There is little doubt that social media is truly revolutionary, the 400 million users of Facebook, the glitterati-twitterati and the numerous bloggers who found celebrity by dint of their blogs, they will attest to that. Hence, as a small business, you will want to take advantage of this concept and try to get as much benefit out of it as possible, which in this case is marketing. While trying to do so, you would want to also ensure that you don’t come across as a desperate company that is bent upon hooking customers every possible way. The trick is to maintain a fine balance between marketing and creating brand awareness, without overwhelming them.

Here is a checklist that will help you work out a social media plan relevant to your business and also guide you in your efforts to execute it.

Know What You Want From Social Media: On social media, brand awareness can go in either direction. If your social media plans don’t pan out, you can end up with a lot of unwelcome negative publicity on your hand. So, be clear about what you want to use the platform for, and how you intent to achieve it. Do you want to use it as an instrument to gauge customer reaction, or would you rather use it as a forum your customers can use to air their views and grievances? Unless you are clear about your expectations, your social media plan in all likelihood will remain a haphazard exercise that will leave you with zero ROI.

Test The Waters: if you are one of those people, still mildly bewildered by the very idea of Social Media (really, there is no shame in admitting it), my advice to you will be to take things slow. Pushing too much promotional information into their followers’ signal stream is a mistake that most businesses new to the space end up doing. You can start by building a blog or creating profiles in the more prominent social sites to touch base with your customers, then slowly ease into your interaction model. The goal is to lure in potential customers and familiarize them with the product, try not to go trigger happy (or more specifically in some cases, tweet happy), and inundate your followers with messages they’ll be forced to label ‘junk’.

Know Your Audience: Once you’ve established your presence on social media, it’s time to consider the different options you have to expand your outreach. Interact with your network to truly know them; if you find that more than half of your network is comprised of men in their thirties with a keen interest in technology, it is very likely that other technologically oriented men in their thirties will be interested in joining your network too. Venture out of your network and engage in discussions happening on other relevant communities, now that you have an idea who your true audience is, tech communities namely, give your business and network avenues to expand their reach.

Prepare To Commit: No business can have a successful run on social media if they aren’t ready to dedicate adequate resources and time to it. Adopting social media as a promotional channel will require that you have someone devoted to monitoring all the relevant signals and responding to them appropriately. The social media promotional model should not be seen as a stopgap measure, but rather as an ongoing process.

Know Your Place: Some companies tend to go out and out with social media, attempting to conquer too much without the right tools or ideas. This can be avoided by knowing where you belong and restricting your involvement only to this level. Hence, don’t get tied up with controversies. If you want to project a certain image of the brand, make sure that you do that with associating the brand with the right causes. Social media is an active and evolving platform, and one way to ensure your social media plan is successful is by taking part in causes that need not necessarily be of monetary advantage to you or your business. Generosity is greatly appreciated on social media, and rewarded too.

Keep Everyone In The Loop: All of your company’s employees are your valuable assets. Hence, when you are chalking out a social media business strategy, you would want to be sure that you are involving them as well. These are your best bets for spreading the word about something that your company produces or is involved with.

Learn By Listening: Social media is all about direct confrontations. This is the easiest way in which you can get close to your customers. Hence, when a customer has something to rant about, you must make it a point to listen to them and take that into consideration. A good leader listens more and speaks less, which is the golden rule with social media as well.

In the end, ensuring all of these aspects might not be particularly feasible, but the least you can do is to ensure that your social media plan at least comes close to the business plan that you have for your company. Don’t be overwhelmed by all these rules, as most of them will end up happening automatically when you are involved in social media.

The other shoe has dropped. Google has officially made a foray into the realm of social networks. (No, now is not a good time to bring up Wave, which Sergey insists is a success – yeah, whatever you say, Sergey.) On 9 February 2010, they unveiled Google Buzz – “a Google approach to sharing”. And apparently, the only solution for the problem of ‘oversharing’ of social expressions on the web. It is but the natural course of events, considering Google’s we-need-to-have-a-finger-in-every-pie attitude. And web domination is not (quite) web domination without a social networking tool.

Coming back to the topic at hand, what exactly is Buzz? From what I can see, it is a robust, not to mention ambitious, email application masquerading as a social networking platform, which also doubles as an aggregator – of status updates, images, videos and links – all in the name of social curation.

Now, how does it work? In a clever move that almost makes up for the mess that is Wave, Google has released Buzz directly into Gmail. So, the next time you log in to your account (this is when I interrupt myself  to say that only Gmail users get to use Buzz), you may just find yourself with a spanking new Google Buzz account. No need to sign up anew, no installation of any kind required. Just click on the Buzz tab beneath the Inbox tab and you can get Buzzing. As Google reports on their official Buzz page, they are still in the process of rolling out this service, and it may take a couple of more days before it is active in all Gmail accounts.

When Buzz is active in your account, you’ll be taken to such a page when you log in.

The Buzz tab, as you can see, appears right beneath the Inbox tab. You can’t miss it.

An active Buzz user profile appears like this.

