If you are hanging out at Social Media Today, you most likely have a vested interest in social media, often in a paid capacity working for brands or advising them in some sort of agency situation. Maybe you just are striving to learn more and build a career path involving social media.
We are often advising brands to develop their content strategy and they 'must' do these things such as engage and be part of social media or they will be destroyed (or something similar). .
The reality is brands are becoming the trolls, or spammers (at least in the way they do it today), which over time will hurt these social networks causing people to find alternative places to track and participate in conversations. This is nothing new, since the same thing happened to email marketing. At first it was cool, but then when too many brands started bombarding us with messages we sought ways to simply block them out.
In my view we have to do our part to ensure success of these social networks, including helping the networks create the right user experience.
As social media leaders we have to help our brands better understand what it is like to be a member of a community and how to add to it as opposed to detracting from it. This is often a fine line, and difficult to decipher. As an example Oreo during the Super Bowl was unique and unexpected, but during the Oscars they were one of many doing similar content. At best the Oscars content was just noise, but I bet some felt they were being spammed.
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