Add This, the social sharing widget, recently released the trends in social sharing they documented for 2010. It's not surprising that Google had more growth than Facebook, but did you expect Stumble Upon to have more growth than Facebook?

The statistic worth noting is that Email is 38% bigger than Twitter.  This doesn't make Twitter ineffective.  In fact, Twitter click through rates kill Facebook and Email.  If you want people to click on a link Twitter is the place to place those links.

Last week I laid out the Top Five Elements to Your Social Media Marketing Strategy.  As important as it is to utilize all of those elements, their reach is limited without the secret sauce we'll look at today.  This secret sauce is not only a crucial ingredient to your social media marketing efforts, it's so fundamental that you'll wonder how people forget about it.

There are two main ingredients in the secret sauce.  The first ingredient is defining your overall business goals. It's amazing that this is overlooked so often, but that doesn't change the fact that it is overlooked.  Here are the most powerful questions you can ask before creating or launching a social media marketing strategy.

Do you remember life before fax machines, email and searching online? Do you remember making an appointment to see your doctor to get an opinion without being able to Google professional and everyday opinions on your computer first? It's like a movie you watched years ago with a plot that's vaguely familiar but has no relevance to your current life.  That's how you'll think of the current web versus the social web that's expanding daily.

The epicenter of the social web has become Facebook. You already know that over 500 million people use Facebook. Did you also know that people spend over 700 billion minutes on Facebook per month, or that Facebook just surpassed Google to be the #1 site on the internet?

It's Google and Facebook's world today and we just surf it. As a Facebook or Google user you win no matter what because they're building better products, but this world has not been peaceful since Google and Facebook have unofficially declared war on each other over the past few months. Most people have not noticed that it's even happening, but it will affect all of our online habits in the future. It will also affect the advertising you consume and the availability of your private information.

 Whether you have heard about social CRM or not, you need to understand it if you own a business that has customers.  Even if you're not ready to use social CRM, the fact that business is becoming more social each day tells you that social CRM is probably in your future.

Traditional CRM (Customer Relationship Management) focuses on culling data from customers to learn how to manage them better.  It's a system managing how sales, marketing and customer service departments motivate customers to buy more product.  A traditional CRM system organizes data that has been collected on customers in order to target them better and to target more people who are like them.

Social CRM starts from the perspective (or some may the new reality) that customers are in the drivers seat.  This makes social CRM start with strategy first.  The company's social presence has to reflect the brand personality and be attractive to customers, but it's the customers who come first.