When a company first starts using social media, it’s like watching someone’s dad play with his first video camera. They seem to share everything in an attempt to “engage” just to show some results. That’s not a judgment, mind you. Everyone has to start somewhere and it’s just counterproductive to be mean about it.

The most powerful thing you can use social media for is listening. “Engaging” your audience without fully understanding who they are and how they relate to you is not engaging at all–it is as irritating as the ad that won’t stop blinking on the blog you are reading.

It is easier than you think to make people to want and need your product. Use tools like Tweetdeck, Google Alerts, RSS, Radian6, Community Insights or ScoutLabs and listen. Track terms in your industry, follow the players who are thought leaders in your space. Understand the current issues occurring in your industry. Create a product that goes above and beyond to solve these issues while not creating lots of other issues. Then show people your product. You can use an ad, a social media guru, whatever. The medium isn’t nearly as important as the message, which is “We are solving these issues you have.”

Listening and then acting upon what people need is far more powerful than any “engaging” you can do. I predict the companies that do it best will win out in 2010.

The real time web in Twitter search and whatever search Facebook decides to build with the FriendFeed guys, changes the game for everything. Even Google seems to reward fresher content with its new Caffeine update. It means essentially that a dissatisfied customer can drop a bomb on you and watch in splendor as it trends in Twitter, in Facebook search, and possibly lists high in Google. It means that one trend can swell to be very big and then die just as quickly. The fact that Google will be more dynamic and Facebook will probably have FriendFeed’s search capabilities means that it will be easier than ever to find what people are currently saying on the web.

Why am I just now blogging about the real time web when ReadWriteWeb covered it earlier this year? Because the only former “real time web” search platforms were Twitter and FriendFeed. Relative to the rest of the web, these are influential but still very obscure services. You can’t use FriendFeed to find reviews of local restaurants or find out the latest football scores. Google is the #1 most used website on the web and Facebook is now #4. That’s a lot of content to index. We will see more perspectives on a range of topics (welcomed or not) than we will have ever seen in the history of mankind.

It’s looking like any one of Facebook’s 250 million plus users will be able to log into his phone and blast a negative or positive review of your business. Then, that review can easily be found by people all over the world by a simple Facebook search. Are you ready for that?