I agree that organisations don’t have strategies, they have strategic plans but your definition is populist and misleading.

Nearly all organisations I am working with understand clearly what social business is and are making plans to get there. 

Yes, we will have to disagree about “return on investment”. Funds for social media come from various sources and capital investment and direct and indirect costs are clearly distinguished. And we measure returns on each source.

I think you really nailed the problems with this post. For me, one of the handful of money quotes is:

“We need full transparency and your marketing team needs to know that
they won’t get the verbal beat down in a meeting if their
data doesn’t show a resounding success every time. Testing is a huge
part of driving social media success, which means that each social media
failure is in fact a success because it is one step closer to figuring
out what will work. The challenge is that, in many risk-averse
companies, a single failure can kill an entire program.”

The fun, experimental phase of social is still playing out in countless organizations. Especially those that put responsibility for social media in the hands of younger team members because they “get it” and knew some tools and terms. Unfortunately, many of them didn’t or don’t know the deeper levels of strategy that you rightly pointed out are critical to using social as a real business driver.

The best organizations are using social to do both: have fun and build an engaging brand persona *and* realize the bottom-line impact, whatever their KPIs may be for social. But those organizations are still pretty rare, and it takes time to get there, so hopefully in 2013 we’ll see more of those light bulbs turning on. This post is a great place to start. Thanks for sharing!

Cheers — Hunter

Even I think that the title could have been rephrased a bit. 

Agreed that Social Media can give benefits in the long-run, provided it is planned and executed really well, and even the fact that Social Media is not just limited to Facebook and Twitter. But the fact is that any general marketing strategy would require this. The difference lies when we talk about the reach and demographics, and the methods used to evaluate the execution and results. 

Otherwise I really like your article. Very well analyzed and written. Great job!

Businesses make a variety of type of “investments”. One of those is a “capital investment” which absolutely refers to a capital outlay are you mention. But they also make “human capital investments” which refers to the money they pay their people who invest their time in one project over another. For every hour their is an opportunity cost for not spending time on something else. Social media comes with a variety of investments, both capital investments and human capital investments. I’m not sure where you see a “loose” use of return on investment. I’ve always been very clear that return on investment is (revenue – cost of investment)/cost of investment and we don’t get to redefine ROI because it doesn’t fit with what we want to measure. I stand pretty firm on that. But it doesn’t mean we can’t supplement ROI with other metrics that are valuable to the organization, provided they align with business objectives.

Finally, I’m not sure where you are coming from when you say I misuse the term “strategy”. The definition for strategy (which was included in the post) is a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. With that in mind it was used appropriately in the post. Strategies do not have to be at the organizational level. In fact, I would argue that businesses don’t have “strategies”. Businesses have strategic objectives and each department develops strategies that are designed to achieve those objectives, which is just another word for goals. 

The problem with your premise is that you assume businesses are ready to even entertain the notion of “social business”. There are far more businesses that are still trying to wrap their heads around how to use social media to achieve strategic objectives than there are organizations ready to talk about full immersion of social media in the organization. 

That’s like taking the invention of the light bulb and saying okay, now we’re ready to run the infrastructure for global electricity. How about we figure out how to use the light bulb to light this room first?

So, with that, thanks so much for commenting. I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one.