That was the question Waggener Edstrom’s Tac Anderson explored at our inaugural LiveBar, Live! event at the Roger Smith Hotel in New York City earlier this month.

In an evening of cocktails and conversations, Tac explained how the web and online communications have grown up over the past two decades (they’re no longer the domain of the educators and geeks!). Now, social media offers brands a real opportunity to validate their marketing efforts through content creation, ongoing and transactional engagement with customers and prospects, and solid measurement.

And the upcoming challenges for social media marketers?

1)  Producing content for the social channels more quickly (speed matters and authenticity trumps production values)

2) Shedding the destination-website mentality and moving to a hub-and-spoke model

3) Improving internal social business processes so that online engagement can happen in near real time

Video: Tac Anderson’s LiveBarNYC presentation

Here are Tac’s full remarks from LiveBar, Live (excluding Q&A) on Tuesday, December 15.

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Video: Tac Anderson excerpt

In this clip, Tac explains how, thanks to social media, brands can now see and read exactly what customers are saying about their products and services.

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