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During my career as a Web strategy consultant I've often had people ask me, "How do I do social media?" Unfortunately the answer isn't simple. But the first step is the same as if you developing any other marketing strategy: know your market. To "know your market" in the old days you needed a $15,000 qualitative market research study that would then need to be quantified for the likes of senior management. The customer research effort was time consuming and expensive.

Luckily the Web offers many ways to gather information on a topic and the conversation around that particular topic or product, in real-time. In fact we are spoiled, even overwhelmed, with free listening tools.

The days of SEO as the primary traffic driver to your website are over. Don't get us wrong, organic search engine optimization isn't about to disappear as a key traffic driver. And thankfully, Google AdWords is still going strong. However, recent technology trends enable a brave new world of marketing. Ignore them at your peril.

Take real-time, for instance. The next generation of search, aggregation, notification and findability services are being developed using real-time technologies that enable users and machines to receive real-time updates. In a recent post, Robert Scoble said he would be better off curating news than actually attending the Apple launch! What? If you aren't thinking about how real time, along with social networks, mobile and location-based services fits in your marketing plan, you're missing an opportunity.

A few weeks ago a company I work with lost an amazing opportunity. We gave them the idea to create one of the best brand blogs I've ever seen.

They said no. Instead, they decided to create a social media strategy that was boring and dictated by legalities. Just imagine a blog that doesn't allow customer comments. The campaign not only offered zero value to customers, but in the end it ignored them by turning the blog into a press release platform. Ultimately, the brand decided to trash the project and walk away from social media.

These days, everyone is talking about social media and discussing what services and tools to use, how to use them, why you should use them, etc. In fact, if you listened to all the advice out there, you would probably think that no matter who you are, whether an individual wanting to build a personal brand, or a large multinational corporation intent on communicating with customers, you should be using social media. But is social media for everyone? Are there times when you shouldn't be using it at all?

Let's say you're a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. You want to get up to speed on the social media activity in your market, as fast as you can. Or perhaps you want to sell things to candlestick makers online, or you're a journalist writing a story about blogging butchers, or maybe you've got some kind of weird baking fetish or academic interest.

Is there any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the "Google and wander" method? We think there is. Below you'll find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry.

When you think of services offering to get you more fans, followers, and friends on social media sites, a few words come to mind: spammy, scammy, and sad. Purchasing fans is taking the easy way out. Instead of building up a community of followers who actually appreciate what you (or your company) has to say, you can give off the appearance of popularity with a store-bought set of fans. While no one in their right mind will come out and say that the social media "marketing" services that deliver followers and fans are worthwhile, the truth is that many people and businesses are using them anyway, even if they won't admit it. But can any of these services really be trusted?

Last night, Amazon sent out emails to their Amazon Associates members touting the latest addition to the company's affiliate program: a new feature called "Share with Twitter." According to the email, participants can generate "tweetable" links to any Amazon product after first logging into their Associates account. By clicking on the "Share with Twitter" button from any Amazon product details page, members are delivered to the Twitter.com website. Here, a shortened link and a bit of auto-populated text are automatically filled in Twitter's "What are you doing?" text box. The included text can be edited to say whatever they want before posting or they can choose to just post as is. After updating Twitter, any person who clicks through on the link and makes a purchase will earn the participant referral fees payable through the Associates program.

According to mobile marketing firm Brand in Hand, female iPhone users are the worst demographic in terms of interacting with mobile ads on the iPhone. The company, whose high-profile clients include Procter & Gamble, General Mills and American Express, has run 60+ mobile ad campaigns over the past two years. During that time, they've had the opportunity to study the engagement of iPhone users with their ads. So why are women ignoring the ads? Apparently, they're too busy actually using the apps.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University recently revealed the results of a study which looked into how people were using Twitter to talk about products. Companies, of course, fear what a negative barrage of tweets can do to their brand, leading many to establish Twitter accounts themselves to provide information, customer service, and support. As it turns out, these businesses may not need to worry too much about what the "Twitter effect" can do to their image after all. The study revealed that the number of brand-related tweets where sentiment is expressed is not the dominating force that you may think. In fact, the majority of tweets mentioning a brand are merely casual comments or tweets from someone giving or seeking information. And when sentiment is expressed, it's generally positive.

