With the massive growth in sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites, there has become a great debate over who should be responsible for these new channels.  PR agencies, full service media agencies, search agencies and lead generation teams are all staking claim to social media monitoring, but who should really be responsible for it?

As business-to-business (B2B) sales cycles are getting longer the most effective social network for prospecting is LinkedIn by a wide margin.  According to this business-oriented site was rated a 3.1 out of 5, compared with ratings of 2 for blogs, 1.9 for Facebook and 1.8 for Twitter. LinkedIn’s effectiveness in this area has translated into significant increases in usage. Nearly one-half of respondents said they were using the site more for prospecting and research than had been a year before. Around one-fifth of those polled were also upping their prospecting efforts on blogs, Facebook and Twitter, but majorities of B2B sales professionals did not use those sites for research at all.