It didn't require any phone calls.

Nor a barrage of direct mail.

Instead, Sara Brueck Nichols and the company she works for went online, raising about $20,000 in six weeks to help schoolchildren in New Orleans. Most donations were solicited through social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

In the past, raising that money might have been a little more cumbersome. For Nichols and her company, the ability to network and interact with people online has been a boon.

"It's definitely helped us create this brand awareness we may not have generated otherwise," said Nichols, who works for Operation Kids, a Salt Lake City-based nonprofit group that advises and distributes donations to children-focused charities.

But other small businesses don't seem to be as open to online interactions. A new survey of 500 small businesses by Citibank showed 76 percent of small-business owners in this country do not find social-networking sites to be useful.

Another 86 percent said they do not even use these sites, including blogs, Facebook or YouTube, to gather business-related information.

It's perhaps to their detriment, according to Hilary Topper, a New York-based marketing executive. In her opinion, the Internet is the way people are going to be communicating in the future, and if a company is not online, it will fall behind in terms of getting information to the public.

Already, the number of adults who have a profile on a social-networking site has more than quadrupled since 2005, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

"We have made so many new clients and new opportunities through the Internet," said Topper, who is the author of a new book titled "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Social Media, But Were Afraid to Ask," (iUniverse, $17.95).

The book is an easy-to-read tutorial of some of the most popular social-networking sites currently available. Topper describes how each site works and then offers her opinion on how a site could benefit a company.

In her opinion, if a person is not on the Internet, he or she is "missing they boat."

Likewise, Pete Codella, president of the Social Media Club of Salt Lake City, said he believes the Internet has "fundamentally changed the way we communicate" as a society. It is critical in helping businesses build brand awareness and also disseminate information about their company, he said.

"Truthfully, people don't pick up the printed Yellow Pages anymore to look for a company," he said.

For businesses that have yet to get started in social media, Codella advocates "baby steps."