You’d usually think of marketers as more media-conscience than the actual media.  It makes sense. Media outlets get paid once an ad airs, so brand engagement is not as significant to them.  But marketers get paid when a product actually sells.  One would think that over time, innovation would not come from the media outlets, but from the marketers who run campaigns on them.

This is not what happened. Thanks to the rise of social media and web 2.0, the smartest guys in the room wound up developing new platforms — Pinterest, Facebook, etc. — leaving advertising execs scrambling to catch up. Going into the why too deeply would take time you don’t have, but to summarize.

1. Integration Is the Way of the Future. People still treat social media as its own silo when it isn’t. Social media can boost engagement, but only if there is something for it to engage with. As Stacy Martinet at Mashable points out: “Customers now expect and demand brands to be everywhere. This requires integrated plans with consistent messaging and emphasis on real-time marketing.”

2. The Age of Rapid Response Has Come.  In the modern world, you handle problems immediately or you go the way of the Twinkie. Fortunately, your social media arm (which you’ve integrated into your general strategy right?) can help manage the problem with posts, news stories, instant responses on Twitter, etc. But failing to address a problem quickly could allow the start of a media firestorm that you may not be able to put out for days, if at all.

3. Design and Design again.  The reason Facebook constantly revamps their pages, why they purchased Instagram for a billion dollars, and why Pinterest is growing so rapidly is that design has become crucial in a world wide web where anyone can find multiple vendors for virtually anything. If your online properties aren’t beautiful and intuitive, people will leave to find ones that are.

In short:  Hire OPUSfidelis. We specialize in all of the above.

Happy New Years!