We live in a world that is constantly updating. It is always on. We are surrounded by new content; hundreds of TV channels, with most of the content available on demand. Thousands of apps for our phones, millions of hours of content available on the web, updated every second with new tweets, blogs and videos of cats.

And in amongst that sea of content, are brands struggling to be heard. They are producing content themselves in huge amounts. Content is king, they’ve been told, and so they’re doing their part. They are churning out blog posts, “virals” and all the while updating Twitter and Facebook with banal salutations of “good morning, how was YOUR weekend?” supported with an unhealthy amount of exclamation marks….

They’ve made a simple, almost forgivable mistake. They’ve assumed that because there is so much content around, so many brands on Facebook and Twitter and producing content online that they need to shout louder, post more regularly, just to be seen. Content is king, and any content will do.

They have become ‘those people’ on Facebook. The ones who feel the need to post about every little thing going on in their lives. The one whose posts you don’t read, whose phone calls you probably ignore the first few times it rings.

What they have failed to realise is that unlike in advertising, volume doesn’t work for social. It’s an easy trap to fall into, and is now so clichéd it has almost lost meaning – they’re broadcasting, and treating social like an advertising channel. In world of mediocre content, only great content will shine through.

Working with brands this year I will be telling them to do fewer things but do them bigger and better. All marketers have limited budgets, especially given the current economic climate. The best advice to deal with this is to focus your efforts. Don’t spread them too thinly. A handful of fantastic pieces of content are of much more value to your audience, and by extension your brand, than hundreds of mindless Facebook updates. A few great videos that are truly compelling over dozens of pointless blog posts. One great application rather than endless puzzle and quiz apps. “Which one of our brands are YOU?” No one cares.

Say NO to filler content. If you find yourself thinking that you have to post something just because you haven’t in a while, stop. Make sure it’s worth sharing. Make sure it’s something other people will want to share and talk about. Because if it’s not, it’s a waste of time, a waste of money, and worse a bad mark against you in your target audience’s mind. If you become the brand that constantly talks about boring stuff, that never does anything new, interesting, useful or cool then they’ll start to ignore you. And once their attention is lost, it’s really difficult to get it back.

Good brands, like good friends, know when to shut up. Does yours?

For more banal updates you can follow Mike on Twitter.

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Having multiple people managing a brand’s outposts isn’t a bad idea per se; in fact for many larger brand it may be a necessity. But a user needs to know what to expect when they engage with these outposts. There are two options when you have multiple people managing a single account. You either ensure that these people follow strict rules about how to talk, ensuring that they are talking as the brand.

Or you allow each person to bring their own tone of voice to the account, but you clearly state that users are engaging with a specific individual. This can be as simple as appending their name to the end of a tweet or status update, or having separate accounts for these individuals.

You need to decide which approach to take to ensure you are delivering consistency. A common irregularity on brand accounts is that some individuals chose to say “we” and others chose to say “I”. On a single account this can get confusing, and leaves the audience confused as to whom they are actually talking with.

The solution is simple, clearly outline your approach; decide whether or not your account warrants more than one person managing it. Do some research, how big is your brand currently in social media. Are thousands of people talking about your products but no one from your company is responding? In which case you might to fortify your social media presence with a solid team of individuals. What are your long-term objectives for the accounts? What specifically are you looking to get out of your presence? Is it customer service, brand education, improving relationships or driving sales? How many people will it take to meet these objectives? And possibly most importantly of all, how much can you afford to spend?

Then decide who is best placed to be managing your profiles. If you want to be delivering customer service through twitter, then someone from the customer service department needs to be involved.

Then give these people the knowledge they need to properly run these profiles.

And as always, continually monitor and review your progress. If you are having huge successes on Facebook, but the level of engagement is being marred by only having one person managing the presence then it may be time to re-evaluate. And similarly, if you’ve put together a team of ten people to manage a Facebook page, but the growth hasn’t been quite what you anticipated, it might well be time to scale back.

Ultimately, the number of people you have managing your brand online depends on how active your consumers are in the social space, and how active you want to be with them. Getting the balance right can be tricky, but the first and most important thing to get right is to have a clear approach as to how you want to be represented online.

Having a Facebook page or a Twitter profile isn’t a means to an end. And simply stating that you want to “engage with your community” doesn’t count as a strategy. Engagement isn’t a strategy. It’s barely even an objective.

You wouldn’t just create a website for your brand. You wouldn’t start an advertising campaign without knowing first why you are advertising, who you are advertising to and what effect you want your adverts to cause. And you certainly shouldn’t start an advertising campaign as a silo; it needs to belong to a wider strategy that considers brand, tone of voice and long term goal. The same needs to be true of your ventures into social media, you need to plan for success.

