1. Creating the Social Company

Building a social media program for an organization is hard. I won’t try to convince you otherwise. The truth of it is that it takes patience, long hours of intricate planning, and a razor-sharp focus on getting things right. When you look at the companies that first started to successfully integrate the social web into their business models—companies such as Ford, Starbucks, Virgin Airlines, Dell, IBM, and Best Buy—what you often don’t see is the mountain of diligent planning it took for them to get there: the research, the team work, the block-by-block building that went on behind the scenes. What those friendly Twitter interactions and expertly managed Facebook walls don’t tell you is that behind every corporate success story in this space is a basic operational framework that places all the right elements in the right way and at the right time. Social media success doesn’t happen by accident. It is engineered.

It is also important to note that success in social media doesn’t happen overnight: Reach, attention, and influence cannot effectively be bought in this space. They have to be earned and developed, much like friendships are earned and developed. In this way, social media is different from other forms of media already employed by the business world. The “spend and reach” campaign mentality of “traditional” media does not produce long-term results here. The social web requires more subtlety and commitment, which is why terms such as relationships, trust, and conversations are such popular buzzwords in professional social media circles: These three words describe the social web’s lifeblood, especially as it relates to business.