It's often hard to tell the marketing experts from the impostors. Being a thought leader isn't about knowing the best buzzwords and having a PowerPoint ready to deploy, it's about being among the first to execute a great idea. Google and The Wharton School have teamed up to provide users with 100 marketing-related videos on how to build community and customer bases in the digital landscape. The Fast.Forward. Channel shows communications professionals how they can evolve to cut through the noise and spam, and build loyal audiences with tech savvy people like us.

A company called Sweb Apps has just launched a new service which lets anyone build iPhone apps, even if you don't have a technical background. The service is aimed primarily at small to medium-sized businesses who don't have an in-house or on-call engineering team capable of developing mobile applications. Instead, using the Sweb Apps website, business owners can create their own iPhone application themselves in as little as five minutes, says the company.

Publicis Groupe SA announced today the acquisition of Microsoft's Razorfish advertising agency for $530 million dollars. In a joint press release, the group announced that the deal will increase Publicis' ability to deliver digital campaigns and further elevates Razorfish's status as a leader in online marketing. According to Bloomberg, in exchange for Razorfish, Publicis will give Microsoft 6.5 million in shares - a deal that makes Microsoft a 3% owner of the advertising company.

Augmented reality -- or the addition of a layer to the world before your eyes (aka the "real world") using technology -- is the next big tech trend. Already making its debut in everything from mobile apps to kids toys, "AR" will clearly soon be talked about by everyone the way they used to talk about "social media" and "Web 2.0" before that.

While augmented reality has its uses -- although many of them just involve oohing and aahing at nifty apps -- this trend is already in danger of being over-hyped, even though it has barely gotten off the ground.

According to Unwired View, Google Voice just filed an application with Fish and Richardson legal services on a patent that is suspected to monetize caller waiting on Google Voice.

The patent application lays claim to the methods and software "in which an indication of a telephone call being placed from a calling number is received, and a determination is made of an audio advertisement to play based on the calling number."

Has Twitter spam gotten a little out of hand? According to today's top story on Techmeme, it has. Apparently, marketers are calling for Twitter to filter out spam and other adult content from the microblogging service. You know, so their all-important tweets about the products and services they're pushing don't have to share the same web space as that other nasty stuff. But fighting actual spammers is still relatively easy for an end-user: it's called the "unfollow" button.

Ironically, if anyone's to blame for spamming our Twitter timelines, it's the marketers themselves. They've managed to trick our friends into spamming us with their messages instead.

The PR Firm MWW Group has just launched a new, cross-platform mobile application designed to bring the best RSS content to those in the public relations, marketing, and advertising fields. The application, called M.insight, features hand-selected RSS feeds from blogs and news sites which deliver relevant articles which you can read and enjoy without the hassle of having to set up and configure an RSS reader.

According to the latest data from Hitwise, paid search traffic has taken a major hit in the last year. While, according to Hitwise, about 9.84% of the search engine traffic it registered in April 2008 came from paid clicks, in the four weeks preceding May 9, 2009, this number declined by 26% to 7.25%. Hitwise registered this trend across all of the categories it tracks, with the sole exception of paid traffic to site in its education category, where paid search results increased slights from 1.39% to 1.45%.

Bob Nanna of Threadless, the online superpower that capitalizes brilliantly on hipster T-shirt culture, takes a moment at the company's Chicago, Illinois, headquarters to talk about how employees have used social media to build and grow "brand love," a bleeding-edge, white-hot marketing term I just invented.

From CRM via Twitter to Facebook live video contests, the folks at Threadless have knocked online engagement out of the park and created a community around a brand while building a great reputation for responsiveness. Watch on and be schooled.

Last month, you may remember having heard about a special iPhone ad from Dockers. Its claim to fame was that it was the world's first "shakable" ad. Called "Shakedown to Get Down," the ad prompted users to shake the phone in order to set the on-screen freestyle dancer into motion. The dancer, of course, wore Dockers. It was certainly a clever attention-getter at the time, something that had everyone talking. But this ad wasn't just a one-off experimental project - it was representative of the start of a new trend and one that's going to change advertising as we know it.

What do you get when you combine a platform for creating user-generated video content with the micro-blogging sensation that is Twitter? According to 12seconds.tv, you get a viable business model for your company, a platform that allows brands to leverage Twitter for communication, and a way for everyday Twitter users to have fun and earn prizes. Does that sound like a win-win-win all around? It very well may be...or it may just be the first example of how Twitter is transforming from a fun, communication tool used among friends to a commercialized platform for mainstream marketing.