This may not need to be said to you, but I’ll say it just in case: social media isn’t a mystical pixie dust you throw on your products or services and sit back to watch the magic happen. It doesn’t work like that, yet sometimes I get the sense that more than a few people think it does.

Social Media Is Like A Spice Rack
Social media for business is like the spice rack in your kitchen. There are all kinds of good flavors (like the Facebook spice or the blog spice) you can add to your meal to enhance and interact with the existing flavors, but there must be flavor to begin with. Too many spices leave you tasting only the spices, and nobody just eats spices. Too few spices leave you tasting the original flavors, which as good as they may be, are probably lacking the mind-blowing, tell-everyone-you-know kind of meal you’d like to have.

That’s how it is with social media for business. When done well, social media enhances a good business. It shows all the great things about who you are and what you do. If there are aspects to you business that are bad, however, it will reveal those too. That’s why social media won’t change certain fundamentals about good business. You can’t neglect some of the most important things about business and hope it will all be fine if you do more in social media. That’s like adding a bunch of spices to burned food. It’s still burned and therefore not worth eating.

5 Things Social Media Won’t Change About Business
Below are five things social media won’t change about your business. If you have issues with these, social media is not going to work as well for you as you like, and it’s not a social media problem. It’s a business problem. Your business problem.

1. Social media won’t fix crappy products. If your product stinks, social media will be the place where people will talk about how terrible it is. If you’re serious about creating good products, you can use the feedback to make your products better. People will talk about that too. If you aren’t willing to hear bad news, learn from it, and change as needed, you’re not going to like what you find and your social media interactions will always be sub-par.
2. Social media won’t fix poor customer service. One of the great benefits of social media is that current and future customers can ask you (or someone from your company) questions. The great thing about this is that it’s all done in public for everyone to see. So if your company does this well, you’re communicating a lot about yourself by engaging in customer service via social media tools. If your customer service is really bad or absent in the social media space, you’re communicating something there too. You’re telling people that you don’t care or don’t know that there are people ready to interact with you someplace where the company doesn’t control the interactions. If you’re not sure whether or not you’re missing anything about your company, products, services, etc. in social media try this: do a quick search in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Technorati (for blogs), to see if anyone is talking about you. If they are, the next question is: What are you going to do about it?
3. Social media won’t fix stubborn leadership. One of the biggest barriers involved in getting a company to begin considering social media is that their leaders are opposed to it in some way. Sometimes it’s a misconception of what social media is and other times it’s a concern over losing control over the corporate message. Despite the grassroots nature that works so well in the world of social media, it’s still really important for a company’s leadership to understand and support it. I’ve worked with organizations that have been able to take social media part of the way through the company only to get stuck with a leader who was never really on board to begin with. Regardless of where you find yourself in your own company, it’s important to have internal social media champions. Someday, you’ll be called on. In the meantime, stay positive and look for opportunities to show the leaders the small wins so they can begin to dream about the big wins.
4. Social media won’t resolve dumb policies and procedures. If your company had some downright dumb policies or procedures, plan on hearing about it through social media. Just like the product comments above, you can learn from these and make changes, or you can hunker down with the “that’s just what our policy is” kind of approach. The funny thing about hunkering down is that you always do that when there are shots being fired at you. With social media you can choose to preempt some of the shots because you’ll deal with them head on. This is yet another opportunity for you. It doesn’t even mean that you give people what they’re asking for all the time. It does mean that you take the time to explain why you do what you do. If they can’t be satisfied, at least help them understand your situation. There’s a great balancing opportunity there which is, again, available for everyone to see. You’ll be saying a lot about who you are as a company and your view of customers by how you deal with these kinds of things.
5. Social media won’t make people like you if they don’t already. Social media is social only because it allows you to interact at a more personal level with many people. The good news is, if you have good people skills and are generally a likable person, social media will allow everyone else to discover that also. If, however, people generally don’t like you, don’t think it’s going to be any different on Twitter or Facebook. This is an important point for businesses in social media because you need to place likable, engaging people on the social media front lines for your business. The crabby, defensive, annoying, or don’t-cross-me kind of attitude generally doesn’t fly too well. We know it doesn’t in real life so we shouldn’t expect that it to be the same in social media space.

Word of mouth marketing is the holy grail of the marketing world. It’s the most attractive and effective strategy, yet it’s also the least predictable and uncontrollable. If someone ever tells you they’re going to develop a word of mouth marketing strategy for you, what they really mean is that they’re going to develop something they hope people will talk about, thus resulting in word of mouth marketing. Whether or not people will talk about it is something you have no control over. If you’re promised anything other than giving it the best shot to be talked about, someone is overselling their services.

The great thing about social media is that it allows any business to position itself well for word of mouth marketing. Here’s why I say this: word of mouth marketing is people telling others about something. That’s the core of social media marketing and a content promotion strategy. You want to use content that people will find valuable and then pass along. The social media tools simply let this happen exponentially faster than the old word of mouth marketing. Just think about how quickly something can spread on Twitter or Facebook for instance. It’s still word of mouth…just at hyper speed.

