Social media is represented as a crisis punctuated by brand-harming firefights like the Dell Hell event. It's time to put that notion aside and think about what social competence looks like.

We already know what it's like to become socially competent, having assembled the tools and habits that allow us to engage first with other children and teens, then other students and professionals. It's never easy growing up into the complex world of human society, which is what many companies are experiencing today with a twist. Instead of maturing into a system of communication, the system itself is changing from the hierarchical top-down-and-mass-broadcast approach to projecting a monolithic message to the marketplace into one where many more facets of social knowledge and agility are required.

Word fights and brand disasters are happening today because companies are not equipped to understand the customer as an individual. In the case of social media (which covers a lot of ground, from blogs to social sites and, even, media sites where readers are commenting or posting counter-arguments in video), companies are starting to realize they need to recognize who their key influencers are, which general-interest maven can assemble a movement directed at their market, and so forth.

That said, imagine that you could sit down in the morning and see who was talking about your topics, with insight into who does so regularly, their influence on topics of interest to your company, as well as who is joining the discussion and what they bring to it. Roughly speaking, it is the kind of social competence one feels when walking into a room full of people at a party—you begin by spotting the social leaders and dangerous wastes of your time. The former you may want to engage with, if you have something you want to get across, while the latter you have a small catalog of ways to disengage gracefully (e.g., "If Doug brings up politics, I have to say I see an old friend and walk away rather than make the mistake of engaging.")

When you can begin to look at the incredible tangle of conversations called "social media" in this way, you move past worrying about where the next unexpected attack will come from to confident engagement based on your available resources and a sense of where they can best be used.