First, social media is not an action (engaging), but an object (medium).

This is the type of medium that allows the mass to voice their opinion easily and frequently (eg. write a blog post, start a forum thread, tweet on twitter, post a status on facebook, post a video on youtube, etc..). It’s much easier than traditional media because it’s absolutely not easy to get on TV, radio, newspaper, magazine.. etc.. to voice your opinion.

So what happened when it becomes so easy to voice one’s opinion?
Many opinions are voiced!! Some are correct and are not. Some are sincere and some are just malicious attack. This is what social media ‘effort’ is all about: dealing with information about your company floating around on social media.

There are currently 2 approaches on ‘social media effort’:
- Engagement: this is what Comcast, for example, does. When some one says something like: ‘Comcast sucks, my internet connection keeps dropping’. Some one from the Comcast social media team will jump on and reply in the comment of the blog post, or post a reply in the forum thread. Hopefully, the angry person would be less angry, and any passerby reading the reply would be impressed with Comcast’s effort.
- Aggregation: Collecting the massive data on social media to identify major opinion/comment about your company, analyzing them and producing report for your technical/production team so they can address the problem. This is the Microsoft’s approach and fixes the root problem.

I personally think the engagement approach is a bad idea. Several issues:
- You have to get through a lot of data, and you cannot respond to everything you see. Especially true for big company/brand.
- Ineffective use of money! Why spend money on engagement on social media when you can spend that money in your customer support department. If your customer service department is adequate, then people wouldn’t need to rant on social media. Fix the problem instead of trying to tell people that the problem is not there (or you will fix it soon).
- You need to keep track of the engagement trail. i.e. you cannot let person A in your team do some of the conversation and person B do some. So you need a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution for that. Your customer service department probably already has this, but you cannot use it because passing too many tickets there prematurely would overwhelm that department. So separated system is needed. This is very expensive, and has a lot of overhead.

I would love to write more but I think this is quite lengthy already..