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.

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