The people responsible for promoting brands and the people responsible for protecting corporate reputation understandably reacted slightly differently to the emergence of social media.

If you imagine social media as a cocktail party, a collection of conversations taking place about your company, its products and services, the first instinct of product marketers seemed to be to stride into the middle of the room, jump up on the table and shout "look at me, look at me." Trained to believe that it was their job to inform and entertain and sell, they were convinced that they were the most interesting people in the room, and the biggest challenge of the new medium was to get everyone to pay attention.

The first instinct of corporate communicators, more focused on reputation and more comfortable—in many cases—with playing defence, was quite different. Too many were content to wander from conversation to conversation, eavesdropping, taking notes, reporting back to their corporate bosses.

Neither of these approaches was entirely satisfactory. Marketers failed to respect the democratic spirit of the social media realm, and often came across as overbearing, obnoxious, or irrelevant. Corporate communicators, on the other hand, were "lurkers," missing an opportunity to engage with stakeholders who were surprisingly willing to enter into a dialogue with companies and their brands.

What we have seen over the past 12 months is that smart and sophisticated users of social media are beginning to fuse corporate reputation management and brand promotion—adopting an integrated approach that recognises the traditional dividing line between those two things is blurring—and to seek out a middle way between the one-dimensional marketing and corporate communications approaches described above, based on an understanding that genuine dialogue and engagement require active listening and polite conversation.

For that reason, the most intriguing finding from this current Grayling PULSE survey—that corporate reputation management is becoming a stronger driver of social media activity—should come as no surprise.

Corporate reputation—the way the public perceives the behaviour, communication and values of companies that stand behind the brands they buy—is now an absolute prerequisite for success in the marketplace. Consumers have at their fingertips the ability to access so much information about the companies with which they do business, that merely monitoring online conversations, or being ready to defend reputation should a crisis arise, is no longer enough.

Smart companies are instead devising strategies to communicate their principles and practices via social media. They are creating content and developing storytelling capabilities to ensure that the an authentic narrative—and any lack of authenticity will be discovered more quickly and punished more severely than it would have been before the proliferation of social media.

In this new era, there are good reasons why the best companies are focusing more and more of their social media efforts on corporate reputation building.

Paul Holmes, Editor The Holmes Report www.holmesreport.com