In the last 12 months there have been $76 billion dollars in social business IPOs and more than $1.5 billion dollars in social business acquisitions. LinkedIn, Facebook, BazaarVoice, Radian 6, Vitrue, and Buddy Media are now all either part of large companies or have become well-funded public companies in their own right.Yet, with each major event the market finds itself doing some soul searching. Doubts about either valuation or value creation hound every conversation, and despite the attention lavished upon social media by hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses alike there remains a debate: are we engaged in mass delusion or mass enlightenment?Personally, I have never felt more certain that the naysayers are 100% wrong. Here is why.

Pinterest sharing is now greater than Google+ and Tumblr according to new data from social bookmarking service AddThis.The data dovetails with earlier reports that marketers were giving up on Google+ in favor of Pinterest, with its shopping-friendly audience.Sharing to Pinterest is 6% greater than Tumblr and 7% greater than Google +1, AddThis said. The company’s data is drawn from 1.3 billion unique users monthly.The service also reported that referral traffic from Pinterest was 30% higher than from Twitter across its 14 million site network in the month of May.

Your small business needs advertising if it wants to survive and grow. But because you don’t have a huge budget you have to find ways to get “free advertising.” One of your best bets is to get “free press.”Free press is a game changer, and fortunately the social media revolution has really made connecting with journalists a whole lot easier than it was in the past. There are so many tools and tips out there and ways to connect with them. Influential bloggers are even right at your fingertips.So, let me show you some ways I’ve used these new rules to get press for my businesses and my clients.

As one who has read, dissected and written about many a study regarding social media, brands and consumers, I can tell you I for one was quite surprised to see read the findings of a survey recently conducted by Market Force – a worldwide leader in customer intelligence solutions.In querying more than 12,000 consumers in the US and UK, they wanted to see how consumers engaged with varying industries – retail, restaurant, travel, entertainment and financial businesses to be specific, via the big dogs of social media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.One finding which was not surprising was the fact that 81% of US respondents indicated posts from their friends directly influenced their purchase decision. This finding supports an early study done by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and Lithium, a social media tech firm, which revealed 80% of respondents “tried new things based on friends’ suggestions.”

In their recently-published book ‘Marketing Communications – integrating offline and online with social media today’, PR Smith and Ze Zook have put together a 10-step guide to developing a social media process that can be applied to any organization.Over the past couple of years, social media has emerged as a marketing game changer that puts customers back at the center of the organization and provides marketers with a new set of tools to listen to and converse with these consumers and to encourage them to engage with their brands.Smith and Zook point out that social media is not just a marketing tool, it’s a new way of running a business that requires a new company culture.