Here’s a comment that has attracted a bit of attention. It comes from Jordan Rohan, a digital media consultant speaking at this week’s OMMA social media conference in New York.

Jordan was complaining that social media marketing doesn’t automatically lead to sales. It’s like Manhattan’s Central Park, where people go to chill out, watch other people and hang out with friends and family, but not to shop. So apart from a few food vendors there’s not much sales action going on there. On the other hand the real estate around the park is worth an awful lot. Ditto with social media: not many businesses make money from campaigns on Twitter and Facebook, but they should pay attention to the real estate prices. “We will eventually figure out how to harvest all this, but it’s difficult to make money in Central Park,” Rohan says.

It’s a nice image, but it seems a mite misleading to me. Advertising campaigns need to impact on the bottom line, but they are also about raising brand awareness and gaining consumers’ trust. Social networking sites are where a lot of consumers are to be found these days, and brands have to be there too if they want to be noticed and keep a high profile. It’s as simple as that.

In a way, Jordan’s comment makes more sense as a criticism of brand awareness campaigns as opposed to product advertising, which is a whole other story.

Marketers and agencies are getting together at this week’s OMMA Global Conference on social media in New York, which should produce some fascinating insights into the extent to which brands are getting their heads round channels like Facebook and Twitter.

Take this comment from Rob Master, Unilever’s North American media director. Two years ago he was asked how social media could be used to help market unsexy brands like Hellmann’s Mayonnaise and Lipton Tea? He hadn’t a clue, he admits. Now he wonders how he could have been so unimaginative. “We’ve gotten a lot more focused and a better understanding of where the consumer is going,” he says. Social media plays “a role underneath everything we’re doing.”

According to Master, Unilever has invested heavily in raising the company’s understanding of social media, including a drive to educate marketing staff on using Twitter.

Ford’s Scott Monty has gained a reputation for some savvy thinking about social media. At the conference he talked about how Ford set out to “humanise” the brand. “It was about how to connect people with Ford. The common elements of a great company are great products and leadership to drive the vision forward — sticking with a plan while being flexible. We applied that to social media strategy, creating a broad vision statement that would bring us forward, even without knowing what the future would hold.”

Social media isn’t like other forms of advertising, Monty stressed. You don’t just show up at a party, hand round some business cards and leave. You have to invest some time and cultivate relationships.

More on Monty’s remarks here.  I’ll flag up more comments from the conference as they come.

Social media is being used to collect, map and share geographical information in different parts of the world. One site that is leading the way is www.ushahidi.com.

Bloggers set up Ushahidi (which means ‘testimony’ in Swahili) during the violence that followed the elections in Kenya in December 2007 to gather citizen-generated crisis information at a time when unrest was difficult to monitor in real time. People on the ground could contribute to the site via email, or text messaging, providing crowd-sourced data.

I found this example in September’s edition of Geographical magazine. It is fascinating to see how social media tools can be harnessed in a variety of ways to bring together stakeholders without using traditional media. This examples underlines the positive way in which social media technologies can contribute to and help people through life-threatening and challenging situations.

The growth of Facebook motors on with the social networking service racking up more than 300 million members worldwide. This is phenomenal. It is an answer to anyone who suggests that social media is simply a trend.

It also serves to clearly underscore the inefficiencies of companies whose media centre teams and PR agencies continue to invest the majority of their time and resources in traditional media whose numbers are declining fast.

Here’s an interesting piece by Ashley Norris about future Facebook trends. It highlights some other social networks around the world which could possibly hold up Facebook’s rise. I’m a friend of Ashley’s and used to work with him at The Guardian and on Shiny Media.