Social media provides brands the opportunity share information and content with it's target and existing customers and in turn engage with their universe and vice versa. Brands no longer have complete control or oversight of how they are portrayed and received. Believe it or not this can actually be a good thing.
The power of peer-to-peer messaging is clear. It's a faster, instant version of traditional word-of-mouth. The key is how a brand monitors, manages and engages with the tools available such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Meebo and an array of others. There are a lot of qualitative results from social media marketing such as loyalty, brand awareness, trust, passion and interaction. But how do you measure these in an especially fragmented social scene? It's a tall order for most marketing departments but with out technologies and strategies, we do the heavy lifting for brands.