Unfortunately, few organizations are willing to invest the upfront time and money to develop a great plan. If you don’t plan, you can’t measure progress and use those metrics to improve performance over time. (Don’t get me started on all the ‘fakey’ results powerpoints people try to pass off…)

People just rush out and “do” without thinking things through and then wonder why their programs fail. You nailed it.

Marketing is still all about the people.

Geoff, brilliant!

Thanks for the link love Geoff.

That said, we’re in a sort of funny position where we have a pretty popular Facebook Page that’s not really sending along any web traffic. Which is totally fine, it’s been a great opportunity to talk to fans and make our brand more “real”, but it also requires a different metric to gauge success. But that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms.

I think one of the most damaging things is that when a company rushes headlong into social media because everyone else is doing it,and before they understand it, they risk turning themselves off of it completely because of early failure. And for a business that might truly be able to integrate social media into their work and create value, it’s a shame that an ill-fated leap without looking can undermine the impact of a potentially great tool.

Thanks for the great post.

Understanding whether your community even uses social media has got to be one of the first steps. We found that a customer survey was very helpful in determining which social networks (if any) our folks were using. With that knowledge we put it to work and it has paid back huge dividends.

/kff