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Did you tweet? |
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How many fans do you have? |
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How many videos do you have on YouTube? |
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How often do you update your blog? |
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This year you couldn't pick up a paper or watch the news without hearing something about Tweets and Facebook fans; YouTube videos were top of mind and everyone was a blogger.
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| Ignoring the pleas for tweets and fans, many of us focused on improving search engine results and finding ways to stretch out our marketing dollars. We also tried to learn how Bing could impact our search strategy and whether we'd have to learn how to optimize our websites for yet another engine but while we were trying to get our arms around these issues, Social Media exploded! |
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| Today, Facebook is the third highest ranking website for traffic with 300 million active users, 100 million monthly US visitors, and more joining daily. And everyone seems to have a profile, not just high school and college kids. Twitter is the new communication and conversation tool with 22 million people micro-blogging through it in November.
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| Consumers are listening to each other and influencing purchasing decisions using the social medium to become raving fans or share their bad experiences. Social media influences consumers and while every fan or follower may not instantly turn into a lead, if you are not careful you could easily alienate a prospect and all of his/her friends in an instant. |
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| So, you really do need to have a strategy. You need to agree on how you are going to measure success and have a dedicated resource that understands the medium.
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Consider this, consumers want transparency, social responsibility and value. US consumers have started saving again and this year we had the highest saving rate in over 20 years. Cooperative consumerism is exploding, people want to buy from brands they trust, which share their values whether a social or bottom line value.
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2009 has proven to be the year we all embraced social media. After all, social media is easy and most of the services are free, however, it's still going to take continuity and patience as well as a strong commitment to develop your brand in the social media cloud.
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