The 2011 National Business Ethics Survey is the seventh such report published periodically by the Ethics Resource Center, but this year’s edition turned up something unexpected. According ERC, “active social networkers,” which the organization defines as those who spend at least 30 percent of their workdays on social networking activities and who make up about 11 percent of employees who engage in social networking,

are much more likely than non-networking colleagues to accept behaviors that have traditionally been considered to be “questionable” or marginal behaviors (e.g., keeping copies of confidential work documents for use in a future job, personal use of the company credit card, taking home company software).

The survey also found that active users are also far more likely to experience pressure to compromise ethical standards (42 percent versus 11 percent of less-active networkers). On the ethical upside, these same active networkers also expressed a greater willingness to share unflattering information about their organizations and co-workers, which one would guess is logically linked to another quality of this group identified by the research: an increased likelihood to report lapses in ethics. These extreme social networkers may be more-frequent whistleblowers, but they also suffer for their outspokenness, being far more likely to experience retaliation for reporting misconduct than co-workers who are less involved with social networking (56 percent versus 18 percent).

The greater likelihood of social networking power users to learn of ethical lapses (or even opportunities to cut corners), as well as their increased likelihood to report violations, makes sense: After all, these are people who are probably receiving and sharing far more information than less-frequent users. But the greater propensity of active networkers to break the rules has no obvious explanation. Perhaps those choosing to utilize social networks to such a degree are naturally inclined to use whatever tools are at hand to get their jobs done rather than stick to the letter of the law (or strictly within the policies of IT) and this correlates with a greater willingness to bend the rules, but that is pure speculation.

What do you make of these findings?  

Image courtesy of Flickr user miss_rogue

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

1. Lack of a social culture. Mandating the use of social media tools such as social network-style collaboration and sharing applications like SocialText or Twitter-style messaging such as Yammer won’t create social interaction. Your company needs to start with a fundamentally communicative culture, one where open sharing and collaborating is encouraged. Just plugging in a new collaborations or communications tool won’t change the culture of your company. If people are hesitant — or even afraid — to draw attention to themselves within your company, they won’t welcome tools that force them into being more visible. While social tools can help expand and reinforce an open and collaborative environment, without mass adoption, they could potentially create deeper and darker silos within an organization. Examine your corporate culture first and create a more receptive environment for internal social tools.
2. Lack of public participation If your team members aren’t already comfortable with using social media tools in their non-work life, chances are they won’t gravitate eagerly to the new social tools you’ve set up for inter-company inter-relating. The flip side of this is that you may see more immediate adoption from team members who are already social media enthusiasts. Identify team members who use s social tools to communicate outside of work and enlist them to help kickstart the use of the new tools. They will often be more comfortable with adopting such tools, and can help champion them to their colleagues.
3. Lack of training. You may have some early adopters to champion your new internal company social media tools, but what about the rest of your team? Without proper training, those who aren’t as familiar with social networking and tweeting may feel left out or even overwhelmed. Even those who take to these tools like the proverbial fish to water will need some guidance as to how, when and why to use the tools in ways that fit into your company’s work processes. Before you install the software, re-examine how your team works, how they communicate and how to appropriately use the new social tools to enhance work and communications, not distract or hinder it. Provide written guidelines and training across the board, regardless of social media skills, to ensure everyone knows what is expected of them, in addition to how to use the tools properly.
4. Lack of access. Has your firewall blocked team access to public social networks? You’re sending mixed messages if you are asking everyone to be more social, to share, to collaborate, to communicate more frequently internally and yet shut off access to public social tools. Before you open the floodgates, however, develop your internal “rules of the road” for interacting in public social media spaces.
5. Lack of willingness. Not everyone will understand the benefit of using social tools internally, particularly for the workers who prefer to remain low-profile, nose-to-the-grindstone, and are content not being noticed. Using team-based social tools within a company can be taxing and can push some people beyond their comfort levels. Make sure the parameters you set up for internal use of social media tools are based on encouraging professional exchanges, expanding internal knowledge bases, increasing collaboration, and helping to improve communications. Be respectful of individuals who may not want to be so personal in a professional setting. Don’t force team members to share their personal interests, for example — make those features optional. While there is something to be said about knowing a little more about someone’s hobbies or interests to engender more human connections within an organization, it may be extremely off-putting to some.

