Before social media grew in to the machine that it is today, brands developed well-defined systems to get the message they wanted heard to the people who would be talking about them. These methods were typically through liaison with press contacts, press releases or the use of PR agencies.

With the expansion of social media came a huge expansion of the sources from which people are able to get information about brands and their respective products or services; the narrow and manageable band of contacts becomes unmanageable, and methods of approach suddenly got a tad more complicated.

For many companies, the only real response to these challenges was to ignore social media and carry on as they were before; and if concerning stories sprung up in blogs or forums they would crank out a good old Press Release in the hope that it would squash the story, sometimes having quite the opposite effect by drawing attention to the very issues that they are trying to minimise.

What working with social media basically comes down to is recognising the people who are taking the time to write about you, engaging with them in a slightly more personal way than you might a more commercial publication and sharing information about products or services that they might be interested in writing about.

The key difference here is recognition and sharing; as they don’t work for a large commercial publisher they do not assume recognition and therefore recognising their importance is a great way to start. These people don’t need your news so if you spam them with press releases it is unlikely going to be received well, and for this reason sharing information with them in a more personal manner is going to have a far greater effect.

Private individuals writing blogs, participating in forums and sharing their experiences online are the ones defining your social media brand today, and therefore it is absolutely essential to engage with them and make sure that they are well informed.