Social networks post mixed results when it comes to business people

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."