While this article takes you through a number of errors people are making with social media, I will just give you two:-

1.  Social Media is still seen in organisations as tactical, while it is used in most departments now; Marketing, Sales, Customer Services and Human Resources it is also used by many teams internally to collaborate rather than the inefficiencies of email.  What it interesting when people look "under the hood" is that people are choosing to use social.  Why?  Because it's natural, we are natural communicators, it's friction less and it works.

Social is often seen in the organisation as the DLS (dirty little secret).  The fact of the matter is that people are choosing to use it, regardless of the companies policy or not.

Companies need to bring social out of the back room and embrace it's power as a "quick win" as part of their digital transformation.

This is a pretty simple exercise, here at Digital Leadership Associates we run a one day workshop for the Board of Directors so they can understand the business imperative, the revenue opportunity, the profit opportunity, the cost and waste that can be stripped out and the competitive advantage.  While this seems like the new "wonder drug"  we are seeing companies already stealing a march on their competitors by taking this approach.

2.  The second mistake that people make is not activating their staff with social media.  This is about providing all staff, sales, marketing, customer service, human resources etc the ability to talk about their products and services on social.  This is not about stuffing social with corporate content that nobody wants to read.  This is about empowering the people to talk.

While we would use ourselves as the test case, we spend nothing on Marketing but have 60% share of voice, when our competition have 37 times more staff than us.  Our clients are already stripping out cost of sales, marketing, HR and customer service by switching to social media.

Worth a think.