We are at an interesting inflection point with Social Media today. One that threatens to disrupt and reinvent every function in your company over the next few years.

Social Media already has changed Marketing forever. You can’t attend a conference or read a blog post without hearing about the latest in this field. Marketing is still playing catch up and will be for a while since we are still at the very early stages of the Social Media game. What makes this different from the adoption of the Web or CRM is that Social Media is changing so much more than those technologies ever did. This makes it harder to keep up.

Social Media is having a big impact on Customer Service as evidenced by all the issues our teams are handling each week for Avaya. We see between 1000-2500 mentions of Avaya each week alone and engage with dozens of customers in any given week. This is very different than even 6 months ago.

Product companies will have a strong social approach to product development using Social Media. Pure Service companies will work with virtual teams to source and deliver work from far flung parts of the world. Finance teams will be getting tweets on billing and finance issues directly from the socialsphere rather than from the traditional channels. Recruiters are clearly already using Social Networks like LinkedIn as their first source of candidates. HR is checking the background of those new hires on Social Networks looking to see what this new hire is all about. IT was already on the scene with Web 2.0 technologies when Social Media hit. And Legal has been working and reworking policies on Social to adapt to the changes. And finally, Learning and Development teams will be harnessing social tools internally to train and enable everyone from new hires to sales teams and beyond.

If you think Social Media is just for marketing – think again. Social is impacting and beginning its reinvention of every area within your company. The question is – are you helping do your share to educate them?

In the last post called Just 4 People doing Social Media? we discussed how social media like email will eventually be in the hands of everyone in your organization. I even put a date on it Jan 1 2012.

But there are challenges to this happening that were not apparent when email rolled out across the enterprise.

The issue is Brand “voice”.

Sure some people are funnier than other people when it comes to witty emails. Some people like to write tombs and some are masters of the one-liners (like myself).

But in Social Media that approach wont work. You cant have some people being long Tweeters – it just wont work – and you cant have some people being fast and pithy. I think it presents a real challenge for a brand. And you run the risk of dilution of the brand.

Now factor in your Contact Center …

They can’t go from super nice phone personas, then whitty Twitter/Facebook personas and then over to long detailed email personas. That would be a very hard thing to do and few people are qualified to do that. And most likely those few would be reserved for high profile escalations of customer service.

I think organizations are going to need a lot of training on successful Social Media situations that resulted in a very positive experience for the brand. Some of this training will be generic to all companies and some will have to be very specific to each company.

The reason being is that each Social Media site has its own “norms” of behaviors that go with them. Learning them are key to success in each of them. So a Social Media content repository (ok that sounds weird) perhaps a Social Media Knowledge Management system (most likely a Wiki) will need to be in place so people can study what has happened, get up to speed fast and go out and get Social!