Socialmediaworx

AdAge has a good article about naming Unilever the Digital Marketer of the Year. What stands out is Master’s comment that social media has to be built on a bedrock of a firm product and brand:

In the end, the commitment to digital doesn’t change the fundamentals much. If anything, he says, it means brand managers have to be more firmly grounded in what their brand is about, because if they don’t define it clearly, millions of consumers in digital social media will - possibly in ways the brand managers don’t like.

This perfectly dovetails with Joshua Porter’s perspective:

Giving people a platform for expression doesn’t necessarily create buzz and demand. It only amplifies what the opinion was in the first place.

In other words, if you give people a platform for expression and:

• If your product sucks, the resulting conversation will be about how much it sucks.
• If your product is great, the resulting conversation will be about how great it is.

In other words, it’s better to think of social media tools as amplifying customer opinion rather than improving it.