The time has come for those of you business owners who aren’t utilizing location-based social networks to jump on board. Google Local, Twitter Places, and now Facebook allow users to “check in” to a location and reveal their thoughts/opinions. Equally impressive is the influential ability of one customer; one good review can lead to another, and so on and so forth. Before you know it, you’ve generated a large amount of business from your customers’ opinions.

Here are some steps to follow to ensure that you don’t miss out:

1. Observe. No matter the size of your company, it’s fairly easy to get involved. Before you do, however, pay attention to what bigger brands are doing and make an effort to follow their lead (after all, they’re doing the major research and are investing in this space). Location-based social networks are expected to generate $3.3 billion in revenue by 2013; Foursquare—a prime example—announced on June 30 that they have raised $20 million in venture capital, raising the company’s valuation to nearly $95 million.

2. Get involved. Explore the space yourself by downloading some of the many existing applications on your smart phone (examples are Layar, Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook and Brightkite). Starts using the tools as an individual, monitoring what customers are saying about your business; this will provide an understanding of what you need.

3. Create your content. Give your business a digital footprint by writing a review, defining your location on Foursquare and Brightkite, tweeting about your spot, and/or creating a Facebook fan page. Sync your website and promote your social media savvy on your business website, and then talk back.

4. Keep a close eye out and react. Listening is a major aspect of marketing that many do not utilize correctly. Monitor what is being said about your business and take the time to respond to questions, complaints and compliments. The more proactive you are, the more digitally savvy your business will appear.

5. Location-aware engagement and contests. This concept is all about incentives and driving participation: offering such things as coupons for checking in nearby gives people a reason to come by. Once they stop by, utilize your physical location with signage or targeted marketing over the networks (which will in turn drive participation).

Taking all of these steps might not show immediate returns monetarily, but the customer engagement and loyalty will ultimately help you in the long run.

Talk about your significant expansion: online advertising—targeting anything and everything involving social media—is expected to grow 14% next year to $51.9 billion. Email advertising will increase by 9% to $16 billion, advertising in video streams will increase by 60% to $5.6 billion, and online promotions will increase by 10% to $24 billion.

It should come as no surprise that companies are using blogs. A lot. In fact, blogs fill a specific niche that other forms of social media do not. It is estimated that this year just over one in three companies have a public-facing blog used for marketing (which is expected to rise to 43% by 2012). Studies have come to show that marketers perceive blogs to have the highest value in driving site traffic, brand awareness, lead generation and sales.

Statuses, updates, posts: while they may let you know what a friend is doing, they don’t have the ability to inform exactly where they are. Just when you thought Facebook couldn’t put you in even closer contact with your friends, they went ahead and introduced the Places feature: mobile GPS technology that announces an exact location upon clicking “check in”.

Similar to services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, Places is available immediately through Facebook’s iPhone app and other advanced mobile devices. Users looking to announce their location simply tap “check in” and are able to view a list of nearby places; they then choose the place that matches where they are. They have the ability to write down what they are doing at that location (as well as what they think about it) and a story appears on friends’ new feeds as well as Recent Activity section on the page for that place.

Facebook’s overall goal with this feature is to not only inform friends of where they are, but to also learn if their friends are nearby at the same time. By writing down details of the place, others are able to view where the writer was days or even years ago. In addition to a single user checking in, the “tag” feature is available for linking others to that location as well (people can tag friends only if the taggers themselves check in to the location too).

The con side to this exciting new feature, however, is safety concerns; how is it safe to inform everyone on your friends list of your location? Facebook’s solution: check-ins will appear only to users’ Facebook friends as a default, and users have the ability to trim the recipients list to specific friends only.

And so there you have it: the innovative world of Facebook expanding yet again.

Let’s face it: we all like to succeed. And our social media is no exception; while it can be easily measured with various indicators such as voice, reach, retweets and comments, measuring without an overall objective won’t bring you any closer to success. You need to be able to gauge its success, measure it, and see that it remains healthy.