Facebook and Twitter are channels, tactics, and you need to understand their role and place these tactics in your broader communications strategy. Until you are ready to do this, you probably should not set up a Facebook page or a Twitter profile

The information allowed companies and brands to build relationships with their customers, no longer just pushing out one message to all with huge mass marketing campaigns, but rather target their core customers with messages directed to their habits, wants and desires. A new field of marketing was born, Customer Relationship Management, or CRM for short.

However, marketing is undergoing another shift and it is again driven by technology. In recent years improvements in availability of broadband communications has allowed Internet access to become ubiquitous and improvements in technology have provided customers with access to more information about companies and brands than ever before. Knowledge of the information being sought by customers can also provide essential data to the companies in terms of honing their messages.

It used to be that information flowed one way, from the company to the consumer. Companies were very careful about the message they sent out, they spent huge amounts of money on slogans, jingles and advertising campaigns, all to provide the company mantra to the consumer. The conversation with the consumer was one way.

Professor Urban of MIT’s School of Management argues that “marketing is changing from the push strategies so well suited to the last 50 years of mass media to trust based strategies that are essential in a time of information empowerment.” (Urban 2004)

The Internet has allowed people to share their experiences and opinions of brands online. The role of consumers online has definitely changed. The Internet is not just a tool for finding information; it is also a tool for communication.

Jake Hird, (2009) referencing a recent study by Netpop Research argues that that with the increase in popularity of sites such as Digg, Twitter and Facebook, users are discussing their brand experiences online with their friends and other contacts. This kind of communication obviously happened offline before the Internet, but talking about a brand with 2 or 3 people around the water cooler or with the family over dinner is a vastly different scale to posting a message that is then available to several hundred contacts.

The power of the individual has never been greater, with almost immediate access to their entire network “consumers can openly challenge brands in an environment where there is scope to make a massive amount of noise.” Hird (2009) argues that brands cannot simply ignore these users, nor can they gag them. The users have taken a large chunk of power, and they aren’t likely to want to give it up any time soon.

It is this shift in power that is driving the revolution in branding and marketing. Companies are no longer able to control fully the message of their brands; the breakdown of the traditional broadcast paradigm (Moore 2005) is forcing companies to change tactics.

We see brands doing this with varying degrees of success, with Dell famously responding to a slew of customer complaints, most notably blogger Jeff Jarvis, by creating a dedicated a dedicated corporate blogger to engage directly with customers. They were pioneering engagement in a new era of socially networked communications. And they learnt a lot in the process, speaking at a Lionel Menchaca described how the game has changed:

• Customers are in control. Work with them and learn from them.
• Real conversations are two-way.
• Think before you talk—but always be yourself.
• Address any form of dissatisfaction head on.
• Be aware that any conversation can become global at any time.
• Size doesn’t matter—relevance does. Just as one journalist can trigger a newscycle, one blogger can do the same.
• Don’t be afraid to apologize.
• Develop direct links to customer community (IdeaStorm for Dell), listen for how we can improve.
• One customer is part of many communities.
• Teamwork, transparency and frequent consistent communication are key in this new world.
• No shortcuts are possible. Implementing business change requires much effort across departments.

David Armano describes the process of moving towards a Social Business Strategy as “the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture.” In other words, companies now must learn to engage with their customers and enter into the conversations they are having. By doing this, they eliminate the middleman of advertising and can enhance their business by actually listening to, and engaging with their customers’ conversations in the social sphere.

This is further broken down into 20% of tweets expressing a sentiment, of which about half were positive and about a third negative. The remaining 80% did not express sentiment but instead were largely questions about brands and answers either from the brand, or from the community itself.

This study is significant for several reasons. Firstly it provides conclusive evidence that conversations about brands are occurring on Twitter, and in large volume. This means that with successful monitoring of the channel a brand can learn vast amount from its customers. This information can be used in a variety of ways, to discover and improve where consumers find complaint as well as to discover and build on compliments.

However, this should be common sense, and is definitely well known in the social media community. What is more significant however, is the degree to which people are turning to Twitter as a customer service tool, with large numbers of consumers asking questions about brands. And the community is responding. This has implications for businesses. Brands on Twitter can harness the power of Twitter to streamline their customer service offerings. The danger lies in not having a brand outpost on Twitter; if customers are receiving bad advice and support from the Twitter community it will reflect badly on the brand, even if they aren’t the ones giving the advice. Consumers expect them to be there. The degree of control they exert over the customer support questions is a topic for another day.

The most important thing to take from this is that vast amounts of people are flocking to Twitter for customer support, but there are few brands that are actively promoting their Twitter outposts as sources of help. More worryingly is the number of brands that are still not monitoring the conversation and just broadcasting out the brand message. What they fail to realise is that these conversations are happening right now, whether they are there or not.