A debate is raging in the business community over the value of social media.

On the one hand, you have social media evangelists (like yours truly) proclaiming how social media can catapult virtually any business to a new level of success.

On the other hand, you have committed skeptics who see social media as frivolous or downright silly – a way to tell the world how much bacon you had for breakfast.

Who is correct? In all honesty, neither. Social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are tools. Tools in and of themselves cannot make anyone successful – it’s all in how you use them. So the question is, how well are you using the tools of social media? There’s no denying they work for some people. But why don’t they work for others?

One reason for failure in social media is giving in to the temptation to dabble. Whether or not you believe social media can help your business, you can’t deny it’s fun. How can you not to be taken in by the kaleidoscope of Facebook features, the hilarity of YouTube, the wild versatility of Twitter? Social media brings out the kid in all of us, and it’s hard to resist the temptation to play.

Tempting, yes. Good marketing – no! Dabbling is nothing new in marketing. It was – and still is – quite common for companies to dip their toe into direct mail, take a shot at telemarketing, and test the waters on print advertising without ever sticking to one program long enough to really find out if it works. What makes social media different is that you can dabble at the speed of light. Instead of trying three or four new marketing initiatives in a year, you can try thirty or forty in a day if you feel like it.

To compound the problem, the very people in a company who are attracted to social media and spearhead efforts to leverage it are the very people who are most susceptible to dabbling – the early adapters, the experimenters, the explorers, the curious, and the risk takers. What we need – and I say this in all seriousness and with respect – is for late adapters and the risk averse to jump on the social media bandwagon.

Marketing should be fun and by all means exploratory. However, in order to have bottom line impact, marketing needs to be disciplined and methodical – words that are not exactly mantras in the Twitosphere.

Any business, whether it employs one or 10,000, should approach social media with an experimental mindset. It’s necessary to explore all the applications these rich online networks offer. But behind the exploration, there must be purpose and design. Telling the world how much bacon you had for breakfast might be silly, or it might have real value. If you never stop to evaluate, you’re wasting your time. If you never give it a try, you’re squandering an opportunity.

To put some discipline into your social media marketing, to give you confidence that it’s working, try this.

  • Take one site at a time so you can understand it in depth
  • Pick two or three ways you want to be engaged on that site
  • Engage in those things as much as time permits
  • Measure results – the proper metrics will take shape as you engage
  • Evaluate what’s happened after three or four months
  • Keep engaging, and/or move on to the next site

Is this overly simplistic? Yes, I suppose so. But to my way of thinking, overcomplicating social media marketing is far more dangerous than oversimplifying it. You can always make a marketing program more complicated. But how easy is it to simplify an aspect of a business enterprise overgrown with activities, procedures, and entrenched habits? Pretty darn hard, if you’ve ever tried it.

Bottom line – Every time you do something on a social media site, ask yourself, Why am I doing this?

Over to You

So … why are you doing what you do in social media?

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