‘Follow us’ and ‘Stay Connected’ buttons are now as commonplace on websites as the word ‘like’ is ever-present in a teenager’s vocabulary.

I’m seeing it in the most unlikely of businesses this year. This photo was taken at a country park. Do you really want to follow and interact with the tweets of a park (it certainly isn’t Disney)? How about the Trainline? Or Firefox?

Yes, Facebook is hooked into 8% of the world’s population (26 million in the UK) but when such buttons become ubiquitous clichés, what will you do to stand out?

Go out with a group of friends and notice how many times Facebook crops up. Did you see it on Facebook… don’t put that on Facebook… I read about your holiday on Facebook… are you on Facebook (instead of the hassle of swapping mobile numbers). It really is becoming ubiquitous with socialising.

Where there are customers, companies will follow suit (like lions to the zebra). Every vertical from retail to radio; from celebrity to cinema are clambering to get aboard the good ship Zuckerberg.

Simple example: the Radio 1 Xtra blog is now their Facebook page. The BBC has scores of blogs and other social media eye candy but Facebook makes it easier for people to comment (and spam), to ‘like’, to interact with. This equals an increase in engagement – isn’t that the Holy Grail that marketers crave so badly?

What’s the problem then? Well, after flipping their privacy policy three times, Facebook has the same level of trust as your average politician. A-list tech folks have deleted their accounts in protest. Well, they tried. It’s a lot harder than you’d think.

So, crucially, whose data is it? Facebook would say it’s yours, but this difficulty in exporting/copying your data and then deleting what Facebook and its partner sites are holding for you says otherwise.

It also looks awful and if every site ends up migrating there my brain will melt from the bland sameness that threatens my screen. The explosion of the web is more than partly to do with the fact that individuals have become the creators – the publishers. Instead of doing this individually through their own HTML skills, or via blogs or micro sites, we’re facing the Borg. Star Trek fan or not, do you really want to join the Borg?

Regardless of shelving your existing content and only publishing on Facebook, there’s a real possibility that Facebook becomes the portal to the web. You can vote by liking items all over the web but there will be a covert element to this because data and consumer habits, along with profiling, is pure fertiliser to the advertiser.

You’ll also stay logged in and even though you go off and surf elsewhere, because you’re logged in, all your habits and actions are registered. Google are extremely clever with their AdSense but Facebook threatens to become so clued in as to make AdSense look like an abacus versus a scientific calculator.

Virtual currency, micro money, Facebook Connect, store fronts, adverts, gaming and the ever growing social graph (The Open Graph as Facebook call it) etc, etc mean Facebook is THE force to be reckoned with online.

A crucial argument from the protesters is that the pure web is open. Facebook are closed and – arguably – they stand to gain more by remaining closed. Come behind our walled garden, fertilise our product by increasing your interaction, and growing the whole ecosystem, and we’ll cash in from your data. Incidentally it’s the same data that we keep changing our privacy policy on.

Some would say it’s giving the web over to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO. My problem isn’t necessarily with Zuckerberg’s leadership; the moneymen will be sure to right that ship. My problem is the possibility of it becoming the de facto site on the Internet.

Facebook has an amazing product. It’s staggering in size and hugely successful. If you’d built something 1,000th the size then you could pat yourself on the back for a monumental achievement. But if the populous web migrates there, I for one will be calling on Captain Kirk to save the day and defeat the Borg.

Managing Director of Emerging Media for Proof Integrated Communications, B.L. Ochman recently wrote about ‘the top 10 companies in the Fortune 100.’ She’d been checking if ‘they included their social media involvement on their homepage.’

Ochman quotes a study by Burson Masteller and her own firm indicating that 54% of Fortune 100 companies employ Twitter; 32% use blogs; 29% have Facebook fan pages. Yet her look at the top 10 found only three who show any involvement with social media.

I decided to do the same in the UK by looking at the top 10 of the FTSE100. These 10 were calculated only by sales price, not any other measure.

1. Rangold Resources (RRS.L)
Nothing anywhere on their site.

2. Reckitt Benckiser Group (RB.L)
Nothing, but there is a news aggregator dragging in stories that mention Reckitt Benckiser (shows some grasp of interaction).

3. Rio Tinto (RIO.L)
Nothing anywhere on their site.

4. Astrazeneca (AZN.L)
Nothing anywhere on their site.

5. Carnival (CCL.L)
Very small Twitter & Facebook icons at the very bottom of the home page.

6. Anglo American (AAL.L)
Nothing anywhere on their site.

7. Vedanta Resources (VED.L)
Nothing anywhere on their site.

8. Next (NXT.L)
Nothing on the Plc site but the commerce site has a Facebook link plus an iphone app.

9. British American Tobacco (BATS.L)
Nothing anywhere on their site.

10. Sabmiller (SAB.L)
Nothing anywhere on their site.

This is all way off the 54% engagement that the Fortune 100 apparently sees, but what does it mean?

