If you haven’t considered using social media as a way of marketing your business now is definitely the time to review your position. Google search in the US is now streaming up the minute information from popular social media sites into their search facilities.  This feature will be coming to UK search soon.

Google revealed their plans for Google Livesearch on their official blog:

‘First, we’re introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.’

Posts from sites like Twitter and FriendFeed are displayed as part of the Google search engine results. This new development shows the massive impact that social media has had on society. Using this new medium will now bring new attention to businesses who use it effectively.

The main search results feature a few social media posts but you can expand the feature to get more.

Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, wrote on the Google blog:

‘Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day.

‘Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we’re announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.’

LinkedIn, a professional contacts network reached 3 million members in the UK this year. To celebrate they held a party (alternatively called – a networking event) at London’s Imagination Gallery last week.

LinkedIn provides a very easy to use service that keeps members up to date with their connections online.  Email updates can be sent to you which let you know about the new connections that your contacts are making.  Membership is free although you can upgrade to different levels of membership.

Last week’s event was attended by Reid Hoffman the company’s founder and CEO. LinkedIn which was founded in 2003, now has 53million global members. Kevin Eyres, LinkedIn’s European managing director also attended the event and talked about the site:

‘If you look at the membership it’s business professionals who are actively trying to network and engage with like-minded professionals in order to expand their knowledge, solve problems and find out how to capture other opportunities.’

The company is keeping up with the times. Eyres said:

‘We have [Microsoft] Outlook integration now, there’s a BlackBerry application that we’ve announced, you can have it on your iPhone, so LinkedIn integrates to the normal tools that you would use in your everyday business.’

The company has also recently added a link to the social media site,  Twitter link so that members can tweet their updated status’ on the site. Eyres commented:

‘If you have a problem and you want to get maximum exposure to not just your professional community but also the wider community which Twitter provides, then you can increase the speed at which your questions are answered and move ahead with any decisions you have to make.’

Concerns arose last week when CYI took over ownership of 289 Facebook groups in order to prove a point about social media risks.

Control Your Info (CYI) is a groups whose goals is to ‘draw attention to questions concerning online privacy awareness.’ They did a search on Google and were able to find 289 groups that did not have an administrator. They joined the groups and took over. The administrator becomes the owner of the group. If a group does not have an owner it can be ‘high-jacked’ by anyone wishing to take control. This is very easy and not illegal.

Their online statement said:

‘Our method of choice only serves the purpose to prove our point and put emphasis on how easy it is to lose track of a part of your online presence. If we wouldn’t have communicated this way, our message would probably have fallen into oblivion the moment it got out.

‘We did not hack anything. Once we were administrators we owned the groups and could have changed any setting. We chose to change the picture, the name, and the description of every group. Our intention was and is to restore these groups to their original form and find a suitable admin among the members. To be able to do this, we first backed up all the data we wanted to replace.’

Online security in Facebook can easily be controlled by altering your privacy settings but CYI actions do act as a warning that it is important to know what you are doing with social networking. From a business point of view this could be a disaster if a group is left open to unscrupulous rivals.

Facebook responded by saying that the groups that had been hijacked had been abandoned by their owners. They said:

‘Group administrators have no access to private user information and group members can leave a group at any time.

‘In the rare instances when we find that a group has been changed inappropriately, we will disable the group, which is the action we plan for these groups.’

Currently there are very mixed reports about social media and social networking in particular: how it can be used for online marketing, who is using it and how successful it is. What is certain is that its importance is growing in the lives of everyday people.

Taking a step back from all the reports there are certain facts that are clear:

• It is being used successfully by some companies to enhance their business
• It is still a relatively new media so even experienced marketers are still finding their way and developing new ways to use it
• Some companies are still reluctant to use it and much of this is based on lack of knowledge

Recent statistics contradict themselves. In the latest survey the ‘2009 Tribalization of Business Study’ 94% of respondents say that they will be increasing their social media spend even though high percentages do not think that their efforts so far are helping them to achieve their business objectives.

So what is the problem here? If its not meeting objectives why are businesses happy to increase their spending in this area?

Businesses are happy to increase their spending in this area because it is potentially a lucrative place to be. Its because that is where a high percentage of their customers and potential customers are actively participating.

One of the problems is with measurement. For example the study found that measurements of success for online communities could be misrepresentative. Respondents cited that stats for the number of active users  and how often people post/comment in a community were taken as the measure of success by over a third of the respodents. This is problematic. Firstly inactive users may be just as engaged whilst ‘watching’ what’s going on and secondly other measurements such as increase in search engine rank and citations/links on other sites may be more important but are not used as part of the analytics.

Ed Moran, director of product innovation, Deloitte Services LP (one of the companies that generated the survey) said:

‘To realize the full benefit of social media and online communities, business leaders must move beyond viewing them as “bolt-ons” to their corporations. Companies need to integrate the new information flows associated with the communities with those that already exist within their companies. New management strategies and practices will be critical, including redefining the scope and role of alliances as well as the overall boundary of corporations.’

No one can escape the fact that the internet has changed the landscape of journalism. People have moved away from newspapers in large numbers and the industry is rightly concerned. 15 German bloggers and journalists have developed an Internet Manifesto which is designed to highlight to mainstream media organisations that the internet is here to stay and that adaptation to this is the only way forward.

The Manifesto has 17 declarations about “how journalism works today”:

1. The Internet is different.
2. The Internet is a pocket-sized media empire.
3. The Internet is our society is the Internet.
4. The freedom of the Internet is inviolable.
5. The Internet is the victory of information.
6. The Internet changes improves journalism.
7. The net requires networking.
8. Links reward, citations adorn.
9. The Internet is the new venue for political discourse.
10. Today’s freedom of the press means freedom of opinion.
11. More is more – there is no such thing as too much information.
12. Tradition is not a business model.
13. Copyright becomes a civic duty on the Internet.
14. The Internet has many currencies.
15. What’s on the net stays on the net.
16. Quality remains the most important quality.
17. All for all.

The authors of the manifesto say that the internet:

‘..produces different public spheres, different terms of trade and different cultural skills. The media must adapt their work methods to today’s technological reality instead of ignoring or challenging it.  It is their duty to develop the best possible form of journalism based on the available technology. This includes new journalistic products and methods.’

What the manifesto does is highlight the importance of the net and the fact that it is a whole new world which needs to be understood and worked with. It has its own language and rules and emersion into it is the only way to understand it properly.

It is a symbiotic organism. Because of social media, marketers cannot ignore their audience because their audience mould what happens just as much as they do.

It can be fascinating, and rewarding as well as challenging but it does not sit well with those who are unwilling or frightened of change. For this reason many seek professional help with this online marketing, at least until they have an understanding of the medium themselves.