A few years ago it was the German media proclaimed that blogs had no future simply because they would give away too much information about the users and that they could not be kept private.

I have found my blog to be a most valuable platform – and so do my over 5000 subscribers.

Yesterday I was shocked to see that they haven’t learned and that the witch-hunt seems to continue: only with a different “witch”.

Now German media outlets, especially the Westdeutscher-Rundfunk (Government-related tv station), has repeatedly aired programs which totally falsify information in context to social networks.

Therein they stated that the information which people upload and enter on to social networks are indexed by search engines instead of the truth that they are only searchable if I the user decide that they should be.

A long line of arguments followed, totally torn out of context, but the primary indicators that this piece of “information” was not really true was that Facebook had 2 million members.

While this may be true for Germans registered on Facebook it was not mentioned by the network that they have a few million more.

If this trend of negative propaganda should continue I think a lot of German companies will endanger their competitiveness on the global markets as they have done with not embracing blogs. Most German companies could be doing better in terms of search engine score and public relations work if they were to utilize these and other great instruments out there.

Let’s see what the next trend in 2010 will be and what stories German media outlets will come up with to demonize those.

as always, it depends on the budget. The most successful portals out there were not built on pre-packed solutions but are unique systems which focus solely on the group of people it was intended for.

Furthermore, you may want to invest a lot of time into determining what your group wants and how they want it conveyed to them. I am addressing issues like usability, etc.
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there are several issues that come along with that. Primarily though, you should encourage either your employees to be present for you on the web. Another important issue is getting the word out about your product. Perhaps having detailed videos on YouTube about the work you do. Or if you have consumer products etc. have videos showing their usage. If the video is unique enough you may very well end up getting it watched a few million times with the result that a percentage of the viewers will visit your website to want to know more. (more…)

actually, blogging is 2.0 – so there is no real more growth to the whole issue. 
Yet, if you’re referring to the direction blogging is going to take, then I would say that we’re going to move more and more towards blogging becoming something exceptionally social with a lot of content contributors on few niche platforms, which will then become pretty famous. 
But unfortunatly, my glass ball is broken, so these were just my 2 cents  

quite a deep question. To answer the first part of it: yes, social media is definitly important for F500 corps. Why? Because there are a lot of people on the social media platforms and the continue to grow. And while the social media platforms remain free (if you really only use the standard functions) every lead you pick up is free also. Like Zero bucks. 
Since a lot of companies are moving towards things like reputation retention/frontline customer care strategies, this person who spends the whole day on the web, could easily be involved in other online communities shoving out content, etc. 
One of the simplest things that come to my mind is to synch up your blog on several social profiles and thus automatically publish posts to the according websites. 
The second part: I am pretty much present everywhere. And has it helped me? Yes, it definitly has. I comment pretty frequently and participate in a lot of discussions, blog a lot of articles associated to my business but also about my private life. 

Interesting to find your question here today since I just started a project with a friend of mine, branding him as a niche engineer in the automotive industry. 
One (but “only” ONE) aspect would probably be online reputation assesment through a well syndicated blog, utilizing social media, third party validation through guest blogging and being written about by other bloggers etc. etc. 
The internet is a great platform to gain visibility, especially on an international basis. It has granted me the oportunity to generate a lot of business around the globe. Business, I would have hardly gotten my hands on if I hadn’t had this grand platform available. 
Hope I was able to help you and feel free to call me if you have further questions.

my sole belief in things like this is that yes, you can get it almost for free utilizing the software/frameworks out there. But then again it depends on what you want to achieve with the platform in the future. 

 If you intend to make the platform something out of the ordinary totally, then the budget is going to be tight. Yet if you say that you want to develop a niche social media platform for a certain group of people that is to be appealing but needs to be nothing out of the ordinary than yes, you can definitly calculate about 2/3s of the costs you have depicted in your question.  

See, the problem with the costs for bandwidth can pretty easily be solved (at least for the moment) using external podcasting sites to host your content. This way the bandwidth consumed by the other provider and not by your servers. Same applies for live streaming. Chat, blogging and co. are pretty much bandwidth neutral and hardly use any real traffic. 

 The most important and key feature of every SOCIAL MEDIA plan should however be an ingenious and widespread function to invite new members to contribute. All popular services like Gmail, Y!, Live, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. pp., (and – IMPORTANT – CSV import) have to be available in order for your existing members to easily invite new content contributers.  Further more, make sure that you ascertain as much information about your users as possible because that is what determins the worth and value of a social network. And it also allows you to implement intelligent advertising platforms.