Chris­tine Dalkan

"At last, 2010 is ex­pect­ed to be the year that so­cial me­dia goes main­stream for busi­ness," states Bri­an So­lis, prin­ci­pal of Fu­ture Works, a me­dia agency. There are of­ten some com­mon stages faced by busi­ness­es when head­ing to­ward full so­cial me­dia in­te­gra­tion. One part of nar­row­ing the so­cial chasm is be­ing aware of the many op­tions avail­able on cy­ber­space.

Face­book Con­nect

Face­book Con­nect has close to one mil­lion users, ac­cord­ing to Nick O'Neil of all­face­book.com, a re­source web­site for Face­book. This ser­vice which in­ter­net savvy per­sons across the world are flock­ing to is de­vel­oped by Face­book to al­low its users to lo­gin in­to part­ner sites us­ing their ac­count and share in­for­ma­tion with Face­book friends. Face­book users are grate­ful­ly wel­com­ing this "sin­gle sign-on au­then­ti­ca­tion so­lu­tion" be­cause this means they don't have to build one them­selves. Face­book Con­nect of­fers ben­e­fits to com­pa­nies who are will­ing to ex­per­i­ment � for ex­am­ple, The In­sid­er mag­a­zine boast­ed of 85% new user reg­is­tra­tions through Face­book Con­nect.

And the most in­ter­est­ing part of this in­cred­i­ble brain­child of Face­book is that it's on­ly one and a half year old and has al­ready changed cy­ber­space pos­i­tive­ly for many. It of­fers a user friend­ly ex­pe­ri­ence � with on­ly a cou­ple of clicks of your mouse you can share in­for­ma­tion from sites with your per­son­al net­work of friends and fam­i­ly via your Face­book news­feed. "Com­pa­nies need to fish where the fish are," says Ken Bur­bary, a pro­fes­sion­al web mar­keter, "and right now the fish are spend­ing their days on Face­book.com." Open­ing up a path from your web­site to Face­book means you have ac­cess to new prospects and clients while bare­ly spend­ing a dime. Some E-re­tail­ers such as Jans­port have no­ticed the ad­van­tage of us­ing Face­book Con­nect and they have im­ple­ment­ed it.

Yoono

Yoono is a pow­er­ful, yet easy to use side­bar in Fire­fox which makes your on­line so­cial life sim­ple. You can con­nect to all your so­cial net­works, even up­date all your on­line sta­tus­es. It al­so makes it quite easy for you to share links, im­ages and even videos from the page you are view­ing. If you're us­ing Ver­sion 7 of Yoono, you can set up un­lim­it­ed per­son­al­ized columns to cre­ate a so­cial dash­board. Ver­sion 7.2 al­so of­fers sup­port for Youtube and even a full text search of your up­dates stream so you can see what your friends are say­ing about a par­tic­u­lar top­ic. And the best news is it's avail­able for Mac, Win­dows and even Lin­ux.It's a sim­ple way to share any­thing from any­where on the web. Even more ex­cit­ing, this year Yoono was ho­n­oured to be a launch part­ner of In­tel for net­books.

"Yoono is a win­ner be­cause of its flex­i­bil­i­ty of al­low­ing users to cre­ate a cus­tom look and the built-in fea­tures that al­low the users to pret­ty much take care of any so­cial task from with­in Yoono," says Sam Di­az, se­nior ed­i­tor at ZD­Net. Are you a busi­ness per­son or just an in­di­vid­ual who us­es the In­ter­net reg­u­lar­ly and is still ques­tion­ing whether so­cial net­work in­te­gra­tion can work for you? Well con­sid­er this � 71% of all in­ter­net users get news for­ward­ed to them via so­cial net­work­ing sites, 50% of these say they pass the links to friends, ac­cord­ing to the Pew In­ter­net & Amer­i­can Life Project. This so­cial me­dia helps so­cial news or­ga­ni­za­tions reach more than half of the US pop­u­la­tion with their con­tent, ac­cord­ing to Reve­News, an on­line source which fo­cus­es on in­ter­net re­lat­ed in­dus­tries.Now, you should be con­vinced to get with the pro­gramme � at least the so­cial net­work­ing one. Em­brace the op­por­tu­ni­ty to bring to or­der, the chaos called so­cial me­dia.