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Earlier this week Avaya announced new contact center products that integrate with social media. Avaya, one of the descendants from Ma Bell, supplies telephony hardware and software to some of the largest enterprises and telecommunications companies in the world, and they are getting seriously Facebook'd.

It isn't all that surprising, really. Avaya isn't some old fuddy-duddy phone company. It has been a huge user of social media for its own purposes for quite some time.

CMOs have been chomping at the bit for a way to access Facebook content. And Gateway for Facebook, a cloud-based service from Microstrategy Inc. might just be the ticket.

By now you know that using social media is an essential part of running any-sized business, but how do you take those first baby steps towards learning about various services such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others? The mailing list provider Constant Contact has put together an excellent site called the Social Media Quickstarter here that is chock full of tutorials and step-by-step directions, along with blog entries on best practices, suggestions, a few podcasts, and other instructional materials.

Socialcast (which was recently acquired by ReadWriteWeb sponsor VMware) ran an interesting infographic these week visualizing, among other things, a social media study conducted by the Center for Marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth on the use of social media in Fortune 500 companies (we covered part of this study back in 2008).

The majority of companies studied found social media - such as blogging, social networking and online video - to be successful. Even as far back 2007 (why does that seem like so long ago?), a majority of the companies surveyed found social media to be at least somewhat important.

Open-Xchange began its life as a hosted email service but has since evolved with a twist: its engineers have figured out a relatively simple process to extract your contacts from Facebook and LinkedIn. It is based on the SaaS pay hosted service, but there is a free service you can use for your contact extraction.

So if you are trying to migrate a bunch of your contacts into Google+, or move from Facebook to someplace else, you might have found that this isn't an easy process.

The Google Plus team is still plugging away at the creation of brand pages for companies, and the service is still being rolled out to consumers, but that doesn't mean businesses can't start taking advantage of it.

Officially, you're not supposed to set up a profile on Plus to represent a brand, even though a few companies have already done so. If you want to be daring and pull a Mashable, you can try, but we can't promise smaller brands won't get shut down for going against Google's wishes.

In the midst of all the Google Plus hype last week, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg dropped in an interview with reporters that the company is going to announce "something awesome" this week. The statement was cryptic and a giant tease to tech reporters looking for the next big story. Now Facebook has to live up to the words of its CEO and actually deliver something awesome.

Awesome is a pretty subjective word. What could be awesome to Zuckerberg could be lame to the rest of the world. What could that be? Powers of deduction around the rumor mill have pointed to some type of Skype integration with Facebook. Zuckerberg made his comments at the Seattle Facebook office. Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond are 15 miles from Seattle. Microsoft was an early investor in Facebook and has had a good relationship with the company. Microsoft bought Skype not long ago. Do all these signs lead to Skype integration within Facebook connected with a guiding hand from Microsoft? Or is it something else entirely, like new photo-sharing tools or an HTML5 application store? Let's take a look at the rumors to see what kind of awesomeness could be released in Palo Alto, Calif. tomorrow.

For users who weren't entirely sure what Google's +1 button was all about when it first launched, the picture is getting clearer, especially with this week's launch of Google Plus. And now site owners can see the button's effect for themselves, thanks to new metrics available in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.

Most significantly, a new report in Google Analytics called Social Engagement demonstrates the impact made on your site traffic by not only +1's, but also tweets and Facebook likes. The report shows the correlation between things like +1 button clicks and the amount of time users spend on the site, for example.

Facebook may have recently reached the 750 million user mark, but not every single one of the social networking giant's members are necessarily in it for the long haul. Whether because of a concern about privacy, a need to tame their digital distractions or for some other reason, many users would prefer to leave the site and shut down their profile for good.

The trouble is, Facebook really, really doesn't want you to leave. Rather than providing users with an easily accessible "delete" button in their account settings, they instead offer the option to "deactivate" one's profile, which essentially makes it disappear until one log back in, at which point the profile is restored as though nothing ever happened.

For small, local businesses using Facebook for social marketing, building up a fan base is important, but only so far as the people clicking the "like" button actually live nearby.

While some businesses can sell their products and services online to customers regardless of location, truly local businesses who serve a particular locale need to narrow their social marketing focus down to ensure they're connecting with the people most likely to actually spend money with them.