In order for companies to realize the maximum benefit and impact from social media marketing, the pre requisite for goal setting must be a certain level of understanding about the nature of online communities, social media sharing web sites and applications.  Unrealistic expectations based on a lack of knowledge about the social web is far too expensive [...]

There are many reasons to search social media including monitoring for brand and reputation management purposes. Smart online marketers have also been using social search for other reasons including competitive research and opportunistic content marketing through social keyword trends.