Yes, there was a relatively small show of hands in response to your question, but I think that was in part a reflection of the fact that Third Tuesday attracts much more than just a PR crowd. I’d hazard a guess that no more than a third of the people in the room were involved in PR – and of those, probably less than half were from the agency side.

Well, 5 out of 100 hands certainly isn’t a great number but I guess it is a start. Social media is turning the profession upside down and whenever a shake up like this happens its the early birds that get the advantage. The advantage could be capturing market share from competitors, satisfying more customers, innovating with new product offerings etc… I see this cycle as is so similar to the early days of the Web – it took awhile before people realized the true value. Can you imagine any business of any size not having a decent website presence today?

Consumers have already rushed into social media and the conversations are already fast and plentiful. Opinions on brands are being exchanged – good and bad – every second of every day – they aren’t going away (they are cached on social sites and search engines for everyone who happened to miss the opinions from now until eternity.)

Dave you make some great points on whether a brand can afford not to be listening to social media. As well, can a brand ignore social media conversations happening amongst their customers while competitor decides to actively listen and engage on their behalf and steals those customers away?

Here’s hoping the 5 hands will inspire the 95 to act quickly before those initiators move from the first 5 brands to act to the top 5 brands in the market.

David Alston
Radian6