About a month ago, Gareth Kay, a man much pithier and more eloquent than I, wrote a fantastic op-ed piece that perfectly sums up our approach to counseling brands on how to engage audiences on the interwebs.

He asks a crucial question: “rather than focusing on social media, shouldn’t we be focusing on social ideas?” That’s the question we had on our minds when we first started ISG a few years ago, and unfortunately, it represents a perspective that’s still exceedingly rare in the worlds of PR and advertising.

Misled by their agencies and the media, when most brands look at the internet, they see a toolkit..  Having identified their target demographic, they map out their messages and then select a delivery mechanism for those messages, picking and choosing from the online toolkit Silicon Valley has created for us over the years in the form of the various available social media channels. But focusing on the tools first means that most brands are missing the digital forest for its trees.

Here's the problem with using the social media toolkit as a foundation for planning communications campaigns...Web users aren’t flocking to different social media channels because they love the channels themselves—they’re using them because of the conversations and stories they enable. When seeking to engage web users through social media, however, in shockingly few cases do brands actually pause somewhere during this process to figure out what, exactly, that compelling conversation or story will be (hint: it’s not that you have a new product, or that your product is special in some way).

Even after spending hundreds of millions of dollars, few brands have anything truly interesting to say online, instead focusing all their resources (time, money, energy) on which tactics and channels to use instead of figuring out how to be useful, how to add value and how to get web users truly excited.

Add to the mix the fact that on any given day there are thousands of organic, consumer-generated stories out there that are more compelling and interesting than anything a brand has to say, and the odds that an advertising or PR agency will come up with the next great breakthrough idea in web culture drops to almost zero.

So then what are marketers supposed to do?

1. Recognize that a good social media strategy doesn’t have to include the use of a social media tools or channels. If you can come up with a good, social idea, web users will spread your stories across Twitter, YouTube and Facebook for you.
2. Learn how to truly listen to the organic voice of the web and add value to what you hear, instead of focusing on finding the most effective way to tell web users the things you want to tell them. Find the organic intersection point between what you want to say and what people actually want to talk about.

What this all adds up to is that at the end of the day, agencies and brands are doing themselves a grave disservice by obsessing over which tools they need to deploy to reach web users, and are putting too much stock in the over-hyped coterie of “social media experts” that reinforce this misguided approach. Social media experts are vaunted as the future of this industry, but in fact the most valuable assets in the communications industry right now aren’t people who are experts at social media.

Rather, the most valuable resource a brand can have at its disposal today is someone who is an expert at understanding what motivates niche audience groups and web subcultures (hackers, cat people, LARPers, etc.) to do what they do online, yet people with this understanding are extremely rare and infrequently found in communications, perhaps because this knowledge is almost completely undervalued in the industry. Unlike practically every single other aspect of PR and advertising, this is an instinct that can't be taught, and is consequently priceless. If you doubt its scarcity, ask yourself...how often do you see a brand online actually talking and behaving like the audience it's trying to engage? I've yet to see a single convincing example, and I pay pretty close attention.

Basically, the difference between a “social media expert” and a true web culture expert is analogous to difference in travel advice you’d get from someone who has visited a city a few times versus someone who grew up there. The gap is vast and significant, and most brands and agencies are still (even in 2009!) on the wrong side of the chasm.

Which begs the question…ok, then how can marketers and brands close this gap? How can we know for sure, before we ask our clients to spend millions of dollars on a campaign, that we have a truly social idea on our hands? Or that, at a bare minimum, during the planning process we’re getting the right advice from the right people?

Hopefully this blog can help, if only in a small way…

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to start regularly posting social ideas, free for you to take and use however you see fit.  They’ll all be timely, relevant, actionable ideas, with quantifiable built-in audiences, and we’ll explain how your brand could create programming around each in a way that meets these audiences at the organic intersection point between what you want to say as a brand and what people actually want to talk about.

So please, steal these ideas!

And in the meantime, think about the story you want to tell as a brand, not the tool or channel you’ll use to tell it. Hopefully, these ideas will help you add value to web culture, create great stories and contribute positively to online dialogue, rather than merely chasing after the user base of the Web, version 2.0. Whatever that means. I bet a social media expert could explain it to me.

 (image modded, via Kate Bernauer)