If you don't feel like reading this article here are the talking points:

1. You're already in social media, you just might not know it yet.

2. "Should I be in social media?" is a dumb question. Yes, you should be: where, how and when are the important questions to be asking.

3. You CAN screw up in social media and a simple apology WON'T always solve it.

4. Little experiments are the best way to approach the space.

5. If you're not going to do anything else in this space, listen.

In another age (read: 15 years ago) there were two kinds of communication: mass and interpersonal. The distinction was simple, mass is a one-to-many medium while interpersonal is a one-to-one.

The rise of social communications tools, from email to Twitter, has made this distinction quite a bit more problematic. That's because we're left with this funny in-between space where individuals are able to communicate with large groups but keep the intimacy of an interpersonal exchange. For lack of a better name, I've been thinking of this type of communication as interpersonal communication with scale. Blogs are a perfect example: individuals can talk to groups of hundreds, even thousands, with many in the audience feeling as though they've had a personal exchange. I've been told many times by friends that they feel as though we talk all the time because they follow my blog, to which I usually respond, "But I'm the only one doing the talking."

With this definition of social media in mind, it's pretty easy to understand why so many brands fall flat on their face trying to embrace its many tools. (Well, that and the idea that it's a single medium, which is totally wrong and ridiculous.) If you think of social media the same way you think about broadcast you're bound to fail, as you'll be missing the key personal elements that keep so many engaged and commenting.

With all that said, there's a flip side to this whole equation, a little thing we'll call Second Life Syndrome. You remember it, right? When every agency and brand was all about getting into the virtual world? Yeah, that didn't work out so well. People were just following everyone else to the newest thing without a) ever trying it themselves or b) giving any thought to whether it was an appropriate place for their brand to live.

In some ways, I feel similarly about social media at the moment. I personally believe there are larger and more important lessons to be gained from it than Second Life (which was pretty much first discussed and discarded around 1994). Should a brand be on Facebook? Maybe, but without a thought to the how or why, it's kind of like asking should a brand be on the web (the answer is probably). The problem here is that most brands throw all their eggs in one basket and then take a broadcast approach: spend a lot upfront and wait for results. That's pretty much the worst way to approach this stuff.

What's more, it's not like 10 years ago, or even five, when the web was just beginning to bubble up. Back then, if you screwed up chances were no one would visit your microsite. Today, the very things that make social media great (like the built-in audience) make it quite dangerous as well. You're exposed at every moment. I imagine lots of folks would respond it's better to screw up and learn something than do nothing at all. While I don't necessarily disagree, I do think that there's this thought out there that you can just apologize for your mistakes and everything will be alright.

Take JetBlue's big screw up a few years ago: they left a bunch of people on planes for hours and got tons of bad press. Then the CEO got on YouTube and apologized, an act I praised at the time. But looking back on the video, it got 345,000 views on YouTube, a small fraction of the coverage the fiasco got in the mainstream press.

And while he certainly reached a nice chunk of audience and it was definitely worthwhile, it's doubtful that it really fixed the perception issue.

So, if you've got a brand that's not quite ready to make the big jump, what is there to do? Well, that one's easy: listen. Get yourself a few Google Alerts on your brand (and other related terms), subscribe to a Technorati feed and one from Twitter search. Pay attention to what the world is saying about you. It costs nothing (except your time) and sooner or later you'll start to see opportunities for your brand to jump in and join the conversation.

Finally, one more note on social media. It's always kind of annoyed me that there's this attitude that we're "empowering people" to share media. It's as if they haven't always been able to rip a page out of a newspaper or discuss (at the water cooler maybe?) that show they saw the evening before. No, all that's new is that there are mechanisms in place to facilitate that conversation. And let's be honest, if there weren't the ones currently available they would have found other ways. Chances are the brand you're working with is already "in" social media. Someone is talking about it somewhere, at least discussing it over email, looking up some reviews...

They're not sitting waiting for you to get involved, trust me.

Noah Brier is head of strategy at The Barbarian Group.