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The rate of sexual assaults is alarmingly high among adolescents. Research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Justice finds that 30% to 35% of female sexual assault survivors were first raped between the ages of 11 to 17. Many of these assaults occur when victims are under the influence of alcohol, and a surprising number of adolescent rapes involve multiple perpetrators. A recent study found that 12.4% of sexual assaults committed against 13- to 17-year-old teens were gang rapes.

When evidence goes viral

Rape is a crime of power and dominance, and social media provide new ways of asserting that power to hurt victims over and over again. Gang rape takes on a whole new meaning when images and slurs are posted and forwarded and spread endlessly. Adolescent sexual assaults are particularly likely to go viral (more so than instances of adult rape) because of the everyone knows everything about everyone culture of middle and high school. The ubiquity of cell phones with cameras and the power of the Internet make for faster, farther-reaching gossip, name-calling, character assassination and ultimately despair for the victim.

TRENTON Gov. Chris Christies re-election campaign went live this morning with a revamped website and social media presence.

His online political headquarters, www.christiefornj.com, takes cues from his governmental communications strategy with a new Twitter account, @ChrisChristie, Facebook and Instagram pages and a channel on YouTube, a medium that has been instrumental in building his national brand.

The new website will be a hub of activity and just one part of a very technologically sophisticated campaign, said campaign strategist Mike DuHaime.

The first tweet, which appeared at 10 pm Tuesday, made a simple pitch for a second term: one just wasnt enough – 4 more years… Lets do this, NJ! #NJGov #strongleadership. The second went up at 5 am today and directs people to website.

Two of the three videos on the site are newly produced campaign materials touting the endorsements hes collected over the past few months and showing footage of him speaking to supporters.

Most small businesses feel like they are wasting their time on social media, according to a new survey.

About 61% of small businesses dont see any return on investment on their social-media activities, according to a survey released Tuesday from Manta, a social network for small businesses. Yet, almost 50% say theyve increased their time spent on social media, and only 7% have decreased their time.

What businesses are trying to get out of social media: 36% said their goal was to acquire and engage new customers, 19% said to gain leads and referrals, and 17% said to boost awareness. Facebook was most cited as the hardest to maintain social-media platform, according to the survey.

In an age where a company such as Netflix is so heavily integrated into social media that it plans to make disclosures to investors on Facebook and Twitter, and a tech giant such as Enterasys Networks makes headlines by hiring based on tweets rather than rÃsumÃs, many small businesses worry their customers will leave them behind if they dont interact with them on social media. Plus its been a smash hit for some. Of the businesses that saw a return on investment in social-media activities, 30% measure that amount as above $2,000.

Terry Benton, owner of Terrys Fabric Cottage in Sulphur, La., was surprised to hear that her quilting store wasnt in the minority of businesses disappointed in the way their social-media campaigns have panned out. She says she created accounts for her business on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter a little over a year ago, spending about five hours a week updating the platforms.

She built it, but no one came. Shes backed off in the past three months after scoring only 60 Likes on her Facebook page at its peak, she says. I love reading things on the internet, so I thought the social-media stuff would be great for me, but it really has not turned out well at all.

Pam Springer, CEO of Manta, says small businesses get returns from social media â?? they just dont know what they are when they see them, and she says its good news that companies are spending more time on social media. If theyre really getting no returns, she says, its probably because they dont know how to launch a successful social-media campaign, and they give up too fast if the campaign falls flat. Businesses, she recommends, should use online resources like forums, and yes, social media, to connect with each other for advice. According to the survey, only 36% of businesses do this.

They have a high propensity to become maybe not as patient as they should be, Springer says. The attitude becomes I dont want to deal with it. I dont have enough time. Its intimidating to me.

Many small business though, just dont have a place in social media, says Stephanie Schwab, CEO of Crackerjack Marketing. They join because of peer pressure and media pressure even though they dont understand what theyre trying to get out of a social-media campaign. Some businesses make the mistake of prioritizing social-media activities over marketing techniques already proved to work, such as having a website.

Just thinking that Facebook alone will send droves of customers to your doorstep is a mistake a lot of people make, she says.

