It's disheartening how many small businesses want to rely on email programs to stay in contact with their customers, because the flow of irrelevant information actually drives people away from email. And now people want customer service assistance to come through Twitter. As a small business do you really want to deal with complaints in the public arena of Twitter? But this is the bed companies made for themselves by flooding the email inbox. Now they're doing the same thing with Facebook status updates. Personally, I turned off all status updates from Pages in my newsfeed. I couldn't see what my friends were doing for all the crappy offers and worthless invitations. 

DachisGroup recently published an analysis of information flows that should be understood by any company that wants to 'stay in touch' with their audience.

Both the telephone and email were designed in a time of information scarcity and it was important that the design allowed for every signal to get through. In our present age of information abundance, filtering the flow of information is key.

So what's the answer? We all need to establish an online newsletter the sends out flows to news feeds and Twitter and Facebook and email suscriptions. Oh, and all those feeds need to be customized to their target channel. Yes, that's a lot of work. It's just like paying rent all over again. You're renting a reliable spot in your customer's mind. And your customer decides what the rate will be.