This is a guest posting by Nathan Egan. He is the Founder and Managing Partner of the Freesource Agency, LLC. Prior to starting Freesource Agency, Nathan worked at LinkedIn and has wonderful insight into the world of social media networking. Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanegan.

Participating on the social web scene has become near-essential for companies. For a growing number of potential customers, the majority of research, referrals, and recommendations are being done virtually through social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. There is an incredible opportunity for businesses to attract both customers and/or clients through social media.  Here’s why your company needs a social presence too.

1. Customer Connectivity

Social media is arguably the most powerful form of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology that the business world has ever seen. Your company’s social presence will allow you to connect with your customers in new and dynamic ways, that among other things, will give you rich data and feedback to help you grow and sustain your business.

2. Communicate with Prospects

I always tell my clients: “Connect to your customers because your customers are connected to your prospects”. Social media is an extremely efficient marketing platform and a sales prospecting tool. When executed correctly, a good social media strategy will generate organic, inbound sales leads through your current customer base.

3. Competitive Intelligence and Market Research

Social media is an incredible tool for “listening” to your competition and monitoring trends in your target markets. The massive amounts of accurate and real-time information you can collect through these systems can be leveraged in many ways, perhaps most importantly, you can make real-time adjustments to your sales strategy based on what your competition is doing (or not doing).

4. Customer Service

Social media enables your company to build brand loyalty in powerful and dynamic ways that were never before possible. A well-executed program will increase customer satisfaction, give you easy access to real-time feedback on product or services issues, and drive down overall operating costs.

5. Talent Acquisition and Employee Retention

As a whole, social media has changed the game of recruiting and retaining top talent. Learn to leverage social media properly and your organization will gain significant competitive advantages in terms of available human capital.

6. Global Reach

No longer is your company restricted to regional or even national distribution and communication. Social media allows you to publicize press, advertisements and company news to the world in ways that have been traditionally cost prohibitive. For example, a public television segment airing in a small geographic region of the US can now be uploaded on to YouTube and distributed through Twitter, enabling the segment to be viewed by an international audience.

7. Social Media is a Freesource!

Generally speaking, social media is a completely free resource and all it takes is your commitment to learn how to use it! Social media is here to stay, the websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc may come and go but this style of communication will not. You owe it to your business to learn how integrate the appropriate platforms into your overall communication strategy - your ROI will be tremendous!

Share the companies you know with a great social presence on the web!

Is your company participating in Social Media and Inbound Marketing? What advice would You leave for others that are hesitating to create a social presence?

Here's a compilation of 13 ways some companies are hindering adoption of their products and services. So if you are doing any of them, don't.

1. Forcing immediate registration: Requiring a new user to register is a reasonable request—after you've sucked him in. The sites that require registration as the first step are putting a barrier in front of adoption.
2. The long URL: Say a site generates a URL that's 70 characters long or more. When you copy, paste and e-mail this URL, a line break is added. Then, people can't click on the link or it only links to the first part of the URL.
3. Windows that don't generate URLs: Have you ever wanted to point people to a page, but the page has no URL? Did the company decide it didn't want referrals, links and additional traffic?
4. The unsearchable website: Some sites don't offer a search option. If your site goes deeper than one level, it needs a search box.
5. Sites without Delicious, Digg and Fark bookmarks: There's no reason why a company wouldn't want its fans to bookmark its pages. When my blog hits the front page of Digg, page views typically increase six or seven times.
6. Limiting contact to e-mail: Don't get me wrong; I live and die by e-mail. But sometimes I want to call or even snail-mail a company. Many companies only let you send an e-mail via their "Contact Us" page. Why can't companies be honest and just call it "Don't Contact Us"?
7. Lack of feeds and e-mail lists: Make getting information about your products and services easy by providing e-mail and RSS feeds for content and PR newsletters.
8. Making users retype e-mail addresses: How about the patent-pending, curve-jumping Web 2.0 company that wants you to share content but requires you to retype your friends' e-mail addresses? I have 7,703 e-mail addresses in Microsoft Entourage. I'm not going to retype them into some done-as-an-afterthought address book.
9. No e-mail addresses as usernames: I'm a member of hundreds of sites. I can't remember my usernames, but I can remember my e-mail address. So why not let me use that?
10. Case-sensitive usernames and passwords: I know; these are more secure. But then I'm more likely to type in my user name and password incorrectly.
11. Friction-full commenting: "Moderated comments" is an oxymoron. If your company is trying to be a hip, myth-busting, hypocrisy-outing joint, it should let anyone comment. Also, many times I've started to leave a comment on a blog but stopped when I realized I'd have to register.
12. Unreadable confirmation codes: A visual confirmation graphic system is a good thing, but many are too difficult to read. All you have to prove is that you're not a robot. So if the code is "ghj1lK," entering "ghj11K" should be good enough.
13. E-mails without signatures: Communication would be so much easier if everyone included a complete e-mail signature with their name, company, address, phone and e-mail address.

