Hotpot, is designed to make local search results for places on Google more personal, relevant and trustworthy and also includes a new social element – allowing you to share your reviews and ratings with friends.

There are three main elements to Hotpot:

• Google Places – There are currently more than 50 million places listed around the world.
• Places you like – When you rate places you like, Google may suggest other related places you may like as well. Hotpot will try to recommend other local places which are similar.
• Places your friends like – Share ratings with your friends and see the places they’ve recommended.

Combining these three elements could make the hard task of choosing where to go much easier; all you need is to rate places and add your friends.

Hotpot is also closely integrated with Google Places, with hotpot ratings showing up as reviews on Place Pages. A new “Best Ever” ribbon is starting to show up on some Reviews, and Google Places has also recently added the ability to add this simpler, quick Hotpot like star rating to businesses that show in the Related Places area of the Place page.

To make the most of Local Search and maximise the opportunity for your Places page appearing in search results, why not encourage your friends and clients to rate your business/service.

A Google account is required to use Hotpot, but this is easy to setup and is free.  You can set a Places nickname when you start using Hotpot , so you control how you post your ratings. That way, only your friends will be able to see your real name.

• high resolution images (storing bigger pictures) – from the beginning of October facebook have been rolling out support for print-quality, high-resolution photos – increasing the size of the photos stored from 720 pixels to 2048 pixels on the largest side or 8 times bigger overall
• a brand new viewer for browsing photos – A better photo viewer makes it simpler and faster to navigate photos.  You can now view photos and even whole albums without going to a new page.  Paging through photos should also be significantly faster

  

• a new uploader with better tagging – a new Flash based uploader allows you to tag multiple photos in the same album at the same time. It will also be easier to tag photos of the same person.

These new features are expected to be rolled out to all Facebook members over the next month or so.

Below, a look at each of these potential benefits and some ideas on how you can make maximise them for your specific needs.

Links

Making use of social media for link building is relatively popular within the SEO community, and for good reason. Using social news sites as a platform to spread your content (linkbait) can relatively easily produce thousands of new inbound links to your site. Compare that with traditional methods of paying or begging for links, and you can quickly see why linkbaiting is so popular.

The of linkbaiting is to produce a piece of remarkable content that will spread virally and naturally collect links. The big social news sites already have millions of users, so the concept is to leverage these sites to get your story popular enough so that it’s exposed to their user community. A popular piece of content on these sites is seen by tens of thousands of hungry bloggers looking for stories to blog about.

Sites that are best for link building are probably Digg, Delicious, and Facebook

Branding

Social media marketing goes further than just traffic and links. It is also great for improving brand awareness. It doesn’t matter if you have a new brand or one that is well established, using social media can help build or strengthen it.

Social media is also part of a brand experience when users interact in these channels. If the experience is positive, high-energy, interesting or funny, all of these elements will support a unique brand experience and support ongoing initiatives in this area. Positive or negative experiences here can really have an impact on a brand.

A few examples of positive experiences include funny videos, useful content, flash games, and contests based on user participation. Each of these methods help engage a deeper dialogue or interaction with the consumer and can help get closer to the customer.

Best sites for creating branding are YouTube Twitter and Facebook.

Sales

The primary aim for many marketing campaigns is to bring an increase in sales. Sometimes this is done directly and sometimes it can be a very indirect process. It can be hard to create a social media marketing campaign that will result in direct sales. This is because you’re reaching consumers in a non-purchasing stage of the cycle. It contrasts from standard SEO where consumers are looking for what you’re selling and at the point of purchase already. Social media is less intrusive, and part of the reason people engage is because there’s more there than just a selling message. Any content with a strong selling message will generally not be received well.

The best way to generate sales through social media is to show how good your product is in a creative way and compelling way.
Sites that are best for direct sales are YouTube, MySpace or any highly targeted social site.

Interaction

There are a lot of benefits to interacting with your customers through social media. Some of these include improving products or services, establishing trust, being viewed as the authority in your space and creating evangelists.

The most common form of customer interaction in social media is done through blogging. With a blog, your goal should be to establish an open dialogue with your customers. This means that should allow comments on the blog, and you should also be participating on other relevant blogs.

Blogging is not the only way to interact with your customers in social media. Consider reaching out to them in the communities where they hang out but be sure tread lightly as they can very easily have the opposite effect you are hoping for. Remember, social media is somewhere that consumers feel safe from marketers, so you need to have the right approach.

The above are examples for some of the ways social media marketing can be effective today. The environment is still evolving and growing. As we see more participation in different ways, the landscape will pose even more opportunity for marketing.