At the end of 2010 Facebook, the online social networking application, reached the limit of 600 million active users, and Twitter, the micro blogging social network, registered 175 million users. To put those numbers in perspective, the entire population of the USA and Germany consists of about 300 and 80 million inhabitants which is twice lower than the amount of all Facebook and Twitter users (Royal Pingdom, January 12th 2010). Simultaneously 35 hours of video material are being uploaded to the video sharing platform You Tube every minute, and the image hosting site Flickr providing access to over 3 billion photographs makes the world-famous Louvre Museum´s collection of 300,000 objects seem tiny in comparison (Ibid).
Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) claim that 75% of Internet surfers started using social media in the second quarter of 2008 by joining social networks, reading blogs, or contributing reviews to shopping sites; which represents a significant rise from 56% in previous year (2007), and it is therefore reasonable to say that social media represent a revolutionary new trend that should be of interest to companies operating in online space-or any space, for that matter. On the contrary they admit that not many firms seem to be comfortable in the environment where consumers can freely communicate with each other and thus they have increasingly less control over the information concerning their business activities in the Web 2.0.
Nowadays, if an Internet user types the name of any leading brand or corporation into the Google search, what comes up among the top five results usually includes not only corporate websites. Public relations executives and managers have no chance and sometimes either knowledge or even right, to control the information, concerning their companies (pp. 59, 60). Faulds and Mangold (2009) agree that the opportunity of communication between hundreds or even thousands of people about the products or services without any control of the company itself can be threatening, and that the impact of consumer-toconsumer communication has been greatly magnified in the marketplace. However they argue that social media should rather be seen as a hybrid element of the