Are we less communicative than our American counterparts?
Big Business doesn’t waste time on the latest fads?
Proper business isn’t for wishy-washy social media?
Established stalwarts aren’t clambering for market share like some others?
The top 10 are involved but aren’t yet broadcasting that from their home page?

Does it mean anything transferable to you and your business? What do you think?

Nestle are used to their fair share of bad press; students the world over have seen to that. But March 2010 is when they will go into social media case study history.

For anyone who’s not read the full saga, here’s the short version: a video was staged which drew a play on eating Kit-Kat and orangutans’ fingers. Nestle had the video taken down but, of course, it reappeared. They chased it around the ‘net like a drunk trying to bath a cat and made life pretty miserable for themselves by fumbling over logo violations when Greenpeace were organised.

I’m struggling here between ethics and communication tactics. If you make a bad product – deem that as you will – then, with or without a great web interaction, you deserve to be called on it. But, lets assume you aren’t evil personified and you deserve your place in the world of commerce, what do you do when attacked online?

Despite what some experts portray, social media isn’t always a simple mirror, signal, manoeuvre affair. On top of the immense variables, there is the fear of inflaming situations, adding sugar to the fermenting jar that forums and blog comments can become. I don’t believe there is a definitive three, five or ten-point plan. Social media has only one absolute for all organisations: listening. If it’s nothing else for you, it’s an opportunity to listen.

That said, Seth Godin believes he’s got an answer: brands in public. He launched this aggregator back in September last year.

Strangely for a Godin fanboy I wasn’t convinced at launch. And after six months or so I can’t say I’m overly impressed with their client list – no Coke, no Cisco, no Microsoft, all of whom are being critiqued hugely online. If anything, is this not a $400/month garden where a bad ‘vibe’ can grow? From a brand manager’s standpoint, doesn’t she prefer any negatives to be disparate across the web, rather than collate neatly in one screenshot? Of course, the positives mentioned online will also look more powerful together.

Which brings us right back to our variables problem: join in and risk inflaming the situation or enter and solve problems with a swath of your service sword? The trouble is unless the Nestles of the world truly engage (as in adopt some of their philosophies, ecological or otherwise) with the likes of Greenpeace, they’re likely to find hugging a tree has morphed into overtaking a Facebook wall as the militant tool of choice.

But don’t be frozen by fear. The wonderful John Battelle at Federated Media recently wrote, “…all of our customers are already operating in social media. You can’t pretend otherwise. And it’s better to engage, make mistakes, admit those mistakes, and move on, than to not engage at all. I call this “conversational judo,” and suggest we all practice it, daily. Twice on Sunday, perhaps….”

Touché.

Twitter is on a meteoric rise. In 2007 folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day; 300,000 times a day in 2008; 2.5 million per day in 2009 and now it’s 50 million tweets per day. This month the whole shebang crossed the 10 billion tweet milestone.

Which of your eyes would sell for a growth chart like this?

But dissenters say that folks don’t stay involved. That 60% of people who sign up, get bored within weeks and don’t return. That the noise from the few is deafening and that the many just listen and regurgitate. They’d say (ironically, probably via a blog) that it’s all a narcissistic fad.

Businesses are looking at Dell as the poster child of Twitter use and think they can all show offers in 140 characters that convert highly. But the fact is transactional sites get less than 10% of Twitter’s exit links, the majority goes to other content driven sites (social media). Others take a more puritan stance and think it’s the conversation – engagement – that wins in the end.

Personally, I’m likening the whole thing to cricket. Is there a more polarising game in existence?

Chances are if you like cricket, you’ll love cricket. You’ll want to skive off work and sit for hours watching what many would call ‘nothing much.’ You might even want to drop your fabulous music career for cricket commentary (Lily Allen does). The non-believers would laugh at you and say the whole thing is a waste of good grass.

Understanding and liking Twitter is every bit as binary. You either do, or you don’t.

But the one marketing area that unquestionably lends itself well to Twitter is sport. Take Lance Armstrong. Lance is the Stephen Fry of tweeting sports personalities and his build-up and insight to the Tour de France will be fascinating.

F1 newbie, Lotus are also on the guerrilla marketing bandwagon, allowing chief technical officer, Mike Gascoyne and others to give us real time access to their thoughts. During the Bahrain GP he actually told us that Jarno Trulli was pitting on the next lap. In the ultra-competitive and secretive world of F1 racing that level of engagement with outsiders (fans and rivals, obviously) is astounding. I’d argue that it’s to the benefit of the Lotus brand – to its share of mindset, to its growth, to its media coverage (as others write about it) and to its value as we get closer to the heart of Lotus as an organisation and build a relationship.

