NEW YORK CITY-Social media may be ubiquitous today, but at the recent Benchmark Social Media conference here, one panel took some major companies back to their campaign roots. Speaker Robert Harles, global head of social media at Bloomberg LP built the company’s strategy basically from scratch, while AOL social media director Matthew Knell found he had to work and change public perception of the Internet giant. Whatever the reasoning, panelists agreed that social media has become, in Viacom's director of social viewing and social media Jacob Shwirtz’s opinion, “a core part, an intimate part of everything that we do.” And this connection opens up new and innovative forms of communication between companies and clients.

For instance, broadcasting messages on Twitter brings a new kind of access to a captive audience. “We connect with stories on a very fundamental, human basis,” expressed SAP senior director of Global Social Media Todd Wilms, and these stories can be told via social media content, which encompasses video, images, audio (podcasts) and articles. He added, “eventually, the idea is to start listening instead of talking – to open up and have conversations and interactions. This shift has been fundamental.”

Online conversations have become larger and more accessible to more people, and all panelists had to learn new ways to telling their company’s story. Listening to an audience, as Wilms described, makes it then possible to structure a corporate social media strategy to best suit a target audience. But listening is key, right from the start – even offline. “Before you start to do anything, take time to get to know people,” Harles said. “Find out what’s important to the business.”