What challenges do you foresee or are you working to overcome as you implement social media tools into your internal company processes?

stock xchng image by user svilen001

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace
• Top Remote Work Trends to Watch for in 2011
• Social Media in the Enterprise

Recently, a recruiter asked me how I found great people to recommend for jobs, and I told him that it was because they were all people I had met somewhere that I had kept in touch with online. When the right opportunity came up, I had people that I could reach out to that I knew were likely to be a good fit because of my past experience with them in some other context. Because there are so many ways to keep in touch with people, I can maintain connections with them for longer periods of time and know how their lives and careers have evolved since the last time I saw them in person. The end result of these maintained connections is that my company can use me as a resource to help find great talent.

Gathering information also becomes much easier with these social connections. I remember doing market research before we had so much data in online databases, and to get information I went to libraries to find the data I needed. Now, I can get most basic information with a simple search query in a browser, but for certain types of information, the social networks are the best resource available. I often reach out to my Twitter followers for answers to questions such as, “what is your favorite tool to analyze x?” or “I need a device that does y, what should I get?” Sometimes I just need to talk to someone who works at a particular company, so I often use LinkedIn to find friends who work at that company or who know someone who does. Without an online network like LinkedIn, it would have been harder to find the right person to contact for information.

I can rely on my network of contacts because I’ve spent some time over the years building and maintaining the right kinds of social connections with  people. But this is where things get a little tricky: you need to spend time building those connections now to get the benefits later, and you don’t get the benefits without giving as much as you take. This means that you need to spend time answering questions and pointing people in the right direction when they ask something from you. You don’t want to be “that friend” who only comes around when she needs something. The way you build these relationships over time is by being there for people when they need you now; hopefully, someone will be there in the future when you need help. Like all relationships, it involves a balance between give and take.

This doesn’t mean that businesses should let their employees spend all day on Twitter, but it does mean that everyone needs to build time into their work for relationship building. As a community manager, keeping in touch with people is part of my job, so I spend some time using social tools, like IRC and Twitter, to keep in touch with people. But, I also know when to turn it off and focus on other work. As long as you take a balanced approach to relationship building as part of your jobs, you can still get all of your real work done today, while setting yourself and your team up to be even more productive over the long-term.

This is why I am sad to see organizations blocking access to social networks for employees. This is a short-sighted move made out of fear that a few employees will abuse it without any thought to the long-term benefits. Educating employees about productive uses of social networks and measuring employees based on what they deliver and accomplish is how you make sure that people are doing real work and not goofing off. You could block most of the Internet, and the people who want to goof off will still find a way to avoid doing work. However, if you stay focused on measuring output, you can deal with poor performers and figure out which employees are doing great work without preventing them from building longer-term business relationships that will make your organization more successful over time.

Photo by Dawn Foster used with permission.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?
• Social Media in the Enterprise
• Enabling the Web Work Revolution

A few months back, I wrote about 6 Ways to Revive a Dead Social Media Channel. I wanted to revisit that and provide a few other takes on what to do when a social network account is languishing or gathering cobwebs. In that post, I assumed you wanted to bring a dead channel back to life and were ready to make a commitment to it. But what if you don’t even think you want to have the account any more?

In order to do a proper assessment of your social network accounts, you first have to find them. A quick and dirty way to do this is to use Namechk, a site that is also helpful to see if your preferred username is already taken. If you’re like me, you are probably using the same username or similar name for each profile you set up bar it being unavailable to you. You can also check your preferred username or names at How Sociable and get back a basic “ranking” to show how sociable you’re being in various popular networks.

How Are You Using Your Networks?