Regina Hartt, owner of Hartts Pool Plastering in Turlock, Calif., says social media hasnt helped her business because there are too many disreputable companies in the construction business, and no amount of Likes on Facebook is going to sway a prospective customer to spend $5,000 to $40,000 on a pool-plastering job. Hartt created a Facebook page for her business over a year ago, but she says out of the 200 to 300 jobs she does a year only three or four come from people who have found the business online.

They want someone whos going to do a good job, and seeing someones comment on a Facebook page isnt going to be enough, says Hartt, who gets most of her customers through referrals.

The National Association of Attorneys General, headed by Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler, has announced a partnership with Facebook to make kids aware of and safety and privacy issues concerning social media.

I wish them the best of luck. I recently had a peek into the sordid world of tween social media and it is not a pretty sight. I saw the messages my son and his friends were sending to each other and have now taken away all his electronic devices cell phone, iPad and unsupervised computer privileges.

Let me give you some context. I teach online journalism to college kids. I require my students to sign up to Facebook and Twitter. Social media are essential tools for businesses to get their messages across to an audience.

But it is social medias ability to reach vast audiences and leave a lasting impression that also makes these programs dangerous. I was shocked at the inappropriate language, the sexual banter and the bullying I saw in my sons messages. If you havent checked out your kids social media posts, do it. Tweens have no right to privacy on social media.

And while Facebook might get all the attention, my son and his friends are using other programs such as Oovoo and Instagram and plain phone texts.

I dont know when Ill give my son back his devices, but I have told him it will be a long time before I will let him use social media to talk to his friends.

Every day we see adults making fools of themselves over Twitter messages, so its not surprising children lack judgment. But as parents, we can control the devices and read what our kids are writing. I know one mother who makes spot checks on her teen-age daughters cell phone, making her stop in mid text to hand over the phone for inspection.

You think its harsh or unfair? Take a look for yourself.

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Who are the Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers for 2013?

You could answer that question by saying, of course, they are the people who most influence the biggest brands or have the best selling book or who have been around the business a long time.

But social media is a very democratizing form of communications and to assess influence you really need to know who is first among equals.

That means assessing who has a real following – real in the sense of real people and not just bots, real also in the sense that the following is active in social media and not just a passive consumer.

Being able to get to that essence, of people whose peers are actively involved with them, is why I chose Peek Analytics as the tool to measure influence.

There are also some basic criteria for involvement – experts must be creating their own content, and it has to be about social media. See more on the criteria here.

On the scoring, Peek Analytics gives people a score called Pull. If an individual has a Pull of 10x, that means that the audience the individual can reach is at least ten times greater than what the average social media user can reach.

If you want to measure your own Pull, you can do that by following this link.

Some observations on the upper part of the list….

The Top 10 Considered

In the top ten this year all the influencers have a pull of between 2,000 and 3,000. This represents influence among a group of peers, whether those peers are in Washington, Palo Alto or Peterborough.

#1. Leaders are more motivational. We are seeing a lot more inspirational messaging via Twitter from this group than we did last year – almost as if social media is relegated (or elevated depending on your taste) to motivational relationships. This is becoming an essential part of being a social media leader.

#2. It is more gender balanced. The Top 10 this year is equally divided between men and women. Last year it was skewed towards men.

#3. It is easier to access. There is a bigger spread of scores here in the top 10 that in the remainder of the top 50 (1000 – 2000). Those scores are interesting for two reasons.

The first is that it still looks as though once you hit the top flight either you automatically get more (and more active) followers or your position reflects an ability to cultivate that type of group.

But secondly the data also shows that the 40 people from 11 – 50 are very tightly grouped and any of them could rise quickly.

#4. There are more self-starters. And finally the top ten last year was skewed towards people who had a strong institutional base – an employer who allowed them time to do social media. The group below are much more skewed towards self-starters who have made social media their business, or who are advising on how to make social media your business.

The Top 10….

# 1. Sean Gardner. Sean, who also writes at Huffington Post, comes in at number 1. Sean blends social media insight with inspirational messaging, a trend we’re seeing across social. @2morrowknight.

#2. Ann Tran. Number 1 on the women’s list, Ann writes primarily about social media in the travel and hospitality vertical @anntran_

#3. Jessica Northey. It’s a trend this year, leading influencers whose base is in a specific vertical. For Jessica it is music. She also says she’s moving away from blogging towards Google +. @jessicanorthey.

