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Want a great deal? Check what your favorite brands are posting on Facebook and Twitter. Interacting with consumers through social media is becoming increasing more vital to corporate marketing strategies. The ability to globally broadcast praises and complaints about companies and brands has businesses very active on social networks.
 
“All the departments have gotten some sort of feedback from customers online. We benefit and our customers benefit,” says Amber Talbot, online public relations specialist for Scottrade. Talbot builds relationships with customers by monitoring what is being said about Scottrade online. The ability to search in real-time through Twitter allows companies to track keywords related to their brands and trademarks.
 
Starbucks spokeswoman Bridget Baker says, “It’s a great way to connect with customers. It’s where the people are.” Starbucks has almost 250,000 followers on Twitter and over 3 million fans through Facebook. This week Starbucks is giving away 800 coupons per hour for pints of ice cream to Facebook fans.
 
Scottrade and Starbucks also leverage the power of YouTube to offer customers educational and promotional videos.
 
MasterCard posts company news through Twitter, Victoria’s Secret and Gap provide original content for their Facebook fans, Zappos frequently tweets and posts specials from it’s 6pm.com discount site, and Southwest Airlines is active on the above mentioned along with Flickr and LinkedIn.
 
These are just a few examples of how social media networks are becoming important tools for businesses and consumers to communicate and interact.

Source: US News

When we talk about collaboration within the context of Web 2.0 and social media, we can expand the traditional view of collaboration as a means to nurture a strategic partnership or manage a complex project into a way to increase productivity at every level of business. We can employ collaboration with prospects, customers, partners, providers, and staff using a wide set of tools out there already such as Twitter (micro-blogging), YouTube (video publishing), Disqus (comment discussions), WordPress (blogging & publishing), Box.net (file sharing), and many more. Taking an Expanded View of Collaboration breaks down these areas into sub-topics and applies some of the popular collaboration tools available today.