2010 draws to a close and everyone is predicting the most obvious outcome of 2011: that social media is going to be big for business. What still seems to be brushed under the carpet is that as companies embrace the social media trend, leap on the bandwagon, go twitter-crazy or Facebook themselves up they’re still keen to keep their brand separate from their day-to-day business.

Let me explain.  The Burson-Marsteller report from earlier in the year showed that two-thirds of the Fortune 100 have at least one Twitter account.  Fifty-four percent have at least one Facebook fan page, 50% have at least one YouTube channel, and 33% have at least one corporate blog. It’s likely that these figures were considerably higher by the end of 2010, and that the reach will have spread far beyond these top tier companies.

This creates the external community of people you want to ‘like’ your company. Those figures show that businesses are at least starting to do this effectively, creating the social presence and conversations with the audience.

Flip to the other side and companies are using social techniques, normally wrapped up as Enterprise 2.0 toolsets, to improve internal communications. From revamped intranets, to google apps, and successful tools like Socialtext, Jive, Huddle: all aim to improve collaboration and build an internal community. Some smarter companies are using the right tools to provide greater engagement with the external community too: from simple prospect research for sales people using Linkedin to competitive monitoring.

Where there is still a disconnect is making sure that the internal community faces outwards. This is where companies get scared. What if an employee puts the wrong message out on Twitter or Facebook (from the ‘I hate my boss’ to ‘we’re ripping off the customer’ type of outburst)? Rather like being guaranteed to lose a battle you don’t fight, you’re guaranteed to fail on social media if you over-regiment the involvement. We’ve seen football teams try to ban the use of their players with twitter. Companies will struggle to stop their staff having a social media presence, but create guidelines that suggest keeping everything separate: encouraging a corporate/personal social schizophrenia.

For 2011 to really be the year of Social Media we have to encourage an overlap. Social media needs people to be ‘always on’. The risk of some bad PR on social platforms is mitigated by the amount of positive discussion that will be generated. When you open your brand to social platforms you accept that people can say what they like, so why not widen that participation to team members? A corporate marketing team that manages its social communications, but then doesn’t use the platforms themselves, is to use the expression du jour, an epic fail. It suggests that the activity is either over-controlled, or that the activity is for presence only and it isn’t considered central to the marketing mix. We’ve seen with Crowdsourcing that businesses are willing to trust ideas and projects to an external audience, now it’s time to start trusting the internal community.

Avoid the dilemma of ‘am I me, or am I the business?’ and encourage people to be both. After all, we’ve spent years saying that a company brand isn’t just a logo, but the sum of all its parts. Don’t leave most of these parts behind.  Crowd out the social platforms and encourage everyone to be part of your story.