Social Media is the hottest topic in marketing circles right now and many businesses are feeling pressured to get involved with social outlets such as Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. Small wonder — eMarketer is reporting that social media has reached the tipping point, with more than half of all U.S. internet users now frequenting social spaces in a typical month.

So at least half of us can now be found hanging out on social networks. Should marketers be there too? Absolutely, notes eMarketer, channeling the results of a February 2010 survey by Chadwick Martin Bailey, a market research firm. According to their data, 33% of U.S. Facebook users have become fans of brands on the network.

And plenty more social network users are talking about brands online. Whether it’s good news or bad news, if it’s hot it spreads in milliseconds across the social networks.

An unfortunate example? On September 26 2009 Kraft Australia launched its glorious new line extension to the iconic Australian Vegemite brand. Vegemite iSnack 2.0 was launched in the quarter-time adbreak of the Australian Football League Grand Final (roughly equivalent to the Superbowl in terms of national sporting importance) down under.

Before the adbreak was even over, tweets of death were resounding across Australia and thence across the world:

NO! Vegemite cream cheese product CANNOT POSSIBLY be called “Vegemite iSnack 2.0″. Bad joke or most epic FAIL in FMCG branding history” - tweeted by downesy

I said “do you speaka my language?” She just smiled and gave me an iSnack 2.0 sandwich. #vegefail – tweeted by jmappellekim

On the rather more positive side, a recent Nielsen/Facebook joint study showed significant uplift in Advertising Recall, Awareness and Purchase Intent amongst those brands “liked” in Social Media.

Nervous yet? Worried about your brand? Or just eager to take advantage of the added value if fans ‘love you’ socially?

It’s time to upskill yourself on social media — it’s too late to be an early adopter, but now would be a good time to start getting yourself socially adept.

For many marketers, however, the social media space is fraught with danger. Recent studies have shown that marketers have three basic fears about social media — and those fears can be crippling (on a professional level if not personally) if the right actions aren’t taken to deal with the problems.

Author and marketing specialist Michael Carney has put together an ebook on “Marketers’ Fears About Social Media (and how to overcome them)”, based on the Social Media Marketing course he’s been running for the past few months.

It’s available free of charge from www.MarketersFears.com, and it’s already attracting attention (and praise):

• “amazing and awesome”
• “That’s the best looking social media document I’ve ever seen”
• “love the comic art”

Michael has made the ebook available at no charge to our readers. Simply go to http://MarketersFears.com and organise your copy.

Tags: course, ecourse, Facebook, fear, learning, Marketing, myspace, social media, tipping point, twitter

Farmville, the scourge of Facebook, is coming to the iPhone & iPad. Farmville is a runaway phenomenon on Facebook, chalking up more than twenty million visits every day as users flock there to harvest crops and feed animals.

Now a large chunk of that misplaced attention threatens to migrate to the iSuite. Be afraid.

Tags: Facebook, Farmville, iPad, iPhone

ABC is introducing a new feature aimed at “encouraging viewers who stream their favorite shows online to make the experience more social”. Right, like we needed encouraging to talk amongst ourselves.

This Saturday, according to MediaWeek:

… the network will launch ABC Social: Episode Commentary on ABC.com. The new tool allows Web viewers to add their two cents by commenting on the show in an adjacent window to the left of the site’s video viewer. Users can log in to this feature using their Facebook accounts and can instantly share their personal commentary with their Facebook friend circles if they so choose.

ABC is using this week’s premiere of the sci-fi remake V to kick off ABC Social—as the show’s debut episode will be the first to incorporate the functionality starting this weekend. To make ABC Social more compelling—and to stoke the passion of sci-fi fans—the site will include commentary from V executive producers Scott Peters and Steve Pearlman. ABC plans to include such “insider” commentary alongside other shows down the road—potentially including commentary from actors, network executives and show staffers, journalists and even bloggers.

Executives at ABC see Social as a differentiator in an increasingly cluttered online video landscape, according to Alexis Rapo, vp, digital media, ABC Entertainment. “This definitely allows us to engage with a deeper, broader audience,” she said, comparing the experience to the “DVD extras” model. “It’s so wide ranging in terms of the commentary that might be available. We have lots of interesting ideas keep coming into play.”

Why bother?

ABC is testing inserted ads within the stream of comments within the ABC Social feed. “We think this is going to be a compelling opportunity for our advertisers,” Rapo said.

Ah yes, of course. The search for the mighty dollar.

The notion of providing extended commentary is appealing, especially for SciFi fans — the BBC has done a sterling job of catering to that community with its DR WHO CONFIDENTIAL companion series to the rebooted DR WHO, which takes fans behind the scenes. But we’re unconvinced that a social stream is needed, especially one with ads.

All very fashionable, we guess.

Tags: abc entertainment, Facebook, sci fi fans, scifi fans, social, web viewers