Small businesses can effectively use blogs to communicate with customers and to attract new ones. Here are some tips for a hypothetical hair salon business. They can be adapted to most any business.

1. Use technorati.com to find blogs about hair and salons.
2. Use tubemogul.com to deploy videos of your best cuts to youtube and 20 other video sharing sites
3. Your blog needs a point of view. There are so many blogs, the ones that stand out have "attitude". As a friend hads pointed out, really good bloggers are usually "rabid" about something.
4. Blip.tv is a great place to "vlog". They have excellent tools and a great audience.
5. The more videos the better. Videos not only attract interest but also help with the site SE0 (Search Engine Optimization) but also show up in what Google calls "Universal Search" - search results showing podcasts and videos.