Recently one of my health related clients' book publisher was talking about the importance of social media to the traditional publishing industry. She said they now strategize books that have websites for reference materials and more information, and places where people can host e-books and bookmarked pages from new book releases. What does this mean? It means that people have finally started to recognize how valuable social media marketing is.

Just like any marketing campaign, Social Media Marketing (SMM) takes hard work, tracking, which the Internet makes easy, as well as maintenance. And we can easily blend traditional campaign tactics with SMM, including direct-response, branding, or radio spots. First, it is about the objective for the campaign, then comes fine tuning the strategy. The Web offers an ideal way to measure return on investment(SOI).

Many organizations are allowing employees to use social networks for business purposes today; it has increased dramatically to 69% in 2008 from 37% last year. More than six in 10 companies are using social media to build and promote their brands, improve communication and increase consumer engagement. There has been a fivefold increase in the percentage of employees who are using popular social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn for business purposes, from 15% in 2007 to 75%. 37% of organizations plan to focus communities on specialty areas where they can provide business value. 40% of respondents report using one or more of the following tools: user groups, tags, communities, blogs, social networking and videos. What are some popular tools? Social networks, blogs and wikis, with adoption rates of between 50% and 55%.

What is the future of Social Media Marketing? Just imagine the magnitude of virtual classrooms! Even futurists like James Canton, the author of "The Extreme Future," has already said that one of the top ten industries of the innovation economy is, education and learning.

In an article written by a professor of computer science at Colorado Technical University named Cynthia M. Calonge, who said, "the benefits outweigh the risks associated with venturing into a virtual world . For me, the virtual world is my preferred learning and teaching environment."

We will all be seeing more and more people setting up social media networks to engage with customers and students, basically to start conversations and share knowledge. This means that websites need to include content that educates people. The sites must also be optimized properly with the search engines so that they will come up first on the search engines. And blogs are becomming a way of life. Self publishing IS the future.

The reality is, that the creation of immediate, portable, transferable, on-demand knowledge sources is way bigger than we can even begin to imagine.