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Thanks to my friends at iMedia for publishing my story about “Sharism” A notion embracing the spirit of Web 2.0, and as the number of bloggers and social media contributors continues to increase, so does the risk to your brand’s image.

I have included a copy of the story here for your interest.

In an interesting paper written by Isaac Mao, (毛向輝) entitled Sharism: A Mind Revolution; he outlines a theory called Sharism. Here, he suggests a re-orientation of personal values and draws conclusions about bloggers having “a social-psychological attitude to transform a wide and isolated world into a super-smart Social Brain”. The paper continues by drawing links with bloggers who generate lively and timely information on the internet, then with tools like RSS, hyperlinks, comments, trackbacks and quotes allow this information to be rapidly disseminated and shared. As Mao stated, “the small-scale granularity of the content can fill discrete gaps in experience and thus record a new human history”.

Record a new human history! I am not disagreeing with Mao on his assertions, but like any digital marketer looking to leverage social media, the frank acknowledgement that we could be creating a potential branding/PR disaster if we get this wrong terrifies me. Further, the trend for engaging in a community is to leverage social applications, like a Facebook app that can also repost to Twitter, which in turn can repost to FriendFeed. These applications communicate and cooperate, by allowing people to output content from one service to another, and facilitate the posts, messages and comments to move along a pipeline-like ecosystem. This interconnectedness allows information (new history) to travel along multiple online social networks, potentially reaching a huge audience very quickly.

In recent studies, it is revealed that more consumers prior to offline purchasing are researching online for information relating to their desired product or service. This is the area that excites digital marketers, who want to seed brand messages and plant positive stories throughout the blogosphere and various BBS’s that attract this pre-purchase readership.

Additional studies suggest that consumers take more notice of product reviews where their friends (real and virtual) can attest to the product and service. So given this, the sweet spot for digital marketers is to leverage social media marketing to influence the buying decisions by harnessing a positive sentiment within a community and also allowing the viralness of information to broaden the reach. You can simply look at the significant number of new fan pages being created in Facebook or MySpace to see which brands (or their 4a agency proxies) are recognizing this fact.

On the other hand, we are now seeing a notable change occurring that’s online. Consumers are becoming more sophisticated in their researching habits and not simply using a single social network for their information. Consumers are now actively engaging across multiple communities, turning into search engines and certainly in China, BBS’s.

The consequence of letting a brand walk blindly on the road of “Sharism” is not one worth risking. However, digital marketers recognize this — many are currently using online monitoring services like Google Alerts to send ‘alerts’ when set keywords are discovered in a blog or website. But these old ‘alerts’ are unsophisticated and require manual work to determine if the alert is for positive or negative PR/brand messaging or if in fact if has any downside at all. Newer tools make this much more effective (US vendors like Radiant6 or Trackur. In China, SinoTech Group with SinoBuzz) are providing platforms that don’t just send alerts but use powerful algorithms to understand the context of the information and can determine a ’sentiment’ of the information, and now even the reach and frequency of a particular story.

Surely, we as marketers need safeguards for our client’s brand and brand image by identifying the impact of social media (and marketing within social media). By actively monitoring the online channels, we can gain insight, develop and maintain a relationship with our targeted communities, and enhance our understanding of the community dynamics and key influencers within the groups.

Sharism is the spirit of the age of Web 2.0 So as the number of bloggers and social media contributors continue to increase, so does the risk to your brand’s image. However, don’t try and fight this trend, simply monitor, mediate and manage.

Dr Mathew McDougall is group CEO and chairman of SinoTech Group.