As you prepare to launch your own social experience for a project or organization, there are fantastic and FREE tools to help make your job faster, simpler and smarter. Let them do the heavy lifting for you so you can concentrate on the concept and flow of what you are doing, not the technical execution of it!

Browser. Firefox. You’ve heard about it but may not yet have made the switch. Just so you know, Internet Explorer is not the only or even necessarily the best way to browse the Internet. It’s just the default setting due to vendor agreements with Microsoft. Check out Firefox for a zippy way to browse that’s incredibly customizable (which you want down the road as you get more comfortable online). Plus, hackers aren’t always trying to attack it, so you won’t spend a lot of time processing updates.

Mobile Browser. Opera Mini (of Safari for an iPhone). Again, there isn’t only one way to access the Internet from your cell phone with a data plan! The default browser is set, but you can always download another! Opera Mini can handle scripts that many browsers can’t, letting you log into and launch pages that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to access. Also a nice, zippy browsing experience.

Website Builder. You simply cannot beat Wordpress for an easy way to build a professional Website and easily customize it with plug-n-play functionality, from instant PayPal shopping carts to linking to your Twitter, Facebook and even Constant Contact accounts. If you want a free site where all of the files live on Wordpress’s servers, go to Wordpress.com. You’ll have dozens of templates to choose from, and for small fees, you can point the site to your own custom URL or get under the hood and futz with the styles. If you are more advanced and want an incredibly powerful constant management system hosted on your own servers, then grab the free full install at Wordpress.org. Thousands of templates and plug-ins to create exactly what you want with just a few clicks.

Graphics and Image Editor. I’m a Photoshopper, for certain, but there’s an extraordinary freeware called Paint.Net that also is layer-based. It’s wildly customizable, too; like many open source applications, programmers around the world love to dig into the code and come up with nifty plug-ins to add functionality.

Sticky Notes. As you hunt for information for your site, like facts, quotes and site links to add to your blogroll, the easiest place to paste and save on the fly is a great sticky note program. I like MoRUN.net’s Sticker Lite because the notes always stay visible, even as I switch pages and programs. It’s a truly “sticky” notes program - and you can change note colors, which may matter only to me…

Interactive Tools. Your Web presence will be more social as soon as your audience can actively interact with you. That means polls, surveys, games and more. You don’t have to build those; just grab a widget someone else has made and go! PollDaddy is integrated into loads of social platforms, and it lets you make interactive polls in seconds (though editing them afterward can be a pain - just make a new one and embed it again). Nothing so far beats Google Forms for surveys that actually capture the results in a spreadsheet (Google Docs) for you - and let you see gorgeous graph results with one-click (no skip logic yet, fyi). If you really want to go on a journey, visit WidgetBox and see all of the incredible, portable mini-apps waiting for you to explore and add to your social presence.

Online Back-Up. I believe in triple back-ups, desktop/local external drive/remote server. I like Mozy for the remote “cloud” offering; once you set up and run the first back-up, you can schedule a nightly update that runs automatically! They have a free level, but the annual fee for a lot of space is abot $60. Being able to access files remotely will save you every time you travel.

Music. It takes a lot of time to brainstorm and get creative and build sites and plan Facebook events and launch YouTube channels! You’re going to want to listen to good music from your favorite artists - and other artists that share the same musical genomes (haha). I recommend immediately creating a Coldplay and a Marvin Gaye station on Pandora and hearing everyone else who enters the mix.

If you have tools you love - or already love these tools - leave your thoughts below!

We’ve all heard the terms Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. So what do they mean - and more importantly, what do they mean to you as a business person?

Web 1.0 was about accessing content. This was the dawning of the Internet Age, and the revolution was digitized. Thanks to Netscape, your AOL account, Juno.com, etc., you could connect to the Internet and read information immediately. That information, however, could be published only by those who understood how to code and upload. Web 1.0 was a revolutionary but one-way street.

Web 2.0 was about interacting with content. Once new tools made it possible for users to start publishing their own content to the Internet, Web 2.0 was born. Videos were uploaded. Blogs were posted. Wikis were…pediaed. And Time declared “You” the person of the year for embracing the newly accessible World Wide Web and exploding it into billions of pages of content. Web 2.0 was a two-way street…with people driving all over the road.

Web 3.0 is about aggregating content. Have you counted your bookmarks lately? Done a Google search and gotten fewer than 20 pages of results? The free-for-all of the interactive online community generated a lot of content, but how do you wade through it all to find the specific content you want? Thanks to keywords, tags, feeds and widgets, Internet content now is entirely portable. You don’t have to go to it; you can tell it to come to you - wherever you are! Web 3.0 portability lets users park themselves on a single Web page (like iGoogle or NetVibes) or their cell phone, find the content they want and draw it directly to them. It’s like the parking lot of the world’s biggest burger joint with car service. On skates. You stay nice and comfy in your car, and we bring your order to you.

Business You.0 is my term for integrating social media strategies into your brand outreach to maximize and modernize impact.  To be effective, it must blend:

• A clear and focused Business strategy
• You as a brand leader and visionary; and
• Whatever version of the Web serves your strategies the best: 2.0, 3.0. 100.0, etc.

Rely on this blog for regular tips, insights, interviews and excerpts to help you navigate new media and expand your brand.

Not sure if new media is necessary for your projects? You might also be waiting for the whole “cell phone craze” to pass. Or you’re holding off on building a Web site until you “absolutely have to.” To quote the venerable Shinseki:

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

New media is a must for any business effort today. Of course diving into Web 2.0 and 3.0 is uncharted territory for you! And all you’re reading now is how everyone else is using it and you’re light years behind. Not to worry. With this blog, you will learn what Web 2.0 (and beyond) is, how you can use it, when you should use it and why.

Subscribe to the blog on the right, or revisit regularly for the latest trends and specific tips on how they apply to your company’s mission. And most importantly, find simple instructions on how to do it yourself - and when not to.

Your questions, comments and contributions are welcome below.