Just about every brand now has a toehold in social media - even such established staples as Land O’Frost and Sara Lee Deli, both of which recently launched campaigns centered around Facebook.

For Land O’Frost, its new community called Land O’Moms, is the brand’s first foray into social media, writes the New York Times. Consumers use the site to exchange recipes and parenting advice, download coupons, read articles from women’s magazines and communicate with popular mommy bloggers, the Times said.

Sara Lee Deli’s new campaign, for its part, is the second stage of an initiative called "Mama Saga" where visitors to the Facebook page watch video clips and get advice on food preparation and other matters.

Don’t Be Tone Deaf

However as such established brands - brands that usually have a continent of lawyers and PR advisers on the sidelines - move online they need to take care they are actually responding to what their customers want, Big Money writes. It points to Citigroup’s recent launch of its blog  as an example of a brand that is tone deaf to online chatter.

“Not only did the bank launch the blog with a series of polished and very unconversational corporate messages, but it then neglected to post anything new for 15 days." Worse, it ignored the one truly relevant Citi conversation currently raging on blogs and Twitter, Big Money said — that Citi recently shut down the bank account of a gay social network, Fabulis, because the site's content "was not in compliance with Citibank's standard policies."

"To its credit, Citi was quick to apologize to Fabulis via Twitter and offline chanels…But the bank still faces a social-media strategic quandary. Shouldn't it acknowledge the Fabulis furor on its New Citi blog?”

Too Many Hands

The problem is that some companies - especially the larger brands - have involved legal departments or PR in their social media efforts, Big Money said. It tells of a FTSE 100 company that had finally persuaded the legal department to let it start a Twitter account. The company asked their external public relations agency to write the tweets. But because the PR company had never used Twitter, they also had to involve their digital agency to publish the tweets. “But before the digital agency could publish anything, each tweet had to be signed off by - you guessed it! - legal."

The end result? “When the first "test" tweet was sent to legal to be vetted, the 140 character message was returned with a 100-character legal disclaimer attached.”