The writer of this blog post, Guy Kawasaki's mantra is "Empower people." He is co-founder of Alltop.com, a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, former chief evangelist for Apple Inc. and author of nine books--most recently, Reality Check.

What is the secret to online success? Great design, intuitive navigation from page to page, easy to read page content, valuable information? Yes - Yes - Yes - Yes and more. The factors responsible for the majority of websites that fail can be traced back to a handful of very avoidable missteps.

1. BAD PLANNING
Effective, thoughtful, and thorough planning and goal-setting for any website is crucial to its achieving success. A lot online initiatives come up short or even fail due to lack of or poor planning. Planning can be further defined by its components: goal setting, team assembly, roles definitions, strategizing, design, architecture, navigation scheme creation, page layouts, visitor interactivity, and finally - effective execution. If all of those elements are not present or do not work in harmony, your website project is fundamentally challenged from the start.

2. FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND THE MEDIUM
Today's winning websites feature content that is designed for the web. Let me emphasize that - the page content has been produced especially to be viewed on a computer monitor or even smart phone. What does that mean? Simply that good sites are not merely doing a copy+paste from a corporate marketing print brochure. No, their 'web' page content has been written for on-screen viewing/reading which in effect means "less is more". And photos of course are optimized for online viewing which means nothing need be higher than 72dpi and you should restrict file size to under 100kb.

3. FAILURE TO GIVE VISITORS ADDED VALUE
Online surfers are busy, have a lot of sites to choose from, and will quickly leave your site if you fail to deliver value. Although the primary goal of your business’ website is to market your product or service, your competitors are probably singing the same song and doing the same dance. So to differentiate themselves from competition, successful site owners are seen offering free tools, downloads, expert advice via chat, etc. that is highly valued by visitors and still very much tied to your business. By doing this, you establish yourself as an expert, and you will create credibility with your visitors as you generously offer them your expertise.

4. BAD CHOICE OF IMAGES, PLUGINS, ETC.
Is that flippy, bouncy, flash intro really necessary? Does it improve your visitor's experience or accentuate your message or help define a process? No? Then cut it. Today's visitors are savvy. They've probably seen those same stock images in dozens of places from newspaper ads to direct mail pieces, so when those same faces appear on your site they know the people portrayed are [1] not your satisfied customers, and [2] not your staff members. So if you opt to use stock photography can you really blame people who conclude that your business methods might be equally suspect? Be proud of your location and your staff; go ahead and post their real pictures on your site. If you have trouble taking pictures, hire a professional photographer for half a day. The cost is neglible and you'll both fire up your employees and impress your site visitors.

5. NO CALL TO ACTION
Subscribe to our Newsletter. Contact us now. Sign up for a free tote bag. Your best contact list building leads are the ones that visit your website and leave their contact information in one of many places you've created for them there. If you are not capturing these visitors’ contact information so that you keep in touch with them, then you are simply ignoring a huge business potential.

Have you seen websites that "turn off" or discourage visitors due to poor design or difficult to decipher content? Tell us about it.