What about you and your organisation? Will you be donning your digital cricket whites this summer or would that be a time-wasting bore?

You know all too well that traditional journalism has changed. We’ve read the Huffington Post and heard about the Google-Murdoch punch up. The journo genie has left the bottle.

So when change has taken place in your industry and the future indicates far more, what are you expected to do? Unsurprisingly Gary Vaynerchuk advocates jumping the sinking ship. What’s new is his push to start a collective of freelancers building a new centre of journalism.

From his inspiring Crush it! “…those who possess that rare combination of fiery entrepreneurial spirit and reporting chops could team up and form a killer online news service without any biz dev partnership at all. They’re going to really win big.”

I completely agree. No, you don’t need to send four people to New York to cover a plane landing on the Hudson. Or send a John Simpson wannabe to a war torn corner of Asia. Instead, save the airfares, expenses, insurance and security costs by running original, insightful and discerning thought pieces, commentary and analysis. Suddenly, a handful of talented ladies and gents are delivering true fidelity.

Thanks to some sharp printers you can even go old school and get a paper run along side your site. The Newspaper Club will print 12 page tabloids in quantities as low as five!

The web has disrupted nearly every vertical on the planet and sent the established incumbents into a spin (obvious example: the Royal Mail). With so many undiscovered opportunities, which will you choose?

You’re having a conversation with a company Big Wig, perhaps an interview, and she asks, “What do you think of this social media phenomenon?”

Well, imagine it’s the 1960s. Horses pull milk floats, colour TV is just around the corner for most households, shillings are in your pocket and the Bay of Pigs has petrified the world. In between watching Steptoe and Son and listening to Elvis or the Beatles, someone asks you, “What do you think about this telephone phenomenon?”

With 20/20 hindsight you could’ve said, “It’s going to be amazing in ways we can’t yet imagine. The infrastructure we and other countries are laying now will be used for revolutions in communications and commerce that sound like science fiction if we talk about them now (think fax and Internet). User take-up will be so overwhelming that the lines will be stretched to breaking point and the ‘phones themselves will become like your watch or wedding ring – always with you. In short, phones will become an integral part of our personal and business lives.

The ‘60s Big Wig would nod sagely, probably with a slight smirk, and take the conversation elsewhere. But the answer to the question if you’re asked tonight at dinner is that, “History will repeat itself here…”

On the right -
Prevent search engines from indexing news content and have readers pay through a variety of subscriptions to recoup lost earnings from physical news sales. People have no right to free journalism and aggregator sites (especially Google News) are to news, what Pirate Bay is to music.

On the left –
If you build it they will come. The internet is an unparalleled open space where the common good is freedom of information without class divides. If providers open their content equally the market will ensure the winners are the cream of crop. Revenue will be made through increased attention and trust.

Further right against ‘Don’t be evil’ -
Stop the Google vampire by embracing its largest competitor instead – Microsoft’s Bing.

If Bing courted enough content providers to bed exclusively with them (by paying, say, the world’s top 50 newspapers and top 1,000 magazines) that would be a huge boon. Would it be enough to grab 10 or 15 percent of market share?

Of course it’s all about money for Murdoch, not attention and that’s where he and the digerati are looking at same issue from different ends.

Marc Prensky is acknowledged to have coined the term Digital Natives, but when the business world heard Rupert Murdoch use it, the term became commonplace (remember he owns MySpace).

The reference is to the swathes of people who don’t think twice about technology being an integral part of their everyday lives. It’s not exclusively a generation Y (18-28 year-olds) phenomenon either, even though saturation surely peeks there. Two ingredients strike me most about young digital natives:

1. They are not colour blind. They are arguably the first to start/finish higher education with a true post-racism attitude. An Obama Whitehouse can only help cement that mindset.
2. They are not data phobic. On the contrary, they often broadcast and share masses of information in an open display of incredible honesty.

Seems to me companies might benefit from having a digital native or two in their organisation, regardless of the CV’s relevant work experience. How about you?

I recently heard comedian Frank Skinner being interviewed by Dermot O’Leary on his Radio Two show. Skinner, former host of his own guest TV show which ran for six years, said that TV is rather unreal. With his makeup applied, his shirt choice amended to avoid a camera clash, specific timing, outtakes, warm ups, breaks, editing and so on, Skinner called it ‘manufactured.’

He went on to say that radio is much more authentic – like two blokes sat at the end of the bar in the pub. Just raw conversations really, making radio much more true to itself (I’m paraphrasing here).

Social media is described as many things, both good and bad. How about thinking of social media’s offer of authenticity as an opportunity for companies to host their own radio show?