On one hand you have your customer service team, a group accustom to working with customers, tasked with fixing problems and [hopefully] knowledgeable about your product, policies and other particulars.

On the other hand you’ve got marketing which is probably the group driving social and has the most access to specials, new campaign information and the juicy details the customer wants.

The problem with delegating out to customer service is that, unless you create new roles and train new staff, you’re responding 1 to 1 on a platform that’s seen by 1 to many. This may seem like a minor issue but when your response ends up on the front of a major blog it’s anything but. Marketing on the other hand is often out of touch with the details of the customer experience (and I’m saying this as a marketer) so getting into support requires learning those find points. Neither side is perfect.

The solution that I’ve always found to work best is the one that gets the customer what they want – the right answer, in the right format fastest. Whether this comes from marketing or customer service isn’t a matter of black or white, it’s a matter of who can do it and who can commit the time to checking Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube, Flickr, Your Blog, The Other Blog, the new video site, the old video site, the second twitter account and that one last blog all the time. If your entire customer service team is hourly it’s not going to be them. If your marketing team isn’t willing to get into the trenches they should stick to strategy.

Either way you slice it the best idea is always to carve out that person. This can be a new resource if budget allows or an existing repurposed one. New clearly has the advantage of being able to get trained and focus on nothing else but sometimes that long time employee who is looking for a new change of pace already has the insights to know how to answer the product questions.

What’s most important, the detail you can’t forget ever is that people who contact you through social are doing so because it’s the channel they chose to use. If your resource doesn’t check it frequently, doesn’t respond well or just ends up pushing them to other channels there’s no use in having them there so whoever you pick, they need to have the permission and backing of the company to go out, give answers and perhaps use a little different tone or brand than may be the status quo – after all, this is social media.

I know it’s not possible to get enough resources to do everything perfectly but don’t skip one area just to try and make another seem perfect – it won’t work. Instead focus on the big areas of opportunity bit spend some time in the others – court a few bloggers, send a few samples, stay on twitter even if you don’t post a lot, create a facebook page and use it from time to time. This way no matter where someone searches you’re there and as the trends change (and they will change) you’ll already have a foot in that door.

Emotes, avatars, small pictures or whatever else you like to call them have been a part of the internet for almost as long as the internet has been open to the public. But by taking a mass of these icons and putting them into a single picture users are able to tag people in their network that they identify with each emote either seriously or as a joke. As more users participate the trend has grown exponentially as users pull more and more people in their network in. And while it may seem like a one time tool different icon sets, battles and jokes have kept people engaged with comments flying around.

The big question of course is can a business participate in this? While the simple anwer may seem to be a no as there’s no network, no place for an ad and no shortage of emote images I think there is a play for the right brand with the right team. As with most free imagery on the web there’s a struggle to find a truly good set of images and most of what’s circulating now while funny could be improved upon. I think that for a younger, fun brand there’s a great play in releasing a set of relevant images and personalities with a branded feel. Nothing too over the top in terms of ads, no product images and certainly no swapping personality titles with brand terms but a message at the top, a good color scheme and some well done images could be a huge hit and get very, very viral.

Of course the trend may be dead in days or weeks as users get sick of tagging each other but it’s big today and marks yet another example of something done in the confines of a network but without any revenue attached, any feature development or market research. It’s just pure viral. Had a brand figured this out before someone started using avaliable avatars this would have been one heck of a social marketing story…