Social media is sizzling at the heart of digital marketing, says Freestyle's Delia Goldsby.
It's one of the hottest topics in marketing right now, the quest to find the best way to harness social media and online PR to ensure maximum exposure for minimum outlay.
Well it was certainly hot topic in the sauna at my gym the other night!
One of my fellow heat junkies - a senior marketer - wanted to know more about the real relevance of social media, and did it really have the potential clout and impact everyone is twittering on about? Turns out her CEO had been asking about "this Twitter thing" that morning: What exactly is it? How does it work? Should we be doing something about it? Who else is doing it, and is it actually relevant?
His questions were largely prompted by a whole bunch of noise around Twitter at the point Stephen Fry mentioned his Twitter trail on Jonathan Ross' Friday night TV show - which did more to increase the social currency of Twitter as a cool place to go and "micro blog" than any other single piece of product placement activity on the planet.
The CEO's genuine keenness to address the potential value of twitters and tweets and other social networks, was ultimately hooked around how it might affect bottom line; did it really put so much 'power' into the hands of the consumer and what does it mean when it comes to long term reputation management issues. The discussion created a great vibe in the sauna, only curtailed when five of us turned puce, narrowly escaping heat exhaustion before stumbling to the power shower for an icy blast.
In truth, social media has been pigeonholed in the last 18 months and most marketers understanding of it is MySpace, Bebo or Facebook - which is fair, given the amount of attention these three in particular have garnered.
What's now become very transparent is that the online social world is a much more complex and harder beast to tame than we all thought. However, the facts are that this is where consumers are socialising, sharing, recommending and reviewing products and services in growing numbers, and it's this fact that means brands and organisations need to know how to begin to have their voice there too.