Cerebra

Media strategists are slowly starting to understand digital as both the client and the agency demand a more holistic approach, but what about social media?

For many, the environment is daunting as it goes against what most media strategists are trained to investigate (such as reach, frequency and Gross Rating Points). Social media means consumers have the voice to talk back, but for many, it doesn’t even feature as a blip on the radar as a channel because it’s foreign to traditional media strategy which is all about broadcast.

To me, social media fits in the media mix just as much as TV, radio or print. However, the current agency briefing model doesn’t lend itself to this type of thinking. A few different approaches I’ve seen are:

Preamble:
No doubt that you’ve heard of Myspace, even if it was something like, “Hey, remember that thing before Facebook? What was it called? Oh yeah, Myspace!”

I actually still have a Myspace account. Admittedly, I haven’t logged in, in about four years, but it’s still there, with my rubbish photos and ridiculous wall posts. The nice thing about Myspace, at least in the days of yore, was that your profile was completely customisable, from background, to the fonts, the box shapes and sizes, their placement, content and other plugins. I hosted videos and games on my profile, come for the laughs, stay for the games.

I'm writing this post as most of my colleagues are too young to even know what is, and why the is a potentially important digital development. One of my first small jobs back in the 00s was to create a MySpace profile for a client, back then, Facebook and Twitter were non-existent in SA. MySpace was all we had, yes it was ugly, and the user experience was clunky, but you could upload videos, photos, text and audio files on one page.

Fast forward a couple of years and MySpace is the old shoe from several seasons back that gets lost in the back of your cupboard. Until today.

As children, we were always told not to bring our gadgets to the dinner table, that it was “rude to be busy with something else while someone was trying to talk to you” and “quality face time is more important than conversation with people who were miles away”. With social media growing as rapidly as it has however, times certainly have changed.

Cerebra’s CEO has this to say, “It's a little bit like saying a hundred years ago you can't have telephones in offices because the ringing will distract people. It's [social media] a part of life these days.”

Twitter is growing exponentially globally. Users are starting to realise that there’s a real currency on Twitter; it’s called credibility and influence. What makes Twitter the home of credibility and influence is that you can’t force people to follow you, it’s not as easy as sending a friend request. We don’t look at someone with 2500 friends on Facebook and automatically assume they have influence. We know they sent out quite a few requests.

However, there’s an ever-growing anomaly with Twitter followers vs. credibility. A booming ‘Twitter follower’ industry is growing under our noses without us even realising it.