INTERVIEW: Facebook APAC vice-president of sales Erik Johnson

Social media is the most important thing going on in marketing today and is changing marketing in a "positive and profound way”, Johnson said. Brands who don't embrace it risk missing out on the most effective way to reach consumers.

“If brands aren’t interacting with social, I think they are missing out on the most effective way to get your message in front of people who care about your product already, or could potentially care about your product," he said. “We trust and listen to our friends. So if you have a choice between watching a TV commercial, which may be a brilliant, beautiful commercial, or having one of your friends say, ‘Wow I just had this great experience of this brand’, the latter is more powerful.”

While word-of-mouth has always ‘been the point of marketing’, it’s now more important than ever as social-networking tools provide mechanism to dramatically amplify it.

“It’s also more important as we reach saturation of media and marketing and advertising that everyone has to deal with,” he added.

Speaking just weeks after the launch of Facebook Timeline features intended at helping brands reach consumers (and generate revenue for Facebook) Johnson said that it is too early measure Timeline's impact but that anecdotally ‘things are good’ and uptake has been ‘very strong’.

The key benefits for brands using Timeline are the ability to express themselves with the new cover photo facility and to tell their story through the format's chronological capability. 

“Brands have always told stories," he said. "If you think about all the great TV commercials from the '70s, they were about stories. And I think in this new medium we are encouraging people to use social as a way to tell stories as well. Timeline is the ideal vehicle to do that.”