Help me, I'm drowning in TMI

It's elementary. Advertisers and marketers have to go where the consumers are. And that, for now, for sure, is social media.

Question is, what's the best way to engage consumers on their own terms in this strange and wonderful new world?

We think WARC, the UK based advertising research group, has its eyes on the prize: identifying brand experiences that are the most engaging, most powerful modes of all—the ones that build relationships by deepening emotional connections with brand values.

Here's more, from Alexandra Wheeler, Starbucks head of digital strategy:

"A brand can promote the heck out of themselves on Facebook and still not build a following if they don't have anything behind that and only nurture and care about it as marketing but not as relationships...(Another important goal) is the translation and understanding [of] whether these communications add value to the bottom line and the business and we believe they do."

...which is why The Big Heads at Fresh Baked are happily tilling that rich rich marketing soil where comedy meets branded content.

You can Twitter all you like—and Twitter's a superb quick-hit distribution too—but if it's a brand community you want (and that's the Promised Land for marketers: relationships that add up to brand communities) then you need far more than simply a Tweet.

And can anyone top entertainment for brand engagement via social media? Doubtful. Comedy clips made viral video, simple as that.

Want more proof?

First watch this, a stunning YouTube overview of the supernova of social media, right here, right now.

And then weigh those amazing stat.s and the explosion of social media messaging possibilities against this, a terrific GigaOm piece on the failure of realtime search to help us contextualize/personalize the 'gushing firehose' of social media today.

The PR agencies recognize the power of the medium—they're ramping up social media content creation—but is all that content actually engaging anybody the way branded entertainment can?

We say no. Point is, for a brand experience to work, context is everything...without relevance that builds engagement (that in turn builds brand communities), we face brainmelt from Too Much Information.

We're drowning in a sea of TMI—which, contrariwise, is why branded entertainment is innately a messaging aggregator of such power. Why drown your brand when you can engage?

Want to know more? Call Rob or Brett @ 647.346.3521. They'll bend your ear.