Its impossible to avoid the excited-chaos around Social Media. Personally, I’m not convinced that its the holy grail of the marketing world.

For sure, we are at the dawn of a new era. It started with Yahoo (the Internet Age), then Google (the Search Age) and now we have Facebook (the Connected Age). Every second of the day, 4 babies are born, 4 new Broadband subscribers, 2 new blogs are created,  1.4 million spam emails are sent, 3.6 mobile phones are sold, 2,970 Google searches are done, 11540 TXT messages are sent and 10 Americans visit an online dating site for the first time. Time spent on social networks is growing at 3X the overall Internet rate, accounting for 10% of all Internet time. Facebook is now the 4th largest country in the world with approx 300 Million users. And Youtube has 100,000,000 videos viewed every day. 1 out every 8 couples married in the USA last year met online!

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I guess it is futile of resist the power of the connected world and Social Media. Millions of people are creating content for the Social Web everyday. These are our and your customers.

So, there you have it. I can’t argue with the numbers. But I do believe that the challenge for us in the marketing world is to figure out how Social Media activities translate into tangible business metrics, such as brand loyalty and sales.

Richard.

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