Last week I wrote a brief post on whether social media was the 4th major platform.

Since then a couple of things have popped onto the radar to further reinforce the fact that social media is a game changer.

In no particular order;

Brands in Public appeared late last week -  launched by Seth Godin,  a joint-founder of squidoo.com – and is well respected in the social media world. The site lets you take a look at how the online social media world views your brand via Tweets, blogs Youtube video and more. This is a more focused version of what Squidoo offers as a ‘lens’, but for brands.

Brands – big ones – are starting to care about how people talk about them online, and solutions and tools for addressing this are sprouting-up.

However, Lisa Barone, herself a well respected social media professional, doesn’t think its such a great idea as her blog-post – Seth Godin tries out brandjackin – sets-out.

Whichever side your on here, the fact is – there is a dialogue going on about how brands are managed in the social sphere.

Then, on friday, I was lucky to catch Owen Stevens, (via Altitude Recruitment – @lauramaddison), for a short talk about branding. Everything was going as it should untill he referenced the Erik Qualman Youtube video about social media (yes the one on the front of this site) in his presentation. It was great to hear someone standing in front of you say that ‘yes, you were doing the right thing’, and that it is worth persevering with trying to get clients and brands to adopt the platform/technology.

And then this morning, Dan Thornton of 140Char posted about Pistachio Consulting, and the Twitter ‘app’ guide they have produced. The thing here is that Pistachio consulting specialise in social media and micro-blogging platforms – good enough for me, that’s a bona-fide business…  and just to make sure, it has its own conferences – Social Media in Business Conference, London and Media140 – reaching right around the world.

So, just to clarify, brands are all over the social media web world, they have tools, are manged, businesses are run solely for this purpose, they have conferences – all around the world – and its gaining more and more momentum and exposure.

*nudge*

Time to talk to someone who knows about this sort of stuff ?

Another social media explanation video via Youtube.