#4. Mari Smith. Mari is a leading Facebook marketing expert and one of the top 10, overall, from last year. She’s also the author of The New Relationship Marketing. @marismith.

# 5. Aaron Lee. Aaron has been strong on Twitter for a long time now, and has a useful website with professional-grade advice but which can also inform people at the beginning of their social media careers. @askaaronlee.

#6. John Paul Aguiar. An eclectic mix of blog advice, Twitter and other social tools, John is in business to help people make money from social. @johnaguiar.

#7. Liz Strauss. Liz runs successful-blog.com. She’s currently taking on the challenge of cancer. Best wishes. @lizstrauss.

#8. Warren Whitlock. Host of Blog Talk Radio’s Social Media Profit Show, like John, Warren’s focus in on social media for profit. @warrenwhitlock.

#9. Ted Coine. Along with Shawn Murphy, Ted runs the Switch and Shift blog. @tedcoine

#10. Pam Moore. Covering Facebook, Google + and the business of social. @pammktgnut.

Just this month, a faculty member with expertise in social media was called upon by the news media to comment on a story about Instagram Beauty Contests. It has become exceedingly clear that social media is and will continue to be an integral part of our lives for decades to come. Who could argue that helping people to connect and communicate with each other regularly is not a good thing, especially in times of crisis and tragedy, when it allows each of us to quickly share life-saving information or respond to a national tragedy? Communication brings us together as a human and global family.

In the latest issue of INSIGHT, the magazine for alumni and friends of The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, we explore the virtual self, and how social media is altering not only how we perceive others but how we are subsequently defining relationships with others. We also hear from several TCSPP experts on how the excessive use of social media can affect interpersonal interactions and relationships and our personal sense of well-being. Also discussed herein is an introduction to the emerging darker side of social media, especially among the youth of our nation. We have all read the tragic and heartbreaking stories about cyber bullying, increased depression and suicide, and the growing concerns over quick and sometimes brutal reputational damage. While many of us are enjoying the benefits of social media, we are also grappling with how best to understand and even prevent the related unintended consequences.

At the professional level and organizational level, many are increasingly engaged in how to leverage social media for constructive and business enhancing purposes. At the same time, many of us are surprised by how individual and organizational reputations can be damaged in a tweeting second. This new highly public rating system for everything we do — personally and professionally — has so quickly become part of our everyday reality.

Like all disruptive innovations and shifts in cultural norms, we will wait to determine the eventual outcome. For now, we must remember that even though we can publicly express our various opinions on almost any and every issue at any given time, this new freedom brings substantial responsibility. It seems reasonable to suggest that a society take an active role in shaping how an action can or cannot adversely affect the lives of individuals. As a psychologist whose practice was once dedicated to the well-being of children and adolescents, I am especially alert to how social media is impacting our adolescents and young adults. As a parent myself, I — like many other parents — take an active role in the use of social media with my own children. As an individual with great access to social media, I find myself reflecting more and more on its role in my own life. As a professional school president, I am curious to watch how social media and web applications will shape the profession of mental and behavioral health.

There are interesting days ahead.

A screen grab of a photograph on the homepage of a Sina Weibo account, identified by Chinese media and netizens as being of Lu Lingzi.

By this point, there really should be no doubt in anyones mind that torture was widely used during the last administration — and that nothing like that should ever happen again.

The new, comprehensive report out today from an august, bipartisan commission goes a long way toward making that abundantly, authoritatively clear, laying the blame fully at the feet of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and other top officials.

But the reality is: Thats old news. Whats new and disturbing and important about the report from the Constitution Projects Task Force on Detainee Treatment is how it calls attention to the absurd reality that we, as a country, are actually still arguing about any of this.

And for that, the report lays the blame fully at the feet of the current administration, for covering up what happened and stifling any sort of national conversation on the topic — and the media, for splitting the difference between the facts and the plainly specious argument made by torture regimes architects that what occurred should be defined as something other than what it so obviously was.

The report points out, as I have in the past, that neither Obama nor Congress have done a thing to make sure that, the next time a perceived emergency comes up, some other president or vice president wont decide to torture again.

Obamas policy of looking forward instead of looking backward, in this light, is exposed as a cover-up that is actually holding the country back from a crucial period of self-understanding, and growth.

