Limitations 2-4
Social media can't succeed without a genuine focus on your customers.
Social media is about listening, engaging, and responding to your customers. If you are not truly focused on your customer, you will not succeed -- period.
Social media can't be a one-off project.
A successful social media initiative is not a one-and-done deal. From a marketing perspective, you can certainly integrate a promotion to ignite participation, engage more customers, and so forth, but it doesn't end there. The Friday's Woody promotion outlined in a previous iMedia article serves as an example of how a one-off promotion without ongoing participation ultimately will cause your efforts to fail. And while they might have close to a million fans, this is certainly not a reflection of any long-term impactful success.
Social media can't work without organization alignment.
Even if your social media efforts are focused on marketing objectives, you are opening up your brand to the world. Anyone, anywhere can say anything. The purpose and objective strategy and guidelines must be shared across disciplines to respond appropriately to the "what if?" scenario. In addition, regardless of the message platform, it is rare for some customer service issues or questions not to arise, so you need to know and have a process in place to get the information you need in a timely matter to respond appropriately. The same applies if your brand is using social media as a customer service platform or any other purpose; there needs to be an understood process for communication when "stuff" happens, as well as consistency in messaging. HR, legal, PR, marketing, and other areas in the organization must be aligned.
