With new online social-media and marketing platforms skyrocketing in popularity, The Brand is faced with a dilemma: leverage this phenomena and market to millions - even billions, but risk losing your brand identity. Or do nothing, and well... do nothing.

Take Twitter for example: Twitter offers marketers the ability to reach an audience previously unimagineable. It puts the brand message in the hands of a community - a community that decides how that message is spread, conveyed, absorbed and ultimately perceived. Tweeting by its nature, eliminates the visual brand, and reduces the brand message to bite-sized snippets. No 30-second spots. No run of site. No paid editorial.

The enormous success of Facebook has rewritten the rules of brand awareness. Again, Facebook empowers the community, giving them the ultimate say in what is effective and shared, and what gets thrown in the recycling bin with the rest of the clutter.

But with these challenges comes immense opportunity to evolve your brand - by embracing your Unbrand.

An effective social media strategy can open up new opportunites to grow your business and spread awareness. Brand awareness in itself is often the difference between an individual choosing your brand over your competition. But by engaging the social media market, and creating unified marketing solutions that harness the technology of these platforms, you can build a comprehensive brand presence that can reach this new breed of customers, as well the members of their personal community. Combined with your traditional marketing efforts, you can assure that your Unbrand supports, and most importantly, does not compromise The Brand.

But then again, you could always raise livestock.

- Joe McGarvey, President - MCG Strategic