Social Media is being eaten alive. The interactive marketing universe is slowly swallowing it like a python might swallow a deer.

BazaarVoice, Pluck, Gowalla, FourSquare, Groundtruth, Flickr, Digg, Twitter, Salesforce, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, Covario, ExactTarget, CoTweet, WordPress, Limelight, Meteor, Magnify, Radian6, Omniture, etc., etc. Are these marketing tech “nouns” and the functions they perform not all part and parcel of the same overall interactive marketing solution space? Can you possibly succeed as an interactive marketer and ignore – or be ignorant of – any of these?

Enterprise software solutions like Pluck and Salesforce and BazaarVoice promise to make connections with owned social media properties seamless. Geo-targeted marketing is not optional for business with physical storefronts anymore – in fact businesses that haven’t already experimented here are behind the curve. Want to succeed in online marketing? Kind of have to include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging, and video site networking to the plan these days.

Facebook, by the way, has become so enmeshed in peoples’ everyday lives that they are addicted. Facebook is the new “front end” of user experiences, partially displacing search in the war for attention.

Optimized SEO is not possible without use of social media. An effective web presence is not possible without use of social media and community-oriented tools and tactics. Direct marketing and CRM are not done well without integration with social media either.

Eaten. Alive.