The internet is full of voices evangelising about the potential of social marketing these days.  One is Todd Malicoat, an internet marketing consultant based in San Francisco.

Malicoat specialises in search-engine optimisation, and thinks that social media is rapidly changing the way that rankings work. Gone are the days when businesses could artificially boost their rankings by buying a whole series of links. Now, he says, you need lots of people coming to your site, staying on it and bookmarking it for later to prove that you deserve to be on top of the search results.

Malicoat concludes:

‘Social media marketing is the grass roots, word of mouth wonder of the web. Social media is building future communication empires at the moment with the likes of facebook, digg, reddit, digg, delicious, as the distribution points for web communication. They are the portals that every dot-bust era strived to be. Social media is separating the old guard from the new, and rewarding those that are quick to embrace the technology.’

In a recent post on his blog Stuntdubl, Malicoat also offers some handy tips for marketers trying to flag up the importance of social media to their colleagues. Read more here.

The biggest social media story of this week is the extraordinary Facebook campaign to get Jeff Buckley’s version of the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah to the Christmas number one spot in the singles chart.

“Extraordinary” because it’s a fair bet that most people haven’t even heard of Buckley, who died in 1997, made only one studio album, Grace, and whose cover of Hallelujah was recorded fourteen years ago. 

Yet there is every sign that the Buckley version, which has had thousands of downloads since Monday, will reach at least number 2 by Christmas.

The Facebook campaign, which has been covered extensively in the media, was launched after the X Factor winner, Alexandra Burke, released her crowd-pleasing  version of Hallelujah – on the face of it a shoo-in for the Christmas number one spot. In a spirit of protest against the manufactured nature of the X Factor single, a few people banded together to launch the Facebook group, arguing that the Buckley version has greater integrity. As the group now has 90,000 members, most of whom have joined in the last five days, it seems a lot of people agree.

So what can we learn from this? Simply that by harnessing the power of social media, it is possible to mobilise vast numbers of people very quickly in a common cause. Even three years ago, there would have been no chance at all of a campaign like this working – while a few solitary individuals might have had a grumble about the X Factor, the idea that they could, in a few days, find, let alone organise, 90,000 others who thought the same way, would have been laughable. 

This week, when we saw massive tv, radio and newspaper coverage of a Facebook campaign launched by a handful of previously unknown people, we can pause and reflect that social media really is changing the world.

It seems as if we’ve only just got the hang of the protocol for writing emails, when along comes social  media with a whole new range of
tricky etiquette problems: if someone follows me  on Twitter, is it rude not to follow them back? If someone  I hated at school wants to be my Facebook friend,  is it OK to decline? And  should I ask permission from my friends  before I post their picture on my blog?

Luckily, Tamar Weinberg has come along to answer some of the difficult questions with The Ultimate Social Media Handbook.

Tamar helpfully provides a list of the worst sins you can commit in Facebook (“Adding users as friends without proper introductions”), Twitter (“Following a user and then unfollowing them before they have a chance to follow back”) and blogging (“Turning a blog into a flame war against someone you don’t like.”)

Tamar concludes by saying: “Remember that social media communities are real relationships, real conversations, and as such, they should be treated like they  are real.”

It’s advice we’d all do well to heed.

Social media started as a youth thing, which businesses can take advantage of. But social networks are also used by business executives, viz LinkedIn and Ecademy.

Ecademy’s co-founder Penny Power recently came first in a competition to reach the most people using social media tools. She signed up to give a presentation at a conference on webcasting only two days beforehand, and got invitations out to 5,000 people by twittering, blogging and posting on the Ecademy network – a real-life example of the strength of social networks.

Click here for the press report.