The hype about Social Media marketing begins to take dot.com boom proportions. The advantage here is that with the exception of some extreme cases most social media marketing efforts do not include any dramatic changes of busieness models and do not require huge investments as in the dot.com case. A recent report of eMarketer titled "How Many Marketers Are Using Social Media?" argues that 80% of the US companies with more than 100 employees will use Social Media Marketing in 2011.
For sure 2011 will be an excited year I only hope that businesses making their entry into the Social Media arena will put also some attention in educating their management, employees and mainly their marketers in this new form of marketing. Crucially important is to learn to listen to the customer (social) voice, put effort in engaging the customer not only in discussion but also on co-creation and last but not least draft a number of rules for the active use of Social Media by their employees; this can help prevent problems for them and their people.
