Small businesses especially build businesses through relationships, which they can do through through blogs, podcasts, video. Social media was built for small businesses, and lets them scale further.

Ryan Anderson, Community Relations, Overlay.TV: It’s an incredible opportunity for small business to bypass filters to get to core customers. The tools let you create conversation that you just can’t do through traditional media.

Darren Rowse, Author, ProBlogger: If starting out again, he’d spend a lot of time defining his niche, establishing self as expert, offering to guest blog in other expert blogs (for free), to get own his content and expertise out.

David Alston, VP of Marketing, Radian6: Small business can use social media to build a brand, in a highly targeted way. Talk to the people in your space and reach out to them.

Mari Smith, Relationship Marketing Specialist: Radical Strategic Visibility — your goal is to be ubiquitous, in a way that excites people.

Liz Strauss, Social Web Strategist, Successful Blog: Use the internet to become irresistible — know which type of people on the Internet they’re going after — readers, people who do, offer and sell things, and people who pass on info to their friends.

Paul Chaney, President, Int’l Blogging and New Media Association: Small business is best suited to use a lot of these tools — an example is a custom signmaker with a blog, who shows the process and tells the story of making the sign, to help customers get to know him.

Find anything particularly meaningful (or offbase) here among our experts’ opinions? Leave a comment and let us know what you think about the social opportunities for small business.

In this next video segment from the Solutions Stars Video series, we’ve got 10 social media luminaries in 5 minutes, telling you, the small business owner, some reasons why You Need Social Networks. Check out the video (and see the full series on available on Blip.tv):

Here are some recaps of what they said:

Guy Kawasaki, founder, AllTop: Twitter is a great way to find and spread information — it’s a way to reach thousands of people, immediately and free (which is great). It takes a little getting used to; give it a month or so — you might hate it for the first few days, but it’ll work out [which mirrors my own experience with Twitter, except I took longer because I am slow]

Ryan Anderson, Community Relations, Overlay.TV: They’re active on Twitter (including the executives), not just for promoting their stuff, but engaging with community. Their CEO will also use Summize weekly (now Twitter’s search) to get feedback directly from users, which is great for businesses, especially young companies.

Wendy Piersall, CEO Sparkplugging.com: You should also use other tools (depending on your business) like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. She doesn’t think you can conduct business online without participating in these types of communities.

Scott Monty, Global Digital and Multimedia Community Manager, Ford Motor Company: People have been networking since the Stone Age, but modern tools let us create networks of subject matter experts. “You don’t have to be the best accountant; you have to hire the best accountant” — online social networks let you tap into people who can help you — you’re not in it alone.

Liz Strauss, Social Web Strategist, Successful Blog: All this has changed the way she would start a business today. Use social networks to find out who’s out there; start on Twitter to listen to people and watch what’s going on. Open the door by promoting other people.

Tim Ferriss, author, The 4-Hour Workweek: Blogging isn’t for everyone, but there’s no excuse not to be on Twitter. You can use it as a blog, and you can be effective using it as a personality and brand on Twitter (like newspapers, activists, others are using it).

Chris Brogan, VP of Strategy, CrossTech Media: Small businesses should use social media tools to create  outposts where people can get to know you — put your face and presence out there, just like shopkeepers hanging out and meeting people in a town. “It’s all the same, it’s just different… but it’s all the same.”

Jason Billingsley, Co-founder, Elastic Path Software — Retailers need to build relationships and community; once you do that, your message is accepted. There are many avenues, like YouTube — many people are educating consumers by doing how-to and instructional videos. They’re informing, not selling, and by creating trust, then they look to you when they need to do transactions.

Mari Smith, Relationship Marketing Specialist: “Radical Strategic Visibility” — using Facebook, social bookmarks, blogging, Friendfeed, etc, — all the tools, in an integrated strategy.

Jennifer Openshaw, President, WeSeed.com: Bringing credibility online is important, and positioning yourself as an expert. A way to do this is to create content on your site, which you can also distribute through partners and social networking sites, so you can add value to people, even when you’re not trying to sell them stuff.

Agree or disagree with something from one of our ten social media experts? Please leave a comment below.

Here’s a quick recap of a short video interview (2 minutes, 15 seconds) from the Solutions Stars Video series (the full series is also available on Blip.tv) — this particular episode is on increasing your small business’ Visibility Through Search. In other words, it’s about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is always a hot topic. Check out the video:

Now, everyone (and I mean everyone) wants to know how they can get their stuff in the first view on the first page of search engines. Better search results positioning means more eyeballs, more eyeballs means more clicks, and more clicks hopefully leads to more customers and revenue.

There’s a lot of good SEO information that you, as the small business owner, can take away, but there’s also a lot of voodoo, handwaving, and hucksterism, too. When I take a look at SEO advice, I focus on things that help you present your information, in a way that’s clearer and better-organized… for both search engine spiders and humans. That way, you (hopefully) get better search results positioning, but you also get better engagement with customers and visitors.

Here’s what the four interviewees have to say about increasing your small business’s visibility through search:

Chris Baggott, CEO, Compendium Software: Branding really isn’t the goal of SEO — it’s how to get found. Blogging is a great tool for leveling the playing field for small businesses when it comes to SEO, especially in local search. Because most small businesses are local, that can be an advantage in search over a corporate behemoth that has locations all over the place — if they’re blogging.

David Berkowitz, Dir. of Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i: SEO is an opportunity for small businesses to get more of their content out there, and to build relationships that lead to inbound links. By engaging with the community, the community helps good sites bubble up to the top.

Jay Berkowitz, author, “Ten Golden Rules” Podcaster: SEO is really important, and you can help your SEO by doing some basic things; at the very simplest, add keywords to every page — pick 2 or 3 main keyword phrases to focus on for the site, add them to the title, and use them 3 times on each page (in the first paragraph, in the body, and in the bottom paragraph.)

Lee Odden, CEO of TopRankMarketing.com (looks like there’s a “d” missing in his name in the video caption, sorry about that, Lee): Find out what bloggers write a lot about and let them know if you’ve got something they’d be interested in by leaving comments.  Another tactic is using optimized press releases, which will drive inbound links. Search engine rankings will increase if they find the keywords on your site, and you get inbound links from sites that are also relevant to those keywords.

SEO is an entire industry, so there’s plenty of stuff to say about it. Leave a comment below if you have a thought to share about the ideas presented in the video, my characterization of them, or thoughts about SEO for small business in general.