A brand is built not on acquisition but on retention.

And retention requires a relationship. And a relationship is based primarily on ‘Trust and an ongoing, sustained engagement, on customer terms that provides economic, experiential and emotional value to the customer’.

That’s what branding is all about. It’s not a communications exercise. It won’t happen as a result of an advertising campaign. And it won’t be carried out on the pages of Facebook. That’s right, social media is not a silver bullet.

Social networks give us the tools to engage with consumers and build relationships with them. But like any tool we need to use it properly to get the most out of it. We still need marketing with links to articles, while papers, blogs and so on that appeal to target markets.

Unfortunately the majority of brands are continuing to use new tools such as social media, that allow them to lay the foundations for a relationship with consumers, in the same way as they use mass market tools that trumpet a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing.

I recently tweeted about a cool bit of kit from sonos, makers of wireless digital audio systems. I asked if there was a Sonos dealer in Malaysia. Sonos tweeted me and told me to contact someone in Singapore and obviously allerted them as I got a tweet from the Singapore guy with an email of the distributor in Malaysia. I emailed the distributor and didn’t get a reply. Sonos hasn’t contacted me to see if I purchased and nor has the Singapore distributor followed up.

There is no silver bullet with social media. It won’t solve all our branding problems but, used correctly, it will help us build relationships with customers. From there you might, just might build a brand