If you’re looking to engage your company or organization in Social Media and you think Facebook is the place to start, you could be wrong. If you also think a some advertising on Facebook or MySpace and maybe a cool application in Facebook is the way to go, you may end up wondering why it didn’t work.

Engaging in Social Media often requires a holistic, multi-channel approach. This means you might well need to consider engaging through Social Network services like Facebook, microblogs like Twitter or Plurk and leveraging YouTube and a blog or two. Additionally, you’ll also need to look at how you actively participate across those channels.

In our experience, most failures with Social Media marketing come from the assumption that an organization can leverage Social Media in the same way as the Web or traditional marketing. You might have some small degree of success in this regard, but it will also be shortlived. We’ve seen a number of cases where an ad agency will execute a clever video style campaign in Facebook and some push on YouTube with great creative. The message takes off, gets good viral uptake and some click-throughs that result in sales. This is good for the short term. But what happens afterwards? The campaign has ended, but the creative lingers. You might think that’s good in terms of ongoing brand awareness, and it is, but it’s also damaging.

With no later follow-up, your brand is simply seen as marketing. This may very well make the next campaigns significantly weaker in uptake over time, since you aren’t engaging your stakeholders over the longer term and they will simply see you as “pushing” rather than “participating” and Social Media is all about participating.

As you plan to enter Social Media it’s important to think about your ongoing engagement and participation, so that the next time you launch a campaign, you have an engaged base audience to help you spread the message. Over time you build a good solid audience with which you gain permission to engage. Campaigns will be more successful and the results will mean better overall sales. That’s a managed investment in Social Media.