Brand management is undergoing a dramatic change with the advent of social media. Brand managers can no longer execute campaigns in traditional mass media and ignore conversations taking place in social media. Does the development of social media and the huge volume of customer interaction data mean that our existing models of brand equity are no longer valid?

In a Social Media (SM) survey (2008-09) conducted by Exchange4media & Blogworks, an overwhelming 90% of the surveyed Indian marketing and advertising executives believed that SM, including blogs, impact businesses. Fifty-eight percent of the executives felt that SM would create a `huge impact' through to 2010. Eighty-five percent of them opined that SM would have an impact in high involvement purchase decisions requiring research and comparison shopping. They felt that since these high involvement purchases depend heavily on brand stories communicated through a variety of touch points using a variety of techniques covering referrals, word of mouth and engagement activities, SM is ideally suited for conveying such stories.

Traditional brand management activities focus on conveying the brand story to consumers using brand awareness and associations to position and distinguish the branded product or service in the marketplace and the mind of the consumer. Measuring why the brand is better and differentiated for customers as encapsulated by brand equity becomes an important measure for reflecting financial value and market awareness. Brand equity directly relates to the price premium consumers are willing to pay for a brand, as well as non-financial measures driving quality and a desire to tell the brand story to friends. Key brand equity components include awareness, image and personality associations and loyalty. In the light of this, the resultant measures monitored by a brand owner/manager require, not only assemblage of these components, but, significantly more post-processing of data that is captured. Inevitably, brand managers and marketing executives revert to using outsourced models and methodologies for brand equity measurement. The most popular services include the Young & Rubicam Brand Asset Valuator (BAV—claimed to be the world's largest brand database) and AC Nielsen Winning Brands.

SM includes blogs, social networking (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more) wikis (Wikipedia is the pre-eminent example), social bookmarking (delicious), photo (Flickr)/video sharing (YouTube) and virtual worlds (Second Life). These exemplary applications facilitate the marketers and consumers to get close to each other and engage in routine conversations and storytelling. The Clue Train Manifesto was the first to recognize the ability of the Internet to enable people to have `human to human' conversations, and thereby transforming traditional business practices radically. According to the manifesto, the Internet provided new means for both the markets and organizations to communicate. Today, the markets know far more about the products than the companies themselves. Consumers are realizing that they can readily get assistance and information from other consumers by soliciting opinions through social networks and visiting Web destinations, like Amazon, eBay, OkTataByebye, TripAdvisor or Yelp.

Advertising Express Magazine, Brand Management, Social Media, Brand Monitoring Strategy, MySpace, Facebook, Virtual Worlds, Clue Train Manifesto, Web Destinations, Customer Interaction, Brand Equity, Brand Asset Valuator, Social Graph, Social Media Marketing, Google Blog Search, Technorati, Trackur, RSS, Really Simple Syndication.