Social networking is the #1 activity online. Even though Google gets the most visitors, Facebook is where most of us are spending our time. And it’s not just about Facebook anymore. We are spending a lot of time on LinkedIn, YouTube, Tumblr and Twitter. While there are some clear major players in the social space, the social media universe continues to expand and 2011 was a banner year for the idea of an “Interest Graph.”

In 2011, we saw Google launching Google+ and Pinterest grewing at an astounding rate. Facebook launched “Timeline” and “frictionless sharing” with partners like the much anticipated Spotify. Facebook also acquired design companies and the team behind Gowalla, showing the company’s intent to provide a consistent experience across devices and becoming a more prominent player in the mobile space.

2011 was also a big year for social IPOs: From LinkedIn to Groupon and Zynga, small tech startups are becoming public companies. There is much speculation around the existence of a bubble, and some say growth cannot continue because social networks are running out of users. However, Facebook is not yet public and we still don’t see a clear exit for Twitter.

There might be saturation, but social media has changed the way we live. And this means social media is no longer a question for marketers. Companies of all sizes have accepted and even embraced the importance of social media. Investments are starting to increase and companies are now building teams to tackle the new risks and opportunities that social media has created. While Facebook and Twitter ad spending is expected to grow only at a decreasing rate, advanced brands are leveraging more digital dollars for their social media marketing strategies and tactics. “Social” has been an afterthought for many years, but marketing campaigns and programs are finally starting to feel inherently social.

This presentation is about the state of social media and social media marketing on January 1st, 2012:

Chris Brogan is a blogger, speaker, consultant, bestselling author and President and CEO of Human Business Works. Chris was one of the very first people I ever “met” on Twitter and I’ve been reading his blog www.chrisbrogan.com ever since.

Below is an interview with Chris about his upcoming book, examples of brands on Google+, Black Friday marketing in 2011, content curation tools, and more.

1. Congratulations on your upcoming book “Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything.” The book description says “This is a business book, not a technology book.” Can you share more about how this book can help businesspeople?

[CB] Business people tend to get a bit twitchy when a new technology comes along. But what I’m saying with this book is that this is a book about how to use the telephone to sell, or how to use business cards as part of your selling, or what to talk about at the cocktail party to sell. The tech of it all isn’t the worry. The problem is, for some unknown reason, humans get really weird when they start trying to use social media to sell. They forget the niceties and the human nature sometimes.

2. Google+ Pages have been around for a few weeks now. What are some examples of companies and organizations making good use of them?

[CB] I love what Samsung USA is doing (and no, not because you work there). I love what Dell has done. I think that Pepsi is already getting great engagement on their site. For a small business, check out Allure Home Improvements. I think people can really learn from places like these. Oh, and Kodak! Great work, Jennifer Cisney and team.

3. Social media is becoming an important part of how brands do marketing. What did you think of Black Friday efforts this year? You know who I saw doing something interesting for Black Friday?

[CB] Cali Lewis. Not a company, a person. Someone who works for a brand of her own, but who used Amazon associate links to point people towards products she endorsed, with a cut for herself. Did I see any brands doing something amazing with Black Friday? Well, at the risk of really seeming like I’m sucking up (I’m willing to risk this), I *did* like that Samsung had a nice summary on the Google+ page. Beyond that? Not as much on Twitter as I’d had expected, and I’m no longer qualified to talk about Facebook. I don’t go there anymore.

4. What are your thoughts on content curation and services like Pinterest, Curated.by and Storify?

[CB] I think that content curation is *finally* getting its due. Steve Rosenbaum wrote a grossly overlooked book, CURATION NATION, that deserves more eyeballs and thought. The specific tools will come and go, but people are finally understanding that curation is just as important as creation.

5. You’ve been blogging for over a decade and you’ve been using WordPress for many years. Do you think WordPress is at risk with the increased usage of Tumblr, Google+ and social media overall?

[CB] I rarely worry much about the tools. I think that there’s a huge group of people using Tumblr for curation and sometimes throwaway products. I think that people looking to use serious tools for serious business will stick with WordPress, but when I say that, don’t presume that I’m being elitist. I’m saying that one set of tools, WordPress, delivers a lot more business value. I’m saying that Tumblr is easy and makes it very easy to share and create. Both are quite wonderful and useful. That’s how I would divide them.

