The surge of social media’s importance seems pretty obvious for marketers. It’s pretty hard to ignore when you see announcements like Facebook’s October announcement that monthly active users hit 1 billion or Twitter’s growing population with 72 million active accounts (who tweet at least 5 times a day) and 96 million accounts that have tweeted at least once in the last 30 days. Or the truly revealing data in The Social Habit that shows that 56% of the US population has an account on a social network. The amount of people on social networks is growing rapidly, but for many CEO’s that just isn’t enough to give full support to a marketing channel that has been hounded for lacking real ROI. In a study by the Fournaise Marketing Group, they found that 73% of CEO’s think marketers lack business credibility. The top reason is because marketers focus too much on the latest marketing trends such as social media, but can rarely demonstrate how these trends will help them generate more business for the company (74%). Smart CEO’s aren’t going to be wooed by growing user counts, but at the same time there is a lot of promise in social media that CEO’s need to understand. And it all connects to driving sales to the bottom line.