This is what a typical Buzz post box (box where you post, get it?) looks like. Like said, you have the option of posting Publicly or privately, you can click on the drop down arrow next to Public to choose the Private option.

Buzz profile of a friend will look like this.

This is the screenshot of a Buzz in the inbox – the interface is exactly the same.

According to Google, Buzz has five key features that make it different from the other leading social networking platforms.

1. Auto Following – With Buzz, you can say goodbye to the hassle of setting up a network from scratch, Gmail already ‘knows’ who your friends are and will follow them automatically. (Years of indexing experience must have come handy, but the feature doesn’t exactly scream cutting edge)

2. Rich, Fast Sharing Experience – Buzz allows you to share photos, videos, links to websites, basically, content from around the web with your network. It has a custom photo viewer that will allow you to view pictures ‘the way they are meant to be viewed’. (This is pretty neat, I admit)

3. Public And Private Sharing Options – Buzz has two sharing options. You can either share Publicly, which would mean your Google Profile will be automatically updated, which, as Google go on to explain, means, it will be indexed real-time and made available to anyone and everyone searching for it on the web. Or you can share Privately with your friends. Wow, Google, those are some groundbreaking options there!

4. Inbox Integration – Google Buzz notifications aren’t just static emails, they posses the same properties of Buzz, which means a Buzz notification mail looks exactly like an actual Buzz, and allows you to respond to it right from the inbox – you can view pictures, like or dislike comment and even have comments updated in real-time. Yes, certainly cool, but I think, totally unnecessary. The Buzz tab is right there in your account, in fact, just beneath the Inbox tab. How long does it take to switch to the other tab, really now?

5. Just The Good Stuff – Google is not a search giant for nothing, they will use nothing less than an algorithm to rank the streams on Buzz. (That’s right, and soon SEOs all over the world will be working at optimizing Buzzes to rank high on Buzz streams, and a whole new power game will ensue.) So, this algo will ensure that you get ‘just the good stuff’ by ‘recommending’ good buzz, ‘collapsing’ bad buzz. Meddlesome much?

So, if we are to believe Google, Buzz is the social media messiah, come to save social media and the ‘signals’ from a preponderance of ‘noise’. Just like Google search swooped in and saved the day with its relevant results. Don’t believe me? Check out the launch video.

Pretty ironic when you consider that Google essentially is a social media upstart. With Buzz, they presume to resolve the ‘relevancy and ranking problem’ that is plaguing the social realm. Buzz apparently, with its ‘open’ source platform, will save the social realm and champion the cause of social information, both of which are really at threat from the ‘closed’ social communities that are so popular now.

At this point, I can’t muster up much enthusiasm for Buzz, Wave-likeness aside, as a social networking tool, it has very few original aspects. ‘Followers’ and ‘@reply’ are features it has generously borrowed from Twitter, with nary a nod in its direction, and don’t even let me start on the endless similarities to Friendfeed. Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, Buzz has distanced itself from any association with Facebook. The ubiquitous Facebook Connect is missing and none of its features make an appearance either. This could be because Goggle sees Facebook as the only true competition to Buzz. But with over 400 million users in its kitty, as opposed to the 179 million subscribers Gmail has cornered, Facebook has nothing to worry about.

Back to the matter of whether Google Buzz will be able to keep buzzing, we just have to wait and watch how great the algorithm is at keeping the ‘noise’ out.

Social media had a smashing year in 2009. No one can dispute that. The web-wide popularity of social networks and social media sites reached a never-before high, and set the ball rolling for several revolutionary changes on the Internet. It is expected to do even greater things and touch greater heights in 2010. Let’s take a look at what social media experts think this year has in store for social media.

1. Social Media Will Get Real – The web is already beset by the real-time craziness, and I am so not overstating things. When real-time search debuted (on social media) last year, it was received so well that all the traditional search folks jumped to get a piece of all the real action. This year social media will take the real-time aspect on web one step further and work as a veritable web trend forecaster.

2. Social Media Marketing and Businesses – This year social media marketing will gather momentum as more and more businesses turn to this revolutionary method of internet marketing to promote their wares on the internet.

3. Social Media Vs. Email – The days when marketers almost exclusively depend on email marketing for all their promotional activities on the Internet will soon be over. This year will see online marketers choosing the very versatile social media with multimedia elements and nifty sharing options over emails.

4. Social While Mobile – Another change that we are sure to see in social media this year is the definite increase in the number of people who access social media sites through their smartphones. With so many improved and ‘smarter’ smartphones available on the market, technology and bandwidth will no longer hinder us from optimally experiencing social media while on the go.

5. Corporate Social Media – 2010 is the year when we’ll see the corporate world truly embracing social media. By setting up profiles on networks and corporate blogs, the previously inaccessible corporations will give themselves ‘humanized’ personas that everyone can easily relate to.

6. Social Media And Women – Women are slowly emerging to be the most popular social media demographic. 2010 will reveal just how much sway women can have on social media sites. Social media yet prove to the great leveler, completely smoothing out any kind of gender inequality, or better yet, it may tip the balance firmly in the favor of the female population on the net.