6. What advice would you give to bloggers who aspire to be book authors?

[CB] Blogging and books are two different disciplines, but I will say that if you blog daily and if you can write thoughts up such that they have a beginning, middle, and an end, you’ve got some potential. If you REALLY want to know what bloggers have to focus on, it’s building platform. Book deals go to people with lots of followers and readers, not the people with the best ideas. Sorry to pop your bubble, aspiring authors, but Trust Agents isn’t a great book. I just have a huge platform. Yep, there it is.

According to recent eMarketer research, Facebook is the number one seller of display ads in the US. eMarketer expects Facebook to generate $2.19 billion in display advertising revenue this year.

How much is expected for Yahoo? $1.62 billion.

And what about Google? Only $1.15 billion.

We all know that if we want to place text ads on a website or blog, AdSense is the first place to go for revenue. AdSense is great because it delivers ads based on the website hosting the ad. But AdSense doesn’t seem to really know much, if at all, about the audience viewing the ads.

So what about display ads? And what about targeted, relevant display ads?

Everyone talks about targeted and relevant advertising, but no one has been able to deliver this in the way that Facebook can within Facebook.com.

It must be only a matter of time before Facebook decides to add advertisements to the Open Graph.

We already see “Like” buttons everywhere and companies like Amazon, CNN, Levi’s and Huffington Post have done some interesting personalization-like implementations on their sites.

Anyone can add a Facebook plugin in a matter of minutes.

So why not Facebook ads all over the web? Why not a FacebookSense of sorts that would allow both large and small sites to deliver targeted and relevant ads to Facebook users?

Think about. You’re connected to Facebook and happen to stroll away from Facebook for 5 minutes and end up on a sports blog. And let’s say you’re a young woman who recently got engaged. Facebook knows you’re engaged and you’re a young woman who likes to run so maybe it would show you a wedding dress ad and a Nike Women Sponsored Story. It might not be perfect because Facebook wouldn’t know whether you’ve bought that wedding dress yet but it would be a better experience than seeing an ad about muscle gain next to an ad for a questionable dating site, right?

And what about visitors who are not on Facebook or don’t feel like connecting to Facebook at that time? Well, Facebook could deliver ads based on the content of the site itself just as Google AdSense does.

My guess is that a Facebook AdSense coming and it’s coming before 2012. Why before 2012? Well, because 2012 is the alleged IPO year. Oh, and also because 2012 might be the end of the world. And Facebook doesn’t have time to wait until the end of the world.

It’s funny to see some of the same people who have praised Web 2.0 and social media for years and highly depend on social media themselves, pointing the finger at “social media experts.” These myopic blog posts get views and buzz, but they are so generic that it shows that they don’t really see the entire picture or are simply seeking attention by trying to stand out amidst a sea of social media related content and opinions.

Are these kinds of articles/posts new? Nope. Criticism of “gurus,” “ninjas,” “experts,” “snake oil salesmen,” etc. abound online. Everyone and their cousin has written about it (I’m sure I’ve done it myself and I apologize on behalf of my younger, ignorant self).

Ironically, many of the people  making these claims are the same ones that speak at conferences, write books, and appear on TV and magazine articles to talk about how much they know about social media. They speak as experts and then talk about a generic group of renegade “social media experts.”

Based on my experience, I know how some small business owners see social media and how very large corporations see social media. I also have interacted with PR/marketing/advertising agencies, technology vendors, and startups/developers to have enough of an idea of how they see it.

And from what I’ve experienced, regardless of what you read in blog post x, most large companies need people who specialize in social media in various areas of the organization. In the same way, most small businesses need help with getting started in social media.

Sure, it would be fantastic if everyone from the CEO to customer service reps, marketing departments, and the agencies helping them were not only aware of how the space is evolving on a monthly basis, but also had experience and deep knowledge about what works, what doesn’t, and what it all means for the organization.

In an ideal world, everyone would have experience and knowledge around social strategy, integration, execution, management, testing, and measurement, and everyone would know how to spend dollars correctly to make things happen efficiently, creatively and with relevance, but that is not the case. The fact is that most large companies are still learning and some are still skeptic, despite the strong data suggesting that people are spending a lot of their time and attention on social sites. It takes resources and money to provide great customer service and create great marketing. In the same way, most small businesses probably don’t even have the time to do much more beyond creating a Facebook page and putting a Facebook icon on a billboard.

