Social Media Exposes the Corporate Psychopath

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Every site is different, but if you keep the following in mind, you won't go too far astray. Do figure out ways to foster, nurture, and support the community you are interacting with. Don't even think about a hard sell.

• Phase 2: Gain Credibility Based on Your Target's World View

The content you enter in the social media arenas must be carefully selected and composed with that environment in mind. Your message and content need to be all about them and what you can do to make their lives better. This means: "Help Them, Don't Sell Them." Be unconditionally generous. Visit Nike, one example of a company that does this well, to see what it's done for runners.

If we are adequately entertaining and educating customers, they will seize the opportunity to fully engage. They will share this content and perhaps even build on it—whether you invite them to or not—because that's what social beings do.

When engagement reaches this level of co-creation, we move into the third phase:

• Phase 3: Co-Creating Dialogue Where Your Company Reaps the Benefit of Exchange

Once we have defined and built the right presence, along with crafting the appropriate, engaging content, we can begin fostering true exchange of ideas and emotions.

We can build promotions, campaigns, and dialogue based on user-generated content, and empower our customers to not just be a part of our story, but to erase the line between "us" and "them."

It's important for your company to build a presence in social media. These new communities are irrevocably changing the landscape for marketers and how we communicate. Increasingly we are being charged with delivering ideas that engage and influence the people in these living, breathing, and highly responsive human communities. For advertisers, this presents both a unique challenge and opportunity: We need to integrate our message and presence effectively, profitably, and appropriately into social media communities.

The presence you build within social media will be analyzed, scrutinized, and perhaps criticized. However, entering this territory—which is controlled by the digital swarms of consumers and their communities—with the right voice and then nurturing that conversation in a manner authentic to your brand, your products, and your customer will ultimately have a far greater positive impact on your level of opportunity over the existing risks. In fact, the greatest risk is being absent from that conversation in the first place while your competition gains a powerful foothold.

G. Michael Maddock is founding partner, and Raphael Louis Vitón is president, of Maddock Douglas, a company that invents, brands, and markets products "for companies driven by innovation." .