Social media has its place as a form of communications. It’s for sharing vacation pictures, boasting about your child’s accomplishments and sharing those memes with cute kittens and appalling grammar–right?

Wrong. While that was certainly social media’s start, as a communications channel, social media has grown up and pervaded every corner of our lives, from social to public to business. It’s more visual, more peer-to-peer and more powerful than nearly any other type of communication. Increasingly, it’s being used by consumers to interact with the brands they choose to do business with. This has been both a source of terror and a source of immense opportunity for companies.

Why terror? Think of the social media customer service stories that have gone viral. There’s musician Dave Carroll and his scree against United Airlines’ baggage catastrophes called United Breaks Guitars, which by last count, has been seen by more than 13.5 million people and has become a book. There’s Patrick’s Stewart’s (Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise) famous viral tweet that claimed waiting for Time Warner (News - Alert) Cable to hook up his service sapped him of his life force. (“I’ve lost the will to live.”) Many companies have discovered the hard way that not only is social media a customer contact channel, it’s a singularly powerful customer contact channel, and it can be ignored only at the company’s peril.

The lesson is, if you haven’t already brought social media into the contact center and you’re still hoping it will “go away,” it’s time to face reality. The good news is that it can be done in increments, and the examples of companies that have both succeeded and failed with it are plentiful, which makes for a wide pool of best (and worst) practices.  According to Sarah Rolfing writing for the SoCo Care blog, first ask yourself what it is you hope to accomplish.

“Start by developing a social mission statement that aligns with your social engagement goals, customer service philosophy, and other standards your organization upholds,” wrote Rolfing. “Next, identify and define the types of social posts you want to respond to. Do you want to exclusively respond to happy posts, negative posts or just those who are looking for help? Establish what criteria make a post actionable while also keeping your organizations customer service philosophy in mind.”

Which social media channels you focus on will depend on your industry, your customer demographics, your available resources and your contact center’s existing set-up. Next, you’ll build your team. The people who handle social media posts (and they can be handled right out of a queue, like phone calls) should be skilled top performers in written communication–people who are already skilled and knowledgeable in social media. Use them as the “A Team” to build out a set of protocols and best practices for your organization that can be followed by others should they leave the company. It’s important to understand that you’re not just monitoring social media posts about your company; you need to respond to them. Social media is a two-way communications channel.

Finally, recommends Rolfing, be sure to measure your social media performance every which way you can, fine-tuning or adding new social media channels as necessary. Many companies find value in hosted contact center solutions that already include support for social media channels. These solutions treat social media as just another channel through which customers reach out – like the phone or e-mail – and allow companies to include them in all aspects of contact center operations, including scheduling, monitoring, screen capture and training.

If social media isn’t already an integral part of your contact center operations, it’s time to stop hiding from it. Your customers have already noticed.