How well is your business embracing social networking tools and what are the potential opportunities for companies to access the wide user base and active participants on many of the core services. We've recently developed some factsheets on the 3 main services - Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, so if you'd like to receive a copy of these, please contact us.

Social media marketing won't work for all companies, but it is an area that should be explored and the basic structures put into place. We've been running a Twitter account for over a year now, as a source of news and communication with our 'followers'. We've also developed our company pages on LinkedIn and Facebook for Web Marketing Workshop, and our subsidiary companies Web Search Workshop and Web Training Workshop.

Please take a look and follow our pages if you wish, to see how we'll be developing these services over the coming months. And if you'd like to discuss the opportunities for your business in more detail, please let us know.

Advertising Age covers the story of a recent report published by Forrester Research that promotes the use of paid blogs, but has attracted the anger of Google who strongly discount this activity in terms of link benefit. According to Google's webmaster guidelines, paid blogs are akin to paid links and are not encouraged - in fact, Google wants such blogs to be disclosed as such and any outbound links should also carry the "no follow" tags that are now widely used by many Web 2.0 sites to discourage 'link spam'.

Following the release of the Forrester report, Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web-spam team, reiterated on his blog in no uncertain terms that those who fail to comply with Google's rules will face punishment, though he didn't state how the offenders would be punished. From Forrester's perspective, the author of the report said he would follow up with a blog post that deals with Google's demands, including spelling out the need to include "no follow" tags in paid blog entries.

There is of course some debate about how big companies are now using blogs and paying writers to post positive articles about their products or brands. The concern for Google is that this is another way to develop website links and also that the use of paid blog entries should be revealed. The argument is likley to continue for some time.

Two recent articles on blogs provide contrasting arguments on the way that these tools can be used as an effective business tool. The first articles from Wired Magazine claims that blogs have now become a dated medium, outclassed by the more 'trendy' Web 2.0 sites like Facebook, Flickr and the latest 'hot site', Twitter. The argument is that the 'blogspace' is now so crowded and overused - particularly by large corporates - that it's almost impossible to get heard and therefore time could be better spent participating and developing content on the newer social multimedia sites.

In contrast, a report on the ClickZ website covers the results of some new research which has found that blogs can have more impact on purchase decisions than social networks, because blogs create the type of online conversation and 'trusted' resource that influences the purchase decision. The survey found that consumers were influenced by blogs more than social networks when making a purchase decision, mostly because bloggers establish themselves as an authority on a topic, particularly in niche areas, and create a relationship with the consumer.

Of course both of these arguments are centred around differing objectives for an individual or business and although there are clearly elements of truth in both viewpoints, there also has to be a clear strategy in developing either process, which can also work better in some markets compared to others.