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Any direct selling executive knows that one of the greatest ongoing threats to their company is an action by a governmental regulator based on overblown income or product claims made by distributors.

I added my first edit ever in Wikipedia today. I love Wikipedia for a quick summary of any subject, and was surprised when I visited the Online Reputation Management entry today and found what was basically an ad. So, I got an account and went to work. It was fun.

I sat in recently on a client's annual convention and it was a blast. Lots of energy and fun for this company that does a large amount of its business in places like China, Korea and Mexico. Which got me thinking, how can we capture all this excitement in far-flung countries via the social web, as we do in the US? Believe it or not, millions of people outside the US are using social media, and a large number of them aren't using it the same way we are.

Are people skeptical about your products? Do they reject your product or promise out of hand? People are naturally averse to hype. In personal lives, in politics, and especially in network marketing. Perhaps it's the industry's larger-than-life personalities or maybe an unfounded fear that if we don't scream about something it won't be heard.

What could be more discouraging than working all day to build trust and excitement about your company, then seeing your company bashed and its execs persecuted online? You will hear me say again and again that in our business, trust is everything, and in many cases that trust can be severed in an instant by internet “commenters” or online complainers with too much time on their hands.

To click or not to click, that is the question. Mainstream social web consultants often advise clients to "NOT click or respond" to negative online comments or forum posts for fear of doing so will drive up search relevance of offending links. This is not accurate.

It seems natural that companies whose primary driver is person-to-person relationships would have jumped on the social media bandwagon early on and embraced it, singing "hallelujah!" the whole way. You would think. Network marketing companies have been too slow to adopt social and have been left behind by many other more progressive consumer industries.

Momentum Factor's first client has me deep diving into what it is that keeps a customer happy and on board. The network marketing business is world-class at adding customers and distributors - we build a base faster and more profitably than most consumer businesses. However, we are just as good at losing them, with an average churn of 75% in 90 days.

Like it or not, today's corporations - especially in network marketing - are in demand to serve as providers of information and entertainment as much as they are a product or service.

Momentum Factor Founder & CEO Jonathan Gilliam recently spent a few days at the 2010 Social Commerce Summit in Austin when he was the CMO of Evolv Health. The summit included lots of sharing, thinking and learning about the future of social media and its application to business and marketing.