Social Media is a cultural phenomenon and its popularity is staggering. According to the most recent reports, as of June 2011, Facebook had well over 600 million users worldwide. The Twitter "bug" is also growing. It took Twitter nearly three years to reach one billion tweets, now Twitter users send one billion tweets per week. YouTube’s popularity and appeal is also growing. On its website, YouTube boasts that it streams over two billion videos everyday. The pervasiveness of social media is evidence that society has developed an intimate and long lasting relationship with social media. It’s a new world where the product owner can target specific consumers at the same time as promoting brand awareness and creating consumer loyalty. The relationship between brand owners and the public is not just one-sided. Advertisers and consumers alike are using social media to connect with one another and to establish more intimate relationships than the vehicles and media used in the past. →Read more

This article was reproduced with permission of the publisher from Canadian Privacy Law Review, Vol. 8, No. 12, November 2011.