Having multiple people managing a brand’s outposts isn’t a bad idea per se; in fact for many larger brand it may be a necessity. But a user needs to know what to expect when they engage with these outposts. There are two options when you have multiple people managing a single account. You either ensure that these people follow strict rules about how to talk, ensuring that they are talking as the brand.

Or you allow each person to bring their own tone of voice to the account, but you clearly state that users are engaging with a specific individual. This can be as simple as appending their name to the end of a tweet or status update, or having separate accounts for these individuals.

You need to decide which approach to take to ensure you are delivering consistency. A common irregularity on brand accounts is that some individuals chose to say “we” and others chose to say “I”. On a single account this can get confusing, and leaves the audience confused as to whom they are actually talking with.

The solution is simple, clearly outline your approach; decide whether or not your account warrants more than one person managing it. Do some research, how big is your brand currently in social media. Are thousands of people talking about your products but no one from your company is responding? In which case you might to fortify your social media presence with a solid team of individuals. What are your long-term objectives for the accounts? What specifically are you looking to get out of your presence? Is it customer service, brand education, improving relationships or driving sales? How many people will it take to meet these objectives? And possibly most importantly of all, how much can you afford to spend?

Then decide who is best placed to be managing your profiles. If you want to be delivering customer service through twitter, then someone from the customer service department needs to be involved.

Then give these people the knowledge they need to properly run these profiles.

And as always, continually monitor and review your progress. If you are having huge successes on Facebook, but the level of engagement is being marred by only having one person managing the presence then it may be time to re-evaluate. And similarly, if you’ve put together a team of ten people to manage a Facebook page, but the growth hasn’t been quite what you anticipated, it might well be time to scale back.

Ultimately, the number of people you have managing your brand online depends on how active your consumers are in the social space, and how active you want to be with them. Getting the balance right can be tricky, but the first and most important thing to get right is to have a clear approach as to how you want to be represented online.

Print adverts have to follow visual guidelines; TV and radio adverts have to conform to tone voice; websites are carefully designed to represent the brand digitally. All communications should be entrenched in brand guidelines. After all, it’s the brand that is talking, and a brand should have a clear personality, a set of values, and a way of speaking.

So then, why do we think we can ignore this with social?

We let interns speak for us. We hand over profiles to junior account execs, with no training, experience or qualifications. Few if any are given direction, let alone clear guidelines on how to represent the brand online.

Countless brands give away control of their online voice to their agencies, entrusting them to stand for the brand, its values, its way of thinking, under the at times misguided belief that they are best qualified. Very rarely are the agencies given brand training by the brand.

We wouldn’t let these people craft copy for adverts, or developing messaging for a television campaign, and yet these people are trusted to engage with consumers on a daily basis, acting as the official voice for the brand.

As social media matures, and companies are seeing its full potential they have to also recognize the huge dangers the face by trusting the wrong people to be their voice in social spaces. Companies need to carefully pick their brand guardians, lest their brand suffer the consequences.