I seem to have sat in a few too many meetings over the last couple of months helping people get their heads around ’social media’. More importantly, how to go about helping them get involved.

The thing that has struck me the most is that the concept of what ’social media’ actually is seems to be getting in the way and making firms who have a firm understanding of who they are and what they do, suddenly very nervous. I sit there and wait for the nervous ticks to start, knowing that any minute the phrase ’so, what’s this social media thing then?’ is about to be asked.

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There are many reasons why we at Republic do what we do. One of them is to help brands create and engage online communities. We do that by giving them (the brands) things to talk about that they (the online communities) find interesting and engaging. Using our finely honed editorial craft and judgment, we lay down an editorial schedule designed to bring the two closer together. An increasingly important part of what we do, is to ensure the stuff we write is both easily findable (high up on Google search results pages) and relevant (so someone will actually be searching for it in the first place).

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