Offsetting these Trends:

• Creating and deploying high quality content is becoming increasingly important for your brand.  As more and more firms and individuals embrace social media, barriers to entry are rising and your messaging must be high quality to be heard in the marketplace.

• Ensure your social connections are more than that. Reach out and connect offline.  Move the social intro into a real world scenario that is conversation driven.

• Social babble (check ins, Twitpics of lunch, inane posts, etc.) creates an illusion for many. People are not necessarily what they seem to be online.  It’s becoming increasingly important to assess and weigh an individuals offline credentials to ascertain whether they are someone that you want to interact and/or work with.

• Use third party applications to aggressively build and measure your social media market presence. These can encompass relationship measurement tools like Klout or PeerIndex or for Twitter, third party apps like Social Oomph or TweetAdder that help you bulk up your account faster.

• There are a crop of startups that now help you to identify everyone you know across the social web by leveraging your email account including Nimble and CloudSponge.

• If your content messaging is not well defined and targeting you risk not getting heard in the marketplace. Relevancy is critical to ensuring your message is heard above the din in the marketplace.

• A YouTube channel is becoming an increasingly important tool for your social media marketing. Your account must be properly optimized to generate traffic. Like other social platforms, it’s becoming increasingly important to augment your presence with third party apps/services that drive high volumes of views and engagement such as Traffic Geyser.

• As content development costs continue to escalate, savvy brands figure out how to bring user generated content into the picture coupled with engagement. The former can be Blog comments (light UGC), guest blog posts, soliciting product reviews for usage via social accounts or web site, soliciting videos submissions to YouTube via contest. Engagement is just that - connecting with and interacting with individuals via the social web to move the relationship into the real world.