SMM (Social Media Marketing) is not just another online marketing acronym – it encompasses a whole host of networking strategies worthy of department vernaculars in any business.  For those who have been in the industry for some time, you may have heard “SMM” references become commonplace in 2006 when the term was officially coined at Ogilvy Public RelationsWorldwide, describing the company’s efforts [paraphrased] to leverage all the links and marketing value derived from social and business networks.
To date – SMM made’s quite an impact in the statistical realm:
WhitePaperSource.com produced a ‘Social Media Marketing Industry Report’ white paper in recent months, showing SMM trends based on the open-ended response from about 700 marketing professionals.   Of those surveyed, 88% use social media for business, of which Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook are the most popular. 
The statistics themselves show why…
According to the Thefutuerbuzz.com, there are more than 133,000,000 blogs in existence. 
Facebook meanwhile has over 175 million users and received 30 billion page views in March alone.   Twitter’s also broken into the billions, where users have tweeted more than 1.1 billion times to date. 
The Future of SMM
International markets and new technology are two factors that have already changed the scope of SMM.  Take China – the country already has the  largest blogger community in the world, (about 50 million bloggers.)  Social networks are picking up steam as more users adapt to web2.0 functionality and appearance.  Sites such as Xiaonei and mop.com are already touted as China’s version of Facebook and MySpace respectively.  To date, Xianoei had about 70 million users.
On the backend (yet very much on the forefront of influencing trends and the evolution of human socialization) is staggering new technology designed to recognize faces (Biometric Face Recognition technology), streamline logins via an open authentication protocol (OpenID),  and small circuit boards (like the Arduino) that enable inanimate objects to Tweet.  
Affnet and SMM
Socializing with Affnet is easy.  Like those 88% of marketers surveyed, the company’s profile  and people are on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and in the blogosphere.  As many online marketers have experienced, the benefits of SMM are all measurable whether it led to new account, increased brand awareness, created viral conversations, and much more.