Social Media has become part of the fabric of our over communicated world; when the web was young - I was very happy that we were finally getting contextual structure to the process of advertising.

My fellow TNoozer - Siew Hoon has an interesting piece on her blog: www.webintravel.com/index.php/blog.html

Being an old ad geek from the 1970s and 80s - the emergence of a truly metric'd media environment was like a dream come true.

Too bad it got screwed up almost as badly as the old ad world. So now we have shades of truth that we can show can prove just about anything.

Just when we thought it was getting at least comprehensible - along comes Social Media. Most companies embraced SM with a passion but not from the same base as traditional media. Many companies today run their Social Media in a different silo from their advertising. For example I understand that Southwest puts Social Media in the hands of its PR team. relevance

We thus have silos that don't talk to each other. These silos can be understood as being separated because the medium/media are new and in many cases not manageable in the traditional formats and metrics. eMarketer has done a nice bit of research on the subject that I encourage you to read. It shows how diverse the silos are. particularly pointing to the likely result of disconnected and obtuse messages being delivered into the market - we know already that this is confusing the user community.

At the PhocusWright session in Berlin earlier this month - the session moderated by Kevin May - PhoCusWright@ITB Bloggers Summit Workshop 2: Brand Management, Fighting Fires and Finding Fans Through Social Media - indicated how this can really get screwed up. The move to real time communications has changed the way companies and brands adjust.

But the message of the squeaky wheel getting the attention most of the time did emerge. That is scary if Social Media is the customer feedback mechanism and is then disconnected with the rest of the brand.

If masters of the brand do not address this and bring Social Media into the overall brand management process then lord knows what we will get. A Corporate version of Chat Roulette perhaps?

Cheers
Thanks for reading - private comments please to professorsabena@gmail.com

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