The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth recently conducted a new in-depth and statistically significant study on the usage of social media in fast-growing corporations. This new study revisits the Center’s study of Inc. 500 social media usage for the third consecutive year, making it a valuable and rare longitudinal study of corporate use of these new technologies.

The new study compares adoption of social media over three years (2007, 2008 and 2009) by the Inc. 500, a list of the fastest-growing private U.S. companies compiled annually by Inc. Magazine. For details about the 2009 Inc. 500 and the complete directory of the included companies, please visit Inc. Magazine’s website at www.Inc.com.

A successful social media campaign integrates social media into the many elements of marketing, including advertising, digital, and PR.

For companies, resistance to social media is futile. Millions of people are creating content for the social Web. Your competitors are already there. Your customers have been there for a long time. If your business isn’t putting itself out there, it ought to be.

But before you take the plunge, bear in mind the many myths that surround social media.

1. Social media is cheap, if not free. Yes, many of the tools that can be employed in social media marketing are free to use. These include Google’s (GOOG) video-sharing site YouTube, Yahoo’s (YHOO) photo-sharing site Flickr, the social-network building tool Ning, and content aggregators such as Digg and eBay’s (EBAY) StumbleUpon. Free blogging tools abound too; among them are WordPress, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

However, integrating these tools into a corporate marketing program requires skill, time, and money. The budget for an effective social media marketing campaign begins at $50,000 for two to three months. I’m sure companies have spent less, and I know they’ve spent more.

From large urban research hospitals to small private practices – medical professionals from all sectors are recognizing the power of social media to assist them in the brand building that results in successful acquisition of new patients, practice growth and patient communication.

From the live Twitter coverage of a father-son kidney transplant to get more organ donors according to Betsy MacKay, vice president of public affairs for Children Medical Center in Dallas as reported by The Dallas Business Journal to the success of Mayo Clinic experts podcasting about health issues and gaining approximately 76,000 subscribers in one month according to the Jacksonville Business Journal – there is no doubt that social media is becoming more and more important to success in the medical field.