So, if those two darlings are falling from favour, what of that once-fashionable online pursuit, blogging? Is it worth your time and effort if Facebook and its ilk are where it’s at?

Inevitably, the answer is, “It depends.” If you are a consumer brand looking to engage directly with your market, Facebook is increasingly the medium of choice. For example, Procter and Gamble is very pro Facebook as a way to interact with customers.

However, for other types of business, and for other business purposes, blogging still has many strengths. Yes, gone are the days when every company expected to attract a mass of bloggers and an online community Boing Boing would be proud of. However, here are just some of the things a blog is great for:

• Making your business ‘transparent’. Customers increasingly expect their suppliers to be open, honest and accountable. Failings are tolerated, provided that they are owned up to and rectified (quickly). Your blog can be a great way of showing what’s really going on in your office and winning some customer loyalty. Famously, Microsoft employee Robert Scoble almost singlehandedly changed perceptions of his company for the better through his Scobleizer blog, which revealed that inside the software monolith was a bunch of people making the same mistakes as everyone else.

• Getting your message out clearly. As we have blogged previously, Bob Lutz, vice chairman at embattled General Motors, became committed to blogging to ensure that GM’s real news and opinion was reaching its customers. Other organisations similarly in the firing line can find it very helpful to create their own news channel in this way, as British Airways is presently doing. However, even for companies that aren’t in the crosshairs, this can be a great way of supplementing and adding depth to the press coverage you are getting.

• Refining your thinking. Nothing sharpens your thoughts more than having to write them down. Making regular blog postings about your business and industry can help you focus on issues and think of new ways to tackle them. This can be particularly useful for professional service or advisory firms, as opinion is their stock in trade. However, anyone who lives by their wits in business stands to benefit from this discipline.

If you want to start blogging or improve what you already do, here are our top tips for better blogging.

Key points covered include:

• Before you plunge in, understand your customer service culture and how/whether social media fits in.
• Next, develop a clear strategy for issues like training, procedures and investment. WestJet thought it all through first, even though it meant delaying its Twitter launch for a while.
• Handle Twitter or Facebook with the same professionalism you would a customer phone call.
• Use social media to promote things of widespread interest, like promotions and special offers. WestJet shows how successfully this can be done.
• Handle exchanges with individual customers offline or as (private) Direct Messages, as in this recent WestJet tweet: “@maxcameron Hi Max, sorry to hear about the delay. Do you mind following us so that I can DM you?”
• Come up with creative ways to encourage customer interactions and brand loyalty – in WestJet’s case, ‘Winglet Wednesday’ and the ‘Declare your Love’ Valentines contest.

WestJet is an excellent case study, not only for airlines and travel businesses, but almost any organisation.

The portal differs from Twitter in a number of ways but most obviously Buzz has no character limit, as opposed to Twitter’s rigid 120 characters. Twitter is also very simple: if you have a public account, your tweets go to anyone who is following you; Buzz is not that simple. There can be public or private buzzes, and Google plans to have buzzes for enterprise and educational users, allowing public buzzes to only be available within your company or school.

With a high percentage of users accessing social media platforms on the move, it is no surprise that Google Buzz can be used on an iPhone or Android-based web browser. It contains a GPS feature, allowing the program to find a location nearest to you it thinks you would like to visit. Mobile users can also post content to Buzz using voice commands.

The good, bad and downright ugly have been reported, but the biggest question raised was concerning the issue of privacy within Buzz. With the privacy settings initially set to public by default, this meant every profile was open to access, and potentially follow, via search engines.

Over the weekend, Google announced significant changes to Buzz, responding to the criticism over privacy. Google moved away from the system in which Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with most. Instead, they have adopted an auto-suggest model, in which you are shown your friend list with an option to de-select people before publishing the list. While a full opt-in model would be less likely to result in inadvertent disclosures of private information, this is a significant step forward.

The security problems arose because Google attempted to overcome its market disadvantage in competing with Twitter and Facebook by making a secondary use of user information. Google leveraged information gathered in Gmail with Buzz, and set a default to sharing your email contacts to maximize uptake of the service. In the process, the privacy of Google users was overlooked and ultimately compromised.

We don’t imagine too many Twitter users will be ditching their Tweets to exclusively Buzz, but add better collaboration with Twitter and Facebook, and Google Buzz could get very interesting indeed. Watch this space.

LEA’s ‘tweets’ include updates on the company’s services and destinations, the latest empty leg opportunities and links to new footage on the operator’s ‘YouTube’ channel.

LEA chief executive Patrick Margetson-Rushmore says: “We’re eager to be at the leading-edge of new technologies and social media. Twitter is 21st-century word-of-mouth and a great way for us to talk to our customers and potential customers. We’re looking to add inventive tweets all the time.

“We’ve got over 200 followers already. We’re used to being a leader and on this occasion we’re happy to be followed!”

George Galanopoulos, LEA’s managing director, adds: “At its best, Twitter is a productive dialogue, not a monologue. As well as being followed, we’ll be tracking key players in the executive aviation and luxury travel industries ourselves, making new contacts and keeping up-to-date with their activities.

“We’re really excited about how we can use new media to promote and improve our business. Some of the videos on our ‘YouTube’ channel, for example, showing off the aircraft in our fleet, are simply stunning.”

The LEA Twitter site can be found at: http://twitter.com/LondonExecutive.

However, many firms are holding back from taking the plunge, with three common reasons being:

• Perceived lack of relevance – a feeling that social media is just for teenagers (actually, only a minority of Twitter users are in their teens)
• Fear of surrendering control – embracing social media does indeed require a shift from the old ‘command and control’ approach to communications, as it enables and encourages anyone to publicly air their views about a business
• Lack of knowledge – technology moves pretty fast, and not everyone knows where to start

There’s no universal prescription when it comes to social media- what’s right for one business might be entirely wrong for another. However, it’s helpful to see some of the different approaches used by companies around the world. Perusing their ideas might help you find the right approach for you.

Our 2009 ‘Taking the Brave Pills’ Gold Award, if it existed, would go to the fearless marketers behind Skittles. They’ve turned their entire website into a mammoth social media forum. Virtually all the content is generated by others – comments are hoovered-up from Twitter, pics are the handiwork of anyone with a Flickr account and video comes from YouTube. With swearing and all sorts permitted, it flies in the face of conventional ideas of marketing, but it’s definitely a bold way to show a brand in touch with its fans.

Our Silver Award would go to First Direct, the UK online bank. Their new social media site firstdirectlive isn’t quite as ‘full immersion’ as Skittles in its approach, but it displays negative feedback alongside the positive. The bank is clearly fairly confident about its customer service and this is an eye-catching but fairly pragmatic way to turn customers into ambassadors. Marketing director Lisa Wood explains the bank’s thinking to E-consultancy here.

Among our clients, Cessna and KDS have shown how social media can be adopted selectively to good effect. Cessna recently launched Fly_Cessna, using the established Twitter infrastructure to reach out to customers and fans. It’s also set up its own Cessna channel on YouTube. Similarly, KDS’s YouTube channel is positively bursting with content about its travel and expense management systems, while its photo library is available for download from Flickr. London Executive Aviation is also on Twitter at LondonExecutive and on YouTube here.

For those who want to dip a toe in the water, Twitter is a good place to start. Mike Steltzner posted on Copyblogger a great primer on tweeting for business and the tools that help.

Come on in – the water’s lovely!