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Well, social media is creating value in a number of areas for marketers. Number one,
it's getting us closer to consumers, which is always something that helps build brand
franchises. Number two, it’s bringing a whole wealth of new measurement capability.
It’s helping us to better listen to the sentiment which can translate into better
media efficiency, better insights and the like. It’s creating very important – it’s
de-siloing organizations. Because to some extent, social media touches every organization.
It touches the PR firm they see as an extension of influencer management. The ad agencies,
they see that as an extension of building new impressions through word of mouth. Digital
agencies see it as an extension of relationship marketing.
So, it’s kind of creating a whole new marketing infrastructure that, to some extent, we’ve
yet to see as of yet, but everyone is moving in that direction. I think there’s a lot
of brands that are, you know, number one, using social media to extend what they currently
do well, such as paid media, where they’re saying, “Boy, maybe we can get incremental
dividends from our paid TV advertising by having conversational programs. By enabling
consumers to share the ads, to talk about the ads and the like.” We sell a lot of
that with the Superbowl of the Olympics or we’ll see a lot of that with the World Cup
in the coming months. But again, building on those core foundations.
Then there’s a lot of brands that are thinking about the power of things like service. Customer
service as a way of getting more credit for those more intimate, more emotional interactions
with consumers. And sometimes you’ll see a lot of small upstart brands that bring a
whole fresh new attitude towards accepting consumer feedback and building on that. But
experiments across the entire value chain are taking place around social media.