Social media is the latest trend in a web going more and more towards a real-time web model. Status updates, Tweets, chat, RSS and news streams are flooding us with information whilst, at the same time, allow us to pick and choose what we subscribe to.

In all this we are just beginning to realize that when we use Social Media to promote a product, a service or an event there are many things which we do not yet know and perhaps we do not understand which means that we are still in the social media usage learning curve.

There are as many things to learn about social media usage as there are social media experts to talk to however three stand out in the picture that’s developing at the moment:

Twitter gives us all the power to be heard and, more than that, to be noticed. BPs very public response to the Gulf environmental disaster might have been less sweeping and less responsive (after all, legally they were not responsible for  the rig) had not the media’s eye been upon them with hourly trends in Twitter and Facebook. Get a few friends and their friends and the friends of those to tweet about a subject which matters and before you know it you have started a global trend and the world is listening. This is power and democracy at work in an unprecedented scale.

Given its complexity and the widespread applicability in which it can be put to use to, social media is slow to teach. You have to cover, exhaustively, every angle and then hope that by the time you have finished a new trend proving you wrong somewhere has not developed. Learn by using it however and you will soon lean what works for you and what doesn’t.

If the web is the collective sum of the knowledge of mankind, open to access to anyone with an internet connection and a computer, social media, is its conscience. Drunken party shots, stupid remarks, online flame wars and the tirade against your boss after a particularly long and pointless meeting are all there, permanently. The moment you post something on the web you lose control of it which means that you will never know for sure if it’s gone even if you remember to delete it.

The web became, for a while, a wild playground without a monitor. We felt that its anonymity allowed us to say anything to anyone at any time. Social media is now coming back to teach us to be more guarded and more responsible.

Apply these three lessons to your online social media use and your marketing will instantly improve by a couple of notches, at the very least.