A Regular Roundup of Social Media Musings
by Anna Gerz & Mike Wilt

This month’s collection of all things Social Media advances the renaissance of offline social interaction and puts some price tags on this Social Media thing.

Being Social Offline (What a Concept)

Last month we made note of a nifty little RFID twist on “liking”—and the trend continues into the summer.

Toyota is making a splash with its assumption their customers are forming a deep and lasting relationship with their vehicles. In an attempt to take this “friendship” online, the Japanese car company has partnered with Salesforce.com and Microsoft and invested $$$ billion dollars to launch “Toyota Friend.” The brand-specific social network is intended to be a platform for communications between electric vehicles and their owners based on the high-touch/high-maintenance relationship the “friends” share. The vehicles start the conversation by communicating maintenance and charging messages to their owners via the social network —with more casual chats sure to follow. The plugged-in pair can even share their updates on more established, public social media for the rest of us to follow as we lament our love/hate relationship we have with our gas-guzzlers.

And from the “that would be cool” department, we stumbled across a student project that highlights the possibilities of linking a social media-managed event to a very simple offline action. At this point the project is still just a concept, but it’s certainly feasible. More importantly, it is another example of active user participation with a social media property casual (and passive) “like.” Kudos to Maximilian Gebhardt.

Heineken - The Invite from Max Gebhardt on Vimeo.

The True Business of Being Social

As we reflect on the business of social media this month, it seems like the whole world has been atwitter. Although Facebook has been quick to implement monetization strategies, we finally saw significant financial strategies by Twitter and LinkedIn, two of the most integral social media platforms in the B2B world.

After months of limbo, Twitter was finally able to complete the purchase of TweetDeck for more than $40 million, adding it to the laundry list of Twitter-related startups to be acquired by the company. Additionally, recent reports make it clear that Twitter is planning to acquire even more companies—most notably, those specializing in advertising technology. It will certainly be interesting to watch over the next few months if Twitter will continue to be aggressive, or if the openness of the Twitter API will have an impact on the company’s plans.

We’d certainly be remiss to not make note of LinkedIn’s impressive IPO this month, which raked in $8.9 million and valued the company higher than many other popular businesses. Since the first purely social site went public with such strong results, we think it is safe to say that we will start to see more and more networking sites go public in the coming months.

And finally, we ask “Does anyone really want to be your “friend”?

• Facebook adds Business Tagging
• As we mentioned above, your Prius is begging you to accept its friend request.