With more than 640 million people on Facebook, 95 million tweets posted on Twitter each day and more than 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, social media has evolved in recent years to become an integral part of consumers’ lives. As a result, companies, such as Dell, Gatorade and Delta, have begun to invest in social media strategies in order to monitor, analyze and engage in conversations with their customers.

Given the growing influence of social media on consumer behavior, I was not surprised to hear that Salesforce, a purveyor of cloud-based solutions for customer relationship management (CRM), had acquired Radian6, a social media monitoring platform, for $326 million ($276 million in cash and $50 million in stock). With this acquisition, Salesforce now has the “social-media-analysis beginnings of what could become a marketing suite,” says InformationWeek’s Doug Henschen. Specifically, trained service and support professionals can now respond to public comment and questions directly—providing ‘‘real-time insights” within popular social networks.

Whether you support the acquisition or not, this deal demonstrates, the growing influence of social media. As expert blogger Brian Solis points out:

“The Salesforce acquisition of Radian6 demonstrate[s] the importance of social activity to create a new framework for a new generation of business. It’s more than technology, it’s not equally about philosophy and social science. With each day that passes, social media plays a greater role in the shaping of customer experiences throughout the entire lifecycle.”

Check out Doug Henschen’s article, “Salesforce.com Acquisition Points To Marketing Ambitions,” and Brian Solis’ post, “Salesforce Listens to Market Trend, Acquires Radian6 for $326 Million,” for yourself and see what you think of this acquisition and how it will impact the marketing community.

According to a recent survey from OneSource that eMarketer published, the most effective social network for prospecting new clients was LinkedIn, which rated 3.1 out of 5 for effectiveness, compared with the ratings of 2 for blogs, 1.9 for Facebook and 1.8 for Twitter.

As a result of LinkedIn’s effectiveness, more companies are beginning to use this business-oriented site to help research and bring in customers as qualified leads. Specifically, the survey found that “nearly one-half of respondents said they were using the site more for prospecting and research than a year before.” At the same time, the survey cited data from HubSpot, which showed that “45% of North American B2B companies using LinkedIn for marketing had acquired a customer through the site.”

Source: eMarketer.com

As more BtoB sales representatives and marketers turn to LinkedIn, companies need to do more than simply create a LinkedIn account for it to be an effective prospecting tool. They need to use the growing number of features LinkedIn offers to help reach out to, and monitor, prospective customers.

Chad Horenfeldt’s article provides a simple, yet insightful list of top 10 tips for sales professionals and marketers to get the most out of LinkedIn “so you can stay on top of your customers and prospects and make it easier to be found.” These tips, listed in Horenfeldt’s recent post entitled “Top 10 LinkedIn Tips for Lead Generation,” include:

1)      Add the Twitter LinkedIn application

2)      Create LinkedIn answer feeds

3)      Add the Tripit application

4)      Make LinkedIn data easily accessible in your CRM

5)      Customize your LinkedIn company page

6)      Set up an industry LinkedIn group

7)      Share content on LinkedIn

8)      Have sales tailor their LinkedIn profiles

9)      Follow companies of interest

10)   Add the Google Presentation LinkedIn application to your profile

To learn more about the OneSource survey findings from eMarketer, visit http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007636. For more tips on using LinkedIn as a lead generation tool, read Horenfeldt’s post, “Top 10 LinkedIn Tips for Lead Generation.”

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired, caused a stir in the technology world when he declared the web “dead” in the magazine’s September cover story. Its demise, according to Anderson, stems from the growing use of simpler, sleeker services such as apps and smartphones. He writes:

“Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule.”

Not everyone is ready to don their mourning clothes for the Web just yet though. In fact, many in the tech community believe Anderson’s statements are not only premature, but potentially based on a fallacy. As TechCrunch blogger Erick Schonfeld points out:

“The [Wired] article is anchored by the startling infographic…, which shows the proportion of different types of traffic on the Internet. The Web, HTML traffic visible though a browser, is only about a quarter (23%) of the overall traffic, down from about half a decade ago. It’s been pushed down by peer-to-peer (23%), video (51%), and other types of apps which use the Internet for transport but are not browser-based. It’s not clear what exactly Wired is counting as video, but presumably it is not all of the Flash video on YouTube which is very much part of the Web.”

Check out Chris Anderson’s article, “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet,” and Erick Schonfeld’s post, “Wired Declares the Web is Dead – Don’t Pull Out the Coffin Just Yet,” for yourself and see what you think: Is the Web really dead or has it just evolved?