social media an advertising tool?

One of the biggest problems we marketers have is that we love to hear ourselves talk.
We just like to see our products in the showrooms or the shelves. We love to see our ads on TV. We like to see our banner ads and web sites. That makes us feel proud. It's something we can show our family and friends and neighbours.

This propensity to talk drives our behaviour in social media. Hey, is this not a great tool to talk to our consumers, and the great thing is, they respond by saying how fantastic and great our brand is.
In order to do so, we set up fan pages, or at least facilitate them, so that we can count our friends, which is giving us something new to brag about.

This is completely missing the point. First, we should stop calling social media 'media'. They are not media in the traditional sense of the word: vehicles that we can use to talk to our consumers. They are rather listening devices. To listen to what the consumers are saying about our brands. Whether they like it or not. What they like about it or like less. What they'd like to see changed.

It's one big open research platform that we should not spoil by sending interfering messages.

So for the first time, ssssht, let's be quiet and listen