The social media revolution has given consumers more power than they have ever had before. For the first time, consumers can speak directly to corporations, expressing what they like and dislike in whatever terms they want. For companies, organizations and governments, they get to be transparent, responsive and as authentic as possible (if they do their jobs right).

Activity on social networks and blogs now accounts for 22.7% of time spent online. Facebook’s Like button introduced in April 2010, has already been added by more than two million distinct websites – getting more than one billion clicks per day. It’s Facebook’s ability to show you exactly what your friends and friends of friends like that makes the like function such a powerful tool.

The opportunity is enormous. Here are some stats to give you an idea of what we are looking at:

• 9 out of every 10 US Internet users are now visiting a social network each month

• 4.5 hours is the average time spent on social networking sites each month by US Internet users

• 500 million active users – by comparison that makes Facebook’s user base equivalent to the third largest global population second only to China and India

• 130 friends for each average user

• 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute, or one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second

• 175 million registered Twitter users