(Guest post by Dorine Sinigaglia) When talking to clients about social media and its effects on increasing sales of their products and increasing traffic to their site, the most asked, common question is: “That’s great – but what will social media do for us? Show me the money!” – and their point is rightfully valid. For those who still don’t quite understand the long-term effects that social media has on their company, it is rather difficult [...]

If we look back in history , we will find that much before Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, there was ICQ. For anyone who doesn’t know, ICQ was created in 1996 and is now wholly owned by AOL. ICQ was THE pioneer of social media and real time updates. It introduced us to instant messaging and a revolutionary new way to communicate with people instantly in real time. ICQ could have been Facebook or Twitter a long time [...]

Starbucks has over 705,000 followers on twitter and over 5,428,000 fans on Facebook. I guess you could say that they’re doing something right on the Web. What is it about Starbucks’s social media strategy that makes it so successful? Let’s analyze Starbucks social behavior across the Web: 1) Starbucks on twitter – Starbucks engages with customers on twitter, answer questions, retweets what people are saying about the brand and creates an open communication channel to speak [...]