It's hard to believe that less than four years ago—at the South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival here in Austin—Twitter reached its tipping point, as the number of daily tweets rose from 20,000 to 60,000. Now Twitter is at its 300+ millionth user, and six new Twitter accounts are being opened every second. This year, the number of tweets for SXSW alone hit more than 300,000.
These growth statistics illustrate that social media moves at light speed. In stark contrast, most corporations don't. Although Dell entered the blogosphere in 2006 and began tweeting in 2007, we've had to learn the fine points of using social media for business value the same way every other large organization has: in real time.
For CMOs and senior marketers looking to use social media to support business goals—such as satisfying customers and driving revenue—this serves as a bit of a boot camp, but with less pain.
