Only twits don’t tweet

“It’s about thought leadership where people can trust and rely on us to provide some good content that they can take away. We are hoping to educate our customers and consumers.”

The company, for example, is planning to run one or two video case studies a month showing how customers and companies use Brennan products and services to tackle particular issues. Brennan IT will make sure the issues are similar to those others face. “It plants the seed in someone’s mind if they’re experiencing the same issue,’’ Marchant says.

It’s all very new so Brennan at this stage is targeting the entire space occupied by its customer base.

Its KPIs are simple: traffic generated and brand awareness. “We want people to be viewing it, it comes down to the traffic and how many hits on the video,’’ he says. “It comes down to brand awareness, we want to see the benefit of pushing the brand out because we are a business and that’s what we do.”

Marchant says every comment needs to be responded to. The company has people inside who have the job of monitoring anything that comes in and responding. Not to do so would create a lot of damage.

“If somebody posts a comment, you have to be on to that very quickly. It’s not a matter of fire and forget, it’s a matter of constant monitoring and constant activity,’’ he says.

“You can do damage if you post a video and leave it there and say it has 500 hits, isn’t that wonderful, but at the same time, you have 27 messages in your inbox and you don’t respond. You have to respond to those very tactfully and efficiently. You are engaging with someone you have never spoken to before”.

As a marketing tool, he says social media is more cost effective. That’s one of the things that makes it so appealing as a business tool. “At a time when budgets are being looked at and you pretty much have to have an RoI on everything that goes out to the market place, it helps create an activity of cost effective marketing,’’ he says. “A lot of the tools are free; the only cost is the time in the business.”

But, as he says, there is a catch.

“It’s only cost effective if you’re managing it. You need to make sure somebody is taking responsibility and ownership.”

He says social media is a marketing model that has a very different target. “You are targeting business but it really is the people within those businesses you are connecting to. They have their own personal agenda, their own personal likes and dislikes. You have to try and come to those people versus the very large machine that’s the organisation.’’

And that is a completely different marketing proposition. It’s not something that’s mass produced; it’s more finely targeted.