Getting to grips with social media

The way brands are communicated to their customers is undergoing massive change in a world of modern and developing media activity. Jemima Kiss reports on what the new landscape looks like.
Social media is a marketing revolution, enabling new ways to engage with customers and potential customers, and empowering customers to interact with vendors and influence brand sentiment in new ways.
The possibilities feel quite overwhelming for brands trying to work out where to start with a social media strategy, says John Willshire of marketing and product innovation studio Smithery. "If traditional advertising is akin to electromagnetism, then social media is more like gravity. It's easy to wield electromagnetism, be very exact and make it do what you want for a set period of time. But gravity – social media – is a weak force that affects everything, and you'll have no idea how things are going to go. The only strategy is to design landscapes and build contraptions to keep things roughly in the right place."
Cadbury is one brand that has certainly found a sweet spot among the noise and distraction of social media. A network of campaigns and a "social first" strategy have combined brand building with entertaining editorial and no small amount of market research; the confectioner famously re-introduced Wispas in response to public demand on Facebook and MySpace back in 2007.

Source: https://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jun/03/social-media-brands-jemima-kiss