Your brand is in a very vulnerable state if you’re not harnessing the power of social media marketing and if you don’t understand how to fit this into your budget. Your competitors are already there, using the ubiquitous SMO to make the most of all market share. Your employees are also there trying to figure out where exactly they are in the world.

Organizations will change from “What is social media?” to “Guide us how to successfully use these new methods to spread our voice, acquire good business opportunities, introduce healthy consumer activities, build mutual understanding between employees and the organization, and develop the bottom line.”

Businesses, private schools, governments, financial services, hospitality, advertising, NGOs, and many other industries are ready to embrace the transformation of marketing strategies. CEOs and decision makers are finally accepting that social media has become an innovative rocket fuel that is equipped with the best marketing and promotion methods available today. Social media strategies are used by all divisions of an organization: the boardroom, business communications, information technology, sales, sponsor relations, marketing, human resources, customer relations, supply chain management, research and development, and the list goes on and on.

If your organization or brand is not present on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other major social media websites, then your brand is quickly dying in the eyes of Google and other search engines. These types of social networking websites will become increasingly important for people to analyze what is hot and what is not.

A well-planned social media tactic can lead the way to numerous predefined results: brand awareness and recognition, driving traffic to your website, good online reputation, and all of this resulting in a potential conversion. SMO is gradually becoming an essential component of the organization’s overall marketing plan as the lines between offline and online marketing are blurring. For example, when creating a Facebook fan page, there are many things to take care of.

Social optimization is very much alive and breathing a consciousness: the universal common brain. It is updating and disseminating information at the speed of a sound. The year 2012 will see much more online campaign activities, not only with search engine optimization and social media marketing, but also by adopting digital marketing as a complete strategy. Competitive advantage will be in the hands of those organizations that understand how to use this strategy in real business intelligence.