Many companies focus primarily on the “media” part of social media - should our CEO blog, do we need a blogging policy, do we need wikis for our customers, etc. That is why many marketing 2.0 strategies based on social media fail.

The most important aspect of social media is leveraging the social component within your relationships with customers and employees - not the media part. If you can get customers and employees to help you based on their social framework, then you will unleash a power that will be hard to stop. If you put the human back into your customer and employee relationships, then you will experience huge transformations in how people deal with you.

Just like you don’t start communities by looking at technology first, you should not embark in social media initiatives by looking at the media opportunities first - it’s all about letting the social element within relations flourish.