Last weekend a couple of us alligatortek personnel had the chance to attend the Social Dev Camp Chicago 2010 conference, or SDCChi. If you don’t know what SDCChi is, it’s a conference for developers and business people to get together for a couple of days in order to discuss trends and possibilities in social networking technologies. It truly is a great forum.

Due to my line of work, I usually know about rising trends and new services before they reach general public. I was on facebook before it was even available for use by the general public, I was on MySpace before it was cool (only to rapidly become tragically uncool), and I was on twitter before it became the holy grail for celebrity stalkers. The draw-back of getting in before anyone else is that many times I never realize the full potential of the platform. This is not because I’m not paying close enough attention, but because when these services first launch they’re usually not that great. Listening to what others are now doing with these platforms is really eye-opening, and also hearing about new ventures into social media type marketing. Some of the speakers that I had the pleasure of listening to include:

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Yesterday Google announced the launch of "Google Caffeine". Caffeine is a new search index that enables Google to serve searchers with the freshest possible results. The way that Google currently works is that it indexes pages in its directory at a rate of about once in about two weeks, depending on the content source (more regular and notable content producers get indexed more frequently). Caffeine indexes small parts of the web at the rate of  hundreds of thousands of pages per second.

What this means for you is that the more regular that you produce content, the higher in search results that you will appear in your given industry. What better way of producing content is there than a business blog? Not only blogs, but what about social networking sites? Now is the time to boost your SERPs, and hop on the social networking bandwagon!

Some companies are taking the next step with social-networking sites. These retailers are selling direct to consumers.

Large retailers have taken advantage of their social media presence in the past with special promotions. Hallmark ran a special twist on the Mother's Day card as a tribute to Moms on Facebook with the Hallmark Mother's page. Since April 19, over 1000 users have sent tributes to their moms, with Hallmark Facebook fans now totaling over 68,000. This is up from just 250 fans last November!

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