No, make that “The Question of the Era.” And it is: How do I use social media to attract and retain customers?
Mashable offers this decent, three-step how-to essay that answers the question excellently. Read it first.
Here’s our paraphrase/reaction:
1. Hook new customers on your social media presence by providing them incentives to friend/fan you on Facebook, [...]

Conscious hip-hop has Malcolm Gladwell. For the more hardcore types, it’s Robert Greene.
His book The 48 Laws of Power has been namechecked by the likes of Young Buck and Kanye. In September, the power strategist published The 50th Law, a collaboration with uber-rapper 50 Cent. Bound in gilded Bible leather, the muscular motivational book contains [...]

Attention to anyone who wants to put together a cool video about how investing in social media brings returns: You make it, we’ll post it. We’ll show it to clients and give you credit. And if it has a snappy, hi-NRG soundtrack, hell, we’ll even dance to it.
This one is by Socialnomics author Erik Qualman. [...]

Karl tags the EKTORP … Carina tags the BRAMFORS … Henrik tags the TULLSTA …
No, we haven’t lost our minds. We’re just ticking out the process by which a handful of lucky Swedes laid their hands on free IKEA products when a new franchise of the “fast-food furniture” chain opened in the town of Malmo, [...]

Whether you’re looking to participate in charitable causes or nab as many bargains as you can on Black Friday, there’s a wealth of ways you can use social media to get more out of Thanksgiving this year than the usual tryptophan-induced food coma.
First, the non-selfish avenue. Created by the nonprofit Epic Change Tweetsgiving is a [...]

Next time you roll out a new product, get Chamillionaire to back it, and it will seem exponentially cooler.
Vidly, a video-sharing service that began as a way to post homemade webcam videos on Twitter, enacted this principle yesterday when it debuted Vidly Express, a tool that allows bloggers and webmasters to add a simple video [...]

Even if you’re not a fan of this Chicago group’s Nintendocore — super-sugary powerpunk that uses 8-bit video game sound effects as ornamentation — you’ve gotta admire the marketing savvy of I Fight Dragons (whose music actually is pretty catchy).
Not even a year into its career as a band and still without label support, I [...]

Hard evidence continues to roll out showing why right now it’s crucial for you to build your brand’s social media profile. The reality is, if people are discussing your brand online, others are going to hear it. And those discussions are becoming easier and easier to find. This means that if a potential customer Googles [...]

Um, we’re going with revolution on this one.
Take a look at the snappy video below if you’re not convinced. Ignore the cheesy Fatbloy Slim soundtrack, but be prepared for some mindblowing statistics. For one, there’s the claim that if Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest on earth. And apparently, that’s true [...]

Using Twitter to build your brand locally is about to get a whole lot easier.
Though the microblogging site is a useful tool for finding out what people are talking about in your area of business and connecting with those people online, it’s been difficult to use Twitter to glean geographically relevant data. For example, if [...]