OPEN

Always nice to hear oneself quoted back to oneself – cheers, Jon Leach – who echoes a catchphrase for big brands and social media I mentioned a couple of times…

• Map: know where your stakeholders and influencer networks are online. Know what they look like (and feel like for that matter – immerse yourself).
• Monitor: not in a sinister sense. But once you know where the good conversations are happening you’ve got to carry on listening to really understand them and your potential relationship with the relevant networks.
• Engage: only once you’ve looked both ways, listened carefully and looked again, should you rush in and engage with your networks.

If, as Jon does, you prefer your axiomatic triplets to be consistently alliterative, you can always go for "Map, Monitor, Mash-up" instead.

In a sense mash-ups (of marketing disciplines, approaches, media, creative ideas) is all you can do at the engagement stage – it’s  very unlikely that there is a tried and tested model or case study that you can follow for reference). But that’s what makes it so much fun, eh?