Theres also a matter of law. That US officials involved with detention in the CIAs black sites committed war crimes and violated interntional law, which the report concludes to be self-evident, isnt something Obama is allowed to ignore.

It actually violates the US legal obligations under the international Convention Against Torture, which requires each country to [c]riminalize all acts of torture, attempts to commit torture, or complicity or participation in torture, and proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.

The United States cannot be said to have complied, the report concludes, noting:

No CIA personnel have been convicted or even charged for numerous instances of torture in CIA custody — including cases where interrogators exceeded what was authorized by the Office of Legal Counsel, and cases where detainees were tortured to death. Many acts of unauthorized torture by military forces have also been inadequately investigated or prosecuted.

So its not just Bush and Cheney who violated international law; now its Obama, too.

The report is blistering about the cover-up. The high level of secrecy surrounding the rendition and torture of detainees since September 11 cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security, it states. Ongoing classification of these practices serves only to conceal evidence of wrongdoing and make its repetition more likely.

The end result is a society in moral disarray: Democracy and torture cannot peacefully coexist in the same body politic, the report states. The Task Force… believes and hopes that publicly acknowledging this grave error, however belatedly, may mitigate some of those consequences and help undo some of the damage to our reputation at home and abroad.

And what an indictment of false equivalency by the media. Shame on us. The report notes:

The question as to whether US forces and agents engaged in torture has been complicated by the existence of two vocal camps in the public debate. This has been particularly vexing for traditional journalists who are trained and accustomed to recording the arguments of both sides in a dispute without declaring one right and the other wrong. The public may simply perceive that there is no right side, as there are two equally fervent views held views on a subject, with substantially credentialed people on both sides. In this case, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that among those who insist that the United States did not engage in torture are figures who served at the highest levels of government, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

But this Task Force is not bound by this convention.

The members, coming from a wide political spectrum, believe that arguments that the nation did not engage in torture and that much of what occurred should be defined as something less than torture are not credible.

So the so-called objective reporters who couldnt speak the truth were basically accessories after the fact.

Theres so much more in the report worth reading, and discussing.

Perhaps its most urgent conclusion is that forced feeding of detainees — going on right now — is a form of abuse and must end.

The report notes the crucial support to the torture regime provided by people in the medical and legal fields, which it says raises profound ethical questions for both professions.

And weighing into territory recently plowed during the debate over the movie Zero Dark Thirty and its depiction of torture as providing useful information, the report notes that there is no evidence to support that view, and points out that the people saying torture worked have inherent credibility issues, one of which is that they are the ones who actually who authorized and implemented the very practices that they now assert to have been valuable tools in fighting terrorism.

The US has lost its moral compass before, the Task Force notes. It does so in every war, to some degree or another. And yet, the report concludes, there is no evidence there had ever before been the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after September 11, directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.

Thats not something we can just pretend never happened. We need accountability.

Dan Froomkin is in the process of launching a new accountability journalism project at FearlessMedia.org. He is contributing editor of Nieman Reports, and the former senior Washington correspondent for the Huffington Post. He wrote the White House Watch column for the Washington Post website from 2004 to 2009, and was editor of the site from 2000 to 2003. Dan can be reached at froomkin@gmail.com.

The news that Liberty Media Liberty Mediachairman John Malone has taken a $2.62BN stake in Charter Communications Charter Communications is not good news fora world in which Governance Matters.

Liberty Media’s governance structure is not one which appears enamoured of public shareholders. Its staggered board (one where directors are only up for election once every three years)consists of mostly long-tenured directors. The multiple classes of stock with different voting rights give far more voting control to Malone than is represented by his economic interest. And the CEO and the CFO are involved in far too many other companies where Malone is also a director or the chairman or a significant owner.

Charter Communications is little better. The company is largely owned by three major shareholders, AP Charter Holdings, Oaktree Opportunities Investments, andFranklin Advisers, each of whom, in turn, designate one or more directors to the board. Public shareholders have little input. In fact, seven of the eleven directors on the board are elected by the company’s principal shareholders.

This new relationship is worrisome, but still not as worrisome as the planned takeover by Liberty Global Liberty Global – another Malone company – of Virgin Media Virgin Media. Governance matters are not much better, if at all, at either of these companies.

