Posted on PracticalECommerce.com by Armando Roggio on January 18, 2010

Some 70 percent of shoppers trust consumer opinions posted online. Facebook has more than 350 million users. By some estimates, Twitter will have 26 million users by the end of this year. And YouTube is the third most popular website on the Internet, bar none.

Social media cannot be ignored. It is just too pervasive, too ubiquitous. But from an ecommerce marketing standpoint, social media is often too little understood. The need for a clear explanation about what social media is and how to include it in your marketing was made clear to me last week, when Practical Ecommerce and HubSpot hosted a social media webinar. The event attracted dozens of questions before the broadcast and hundreds of questions during the presentation.

As I prepared for last week’s webinar, I read a new book, The Social Media Marketing Book, from Dan Zarrella, who is a marketing product owner at HubSpot, a Cambridge, Mass.-based provider of in-bound marketing applications and advice. The book provided a concise yet complete overview of the social media landscape and discussed specific marketing tactics for many popular social media sites, earning the text four out of a possible five stars in this, “The PEC Review”.

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