Today, this hub of customer
activity is increasingly virtual, located inside a social media or social networking site.
Consider the speed at which social media is being adopted by consumers and businesses
alike. In 2010 there were more than 500 million active users on Facebook, 70 percent outside
the United States.[2] By March 2010, more than 10 billion messages, or Tweets, had been
sent through Twitter since its launch in 2006. By July, that number had doubled to 20
billion.[3] And in the Asia-Pacific region, 50 percent of the total online population visited a
social networking site in February 2010, reaching a total of 240.3 million visitors.[4]