Understanding what tools are available and how to implement them, seems to me to be a tough issue for businesses to figure out right now.

It’s not hard to obfuscate oneself a niche (and, in fact, many seem to take a perverse pride in doing so) by making social media seem difficult to understand. You can have teams of community managers and hired gun PR specialists doing everything but wiping your nose for you and still fail. Why? Because if you cared in the first place, YOU would be the evangelist for your product, services, company, and efforts…YOU would be seeking out those conversations, finding the tools, and monitoring channels on your own initiative. It’s your business, to manage your business after all, isn’t it?

The first threats to social media marketing/CRM failure arise because leadership is poor, ethics are lacking, someone mistakenly interpreted profit as being the business they were in–no culture was created within the organization that employees could and would believe in or feel good enough about that it would allow them to become natural evangelists for the products, services, company and leadership. And that poor situation means leadership isn’t doing it either, obviously.

Then, you have HR departments who are clueless about what a good employee is (apparently, if they have a degree and passed the piss test, it’s enough…). Not that it matters all that much if you/the company are outsourcing customer service overseas to non-native speakers of your customer’s language–in order to cut costs–and using those voice-response phone systems which you yourself f-ing hate to encounter.

Companies that embrace the living economy principles, accepting a “living return” in stead of a maximum return, need far less social media PR/CRM. A living return means that you might accept less profits, but pay your workers better wages and hire locally rather than outsourcing overseas–creating a better workplace, an employee stake in performance, and contributing to the economic health of the place in which you live. Many companies/individuals simply lack the spine and ethics to do that in this day and age.

That’s sad, because that very sort of culture fosters natural brand evangelism in customers–internal and external–which makes social media work to your advantage as naturally as weeds growing in an abandoned lot. Good, ethical, responsible, caring business practices are fertile soil–social media is the sun, rain, and temperature. What grows are the seeds of happy customers into stories of success.

When it’s all said and done, the Mom and Pop stores, the sole proprietors striving to know every customer and make them all happy…they instinctively do social media right. It’s called word of mouth and your business relationships. It’s not an afterthought that you try to mitigate and manage, it’s a mindset and culture you embrace.

The bottom line is that if you’re running your business right and make your customers happy, you really wouldn’t need to WORRY about the conversations going on in forums, on blogs, or in Tweets. You KNOW they are all good, unless they come from competitors or non-customers unfamiliar with your brand. If you are running your business right, you KNOW your social media team will address them appropriately…and that team consists of your loyal, satisfied customers–whom you listen to all the time because it’s in your company’s culture/nature to do so.

It’s incredibly easy to do right by customers. The bizarre fact that so many companies would rather create expenses avoiding doing so in the first place is why social media marketing/CRM offers any employment opportunity at all.

And to those worrying about inbound/outbound channels, traffic online, the latest API, popular social networks, and attempting to deploy bleeding edge this and that…it’s not all that complicated. You need not use nor monitor every tool, just pick a couple versatile ones and USE them…with sincerity.

A really good company would simply make a standing offer/reward to customers and have them monitor social media/conversations for the company–challenge them to find a negative conversation and report it. Then react swiftly, ethically, and resolve it. It’s not hypothetical BS that can’t be done…it’s that companies/leadership/people seem inclined to take the easy way out instead of doing the right thing. The “right” thing ought to be instinctive, but the mere fact that it’s not tells you precisely what we’re not teaching and advocating in homes, at high schools, in MBA programs and online…in social media.

Business ethics classes these days are jokes, case studies in case studies and little more. In the workforce, no one has a stake in anything, it’s just a J-O-B; with a society where anything goes and no one respects anything, what’s to be expected? It’s precisely why we’re in the sorry economic situation we are today.

Great article. I’m out of coffee…

The key concept that organizations must embrace is the reason why they do what it is that they do. IT is a tool to enable our business to get things done more efficiently and effectively. However, somewhere along the line, we have lost direct contact with the customers (internal and external) that we are supposed to be serving.

Twitter, social networking, blogging, etc. are simply noisy, distracting tools, unless organizations are passionately committed to authentically join the conversation with the customer. What makes this model work is that money is no longer the motivating factor. Customers are savvy, and can see through any organization that is exploiting a new tactic for the sake of gaining market share.

In short, there must be a return to simply knowing who it is that we serve, and then, actually serve them.