Create a grid with your networks and order them based on how frequently you use them. I don’t know about you, but I use three networks daily and maybe refer to another three occasionally, but I have way more than six accounts out there in the social mediasphere. Here is a very rough example of my social network account grid:

While embarrassing to admit, I also have accounts on: Bebo, hi5, virb, digg, kirtsy, Biz Sugar, Sphinn, Friendfeed, Vimeo, Viddler, Blip.tv, 12seconds.tv, Upcoming, Eventful, Xing, Photobucket, Ning, Mixx, Reddit, Tripit, blippr, Plancast, eCademy, Stumble Upon, Kwippy, Audioboo, Squidoo, last.fm, NetVibes, Gather, Jumo and GiveBac, just to name a few. I also warn you now: Do as I am about to say but not as I do. I’m currently carrying out my assessment process and will begin the clean sweep over the holidays.

Determining Your Next Steps

So now here is the tough part. Once you’ve listed them all — or at least the ones you can find or remember — you need to make some decisions about each of the networks you only visit infrequently. I’ve boiled the choices down to four:

1. Revive it. If you really have the time to make a commitment to keeping those networks alive — or if you haven’t gone overboard so only have a handful a networks to maintain — you can get some helpful tips here: 6 Ways to Revive a Dead Social Media Channel.
2. Kill it. I’ve been on the fence for a long time about whether or not to kill many of my old, tired social network presences and my feeling right now is that I won’t kill them. If the network is really dead, it won’t be an issue. If it is just barely alive, you may want to try #3 or #4 below to keep your presence going with minimal upkeep. If for nothing else, I want to keep accounts with my preferred username even on a network I don’t use; that way nobody else can take my username and create confusion.
3. Refresh it and make it a “gateway.” I like this idea because if you’re going to have presences in multiple sites, they could attract a certain (even if only small) crowd that you could then drive to the key places where you want them to be, such as your blog or your Facebook Page. I’d go for consistency and use the same or similar bio across all of these ancillary networks. After replacing your old and outdated bio with a new, concise one, you may also want to update your image to one that is the same across the board. Then make sure you can enter key links just to the core networks where you want to drive traffic. While many of these networks let you link out to dozens of other networks, resist that urge and stay focused on concentrating on driving traffic to your key presences.
4. Refresh it and feed into it. Another approach is to turn some of these minor networks into satellite presences instead of gateways; not full destinations, but sites where people can get a good feeling for who you are and what you have to say. These are the sites where you can easily import RSS feeds from other sources, like MySpace and Tumblr. For these, I’d recommend focusing on only a few feeds: my blog, Twitter feed and Facebook status updates would be what I’d bring in. The key is to make sure you provide the right balance of messaging as a “package” and then look to place that branded package of key content in the sites where you can. In your bio, you may want to identify the account as containing feeds from your main sites and encourage people to visit — and connect with you — at those.

Trying to wrangle your social network identities and accounts into some semblance of consistency will most likely take a lot of time so be prepared to tackle the process a few accounts at a time.

How many accounts do you think you have, and what are you doing to manage them?

Stock xchng image by user ppreacher

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?
• Social Media in the Enterprise
• Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Canadian company Swix offers solutions that can help businesses and agencies track and analyze social media community growth, as well as the results of campaigns or offers.

Swix can answer questions such as:

• How are my social media communities growing?
• How many people are clicking on my offers in social media, on my site or blog, and via email?
• Of those who click, how many take an action (purchase, provide data, etc.)?
• If there are sales tied to my actions or offers, how much money are my social media channels generating, and which ones are generating the most money?
• What’s my ROI based on money generated versus money spent on my campaign?

Swix offers two products: Swix Analytics and the new Swix Social Marketer, currently in beta. The analytics tool lets you track audience sizes for all of your social media properties in one unified dashboard so you can check the health of your community. You can generate analytics reports easily by clicking on the metrics you want to publish — audience growth or engagement numbers — and they are added to a report that appears on a password-protected web page to share with your team, client or other stakeholders.

Social media campaigns usually consist of a landing page or microsite where actions (a purchase or sign-up, for example) can take place. Swix Social Marketer generates unique URLs to help measure the traffic that various social media properties or tools are sending to the landing page and converting the most people per campaign. You can broadcast your offer out to your social network communities using the unique URLs generated by the Swix system for Facebook, websites, RSS feeds, Twitter and email. When people click on the specific link, the system tracks  what they do using cookies, so you know how many people clicked and who converted or took the prescribed action.

