Social media and Web 2.0 present big challenges for large companies. And the fact that the tools and communities that use them are so very accessible just makes those challenges so much more frustrating.

What we all want to do with social media is dialogue and share. For large enterprises, the opportunity is to engage with their customers in a more transparent and effective way than ever before possible through ‘linear’ marketing campaigns. But it ain’t easy…

Here’s my take on the obstacles facing Big Corp:

1. Understanding - social media is typically approached as just another route to market and this leads to a campaign approach with businesses majoring on ‘viral’ marketing and tapping up the blogosphere as a PR channel. By thinking in campaign terms, ’social marketing’ is driven by the tempo of the marketing plan and is at the mercy of the quarterly campaign focus. However, conversations involving your business can start at any time and judging when and how to engage simply can’t be planned. Inconvenient I know, but nothing you can do about that!

2. Skills and confidence - marketing in Mega Corp is coming down to a reporting, budget and program management function with the doers being the rostered agencies. As a rule, traditional marketers, including those with an online background, have neither the skills, nor confidence to enter into a conversation with their customers using blogs, podcasts, and video or through forums, or social networking sites.

3. Process: One reason that marketers are uncomfortable getting stuck into the social graph as their day job is that they are not empowered to do so and may even be explicitly barred from doing it. In effect turning your marketing team into ’spokespeople’ for your business is not something companies do lightly. But changing or indeed writing for the first time policies that enable employees to take part in online conversations is essential if businesses are to benefit from social media as a customer engagement tool.

Also the team developing an engagement plan using social media needs the freedom to procure services they need from a variety of suppliers most of whom won’t be on the roster. I’m convinced that as social marketing becomes core to the ‘plan’, purchasing of marketing services needs to become more like software procurements (project based) and less driven by the dictates of who is on the roster.

An outcome of these obstacles is that forward-thinking marketing departments that do see the potential of social media often turn to their agencies to define the strategy and lead the campaign. This approach is simply doomed to fail. Effective social marketing demands as its foundation transparency and proximity to the customer and cannot be done by proxy. Social marketing even transcends the boundaries of the marketing department. The best people to engage with your customers are those closest to the topic of conversation with the customer and this could be someone from the product, customer service or sales team.

So my advice to any enterprise looking to put Web 2.0 into the marketing mix is don’t get worked up about digital influence or going viral, but simply look at what your customers are talking about, understand what matters to them, and let your people join the conversation.