Almost every single company in the world has a social media presence. Someone in every company is writing tweets, composing email messages, crafting Facebook posts, and attempting to engage customers in a friendly conversation in which the company looks great and the consumer is compelled to do business.

That kind of thing has been going on for years. But recently, I've seen many marketing blogs that suggest that we're approaching consumer engagement in the entirely wrong way. For those bloggers, social media work must truly be social. In other words, the content must feel like it comes from a human being and be somehow authentic and real.

Companies that engage with consumers in that manner, the thinking goes, will experience astronomical success that eludes others. Some bloggers are going so far as to suggest that CEOs and other executives, under their own names, should communicate with clients directly rather than attempt to speak for a business.

Let me say upfront that I think this approach can be catastrophic for some companies, as it often leads to really nasty reputation management problems. In fact, I think that getting real isn't at all the right approach for companies that really want to do business in the years ahead.

And I'll tell you why.

The Concept of Human

There are myriad wonderful attributes that humans share. We can be funny, supportive, generous, and even amazingly kind. We can also be sad, needy, depressed, and sometimes just a little scary. That full range of emotions is what makes all of us real, but some of those emotions have no place in a business social media site.

The following example is a few years old, but it demonstrates what I'm trying to say with eerie precision. In 2011, a social media agency responsible for the Chrysler account confused the personal and the professional and tweeted a message that condemned all Detroit residents for the way they chose to drive. There were numerous expletives involved in this message, so I can't reproduce it here, and the person in question posted that message on the Chrysler page, not on his/her individual page. That person lost a job.

Now, on the surface, it might be easy enough to say that someone running a social media agency would know enough not to share something hostile on a client Twitter account. But, wasn't this person being real and authentic? Wasn't this person being human?

If Chrysler had followed the run-of-the-mill advice about being human online, it's possible that this angry person might have experienced no confusion at all. The person would have posted on an individual page, expressing an individual thought. It's possible that the reaction wouldn't have been so severe if it came from an individual and not a company... but I'm not so sure about that.