While neither of these offerings sounds particularly groundbreaking, they provide the kind of reports that you usually get by cobbling together data, mostly by hand. The cost of Swix Analytics is $9 per month, per brand. So you could start tracking all of a brand’s social media channels including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as its blog’s RSS, and see all the data on one page versus having to go into each channel every week and lifting the numbers for $9 a month. The next brand you want to track would be an additional $9 per month. Swix Social Marketer is currently in beta and free.

Is social media really the future of marketing? Join me as I talk about how the power of social media is grossly exaggerated. Social media is a powerful tool, but it is just one of many gears that you need to make up your marketing machine.

I agree with this statement, and it got me thinking about all the hype we’ve seen recently over social media. Where is this thing going?

History Repeats Itself

As happened in the early days of the Web in the mid-1990s, social media has its nay-sayers, doers, exaggerators and believers — that’s all par for the course in the cycle of a technology as it goes from introduction to mass adoption. If you started riding the social media wave early on, you have probably gone from curiosity to interest to avid enthusiasm to evangelizing. Then as the landscape began to change and others swooped into what felt like “your territory,” you may have experienced some irritation, nervousness, competitiveness, even fear. Then perhaps you regrouped and shifted your focus to carve out your space in an ever-increasingly crowded marketplace. Some of you may already be curious about something newer on the horizon, something shinier and more interesting than blogs, microblogs and social networks, like mobile and augmented reality.

No matter where you are in this cycle, one thing is clear: Social media is not just hype, in the same way that the Web was not just hype, or the Internet or the cell phone or the personal computer. HubSpot’s promotional email got it right that social media is a powerful tool (or perhaps more accurately, a “set of tools.”) But like any tool in your marketing, communications and customer relations toolkit, it is not the be-all and end-all.

The Masses Are Here

Two things happened to me in the last week that made me realize that this is the “big moment” for social media, right before the hype starts to die down, and we begin to take for granted that these tools exist because they will be assimilated into most people’s work and lives:

1. My dad told me he watched a segment on CNN about Facebook and social media for small businesses. My dad is a civil engineer and would admit to only being moderately active on the Internet. The fact that he took the time to watch the segment was significant. Social media, Facebook and Twitter are all becoming a recognized part of his world, although he still scratches his head about them. He’s “getting it” more, although he may still tell you he just doesn’t “get it.” Yet the information has reached him and has sunk in.
2. A friend asked if I knew how she could get a Facebook Page for her church’s youth group. She’s an accountant and other than having a personal Facebook profile is not a techie, unless you count financial and Quicken skills, of course. Her budget was about $200. And I knew she could get a suitable page for that amount of money because someone out there is proficient enough to build it for her for a few hours pay.

Basic Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts are fast becoming commoditized. The more challenging and critical aspects of using social media — the aspects that we need to pay attention to — are being strategic about how we enhance our social media properties; how to incorporate them into our processes, including our communications and marketing mix; and how to manage our social media properties and the people who connect with us through them.

Do you feel that social media is about to become something we take for granted, like the web?

image released into the public domain via Wikimedia Commons by GravisZro

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• Social Media in the Enterprise

But what if that dead channel belongs to your company or organization, and for whatever reason, you now want to bring your neglected social media presence  back to life. Can that channel be saved?

Trying to bring a stagnant social media channel back from the dead requires more than just posting to it again and hoping that your connections didn’t notice your absence. Each channel that you’ve neglected will require different resuscitation techniques. For example, if you are trying to revive a YouTube channel, you need a strategy for producing compelling video and video production will need to be part of your overall content generation strategy.

Trying to revive a Facebook Page can be a little easier because once you begin interacting with your fans again and re-establish trust, they may be willing to suggest your Page to their friends. Once new people start “liking” your Page, even more people will see that action and hopefully build some momentum. But if you’re not participating on your Page with thoughtful interactions and compelling content, you’re not going to get far with bringing your channel back to life.

