Social Media Marketing Explodes
As of this writing, Facebook has nearly 500 million members and Twitter has moved beyond its 10 billionth tweet. Even though much of the worst hype around social media marketing is already dwindling, the audiences made available for marketing campaigns by social networks and other socialmedia services will just keep getting bigger.
Social media is transforming the way companies communicate with their customers, and that's not a fad, but a trend. The big social networking players are sorting out the market. Niche players are emerging. And the companies that figure out how to deliver their marketing messages though these networks will kick the competition's butt.
What Does Stephen Colbert have against Wikipedia?
Probably nothing, but the comedian and star of The Colbert Repor got a lot of mileage out of a bit of mischief, when, in 2006, he made changes to Wikipedia articles during his show and urged his viewers to change entries on the site to say that elephant populations had tripled. Wikipedians locked out these changes as soon as they became aware of them, and reportedly banned the account “Stephencolbert.” Colbert was moved to create his own wiki called
And that means that best practices and standard approaches will be established. Users have already seen the nascent rules of thumb for social media marketing surfacing and establishing guideposts.
The downside for users is that the networks are going to be stacking up a staggering volume of company and product pages in the future. Or maybe that's a good thing, because it'll give us access to the products and companies that matter to us. Time will tell.
