Welcome to the Interact Congress Blog. We have invited some leading European guest bloggers to share their observations on interactive marketing and communication skills within the integrated experience. The blog also offers you a first opportunity to interact with your peers.

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Thursday 6 May 2010

Socialised brands can be contagious, social media is just stuff.

Social media strategy.

There’s something inherently wrong about that, no? Why create a bespoke strategy for this? Or worse, mistake “being on Twitter” as a strategy. Social media is becoming a bit like a collection of stuff; half a pound of Facebook here, a dash of blogging there and a slice of Twitter on top as a garnish. Oh and a bit of that FourSquare malarkey to make me look cool. To the extent where the phrase “social media” is becoming a bit of a hindrance rather than a help because people use it to default to executional elements such as having a Twitface.

Where social media is really interesting is it being an enabler to our business and brand strategy. Yes, I am going to use that word integrated because the social media world doesn’t just exist in marketing, it transcends the entire business. Which is why social media should probably be killed as a term. It suggests a marketing only existence. And the endless isolation of social media from other comms and its positioning by social media people as the saviour of everything is why it’s viewed by many senior marketers as a bit of fairy dust and not something that can fundamentally make a tangible difference to their strategy and their business objectives. You don’t just do a TV ad without understanding the business and brand challenges so why are we so eager to suggest getting on MyFace is right for your brand without understanding these challenges?

Change the focus to how social can enable your brand by using the space in the right way, being cohesive with all your other activities and allowing deeper engagement, amplification and reciprocation of your strategy.

Socialised brands can be contagious. Social media is just stuff.

Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn |nicholas.r.gill@gmail.com

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