Are you thinking of experimenting with social media in your business? Be careful about the experiment. What are you actually testing? Are you testing whether social media can work for your business? Or testing how best to use it?

The other day I did a Strategy Session interview with one of Australia’s leading sales trainers, Sue Barrett. It will be published here in the next few days, but one of the clear messages from Sue and others is that we’re in an age of social selling. No big surprise there, but as always it’s about why you do it, how you choose to do it and what tactics and tools you use.

It’s not "if" you can use social media in your business. The question is "how". That’s the issue to experiment with.

You see, not all experiments work how you plan them. Experiments may be used to try to prove or disprove an hypothesis or a question. Sure, you may even end up proving something right or wrong, but really every experiment is an opportunity to learn and improve.

Is Social Media being taken seriously?

Learn and improve. It’s not whether or not your business should be using social media, it’s how. But there’s more to it than that. Be careful of experiments that could be set up to fail.

Unless you have the backing of your CEO and senior management, any experimental plans to use social media in your business may be doomed.

If you’re not the CEO, then make sure she is committed to making the program successful, otherwise you might just be wasting your time.

If you are the CEO, then make sure you treat the program seriously. Don’t experiment without giving the experiment the time and resources and respect it would deserve if it was already successful.

The social media marketing programs must be taken seriously within the business and be directly sponsored and backed by the ultimate god in the business – preferably the CEO. It’s not about who does the social media work in your business, it’s about what happens when you learn something – and how other people in the business act and react.

If others know that feedback and suggestions coming from social sources are taken seriously at the top, then the programs have a chance to succeed – irrespective of the possibly junior status of the worker bees doing the social buzzing.

Or is it a Social Joke?

But if the social media programs are seen by other people, especially those in senior management as an experiment that could fail, then it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy or expectation. You don’t want it all to be seen as a joke waiting for sarcastic "I Told You So" laughter. And you don’t want it all to be seen as a waste of time of the people involved or this attitude will prevail and quickly spread through the company.

Organizations need to realize that any employee having a conversation with a past, current or future customer is engaging in a moment of truth that could end positively or negatively. Ultimately businesses succeed or fail on how they handle each one of these moments of truth.

The people involved in the social marketing programs need to have good communication with others throughout the business so that feedback can be passed on to whoever in the business is responsible for that issue and any related systemic causes or consequences of the issue.

Even one negative moment of truth handled badly can cause a business to explode.

If your use of social media within your business is seen as an experiment by your staff, this view will inevitably filter out to your customers. Those customers who like to use social media and use it effectively will think less of you and will gravitate to other suppliers who are sincerely on the social media wavelength.