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Now, more than ever, businesses are realizing the importance of interacting with their market. Social media platforms present a perfect setting for businesses to engage their consumers in conversation and vice versa.

The consumer has changed and one-way marketing will no longer make the cut.

David Kramer, President and General Counsel at Castle Title, LLC simply put it, “If social media is not a large part of your future, then your company does not have a future.”

Marketing strategies need to reflect a new generation of more accessible customers.

Kramer welcomes change and believes in innovation.

“So many people complain about the market, but if you keep doing the same thing, you will get the same results,” Kramer said.

Ken Montville, Associate Broker and Realtor at RE/MAX Advantage Realty, has spent 10 years in real estate. He also realizes the need to evolve with the consumer.

“The internet is a constant flow of information. So, consumers do their research first, and then they contact realtors when they have more focus,” Montiville said.

Marney Kirk of Keller Williams Excellence Realty agrees that the consumer has changed but she points out that the flow of information Montville speaks of is not always valid.

“The consumer does have an opportunity to be more knowledgeable, but it has become more important to educate the consumer because of the misinformation on the web,” Kirk said.

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Bing first woke the sleeping giant and now it looks like Facebook is going to take a shot at them too with the development of a real-time search. Yesterday was a big day for Facebook. They announced the acquisition of Friend Feed and then made the announcement of their new real-time search for Facebook users. Google immediately took notice and the only thing they could do was make an announcement of their own.

On Google’s official blog yesterday they unveiled “Caffeine,” their super secret search update. On the surface very few can see the difference between the old version and the new version. The version they released is just a developer’s version and there are still a lot of features to add, so I’m sure there’s a lot to come. Right now they’re simply looking for feedback on the differences between the versions.

As for Facebook, the search is available to Facebook users right now. In reality the search seems to target Twitter. The Facebook search is very similar to the Twitter search in that it sifts through all of the public posts on Facebook. However, with their purchase of Friend Feed they may have other plans for search beyond Facebook.

At this point we can’t say much about Google, or Facebook’s plans. So right now we’re just waiting to see the next step for both of them.

UPDATE: Facebook also reporting problems with DDOS attack. Twitter is now running fine and Facebook problems are intermittent. Source of the attack still unknown.

Twitter is blaming today’s outage, ongoing since 6 a.m. this morning California time, on a DDOS (distributed-denial-of-service) attack. Partial recovery was made but the attack continues.

It is unclear where the attack is coming from. Due to the popularity of the social media network and recent hacks to Twitter employee’s email, it was only a matter of time before the site itself was compromised.

Currently Twitter is running slowly and in some areas it is completely inaccessible. So I guess everyone will have to wait to hear what Ashton Kutcher had for breakfast. I know I’m dying to know.

Mark Zuckerberg's lame corporate profile shot

We all know that Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire but the big question that I have is, did he sell his soul to the devil getting there?

I’ve been a big fan of Facebook since its inception.  However, in recent days, it’s become more evident that their approach to success is selfish and user security and privacy is slowly becoming less of a priority.  I see more and more users getting hacked and sending out crazy emails that bait you into some sketchy malware website – urgh.  I even got fooled the other day by some crazy message.  Where’s it going to stop. (not to mention Facebook is done a good job at keeping this out of the media)

I liked the days where Facebook had a targeted niche of well rounded individuals that didn’t play dirty.  I feel like its become a centralized highway of unsolicited crap that I get on a daily basis which I have to weed through to actually hear from my friends.  It’s getting annoying.

I’m a big fan of opening up the application development but there has to be some sort of quality control, some of these apps are just plain ridiculous and all they want you to do is click on ppc links.

So is the house of cards going to collapse?  Probably not, but it’s due for a major correction.  Current market conditions are making the few surving online advertisors smart and this will eventually catchup with Zuckerberg.  I think he needs to stabilize his growth and think about quality and not quantity.  Advertisers would be happy to pay more to have better conversions.

Call me crazy but I see this as the beginning of the end of the 10 billion dollar valuation.  Facebook is here to live on forever, but I think Zuckerberg is in for a big suprise.