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Essentially, a podcast is the multimedia version of a blog; delivering audio and video content as opposed to a blog's written content. Usually a podcast is anywhere from five-to-30 minutes long. Any longer than that, and you risk losing your audience — remember this is still the Internet.

Zane Safrit, CEO of Conference Calls Unlimited, sees podcasts as the next iteration of blogs. "In a blog, you can wordsmith the content to craft what you want to say. A podcast captures the spontaneity in the speaker's voice. The challenge becomes how to corral that spontaneity into the short span of a podcast. If you're a small business leader and you're serious about podcasting, you'll need to work at becoming a concise speaker."

What's the benefit? Safrit says you simply can't beat the payoff. "The most powerful competitive advantage a small business has is its authenticity and its close personal relationships with its customers. Podcasts let a you communicate directly with your most passionate and loyal audience in your own voice, in a format and at a time that is most convenient for you and your audience."

Should you decide that a podcast is right for your business, these sites — Podcasting Publishing, PodBlaze and PodShock — can help you get started.

Wikis

A wiki is a type of public or private Web site that lets visitors edit the Web site's content, many times without having to register on the site or secure advance permission.

Why would a business want to do this? Wiki is the Hawaiian word for quick, and as such wikis take the bureaucracy out of online collaboration. Anyone can post basically anything at anytime to add to the conversation — and every company can benefit from three-way communication. In this way, wikis are very similar to blogs. But, Ben Elowitz, CEO of Wet Paint is quick to clarify, "Blogs are great if you have a number of customers who are very engaged and want to dialog. The problem is that most blog readers are only passively engaged and will not subscribe to the blog or post comments. In addition, a blog does not work for every business model."

Private wikis, also known as enterprise wikis, are mainly used for a company's private internal uses such as project updates, idea vetting and data storage. Wikis also let a company create an electronic paper trail without having to save hundreds of e-mails.

Elowitz says that wikis help small business owners to "build a fabric of community and conversation around their company. Your customers are going to have conversations about your business whether you are there or not. Why not enable that conversation with a wiki and be a part of it?"

Managing a wiki used to take a lot of technical expertise and code proficiency but, if you're not a coder (and you don't play one on TV), Wet Paint has made the steps as simple as one, two, three. Registration is free and takes about 10 minutes.

Now that you know that making use of various online technologies doesn't have to require an MIS degree or a large cash outlay, isn't it time to see if any of them might be right for your company?

Lena L. West is the creator of the Technology Diet, an eight-week teleconsulting course that helps business owners harness technology to build the business of their dreams.

This article first appeared on Small Business Computing.com.

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