Social media is here to stay. It’s about as mainstream as mainstream gets and pretty much everyone has realized the import of the medium for businesses. As a marketing tool, it’s invaluable, though not without its pitfalls. I have written before about how to use social media to grow your business, market products and run specials. Today I am going to talk about how to use social media to build your business’ reputation with customers.

Interacting with customers in a public way is commonplace on the Internet, but on social networks it gets personal. Social networks, by their very nature, encourage participation, interaction and conversation. For individuals that makes keeping active friendships easier. It keeps families closer. It provides a forum for debating the issues of our day. From a business perspective, it presents a potential problem. In some cases, without the proper forethought, monitoring and attention, that problem can be devastating.

For a business, customer service is a cornerstone of growth. Without good customer service any business can fail, and fail fast. With social networks, customer interaction becomes virally public. In the old days, a customer might complain on a forum or on a blog, but today they complain in a Facebook feed… YOUR Facebook feed… and everyone sees it in real time. How you handle that complaint will define your customer service to existing and potential customers. This makes developing an internal customer service policy for social networks paramount. But how many companies are doing this? Is this critical element of social media business being ignored?

On a social network, a snide remark from a tired employee can influence thousands of potential customers. Incorrect information can snowball into a support nightmare in minutes. Every single interaction is being watched by your customer base, your bread and butter. If you’re not coaching your employees on how to handle social network interactions, you better start… fast.

One way to handle this is to restrict access to your social network account. Only give access to employees you trust, who understand the importance of decorum. It is also very helpful to develop a standard policy for social media interactions that focuses on openness, honesty and fairness. The good side of this kind of transparency is that customers can see when one of their own is being unreasonable just as easily as they can see everything else. If you handle interactions admirably, you will build trust, a kind of trust that no amount of traditional marketing can create.

So the social media of our times is one of the most useful and personal tools we’ve ever had for business. It crosses the divide between personal and commercial, paving the way for companies to build relationships like they used to in the mom and pop businesses of old. But with that incredible access comes great risk. Developing a strategy for social media interaction today will help protect your company tomorrow.