Before I talk about what you should do to revive a dead social media channel, let me be clear about the wrong way to go about it:

• Don’t post for the sake of it. There is a real temptation to just start posting frantically just to fill the void. Without some thought behind what you are trying to achieve with your social media channels, your efforts will either sound forced or empty.
• Don’t “fishbowl” post. “Fishbowl” posting is when you post something to a channel then use a different account to make a comment, “like” the post, or retweet it or perhaps get someone else from your organization (or friends or family) to do the same so it looks like you’ve got some activity happening on your once-dead channel. While there is a community technique called “seeding,” it doesn’t mean setting up fake exchanges to look like spontaneous participation. Planning for a conversation is one thing. Faking it with people in your fishbowl is misleading at best, lying at worst.

Here are some steps to take to breathe some life back into your social media channels and to make them thrive:

1. Map out a plan. Every good social media marketing campaign starts with a plan. Reviving a stagnant channel requires a plan for ongoing messaging, monitoring, management and maintenance. Your plan should include a social media calendar that incorporates all of your your content assets across channels as appropriate.
2. Address your absence. Make a brief statement about what you’ve been up to and why you haven’t been participating in your social media channels. You have to regain the trust of your connections, and an open and honest statement will make a good start. Even saying something like, “Due to resource constraints, we had to step away from this page for awhile. However, we’re now back on track and looking forward to interacting with you” can go far.
3. Start afresh. Treat your efforts to revive your social media channels the way you would if they were brand new, and you were starting at zero. Just because you have a few hundred followers or fans, it doesn’t mean they are paying attention or that they’ll do so just because you start posting again. You’re essentially starting from scratch so you need to work at it.
4. Acknowledge fans and followers. Look back at the history of conversations within each channel, and identify individuals who were actively participating in the past. Without being spammy, reach out to some of them to invite them back for conversation and information.
5. Post consistently and relevantly. Another aspect of gaining back the trust of your connections is to show a commitment to engaging in and updating your channels. Jumping in once every few months appears haphazard and careless. If you don’t show you care, why should anyone else?
6. Respond promptly. If someone acknowledges something you’ve posted through a comment or question, make sure you’re monitoring your channels to be able to respond in a reasonably quick manner. If someone is going to take the time to reach out to you or reconnect, the least you can do is be present.

Before you start reviving dead social media channels, make sure you have the time and resources to make a commitment to them. You don’t always get second chances, but even more rarely will you get a third. Don’t blow it.

How have you revived dead social media channels?

stock xchng image by user the_peach

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• Social Media in the Enterprise
• Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

As you are looking to fill in the blanks in your social media calendar? Here are some ideas you can use to develop the content for your blog posts, tweets and status updates.

Start with some “Marketing 101″ questions:

Next, you want to think in terms of “big picture,” longer-term items, then narrow your view to the more immediate and daily. Here are some questions you can answer to start filling in those blanks:

Annual, Quarterly and/or Seasonal

Start by thinking of “big picture” umbrella events and messaging:

• What events are taking place six months to a year out that inform your marketing efforts?
• What other marketing efforts do you have scheduled — or do you need to schedule — including press releases and social media releases?
• What are touchstone issues for your company that can inform messaging that expresses your company’s values?

Monthly

Concentrate on you want to achieve each month, including date-specific events that you can use to anchor your messages:

• What are you promoting?
• What actions do you want your audience to take (particularly ones that are measurable)?
• What’s happening with your company this month?
• What’s happening in your industry this month?
• What’s a hot, current or trending topic this month you can comment on?

Daily

Here are some ancillary ways to keep conversations moving and draw out the lurkers in your social networking communities:

• What are you reading?
• What are you thinking about?
• What are you doing?
• What do you want to know about your audience (i.e what questions you can ask them)?
• What’s happening with your company today?
• What’s happening in your industry today?
• What’s a hot, current or trending topic you can comment on?
• What are your friends, fans and followers saying that you can repeat?
• What are your friends, fans and followers doing that you can acknowledge publicly?
• What calls-to-action can you announce to attract attention and stimulate conversations and participation?

