There's no denying the power of social media to effect change---whether social, commercial, or anything in between. Most brands are responding by increasing prominence to their social channels amongst their marketing mix. Technology scales, but humans don't, and many businesses frequently lack the organizational structure or size (or just the understanding) to know how to manage these channels efficiently. Few are affected more by this than agencies.

This means that interactions are inefficient, costly, or worse still, untimely. They don't respond to the speed of the market.

In my experience, this is almost entirely down to an internal blockage (so to speak!)---the inability to produce a timely outflow of responses and content to the significant volume of inbound ones as well as the conversation-stimulating content, too. Social-media-savvy staff members often don't have the internal contacts, product knowledge, or experience to answer questions directly every second, taken finding the answer increases the chances of RTs, Likes or +1 infiltrating the web.

There are several different models for how a business can organize itself efficiently for social media and (for mainly agencies), I also penned a piece exploring a time management and costing model for this. But often, only seeing is believing. Demonstrate how social media affects every aspect of your business (whether that be communications, marketing, distribution, call center, legal, warehouse, etc.) and you go some way to mobilizing the business to prepare for it.

So, here is how you can help me and each other: Please leave a comment below telling me what one single thing social media has done to or for your business.

If there are enough replies, I will write the best of these up in another MarketingProfs piece. With a bit of luck, the diverse range of replies will arm any of you who are struggling to prove the business case for internal departmental buy-in with the ammunition you need!