Pointing a finger at “social media experts” is like pointing a finger at “media planning experts.” It’s terribly vague.

Another case against the “social media experts” is the large amount of scammers and spammers out there. True, there are a lot of people trying to sell you everything from “ROI” to revolutionary sentiment analysis to $99 Facebook pages and Twitter followers by the gazillions.

Every single day of the year I get either a call, a LinkedIn message or an email from someone trying to reach the social media strategist/manager/expert/owner/director/leader at the company I work for. Every single day.

Are we in a bubble? Nevermind, wrong topic.

So every single day I get these kinds of messages and I try to take some of them because there are some pretty interesting and valuable tools, vendors, agencies and startups out there. The interesting thing is that all of these salespeople want to talk to some kind of social media specialist. Regardless of how good these vendors are, they are all looking for who? Social media experts.

And you know what? The good companies will try to talk to a social media specialist. The bad ones will probably try to reach anyone in marketing communications, corporate communications, media planning, research, or who knows, maybe even HR, legal, and accounting to try to sell what the anti-expert experts call “snake oil.” It might be easier to sell “snake oil” (either through a phone call or a blog post) to someone who doesn’t really understand what works in social media.

Without experts/specialists, it’s easy for companies to fall for fluffy, borderline useless, and/or expensive services and products.

And without people who know how to get things done in social media, it is easy to miss on great opportunities and completely dismiss great threats.

I wish we could, but we can’t just become all-knowing over night.

Someone can’t just wake up one day and do marketing and customer service in social media simply by “knowing the consumer” and saying “transparency,” “brevity” and “relevance” out loud to magically “generate revenue.” Sorry but ummm no. You don’t magically wake up one day just knowing everything there is to know about any topic or profession. And you don’t magically learn about new technologies and opportunities simply by knowing the basics of business. And on a sidenote, marketing is not just about revenue. Social media is most definitely not just about revenue.

Another issue I have with the anti-expert statement is the despise for younger professionals. It’s easy to poke fun at interns but sometimes they might have more passion, interest and skill in social media than people that have been in marketing for a long time.

Everyone learns at some point and that’s why companies need to seek people who are most knowledgeable and experienced (not just most popular or “influential”).

In a way, many of us who work within social media have been snake oil consumers, and even “salespeople” if you want to think about it that way. A lot of the “influencers” in social media were once ignorant Kool-aid drinkers too. At some point Gary Vee was just a guy trying to upload a video online. At some point Robert Scoble got excited over a web log. At some point Frank Eliason was just someone in a customer service department who liked a site called Twitter. At some point everyone was on Google Buzz. At some point Empire Avenue was going to take over the world.

I’m not really sure if this is making sense as I’m just typing thoughts at this point but I must say I simply find it very dishonest and self-righteous to one day brag about the powers of something, and the next day shun others doing it or specializing in it. It is one thing to say to a colleague “watch out for x, y and z because it is not true and a, b, and c will save you some trouble.” It’s a completely different matter to point a finger saying “social media experts are idiots and I’m not.”

I think it’s time to end the whole “snake oil salesmen” and “social media guru” finger-pointing conversation.

We get it anti-expert experts. You think you’re awesome and everyone else isn’t, and you want us to retweet it because you’re so influential and strategic and revenue-oriented.

At this point, blog posts about “snake oil salesmen” are becoming “snake oil” themselves.

I have a few problems with “Personal Branding.” I’ve read a lot about the topic and the recommendations provided are all pretty good. Things like  creating a blog, signing up to services all over the web, tweeting, podcasting,  commenting, getting a yourname.com, checking-in, speaking at conferences, creating content, connecting on LinkedIn, name dropping, making fun of MySpace, etc.

I’ve done most of these things myself and they’ve all been helpful. I wouldn’t be a Social Media Manager if I hadn’t tried all of these. More importantly, doing them has been a fun and rewarding learning experience.

Still, I don’t like that ”personal branding” is sometimes sold as a roadmap to success. It’s sold as a way to make money and become a micro-celebrity. Celebrities are often associated with “personal branding,” as if the average person could ever be Oprah. I’m sorry but Oprah doesn’t need Twitter to be Oprah and if she wrote a book about success, I doubt she would start with “How To Tweet Your Way to Success.” The fact is Oprah happens to be a nice likeable lady that worked like crazy for many many years.

