Small business owners get a lot of mixed messages about what the "magic bullet" is for marketing their businesses. Twenty  years ago it was "you must have a website" to be considered legitimate, and today it's “you have to have 5,000 ‘likes’ on your Facebook page.” Day in and day out, I field a lot of questions from our clients or even folks in passing about how social media marketing should be used for their businesses. In fact, I get SO many that I am going to take some time over the next few weeks to answer a lot of them here.

One of the biggest misconceptions about social media marketing is that it is a salve for a bad reputation or a crappy product.  I've consulted with clients who were so resistant to social media, and I couldn't understand why. Once I was finally able to get down to the root of it, it turns out they were afraid that people would say bad things about them.

I'm going to be very blunt here.

If your company is failing, has a bad reputation or bad products, the only thing that social media is going to do for you is get that message out to the public faster.

Thinking that social media is going to solve your internal issues is the same as thinking that if you put a bad driver behind a nicer, faster car that it's going to make them a better driver.  In the end, the driver is still bad—no matter how amazing the car is.

Nothing will flush out issues like being involved with social media. If you know that your company has major service or product issues, you absolutely should fix those issues before launching into a full-fledged social media marketing campaign.  If you have not established a way to monitor the chatter about your company and brand, at the very least, set up a Google alert and start monitoring what's being said. Customers are quickly learning that the fastest way to air their griefs are through your company's social media channels. They will post their problems with your company on your Facebook wall as well as using twitter, and if you're not there to catch and respond to them, it can snowball into a full-fledged nightmare.

However, if you are there and you are listening, it's a fantastic way to learn of issues that you might not have known about before. Who better to tell you what's great or what's broken with your products or services than the very audience that you're selling to. Use the feedback that they're giving you to start fixing the problems. Showing others that you are willing to address and fix the issues is a good step in the right direction to getting and keeping your customers happy.

Don't be afraid of the power of social media—just be prepared to respond to your current and future customers. There will be those who only want to complain and have no interest in actually being helped, but those are few and far between.

What experiences have you had in handling customer-service issues using channels such as Facebook or Twitter?