When it comes to social media marketing, there are strengths and there are strengths. For one thing, there are different types of social media and different types of social media marketers. Each type of marketer has a strength they can play to, but most social media marketers need someone else to fill the gap. Developers are typically technically proficient personalities who are capable of building cool applications and widgets.

)Source( The U.S. podcast audience hit 18.5 million in 2007 and is on track to increase 251 percent to 65 million in 2012, eMarketer estimates. Podcasting has been on the rise since its inception, but this looks like a bigger jump than one would expect. It makes sense, though. More people are starting to pick up on the potential of podcasting and Internet radio. I believe there is huge potential here for advertising if approached from the right perspective.

Advertising may not be the best way to get new business from social media sites like Facebook and MySpace. The reality is those sites were not designed to be advertising sites. They were designed to be networking sites. Imagine this: You are invited to a attend a free trade show in your industry. You decide to go, thinking it could be a good way to meet new people, potential business partners, and customers. When you get to the trade show, before you can walk in the door,

More than 2,000 users have signed up for the MySpace Developer Platform Forum . I suppose that's good news, but there have only been 223 posts made so far. This is, after all, the first day of the great race. The most active user on the forum has only made 15 posts. That leaves a lot of room for someone with a lot of time on his hands to sneak in there and ask a buttload of questions, or provide the answers.

Do you need a developer API? This is a question that you'll need to answer for yourself at some point. Many social networking sites like Facebook, now MySpace, and Digg allow users to develop their own user and social marketing tools using networking site's API. API stands for Application Programming Interface.

How much time do you spend networking? Have you found that social marketing can take up a lot of time? How do you structure your networking time? Whether you are an avid user of Facebook, a mover and shaker on LinkedIn, a MySpace groupie, a member of all three, or a connoisseur of every social networking site online, you need to think about how to best structure your time so that you get the most out of the activity.

If you have profiles at MySpace, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Plaxo, Twitter, 20 different article directories, a handful of social bookmarking sites, and your local public library, you might find a use for Google's new Social Graph API . OK, I'm stretching it a bit with the local library jab, but this does look like a cool API. The idea is to draw connections between information that is public on many websites and from various sources about a lot of people.

Now that the cat is out of the bag about Microsoft's offer to buy out Yahoo!, let's talk about del.icio.us. As you know, del.icio.us is the social bookmarking site that is owned by Yahoo! It is the most popular social bookmarking site. Yes, even more popular than Digg. But Digg is much more social and better in terms of social marketing. For the most part, del.icio.us still looks the way it did in 1999. Not much has changed.

)Source( Imagine if all the conversations on Facebook were fed through natural language interpreters in order to understand users' likes and dislikes. Take this a step further and imagine if all of the users photos were fed through image interpreters to find commercial products. In theory, a system could be created sophisticated enough to identify the clothing brand of a person featured in an image,

On February 5, MySpace will be launching its developer platform . Following the lead of Facebook, it looks as if the social marketing site may have been taking some notes. They claim to have addressed some of the issues and found a way to avoid the pitfalls that other social networking sites have experienced. One feature of the MySpace developer platform that looks really promising is its integration with OpenSocial , the joint venture project between MySpace and Google,