Also think of the types of conversation starters you can use to achieve particular goals while taking your community’s needs into consideration. Here are some ideas for posts, tweets and updates:

• Brand-related: Something about your company or brand to establish values, tone and “personality”
• Fun facts about your company or industry
• Press releases with specific company news announcements
• Coverage of real-world events
• Creation of online events
• Hybrid online/offline events
• Customer service oriented
• Crowdsource a FAQ for your company
• Ask for feedback
• Respond to feedback
• Ancillary but relevant or related topics
• Current news (relevant but not too controversial)
• Twitter trending topics
• Customer recognition (birthdays, accomplishments, etc.)
• Quizzes, polls and surveys
• Quotes (but make sure they are relevant and don’t overuse them)

An important thing to remember when you are filling in your social media calendar is to stay focused on useful messaging, but even more important is to be present and genuine. No amount of planning can ever take the place of those spontaneous moments in your social networks when you act or react in the moment and your friends, fans and followers respond in kind.

How are you planning for the content you produce and messaging you publish in your social media channels?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

stock xchng image by user tome123

Here are 10 ways to really connect with others through social media:

1. Focus, focus, focus. It is so easy to get sucked into the social media vortex, flitting from shiny object to tweet to update to post with a panicky feeling that if you don’t see everything, you might miss something important. Sound familiar? Stop the madness, set strict parameters designating time to review your social media channels, and stick to them. You may miss something, but you will find just what you need to find, especially if you heed the next point.
2. Listen attentively. Set up alerts through services such as Google Alerts, SocialMention and Tweetbeep, or one of the many fee-based monitoring services. Go through your alerts to take care of more pressing conversations where you should be paying attention. Then spend time really listening by reading your streams on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like. You don’t have to read everything but what you do read, give it real consideration and look for ways to move to #3.
3. Respond meaningfully. If you want to make an impact in these channels, make sure your responses to others are thoughtful. The occasional “ditto” or “uh huh” aside, every response you make — especially if out in the public stream- – is an opportunity for greater connection. Ask yourself: Is what I’m saying relevant? Will it resonate with my friends, fans and followers? If not, then why bother?
4. Retweet or share. One of the funny things about us humans is that we love to be recognized. In social media channels, recognition comes in the form of retweets, likes, comments and shares. When any of us publishes something, we want to be noticed. By taking notice and sharing what others have posted, we are giving them kudos. Keep in mind that who you recognize is also a reflection of you.
5. Provide value. In your own quest to be noticed and heard, are you giving people a reason to follow you or otherwise connect with you? So many people try to build their Twitter accounts by following a lot of people thinking “oh, they’ll just follow me back” but they haven’t even thought about why someone would want to follow them back. They aren’t yet tweeting or if they are, it is inconsistent and unfocused. The more value you put out there, the more followers you attract.
6. Ask questions. I find that some of my best connections happen when I ask questions. People love to help. And then once I receive good answers, I share those with my followers as well because I know others out there may be asking the same questions I am.
7. Be transparent. There is always a lot of talk about “transparency in social media,” but what does that really mean? I believe it means starting with honesty and being open; handling even difficult conversations in public as long as the only thing at risk is your own reputation. If you are doing good things, honesty and transparency are not a problem. If not, beware.
8. Take your time. We all seem to be in a rush, rush, rush wanting things now, now, now. Calm down. Slow down. You don’t have to hit 500 Twitter followers in your first month out of the gate. You don’t have to have 1,000 or 10,000 people liking your Facebook Page in three months. Sure, it might happen, but you’ll gain more friends, fans, and followers who really care about you by taking your time to care about them. Success in social media is not about accumulation; it’s about meaningful interactions.
9. Make connections. We have a job to do. We have something to sell. We are keenly focused on our own goals and objectives in business. But when you enter social media channels, the focus needs to be on everyone you’re trying to reach. While some people will tolerate your broadcasts of news, articles and information — and a few may even welcome them — most people are using Twitter, Facebook, and other networks to make connections with people as well as discover useful information. Embrace those connections.
10. Smile. What attracts people? A positive attitude. Even when something goes awry in your Twitterstream or you come across dialogue that feels like a backlash, be positive, thoughtful and look at the situation as an opportunity to showcase your honesty, transparency and caring. Everyone makes mistakes and people are more forgiving of those who own up to their mistakes and to be open to conversations about how to remedy the mistakes. Feel criticized in social media channels? Smile, thank others for their feedback, and think long and hard about what is being said about you or your company. There are lessons to be learned.

