So many social networking sites. So little time. This simple flowchart will help you decide which social network is best for you.

Where is social networking going in 2012? What's the fate of Google Plus? Are merchants even paying attention to 2011's trends?

There are some articles I want to share on my Facebook. But I don't want every article I randomly surf to be shared. Sure, I want my Facebook friends to see I'm interested in stories about central banking but I don't want them to see for every one serious article I appear to be reading I'm reading five articles about octomoms, incontinence treatments in the pipeline, and Adam Sandler movie reviews.

BlueCamroo is pleased to announce we've rolled out our API or "application programming interface". At this point you're probably wondering "what's an API and why do I need to know about it?" Well, technically if you're not a software developer and you're a fully satisfied BlueCamroo user, you probably don't need to really worry too much about the API. However, if you're a power user, an API lets you turn up BlueCamroo to the proverbial eleven.

Be careful about who you outsource your online reputation management to. Make sure the company has responsible track record. It's not some foaming-at-the-mouth kook operating from a laptop in a Starbucks.

Social CRM is CRM software that lets you engage customers and potential customers anywhere, including social networking. Bringing a lead into your CRM should be no different if that lead came from a phone call, a business card you got at a trade show, someone visiting your site and requesting more information, or a Twitter user.

So far we've look at Google Plus in terms of the past (Google's forays in social networking) and it's present (company profiles). It's time to turn the scRoo (screw? Huh? Huh?) towards the future and consider what Google Plus can do to avoid its social networking platform going the way of Google Buzz, Google Wave, or just becoming a regional niche social network like Orkut.

Google has recently opened up its Facebook-(not yet)killer Google+ (aka Google Plus) to company profile pages. Actually you can create a number of different "I'm not a human" pages. Are you a rock band? Want to set up a page devoted to a specific product? Want to make a tribute page to the flying spaghetti monster? No problem. No more having to try and setup a human profile with a jury rigged name. So, Mr. Coca Cola you can now create a product page.

One of the first questions prospective users of BlueCamroo ask us is who can see what in BlueCamroo. To understand who can see what, you have to understand BlueCamroo's Permissions system. Permissions in BlueCamroo (and nearly every other application or computer system) implies two things: 1) What can I see? 2) What can I do to what I see? The First Law of BlueCamroo permissions is this: You can only see what you yourself have created. No one else can see it. You can't see what they've created.

In BlueCamroo, Leads are what I like to call "the big slush pile". The Leads section is where you enter your first contacts. Got a business card at a trade show? Saw someone on Twitter? Someone filled out a Send Me Information form on your web site? Got an inquiry to your info@mycompany.com email? These are all leads. And they can all be captured easily and in the later two cases automatically by BlueCamroo.

I'm glad you asked. Not many of us have in-house talent or resources to create the next Angry Birds (it cost Rovia about $200,000 to develop the game). That doesn't mean, however, you can't think creatively about producing free digital content that can have spin off benefits.

A question we're often asked is what's the difference between an Internal User and an External User. The simple answer is an Internal User is a member of your company. An External User is a client or customer you want to give access to a special "Intranet" portion of BlueCamroo.

So Google has opened Google Plus to the uninvited masses. Back in July the Roo Blog took a first look at Google Plus. What we found was an impressive collection of features that, compared to Facebook, made it a more compelling and logical place for business. The circles feature was a particularly useful expedient for keeping work/social life aspects firmly and easily separated. One of Facebook's great weaknesses, and a reason it's not been adopted for business like Twitter, is it is very hard to create a firm separation between your personal profile and your professional profile.

The Opportunities tab allows you to track sales opportunities and create a series of tasks needed to close the deal. For some, it might be a little difficult to understand why you'd use the Opportunity feature instead of just creating some tasks associated with the account.

Your heaviest use of documents will probably involve projects. A project has two ways of uploading and sharing documents. The Attachments button works the same as above. The Documents button, however, gives you powerful source control features. Add a document in a fashion similar to adding an attachment. After uploading the document, BlueCamroo presents you with several new options. You'll note there's no Browse button. You cannot upload a file over top until you click the Checkout button. Clicking that will bring up a standard download box. After downloading, the downloader is presented with two primary options. Click Check In upload the updated file. It's good to leave comments, helping other users understand what changes were made. This dialog also has a Send Notification box, check that to alert users you've modified the file.

One of BlueCamroo's strengths in the cloud marketplace is it brings a lot of business productivity cloud apps together into a unified package: CRM, project management, customer support, social CRM, social networking reputation managements, email marketing. Well, I could go on. But you get the idea. That said, BlueCamroo is an application you need to invest some time learning. We've done a lot to create a real world default setup and create a number of setup wizards that get BlueCamroo customized for your office environment. We've designed BlueCamroo so you can start using it out of the box for your basic CRM needs and then "ramp up". We spend a considerable amount of time "pouring cold blood" on the interface and wondering how to make it intuitive.

Your audience is captured and motivated: Podcast listeners download your podcast by choice. It offers them the content they want. They listen to it to the exclusion of competing media. Unlike listening to music, spoken word podcasts require a greater cognitive investment.

A few days later the same news orgs that rather uncritically reported the news did an about face and admitted they were hoaxed. Someone setup a bogus site in hopes of starting an urban legend and weaning people off of what the site developer thought was a troublesome browser to design for. Seems a little over kill. If you truly believe IE users just sit around and drool, I guess you could just put some javascript on your site that detects a person's browser and redirects them to the Epic Meal Time channel or Rick Roll them.

Last blog post we covered some ways to handle the inevitable: finding a customer, tearing down your product or company on some social network. To sum up: take a deep breath, respond with empathetic language, and remember you're playing to the customer's audience.

BlueCamroo's Social Network Scout provides a number of ways to monitor your online reputation. Searches under Social Network Scout Buzz and Support channels can keep you on top of bad PR wafting its way through Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately, even Social Network Scout can't (yet) provide the kid gloves needed to handle these types of situations. What do you do?