Social media may experience more changes than the ones mentioned above, or even completely different ones. One thing that is sure is it would be a mistake to ignore it and not try to benefit from it.
This post was inspired by another social media forecast post, in which these points are explained in detail.

My reaction to this revelation, though, is largely that of indifference, it doesn’t affect me one way or another. Probably because my activities on Facebook have never been network based, I have always taken care to set my privacy settings at ‘Only Friends’, which ensures that only the people on my friend list have access to my profile and the contents. And to be honest, except for the fact that it could possibly indicate the geographical location of a user, I’ve found the concept of regional network rather useless. In my defense, even Facebook admits (sort of) that these networks turned out to be pretty useless, apparently only 50 percent of the users ever joined regional networks.

Facebook first mentioned of a change in status quo in their 03 June post on their blog:

“…To make the site easier to understand, we’re taking the first step towards removing these regional networks…since they did not adequately reflect a world where people choose exactly the audience with whom they wish to share…made sense for those who wanted to be more open when Facebook was small, but they lost their utility as the site became global…”

In addition to frequently publishing posts regarding the matter on their blog, over the months, they have also maintained an active discussion thread for users to comment, air views and give suggestions.

On 2^nd December, Mark Zuckerberg was definitive when he revealed on the blog that the plan was to do away with regional networks completely and to create a privacy model that would allow users enough flexibility to choose what content they wish to reveal and to whom.

In essence, it’s Facebook’s success that has made the concept of regional networks redundant (There is an irony in there somewhere). There are just too many people on each regional network for a privacy setting based on it to be even considered practical. Why would I want to share personal profile contents with several hundred thousand strangers just because they happen to be on the same network as I am? I might as well share them with the rest of the world.

So, the reason cited makes immense sense, to me at least. But I am just one among the 350 million people who call Facebook their virtual home. The (Facebook) public opinion is divided on this – there are users who welcome this move, also ones who vehemently oppose it.

“It’s about time! The privacy settings based on Geographical Networks make no sense. I live in New York and that network has hundreds of thousands of people! Give me one reason why I would want to set privacy settings for that network. I think geographical networks should be eliminated altogether because they are useless and I am glad Facebook is headed in that direction,” commented a user on the Facebook blog. I am guessing, that’s the kind of response Mark Zuckerberg hoped to garner when he sent out his open letter.

Bet he didn’t anticipate this move would antagonize so many of his loyal patrons. Read on.

More than anything, the users who oppose the move are worried the removal of regional networks will hinder them in their effort to connect with those from their city or country. It will eliminate the option of regional network-based search and since not everyone publishes his or her location details on the profile, this will prove to be a big cause for concern; so, some have been rather vehement in their protestations. “This is the worst idea ever. If they were going to eliminate regional networks, why did they bother making them in the first place? I moved a lot as a kid and never went to college so the ONLY network I can use is regional,” bemoans a user. Facebook’s response to this: they’ll eventually move information about those networks to the profiles For example, “If a user’s regional network is a city, it will be listed in the “Current City” field. If it’s a region or country, it will be listed in a new “Current Region” field.”

Then there are users who think this content-based privacy update will make Facebook unnecessarily complicated. And they may not be entirely wrong to think so. Just thinking about managing individual privacy settings for all the content on my profile is giving me a faint headache. In light of all this, I can’t but ask this question: what if I don’t care to change the settings, or more likely, forget to change them? Will the default setting beam all the contents of my profile to, you know, ‘everyone’?

Dear Facebook, a post addressing all the various (hidden) privacy concerns would be appreciated, thank you.

In the middle of all this, TechCrunch has speculated (though they appear to be a tad unsure) that this may be another step towards the ‘twitterification’ of Facebook and that if it presses people to use the ‘everyone’ option in the privacy settings, it could end up making a lot of private data public without the user quite realizing it. Short of Facebook successfully brainwashing 350 million odd people, with recommendations, of all things, I don’t really see that happening.

Historically, people haven’t taken the changes on Facebook well. Almost every update it’s had has caused users to get up in arms and demand that Facebook revert to its previous avatar, in vain of course. So, not surprisingly, this latest change in status quo has shaken the user base, yet again. Once again, I don’t blame them. Facebook has changed its interface and features (even its domain name once) so many times since its humble birth in that Kirkland dorm room, it could practically qualify as a shapeshifter. There have even been threats (from users) about quitting Facebook altogether:

“I’m done with Facebook. Aside from the reasons listed, they’ve messed so many things up already. The friends list pages are gone, friends are no longer in alphabetical order so it’s hard to look someone up…. it’s so complicated for no good reason at all. Eliminate networks, make it just a simple site with private profiles, or public profiles. Until you fix your stuff, good bye Facebook.”

I am pretty sure they won’t make good on these threats, but it’ll be quite interesting to see how Facebook handles such challenges & powerful user reaction. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg will write another open letter, since he is turning into quite the PR pro.