Another thing I don’t like when I read about “personal branding” is that they often fail to mention that actual branding at companies includes a heck of a lot more than just doing social media marketing. Sure, anyone can grab a marketing book and say “see, you can do all of these things, starting with the 4 P’s.” Again, just like with Oprah, McDonald’s did not become McDonald’s over night.

Please don’t get me wrong, I have huge respect for anyone that has ever written about the topic and I know their intentions are probably good (I myself try to share what I’ve learned about and in social media and would love to be able to even start writing a book some day).

My really big problem with “personal branding” is… the term itself. People don’t need to be more like brands. Brands need to be more like people.

 If you ever meet a brand with a soul, emotions, dreams in the middle of the night, fears, suffering, family members, aspirations, you tell me… because I’ve never met one. Without the people behind them (entrepreneurs, designers, engineers, marketers, accountants, architects, lawyers, executives, salespeople, customer service reps, subject matter experts, testers, consultants, etc.), brands would cease to exist.

If anything needs some “personal branding,” it is brands and companies.

I am not a brand. I don’t want to be a brand. I won’t ever be a brand.

And I think anyone who is really into social media needs to get past the idea of wanting to be a brand because trying a little too hard might actually end up making all of us a bunch of narcissistic people trying to get a bunch of retweets, views, and comments out of others. I have close friends who have told me that I share too much and that I blog too much and that they’d rather give me a call than sign up on Twitter.

So my question is: Do we really want to have a “personal brand?” Why?

Are we interested in marketing the hell out of ourselves to be micro-celebrities or do we just want to do use social media to learn, have fun, make some actual friends, and hopefully do some of that for a living? I think there is a difference.

Think about it.

Do you want to sell “you?”

Is “engaging” and social media really about success and selling ads and books and ideas and… people? Or is “engaging” and social media really just about… sharing life?

I hope it’s the latter.

Maybe it’s time to re-brand personal branding.

Or maybe it’s time to unbrand it altogether.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab was unveiled today at IFA in Berlin. As Samsung USA‘s Social Media Manager, I’m a bit biased about all things Samsung (and Android in general), but I’ve seen the Galaxy Tab myself and it is truly an impressive device. I’ll keep sharing my thoughts on Twitter @SamsungEsteban & @SocialNerdia, but here are links to initial reactions from around the web so you read some previews/reviews and watch some videos/photos.

Engadget: Samsung Galaxy Tab Preview
Engadget: Live from Samsung IFA 2010 press event
Android Central: Samsung Galaxy Tab photo gallery
Android Central: Samsung announces the Galaxy Tab 7-inch Android tablet
Android Central: Samsung Galaxy Tab Hands-On [Video]
CNET: Samsung Galaxy Tab Photos
CNET: Samsung Galaxy Tab Android tablet goes official
CNET: Samsung: Galaxy Tab has leg up on Apple iPad
Gizmodo: Samsung’s Galaxy Tab Runs Froyo, Has Flash and Measures 7-Inches
Into Mobile: Hands-on: Samsung Galaxy Tab Android – 7 inches of Android tablet goodness
Mashable: Samsung Officially Unveils Galaxy Tab
Mobile Burn Samsung launches new Galaxy Tab Android 2.2 tablet
Mobiel Review Samsung Galaxy TAB. First Look
PC Mag: Samsung Introduces Galaxy Tab
PC World: Samsung Galaxy Tab Makes Its Intriguing Debut
Phone Arena: Samsung Galaxy Tab Preview
Samsung Hub (unofficial): Galaxy Tab gets official
TechIt: Fringing has just become more awesome on Galaxy Tab
The Droid Guy: Samsung Galaxy Tab officially exposed to select members of the US Android/Mobile Media
The Next Web: Samsung Galaxy Tab goes official, gets mid-September european release
Twice: Samsung Galaxy Tab Targets iPad

Stay tuned to @SamsungTweets and facebook.com/samsungusa for the latest news about the Galaxy Tab in the U.S.

Disclaimer: While I am employed by Samsung, the views expressed on this post are mine and do not necessarily reflect the views of Samsung.