Social networking has been hot for quite some time, and sites and companies have been doing it awhile without clearly understanding why, or how to determine what they’re getting out of it. Now the prevalent question is, “What is the ROI on social media, and how do you gauge it? One public radio station, however, offers another reason for social networking, in its article on the NPR site.

Seattle, Wash.’s KPLU says that ROI or not, social networking is crucial to your company’s reputation; that many companies are hiring social networkers who do nothing but interact with customers, and try to resolve complaints before they end up as a virally-reposted bad rep on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and so forth.

As an example of what can happen, the article, “Social Media Gets Down to Business,”  talks about guitarist Dave Carol, a recent passenger on a United Airlines flight.

“Somebody noticed they were throwing guitars around and one of them turned out to be his. And he wrote a song about it and posted it on YouTube because United wasn’t getting back to him.” According to the NPR piece the YouTube video of Carol’s song has been watched more than eight million times. United Airlines suffered from a lot of bad press as a result.

While the article doesn’t totally resolve the issue for companies too small to hire a team of social networkers, it does offer some tips on what these staff members are doing. It also makes it clear the kind of damage control social media can mean for a business.

Social media needn’t all be a reactive tool, however. It can help build your company’s goodwill and good branding as well as prevent customer complaints from bad press. That doesn’t take a team of social networkers. If all you can do is set up alerts for what is being said online about your company, join LinkedIn, set up a Facebook fan page and ask your staff to tweet, you’re farther ahead than a lot of media groups.  This is especially noticeable with newspapers, many of whom, rather than being out there on major social networks responding to the “death of newspapers” or other bad press about their products, let these posts and tweets go unanswered and talk among themselves about what they should do.

I’ve been watching – and commented once – in a LinkedIn discussion in the Newspaper Professionals Group. The question posted was “How do we get out of the mess we’re in?” So far there have been 110 responses. I can’t tell you all that was said because I stopped reading quite some time ago. What’s interesting is that most in the discussion are not newspapers but industry vendors, consultants or educators. But there are some newspapers.  In the time spent writing and reading these very wordy posts these newspaper folks could have each posted several times on Facebook, tweeted about their latest promotion, or product, or just about hot local news content their publication carried. They could have responded to alerts about what was being said about them good or bad. Instead they choose to talk (some would say whine) among themselves. And I want back through the posts today to see if anywhere a newspaper had said, “That’s a great idea. I’m going to try that.” No, there was / is none of that.

If you’re a media group, after you read this article, don’t talk to another colleague about how poorly things are going in your business. Take the time instead to do one social media something. Talk to your online followers. If you have no followers, find some. Follow what others are saying about you online, respond, and build your new reputation.