There’s a vast expanse between the transactional moment when a consumer likes, friends, or follows a site and the instant that same consumer becomes a brand evangelist, entering into a state of emotional commitment. The former isn’t difficult to achieve; observe how many sites have hundreds of thousands of friends, very few of whom feel any real passion for the brand, or would go out of their way to recommend it to somehow (least of all defend it in a the social-media equivalent of a barroom brawl.) The latter is the bell-ringing marketing challenge of today. It’s not surprising that there isn’t more deep-down devotion among the millions of superficial friends and followers.
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