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Green Mountain Coffee has made social media a key element in its web endeavors, and on Oct. 7, its director of consumer direct, Ken Crites, explained the Waterbury, Vt.-based company’s approach during the Hudson Valley Direct Marketing Association’s fall luncheon in Greenwich, Conn.

Social media has been broadly embraced by the public for several reasons. But two stand out in my mind, as I relayed to attendees of the NEMOA Conference in Mashantucket, Conn., Sept. 16-18, during my session, "Social Media Marketing — Separating Hype from Reality."

With more than 41 million subscribers in its nearly seven-year existence, professional networking site LinkedIn is grabbing the social media headlines these days right along with Facebook and Twitter. In his keynote presentation at last week's DM Days New York Conference & Expo, Mike Gamson, LinkedIn's vice president of corporate solutions, revealed some of the secrets to his company's success, as well as tactics other direct marketers can use to make Web 2.0 more than just a buzzword.

Like many marketers, the Spiegel Brands catalogs — Newport News, Shape FX, Carabella, A.B. Lambdin, as well as its namesake title — slowly are feeling their way around the emerging social media space. During a roundtable session at the April 15 Hudson Valley Direct Marketing Association event in Greenwich, Conn., Spiegel's marketing manager, Amy Heir, explained how she took a modest $100-a-day budget to invest in social media marketing and ran with it.

When it launched a digital version of its catalog 18 months ago, natural nutritional goods cataloger/wholesaler Shaklee was pursuing cost savings and the chance to target a new customer segment. And last week during a Catalog Success webinar called “Digital Catalogs: Expand your audience while slashing your costs,” which was sponsored by digital publishing services provider Nxtbook Media, John Cortez, e-commerce manager at Shaklee, chronicled his company's experience with its digital book.