More and more companies are looking for social media marketing to deliver the world to their door. That’s a tall order, especially when they haven’t really embraced the idea of meaningfully participating in a community in a way that does something more than channel their products.

1) Social won’t fix a bad customer experience, it will only amplify it. If your website sucks or even is just hard to navigate, pushing people to it with a social media marketing campaign isn’t going to help your cause.

2) Social won’t fix your organizations ‘shiny object’ syndrom. In fact, it might make it worse. If you have a leadership team that always wants to jump on the next great thing, check out this great graphic from Buddy Media / Business Insider showing the current landscape of social media platforms. Any company that has tried to jump into all of them as they’ve come along is bound to go ‘mental’:  http://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-marketing-landscape-complicated-2012-5

3) Social won’t help if your price point is out of alignment with your product features and your target market. Life is ever more transparent, and that goes for your pricing strategy as well – it will get dissected and debated in public, and if it doesn’t hold water, watch out.

4) Social won’t help you out in a crisis if you wait until crisis hits to do anything in the social sphere.  People come to the defense of brands they know and understand within their communities, and brands that have delivered consistent value to them over time. If you try to activate a community on your behalf only when you need them, you will have a hill to climb.

5) Social is not necessarily a fast fix. Everyone wants that content that goes viral and launches their brand into orbit.  But staying power takes consistency, presence over time, and value over time. If you are in and out only when it serves your campaign interests, you will have less powerful results.