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Tweet it. Re-Tweet it. Digg it. Fark it…What? by admin

Although some people haven’t quite been able to wrap their heads around the social media lingo just yet, the fact is that social media is here to stay. Not only has social media fundamentally changed the way we as individuals communicate, it has without a doubt altered the way brands must communicate with their consumers, and in turn, monitor consumers’ reactions to their brands.

With user-generated content at our fingertips, consumers have more power than ever to influence a brand and leave a lasting impact on the reputation of a brand. Gone are the days when you had to be in one place to listen to, watch or read about breaking news or search for a product to purchase. Now, the news, and the product reviews and the conversations find us… No matter where we are and regardless of whether we were actually searching.

Case in point, news just “found” me via the Mashable application on my iPhone, which told me that Facebook traffic levels have hit another record high with more than 141 million unique visitors last month. That’s up 11 million from the previous month! This means that brands not only need to break into the realm of social media with things like ads and Facebook fan pages of their own, but they also must be alert as to what consumers are saying about their brand on these social media sites. In the amount of time it takes to read one newspaper article or watch the nightly news, abundant amounts of information are passed along via social media to millions of consumers. It’s as simple as this – one person posts something to his Facebook page; another person notices it and tweets it; then someone else re-tweets that to her followers who then have the opportunity to re-tweet it again, and again, and again… get it? Okay maybe not, but the point is that within minutes, I mean seconds, one comment from one person spreads virally to thousands of people all over the country and potentially across the globe.

Erick Qualman, author of Socialnomics said it perfectly, “We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media; the question is how well we do it.”

This couldn’t be truer. As a summer intern at MS&L Chicago, I’ve seen the importance of social media from an entirely different perspective – the consumer brand’s perspective. Before this summer, I only had the perspective of a consumer sharing my pleasant (and sometimes not so pleasant) experience with brands via my social media profiles.

Now, I see the true impact one person’s comments can make on a brand, and I understand how important it is that brands effectively listen and appropriately interact in social media.

So, what does all of this mean? It means that ready or not, brands have no choice but to get social media savvy, and pay attention to how their brands are being talked about in the world of social media.

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