So what’s wrong with Liberty Global’s ownership structure and why does it matter?

Liberty Global’s governance structure is not much different fromLiberty Media’s, or fromLiberty Interactive’s, or Liberty Starz’. At all of these media companies, co-founder, sometimes chairman, and sometimes former CEO, John C. Malone disenfranchises public shareholders by giving their shares one vote to the ten votes per share he owns.

Given the John Malone connection here, you might be tempted to think that this is just one of his traits. But that’s not the case.This undemocratic situation is all too common in the media industry. For example, it is favored by two of thebiggest bosses in theindustryNews Corp’s Rupert Murdoch and Viacom and CBS’s Sumner Redstone. In fact, almost 83 percent of the 86 media companies in the Russell 3000 have either a controlling shareholder or are family or founder firms. You cannot find any other industry sector which would demonstrate this kind of domination by controlling shareholders. What is it about media bosses and their public-shareholder-be-damned voting structures? Founders of media empires all seem very eager to raise cash from public shareholders but seem extraordinarily reluctant to cede any control to them. It’s a voting structure that might be suitable for a privately held family firm but not for a public company.

ButJohn Malone’s influence goes even further than theLiberty group of companies. Healso maintains a tight control over and/or interest in a group of other media companies:internet radio company Sirius,internet travel company Expedia, andbroadcaster Discovery Communications. Indeed Malone sits on nine company boards in the Russell 3000, all of them with complicated ownership structures that favor insiders over public shareholders. Andeach of theseboards is made up of aged, entrenched, tenured directors, just likemost of the Liberty group of companies.

As can be seen from the chart above, provided by governance rating firm GMI Ratings’ Global Leaderboard product, Malone’s connections look like they were drawn by an extremely angry, hyperactive four year old with a malfunctioning Spirograph.

But does any of this have anything to do with share price performance and shareholder value? Just as an experiment I compared the share price performance of Virgin Media to the companies in the Malone Empire. They’ve basically been tracking each other’s growth, with the odd bumps and drops, for the last five years. They’ve all been doing relatively well. Clearly, performance is being driven by the sector, rather thanmanagement, or even theownership structure.

So if there’s no difference in performance, why should shareholders worry? Well, short-term shareholders will not see a significant impact on performance because of these inequitable ownership structures. They won’t have any influence, but that probably doesn’t bother them. It’s the long-term shareholder that should beware. Bad governance doesn’t make much difference in the short term, it’s usually in the long-term, sometimes as much as eight to 10 years, that the rot starts to set in.

One only has to look at similarly controlled companies in different industries. There are plenty of examples of faltering performance when a controlling or founder CEO who calls all the shots gets into trouble because the shareholders can do nothing to stop him or her. For example, public shareholders have few rights at Facebook,Groupon, or Zynga because of similarly inequitable voting rights. Performance at each of these companies has suffered since their IPOs, but public shareholders have had little opportunity to voice their discontent. Finally, at Groupon, the board has ousted the founder CEO, something public shareholders did not have the right to do.

And even though these poorgovernance structures have yet to impact performance at these media companies, one Virginshareholder believes very strongly that they have impacted the value of his holding. The announcement of the acquisition by Liberty Global of Virgin Media prompted the immediate filing of ashareholder law suit against Virgin Media directors [Grimsley v. Berkett, 650469-2013, New York State Supreme Court, New York County (Manhattan).] The case, led by Virgin investor Jeff Grimsley, accuses them of selling the company too cheaply to Liberty Global without considering other offers.Grimsley’s initial concerns might stem from undervaluation of the company, but they are likely also to be inspired by soon-to-be-deteriorating governance at the combined company that he and others willown.

So is Virgin Media’s governance going to go downhill once Liberty acquires it? Frankly,it doesn’t have the most independent board in the world either. One director works for a company that has its insurance products bundled with all Virgin’s mobile handset contracts. Even more suspect, Virgin’s current chairman is a director on Sirius XM’s board where he joins Liberty Media’s CEO Maffei, and Malone. I have a feeling that that is a factmentioned in the court filings for the lawsuit.

But once the ownership structure has changed and the combined company moves forward, future performance will be the real test of the governance effect on shareholder value. The trouble is, since the company’s chief rival in the UK is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp,where few public shareholders have any kind of power over what happens at the company, it’s going to be tough to find a real, publicly-owned, publicly-controlled company to compare.

