Don’t tweet your heart out

I enjoyed this excellent article which first appeared in last week’s Marketing magazine in the UK. With social media channels changing the way we search for and interact with information of all types, it’s clear that marketers like me must now figure out how they’ll manage and segregate their personal and professional brands within online channels.

I’m new school so am convinced that all senior marketers will be active users of social media channels in the future, maybe five to ten years from now. Marketers can no longer hide in their ivory towers and rely on the ‘shout-once and listen for echo’ marketing techniques of old. Not everyone agrees that this social media thing is here to stay, but I remember long-forgotten colleagues saying the same about the Internet not so very long ago. For now, I’m willing to bet my career that to survive in a world irrevocably changed by the empowerment that social media brings, marketers have a responsibility and a duty to leading the way by becoming visible, active contributors to social media channels. Without participating in the conversation you cannot properly understand its effect, and you could be left behind wondering why the echo has disappeared.