Few things have gotten more press over the past twelve months than Facebook, Twitter, and all of social media. Media companies have been aggressive about staking out a position at all of these locations. This is smart because you can’t participate in social media if you’re brand isn’t willing to go out and be social. A problem I often see, however, is that while the strategy is sound and radio has the best intentions, execution leaves a lot to be desired. With social media that lack of execution generally manifests itself in a focus on the “media” and not the “social.”

Part of this is due to the DNA of radio, which is all about broadcasting. Radio sees social media and locations like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter as new distribution points, new places to broadcast their message. This works at a certain level, so it is easy to see success when your Twitter followers reach a certain level, or you create a successful Facebook contest. However, the key aspect of social media is the word “social.” Social is not broadcast, and if there is a primary lesson in utilizing social media, this is it. What this means is that it is not enough to have a presence on Facebook. It’s not even enough to provide lots of compelling content pointing to your website on Facebook. What you need to do is interact on Facebook. That said, there are a couple of caveats to this.

The first is that you don’t initiate conversations on Facebook, you respond to them. The reason is that dynamic conversations should happen on your site, not Facebook. You initiate interest on Facebook, and then take the conversation to your site whenever possible. The power of the conversation can be seen in sites like the Huffington Post, where the initial article will generate less time-on-site than the pages and pages of commentary. That said, the community gathers where the community gathers, and you need to take part in the conversation on Facebook, at least in part. Which leads to the second caveat: Don’t react to everything. Reply enough to let the community know that you are part of the conversation.

The difficulty of this is that it is time-consuming to monitor and reply to conversations on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other social media sites. This is one of the reasons that we are seeing social media specialists being hired by media companies. But the truth is that you don’t need a social media specialist. What you need is your team to be educated in using sites like Facebook and being encouraged to interact. I learned the time-consuming aspect of social media, as well as the benefits, in the comments section of a recent blog post about Triton Media’s recent purchases. The author and several commenters made some factual mistakes about Triton, and I used the opportunity to take part in the conversation and correct some mistakes. I quickly found that the same questions were asked over and over, and eventually I had to let the conversation go on without me. But I made the effort. Here is the beginning of one of the later comments:

To Jim Kerr: Thank you for your explanation. In this day and age it is so rare for someone from “the other side” to respond.

Like you, we are a company building a brand and goodwill. Reaching out and taking part in social media, whether it is a comment on a blog or a post on Facebook, is a critical way in doing that. But social media can have even greater impact than the somewhat intangible results of good will. Take an exchange on Mark Ramsey’s Hear 2.0 blog, where I commented on a recent column about our partnership with Jelli. I simply was responding to questions about the service that were raised in the comments section, when one of the the commenters gave me a lead on a Canadian company that might want to use the Jelli platform, complete with the name of the person to contact.

Social media leading directly to business leads—is this that far from social media leading to new listeners? And what started it all was simply involving myself in the conversation. A conversation—this is the key part of social media that radio needs to dive into. Unlike other things, it is not enough to just show up or “broadcast.” You need to dive in, listen, and respond.