A new report from online business community Manta shows that, desperate to increase sales numbers in 2013, American small business owners are turning up on the social web in droves. The trouble is, no matter how much time they spend, they’re simply not seeing a return on investment.

Social media use is trending upward according to the survey of more than 1,235 small business owners, no surprise given the attention paid to the various social platforms by big businesses and media outlets. Nearly 50% have increased time spent on social media this year and nearly 55% say they’re using platforms like Twitter and Facebook Facebook as a primary tool for either acquiring new customers of generating sales leads.

It all sounds promising until this head-scratching result: despite their dedication and belief that social media is the Hail Mary of small business owners everywhere, more than 60% of small business owners say they haven’t seen any return on investment from their engagement online. None.

Social guru Ted Rubin isn’t surprised one bit–and says it’s because the small business community’s expectations of social media platforms, how they’re using them and the reality of the technology are simply way out of whack. He should know–as the Chief Social Marketing Officer of Collective Bias Collective Bias, a FORBES Most Promising Company that drives retail sales through coordinated creation of social media stories and which recently raised a $10 million round–the man lives and breathes online.

“First of all, small business owners are being sold on the strategy of social by ‘experts’ who are trying to get them to pay to set up accounts,” Rubin says, talking, of course, of firms not unlike his own who manage social media platforms for businesses. “But more importantly, their expectations are being set up in the wrong way.” Set up, it seems, for failure.

First up, if an expert or strategist tries to sell you on the notion that setting up a Facebook page or Twitter handle (or even a LinkedIn company page) will open the floodgates to an Internet’s worth of sales leads, they’re selling you some bad medicine. “It’s not going to cut it,” Rubin says. “Social actually can be a powerful lead generator,” Rubin says, but not in the way SBOs think. Jumping online to check in on Facebook once a day or posting current sales deals isn’t going to bring the business in. It just isn’t.

Instead, he says the only real way to use social to bring in new sales is to dedicate a staffer (think low-level, he says, “Think your teenaged son or daughter.”) to spend some serious time online just listening. “If you’re selling insurance, or plumbing, carpeting or other services,” he says, “Listen for people who are complaining about their current service providers. Those are leads worth pursuing.” Filters and using social as a search tool can help, but the most critical factor here is time. According to Manta’s survey, despite the increase in time from 2012-2013, more than half of small business owners spend less than three hours a week online.

It’s frustrating, of course, this notion that you can’t simply set something up and watch the sales stream in–which explains the disappointment of the majority of business owners surveyed who say they aren’t experiencing a return on their investment in social. “Small business owners are being told social can generate leads and bring in new customers, so they often consider it as another direct marketing vehicle, like getting their company into a weekly ValPac or Penny Saver circular,” Rubin continues. Those directives are easy to measure. You spend $1000, you get 20 new customers as a result.

In contrast, social is a patience game, which for many can be a bitter pill. “Return on relationship takes time,” he says. “People are being sold on social as a place to generate leads, but it’s really a place to build loyalty, answer customer service questions and to build a community.” These things take time, he says, and commitment to the platform, but in his experience they have proven to be the value that does result in an increase in revenue. How? Through trust and loyalty.

“Any business owner small or large will say that’s the win,” Rubin says. “If people trust you they’re going to be loyal. If they’re loyal, their average order will be higher, the frequency of their purchases will be higher and the life expectancy of them as a customer will be longer.”

According to this survey from Manta, small business owners are eager to embrace social media, but they’re going about it all wrong–and it’s creating real discontent. Rubin–who has seen first-hand the results of social media marketing and building communities between brands and consumers–says that with a few subtle shifts in priorities and an adoption of the long-view, small business owners can put themselves back on the path towards success.. and sales.

“Small business owners have got to be thinking of their social presence as first and foremost an extension of what’s happening in their physical locations,” he says, whether it’s a storefront of service business. If customers come in for local gossip, then tear it up online, he says. “Facebook is a great place to extend your personality online so that customers existing and new feel connected.”

What Facebook isn’t is a portal to millions in instant revenue. Once small business owners can appreciate that, they’ll have a much better time of it–and long-term reap much more profitable rewards.