Social media channels and tools merely provide us more ways we can connect — they aren’t leading us to entirely new and different things that we’ve never seen before, but they are doing it in interesting, new ways.

How are you really connecting with others through social media?

First image by stock.xchng user cobrasoft

Second image by stock.xchng user hoefi

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise

Your websites are probably on servers owned by a hosting company that guarantees you “no downtime” because they have (ostensibly) an intricate system of backups to keep your site up 24/7. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest have zero contractual obligation to you to stay online. Yes, they have good reasons to not go down. But what will we do if they do? It isn’t as if we have many other major choices of social networks where we can disseminate our messages on a massive scale.

Sure we can hop from Twitter to Facebook, but what if Facebook also goes down? I don’t see a mass exodus to MySpace happening. Maybe we’ll hunker down in our niche networks or micronetworks like Sprouter or BizNik or a Ning community waiting out the storm. Maybe we’ll check in furiously on Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl and the like, hoping someone notices that we’re still alive. Maybe we’ll sit in our blog and send out an email blast inviting people to join us for some conversation in the comments.

What Are We to Do?

If you’ve ever used Second Life for business, you’ve probably faced chronic downtime on a network where you’ve have put creative energies and efforts into building up a storefront or holding a major event, only for the Linden Lab servers to go wonky and you’ve lost sales or had your event ruined. With Second Life, those of us who were entrenched in making it a viable marketing and commerce play for our companies would curse the company that we loved for creating the platform but hated for putting our ventures at risk. Then again, it has never been Linden Lab’s fault that we’ve decided to depend on the servers of a single company for major business transactions.

We Are at Fault

What are we thinking? We wouldn’t build our company headquarters on somebody else’s land that they owned without a contract, some guidelines, guarantees and stipulations. And yet we spend hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of dollars creating assets and putting them on somebody else’s servers — and not even companies that are in the business of keeping things their servers up 24/7. They are in the business of getting you to be on their networks, because the more numbers they gain, the more powerful they become.

Our tolerance for their outages just goes to show how dependent we are on them. We think of these moments as par for the course because we are on the “cutting edge” and dealing with “new technologies.”  We’ve been mesmerized by the promise of exponential reach. We’ve been hypnotized by the potential numbers. We’ve been sold a bill of goods and come out of these moments of outage when some of our marketing and customer service efforts come to a screeching halt, wipe the sweat from our brows, smile feebly, put out our hands and say “Please sir, may I have some more?”

Can We Stop this Madness?

Unfortunately, no. We’re too far gone. We’re in this thing too deep. We’re intoxicated by those moments when we get some genuinely impressive results with our Twitter outreach or our Facebook engagement, and we salivate at the possibility of more of that good stuff. We’re hooked.

So if we can’t stop it, what can we do? Here’s my advice:

• Don’t replace your stable marketing tactics. Look at social networks and social media marketing as an augmentation of your traditional marketing, not a replacement. Don’t give up the rest of your outreach and marketing efforts.
• Have a contingency plan. Downtime on the big networks is inevitable. If you can’t be real-time on Twitter or Facebook, where will you go and where can your customers find you?
• Support niche networks. Yes, Twitter and Facebook are huge, but they’re not the only places offering the same kind of messaging capabilities. Set up shop in a smaller network and support their efforts to be the next Twitter or Facebook. They’ll love you for it and give you the best darned customer service, because they want and need you.

And keep in mind this mantra: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. It’s an oldie, but a goodie.

What are you doing to better distribute your social media presence to safeguard against the Fail Whale?

Fail Whale screenshot from twitter.com

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?