As a voice of reason over all the hype about Facebook, I always want to check in with Jeremiah Owyang Partner at Altimeter Group. They’re based in Silicon Valley. Jeremiah gives me the straight scoop on their latest announcement. To all my listeners, sorry the sound is not great. I wanted to share the content anyway.

Forrester Social Marketing Expert Jeremiah Owyang believes that the future of the social web is entering the era of social colonization. Given these insights, Jeremiah offered his perspective on the best strategies marketers have to implement to be successful. Of all the largest corporate brands, Jeremiah believes Dell is doing the best job in social media today. When asked what an average corporation spends on social media today, Jeremiah said the budget was around $100,000.

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Not being social enough is a big problem for corporations trying to use social media. That’s what Jeremiah Owyang and his team at Forrester discovered in a new report. Forrester selected 16 firms across four industries and found only one company worthy of accolades. What makes BMW a social marketing winner? In part, it’s that the automobile manufacturer managed to avoid the most common pitfalls, which is still where most firms fell short. Some examples of those easy-to-make mistakes: creating marketing programs that aren’t self-fueling, that don’t encourage members to participate in conversations amongst themselves and that don’t include some amount of participation from the corporation, itself.

Jeremiah discusses his findings with Jennifer Jones in this Marketing Voices podcast.

Facebook is the future. This is according to many analysts and Web experts. Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with Forrester Research, believes in the power of Facebook. Jeremiah tells Marketing Voices’ Jennifer Jones how the site works, and how communities are forming there. Marketers need to understand the opportunities that are ripe on Facebook, and to embrace and extend their network through the site.