To get the most out of your social media measurements, follow these seven steps:

1) You need a goal. Know why you are engaging in social media in the first place to help you dictate not only what you do, but how you measure what you do.
• If your goal is to drive awareness, you will be looking at metrics like share of voice, reach, readership and engagement with content (measured in action vs. views)
• If your goal is to create better products and conduct market research, you will need to focus on top market trends and satisfaction with various competitive products

2) Your departments need to be on the same page. Necessary departments need to work as units toward a common goal to ensure success; this means communicating and sharing the right metrics with the right people on demand (for example, creating a dashboard that’s easily visible by every department).

3) Context must be considered. Always make sure to look at metrics over time and inside of a competitive landscape (if you know your share of social media conversation is 35, what does that mean compared to your competitors’ shares or their change over time?).

4) Choose the correct platform. Consider aspects such as data (determine which channels you are going to measure?), reports (identify how you want to share and present information), budget (figure out whether you have a budget or can only afford free tools), and ease of use (consider productivity-boosting alerts and workflow modules, automation and advanced analytics).

5) Audit social media. Note where you and your competitors are today and use this as a baseline against which you will measure at least once per month.

6) Research your channels. To get the most out of your social media analysis, you must dig deeper: evaluate performance by channel, for yourself and for your competitors, to find which selections are performing well and to help give your numbers specific context.

7) A/B testing. If you have several campaigns out there and are curious about what content is getting the best response, social media measurement can help you to conduct the right analysis to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. You can measure the public’s opinion of things you try.

Social network usage, which has rapidly increased in popularity, will rise sharply in 2010. 127 million people (roughly 57% of all domestic internet users) will visit social network sites on a monthly basis in the United States by the end of the year. A 16% increase since 2009, it is projected that by 2014, 65.8% of Americans will regularly visit these sites.

Vitrue, a social media management company, has announced the newest addition to their enhanced Virtue SRM (social relationship management): Vitrue Publisher 2.0.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing features of Vitrue Publisher 2.0—in addition to managing multiple Facebook pages—is the support for Facebook’s Open Graph API. As the new ‘Like’ button is driving a considerable amount of traffic to publishers’ sites and click-through rates are three to five times higher, Facebook has announced that publishers are now able to do even more with it: publish to connected users directly from the Open Graph API. Simply put, if a user ‘likes’ a particular product or company, that company can send the user news on discounts or updates to that product in their News Feed. In addition, when an update is pushed out to a publisher, certain groups are now able to be selected instead of just one mass News Feed.

While comment moderation may have been a problem in the past, it is now much easier: certain phrases, URLS or hashtags can be flagged, and any comment that contains profanity, certain words or URL patterns (associated with spam) can be automatically deleted.

Social management space is really beginning to take off. The more brands invest in Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, the more tools are required to maintain proficient functioning.

Facebook has recently acquired a $40 million set of patents on social networking that cover social app functions (ranging from friend lists to the news feed) from Friendster. Friendster has been awarded a wide array of social networking patents over the last decade and, according to VentureBeat, there are 18 patents in all. These patents are overly obvious, in the sense that they are very broad. One patent, for example, covers “a system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on the relationship within social networks.”

On July 6, 2010, Fast Company Magazine unveiled The Influence Project to determine who the most influential online people are right now. Participants will have their picture featured in the November issue of the magazine as part of a photo spread, with bigger pictures for those who demonstrate the most influence.

The magazine describes influence as not only having the most friends of followers, but about being able to affect the behavior of those you interact with (to get others in your social network to act on a suggestion or recommendation). A prime example would be posting a link or recommending a site: how many people would bother to check it out? How many would forward it on? Exactly how far does your influence spread?

In order to determine influence (which, in turn, determines the size of your picture), Fast Company follows two measures:

1. The number of people who directly click on your unique URL link. This indicates the primary measure of your influence.

2. Partial “credit” is issued for subsequent clicks generated by those who sign-up as a result of your URL (anyone who comes to the site through your link and signs up for their own account is spreading your influence while also spreading their own). Fractional credits—such as 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc.—are given for clicks generated up to six degrees away from your original link.

The end result is Fast Company’s “most influential person”, who demonstrates the greatest overall influence by the deadline of August 15, 2010.

Fast Company is a business magazine that produces 10 issues per year, reporting on such topics as digital media, technology, change management, design and social responsibility.