Two years ago Ketchum released the findings of a study that verifies this. Here are two interesting quotes from the study:

“Advice from family and friends is the No. 1 source that consumers turn to when making a variety of decisions ranging from purchasing consumer electronics to planning a vacation.”

“Communicators rank their company’s own Web site as the most effective way to share corporate news or issue a response to a crisis, but consumers rank company Web sites sixth and seventh among places they turn to for corporate news and crisis response, respectively.”

What we see here is verification that people telling other people about things is the best promotional tool and that despite any company’s high regard for their own website, the people are looking many other places first. This isn’t really new news, it’s just more of validation. If you’re a social media marketer or the champion for it in your organization…consider yourself validated.

Last week I had the chance to sit down with Ray Carman, an auctioneer who has been using social media to promote his business for well over a year now. Ray has seen his blog push his Google results up to the top of a search for auctions in his county which has resulted in new clients and new business. Ray also said his active participation in Facebook has generated several clients. According to Ray, 80% of his business comes from his various social media efforts.

One of the more interesting things Ray said was that his business remained steady this year despite the negative economic environment that was impacting the real estate industry. Ray attributes his social media efforts for keeping his business steady this year. Here’s the video to see the full conversation.

In the most recent episode of The New Mediology podcast, Nathan and I discussed two opposing views of social media. One view looks to social media solely for making money. The other view looks at social media for marketing. The big question then, is this: is social media for business primarily for revenue generation or a necessary (or unnecessary) expense?

The difference in these two perspectives is not whether or not revenue is important. Both would agree that it is. Rather, it’s the way in which they use social media to get to the revenue that changes based on the perspective. The “solely for making money” view is only interested in how the tools can be monetized very quickly. This view tends to not have the patience or persistence needed to really begin seeing social media work.

People with the view that social media in business is more for marketing know that they must first understand the rules of engagement, the culture, the techniques, methods, and tools that are out there. They realize that it’s just as important to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. They see this investment of time and energy as an expense that will later return in revenue.

Both models of social media exist, but I think it’s wiser to take the long view of social media by adopting the mindset that it is going to be an expense first, but the revenue will also come in time. There are two many cases already to prove this. Just as Scot or Jeff.

You can listen to the full discussion on this topic on the podcast. It’s available to listen online or in iTunes.

Today I observed an organizational tipping point for social media. I was meeting with the Chief Operations Officer of a company I’ve been working with a few months now and we were at a strategic social media crossroads. He had a key decision to make.

On the one hand they have been very successful doing things the way they’ve always been done. They don’t have to change today. They have controlled everything from customer interactions and sales leads to which employees are permitted to access YouTube and Facebook (which until recently was almost nobody).

On the other hand they can dive fully into social media where the lines of professionalism and personal life are blurry, where trust and authenticity are key, and where sales and marketing involve conversation and earning attention rather than demanding it.

The COO admits that he doesn’t fully understand all the implications of  social media, but he’s smart enough to know that it’s something to investigate. That’s why they called me a few months ago. Now he’s convinced they need to move forward, but the organization doesn’t fit with this new stuff. As the fog lifted today he saw clearly that they’re at a crossroads. Would they keep on doing what they’ve always done or take the other path?

The Internal Evangelist Tips It
For a few minutes I wasn’t sure which way he was going to decide but then the COO invited the internal social media evangelist into the meeting. The social media evangelist isn’t a high ranking manager or director. He’s just a well respected guy who works there and knows about social media and has started using it on his own. He’s even seen it pay off for him several times. He’s been leading by example and taking every opportunity to talk about the need for change when given the chance. He was the difference today. Without him in that meeting, I’m not so sure the COO would have chosen this path.

Why the Internal Evangelist Is Gold
So here’s why I’m writing this: almost every organization I know of has at least one social media evangelist right now. In many cases it’s not a vice president, director, or even a manager. It’s usually someone down in the ranks who sees the opportunity for change and has already started doing small things under the radar. These people are gold.

They’re gold because when a CEO, COO, VP, or some other executive type comes to that crossroads, they’ll call the internal evangelist in. It’s the moment the evangelist has been hoping for and it’s exactly what the company needs. It’s what the company has really been paying the person for all along and they didn’t even know it.

Internal social media evangelists are all over the place.

Becky is one. She even had a blogger take notice of her efforts this week.

Ray is too. He has a social media success story that’s becoming legendary within the company (and is quietly empowering and encouraging fellow employees too.)

Chris had one of those crossroads meetings a few months ago. Now the company is enthusiastically doing things they didn’t support even six months ago.

If you’re the social media evangelist in your company, be encouraged. The day will come when you’ll get the call or the email to attend the crossroads meeting. It may be sooner than you think. Be ready. They’ve never needed you more.