In a constant effort to get closer to their consumers, brands have lapped up new marketing channels and the advent of social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook and Twitter saw marketers adopt social networking as a new marketing channel globally. Apart from their use as advertising channels, social networking sites are also being used by marketers to engage their consumers in conversations about their brands.

But the danger in misunderstanding this channel is that a marketing manager could actually damage his brand's image by using these channels wrongly. Like Benjamin Palmer, co-founder and CEO of the Barbarian Group, says in his insightful article on brands and social networking, "Social media was not made for brands. Lots of other stuff on the Internet was, but not Facebook and not Twitter."

Twitter, for all its inability to be monetised, has proved to be the most popular of the lot; ‘Twitter' was the most popular word of 2009. Still, the fact remains that this is not something that's evolved from any form of marketing or advertising.

"When the banner ad was invented, it was devised to be the interactive version of a print ad. It fits in conveniently into a marketing plan and it's not an extraordinary leap to go from a clever print ad to a clever interactive ad. Brand sites and microsites naturally evolved from brochures and magazines.

"But social media evolved from conversations. It's the digital version of a bunch of people talking and being friends, and actually poking someone in the shoulder with a finger when they want to get someone's attention. The precedent is not an old form of media; it's a form of behaviour," says Palmer.

Brands have had it easy with campaigns. You shout as loud as you can to make sure people hear you, and your job's done. You could be saying just one thing, and that's more than enough. Conversations aren't the same. They can evolve in a moment, or engage people for hours on end. Brands need to pay more attention to what people are saying; they need to listen and react. In this case, being proactive is not necessarily the best course of action.

However, that's not an easy thing to do when you're confronted with a fact like this: According to Alexa, a company that monitors online information, India is second only to the US in Twitter usage. So for a brand manager, getting people talking about their brand might seem like a good thing.

But while a brand might be content with people talking about a particular campaign of theirs for hours on end, brand managers need to pinpoint when to move conversations ahead, while maintaining the focus on their brand, thereby keeping the brand's activities on the network fresh and engaging. As more brand managers across the globe adopt social networking, they're simultaneously learning how these networks function, including when to speak and when to listen.