I talked to one of my Twitter followers recently — haven’t met him in person yet, but I hope to — about a policy his company is implementing called “95 in 5.” Essentially, the plan boils down to this: the company wants to address 95% of customer complaints within 5 days. The goal is to get employees to respond to complaints more completely and more quickly. An admirable goal, to be sure.

But it’s the wrong one.

It’s wrong for one very simple reason. Talking to people isn’t the same thing as solving their problems. When your company screws up, you can say “sorry” till you’re blue in the face. But until you solve the problem, you haven’t done anything substantial.

To be clear: being social is good.

When customers have problems, they want their problems solved. The problems can be solved by robots, humans, friendly woodland creatures, or personified bottles of cough elixir; it doesn’t matter. They want the problem to be fixed, and fixed right this very second. To do that, you have to be social, and you have to engage your users.

But engagement isn’t always the goal of social media, especially not when you’re fighting from your heels. In some situations, engaging is the easy part — your fans will do it for you. This means that their expectations have changed. They now expect service. And they expect it now.

Solving problems is better.

The simple fact of the matter is that if you only talked to your customers when they had a problem, they’d be perfectly fine with that. Granted, that strategy wouldn’t win you any awards, and it wouldn’t improve your new business numbers very much (though it couldn’t hurt). But you wouldn’t lose any customers if that was your only strategy.

Amber Naslund likes to say that if all you did in social media was say “thank you” and “I’m sorry,” you’d be doing better than most businesses in the world. I’ll add to that. If you don’t say “thank you” and “I’m sorry,” you’re failing to meet the basic expectations of your audience. And if you do, you’re only meeting half of their expectations — the other half being that if they come to you with a problem, you will solve it.

A sensible solution:

If you’re starting out in social media, or if you’re new to a piece of business, or if you’re rethinking your social strategy, here’s what I want you to do. It’s a very simple two-step process that should be as intuitive as Amber’s maxim, but often is not. Here it is.

First, figure out how to solve problems.

Then, figure out how to be social about it.

I could cite a bunch of people here — @ComcastCares, @Twelpforce, Vicks, and so on — but I won’t bother. If you’re in the business, you know about all of these already. The point is this: being social is not the same as fixing problems. And you  have to figure out how to do the former before you figure out the latter — because the latter doesn’t cut it all the way, and the former does.

P.S., to all my blogger friends, yes, I suppose this is the obligatory “silver bullet” post. But I hope I’ve spun it enough to be at least moderately interesting. And if not, well, as Carol Bartz once said, “Fuck you.”