I think we all agree that Social Media is very important and that it has produced lot’s of changes in our life. The impact of social media in our day to day is enormous and it’s not different for business. Hanging from this I see lot’s of people with different backgrounds talking about Social Media as the holy grail of business. “If you’re not on social media, then you’re an old boring company with bad service” seems to be the punch line used by all this people. 

The main problem I see with this way of thinking is that social media is not the holy grail in itself. Social Media has made it possible for us to interact socially in a broader way and, therefore, to welcome companies into our social space. This has lead businesses to believe that they can use Social Media as an extra communication channel (additional to tv, radio, press and papers) where they can broadcast their message and pretend they are listening to us. I say pretend they are listening to us because they can listen to us, but their values and organizational structure is still the same so they can’t listen to us or respond fast enough. 

This is why I encourage businesses to stop thinking about Social Media as the holy grail or the answer to this new environment, and to think of Social Media as an biz environment changer that creates the need to rethink the business values and recreate the organizational structure. Social Media won’t help if the structure is slow and the values are not correlated with those of the community.

Businesses want to enter our social space and impose their values to our space. This was useful in the times of mass communication, but now that we can be approached individually and that brands enter our social space we expect them to interact with us following our rules and values. 

Instead of thinking of applying Social Media out of nowhere companies need to think how this will affect their information input and their capacity of responding. They need to take into consideration some of the following points.

• The values communities have are different from the values businesses have been preaching for the last century.
• If you’re interacting in a social environment you are accepted to interact as fast and with the same language and tone as any of the members of that social group. Therefore you can’t go and send out a PR statement into a Facebook group. 
• Social Media makes us aware of information we had to guess before. Before this social tools existed companies needed to spend millions of dollars in market research, focus groups and statistical analysis that gave a wild guess as a result. Now they have access to more information and  in real time which changes how the structure should be set to respond to it.