"Twitter, Facebook and our blog have changed the way we do business," said Robert Haufler, director of marketing for Somerset Investors Corp., (www.somersetmortgagelenders.com) a mortgage-banking firm in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. "People can get mortgage rates on a daily basis. We talk about new programs or updates on existing programs. Cutting-edge people come to us, and they´re the ones with good ideas." The audience is a combination of homeowners and realtors.

In recent months Twitter and video blogs and posts have produced better results than Facebook, Robert said. As a result, Somerset has shifted its emphasis accordingly.

"Using social media has moved us up in the search engines and gives us a better page rank," he added. "Every tweet or posting gives us more exposure. We were spending $20,000 a month on pay-per-click advertising. We recently cut this in half because of the exposure we are getting on youtube, MySpace, Twitter and Facebook.

"When we do press releases, we tweet about them. About six publications have done stories on our use of social media. That, in turn, increases our page rankings. When we tweet about the stories, we get even more exposure.

"For example," Robert said, "go to Google and type in ´divorce buyout.´ The first organic (nonpaid) listing is ours." (Editor´s note: Robert made this comment several weeks ago; Somerset still came up at the top of the page when we repeated the search a few days ago.)

Somerset has two employees devoted exclusively to social media at an annual cost of about $100,000. One has a public relations background and previously worked with Internet media in the medical field. The other was a nightclub promoter.

"We moved to social media because we realized the world was changing," Robert added. "Everybody is busy. People don´t watch much television and they fast forward through the commercials. We weren´t getting the responses we used to. But when people type ´divorce buyout´ or ´mortgage rates´ into a computer, you know they want to hear your message."

As a result of these efforts, page hits have increased 148 percent since July.

Robert´s wife, an assistant to a member of the $1 million life insurance roundtable, has started moving away from ads in smaller, local newspapers to Twitter and Facebook.

In addition to the "Big Three" social media -- Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, Somerset uses AOL´s BBO, Google´s orkut, Digg, Deli.ci.ious and Yahoo! Buzz. Somerset submits information to more than 1,200 Web sites, working with 50 to 100 of them each day.

Robert finds LinkedIn to be the most useful for researching business contacts.