#Socialmedia has had some very bad #PR recently – it seems the likes of Twitter can do no right, what with trolls threatening to rape politicians and bomb their homes; not to mention Ask.fm and the terrible suicide of Hannah Smith. So why are brands continuing to focus more and more of their time and finances into the medium?

The answer is that #socialmedia is crucial for #brandrecognition and for building relationships with clients and consumers alike; a good social #mediacampaign can boost profits in no time.

When Prince George made his first public appearance he was wrapped in a blanket with little green birds on it, 45 seconds later the internet went crazy, tracked down Aden and Anais as the makers and within hours their website had crashed. They experienced problems for three days and now have an order backlog of over 10,000 with people willing to pay shipping fees to Australia. Not a bad day’s work for a previously unsung company.

More recently, the pop singer Adele posted just one tweet to her 16 million followers about an un-heard-of gothic folk duo ‘The Civil Wars’ and they are now set to reach the top spot in the charts.

All of this leads back to one fact; today’s #consumers are Generation Z – the iPad generation, used to constant interaction with their friends and 24 hour rolling news, Generation Z is the future, and any brand or business that does not see that will surely find themselves in hot water soon enough. We are hurtling into the digital age at a rate of knots and soon #printmedia will be obsolete; the Sun is the latest newspaper to have jumped onto the online bandwagon and magazines are going out of print on a daily basis. #Online interaction, especially social media is what is keeping older brands going whilst also bringing in competition in the form of new, fresh content.

When used for good, social media is an excellent tool, but we are in un-chartered territory. With no regulation there is no way to stop the hate messages, the pornography or extremism, in just one average minute on the internet there are 1.8 million ‘likes’ on Facebook; 278,000 tweets posted and 571 new websites created, not to mention all the other unknown things that are going on instantaneously.

Despite recent unfortunate events brands and businesses cannot continue without social media, those that are still wary will soon be overtaken by more ambitious competitors, the moral of the story is I suppose, embrace it – but for the right reasons. If you treat it with respect it will work wonders.