The erroneous way to approach Social Media services, advocated by some other agencies, it is the pay per profile, pay per automatic tools to be present in social networks or per tweets/Facebook friends/Linkedin contacts, etc. This approach is the equivalent of blog comment spam or automated link requests and goes against the intrinsic nature of social media which is based in engaging in the conversation.

In my opinion, the way to monetise the use of social media as an agency service for marketing departments is through education. You don’t give a fish to a hungry man you teach him how to fish. The marketeers are always going to know more about their target audience than any search agency, they know their products upside down and they can relate to their customer’s needs and enquiries promptly and accurately, unlike any third party agent.

Most of people are already engaged in social media whether the CEOs approve it or not. We all have Facebook profiles or twitter accounts or we use youtube and upload videos. It is the way it is and banning it would be useless. On the flip side, that means that every company has already the potential to leverage social media as a tool to generate leads, improve customer services and cut costs accordingly and apply insight gathered from their customer base to product development. They just have to capitalise on their workforce, find an agency/trainer who can educate them in the use of social media outlets for corporate purposes whilst keeping it fun and personal.

Additionally, a corporation is nothing but the sum of its employees and the sum of the personal reputations would enhance corporate reputation. It is a win-win situation.

At the International Search Summit next week, I will speak about the balance between personal and corporate reputation, how to capitalise on your social media savvy workforce and why social media gurus can just be snake oil salesman; a successful social media strategy will only be successful if stems from the corporate core and the company most valued assets, their people.

This group believes that the sector’s discontent is the result of “mismanagement” . The transition from the previous system – managed by OJD and Nielsen Market Intelligence has proved to be “flawed”, the lobby states. The argument wielded by the critics is that the new data should not be compared to data from Nielsen’s previous system , since both methodologies are not the same. Therefore, the published growth rates do not correspond to an actual increase in audience, but are the result of the change in methodology.

According to a speaker from Media On  “this decision was taken without being notified to the customers affected, which has caused a situation of unequal treatment and generated distrust in the industry.”

Despite its crititicism , the association commended the OJD for its wilingness to facilitate the process transparency. Media Group On comprises of several powerful communication companies such as Editorial Unit, Prisa, Vocento, Grupo Zeta, Grupo Godo, 20 minutes, Editorial Prensa Ibérica and Grupo Antena 3, etc.

This polemics could be extrapolated to the rest of European Internet ranking systems. With advertising budget being shifted to online channels being on top of the list migh mean a great deal of additional revenue for traditional publishers, that are seeing on the Internet the opportunity to make up for plummeting advertising deals in their offline outlets.

In the International Search Summit, hosted in London the 14th of may, Martin Belan from the Guardian will talk about how major publishers as the ones on the top of the Spanish list are leveraging social media to drive traffic, and thus advertising opportunities to their online properties.

Spanish Social Networks have been under the scrutiny of traditional media channels which have deemed social media outlets in Spain as partly responsible of indiscriminate violence. A journalist found out that the 17 year old girl killed in Seville, Marta Castillo, had a profile on Tuenti, the most popular Spanish social network among teenagers, and so did her friends. One of them has confessed being the criminal.

Moyano criticized the newspapers that have made use of Tuenti to publish private messages, profiles and conversations among friends of the murdered 17 years old girl Marta Castillo, considering this a “breach agaisnt her privacy rights”. He added that 95% of users interacting in this network have privacy settings on. Tuenti’s director of Communication stated that Marta Castillo’s case has become a target for sensationalist media.

Spain is the second country in Europe and fifth in the world in the use of social networks such as  Facebook or Tuenti, with 13 million users. Seven out of ten social media users are less than 35 years old. Only Canada, Brazil, UK and Mexico outnumber Spain. Worldwide, more than half of Internet users use social networks to interact with their social circle.

Another participant at the symposium was Rosa Jimenez, a journalist and blogger from the most populat traditional newspaper in Spain, El País, who defended the figure of traditional journalistic channels, whereas other speakers highlighted how news have shifted from belonging to the media to be part of the public.

The bottom line of this debate is that at a time of economic turmoil when advertising is feared to be reduced to minimum in order to save costs, digital platforms arise as cheap and innovative new media formats, making the user the vital part of the marketing equation. Traditional media has understood where the enemy is and while they have been losing advertising revenue at an alarming rate, social media networks emerge as a much more targeted way to appeal to specific demografics. I don’t rule out more gratuitous attacks from tradional media outles in order to try to demonise online channels.

Much more insight will be provided in the International Search Summit where I will be speaking about all sort of Social Media developments across Europe.