I’ve been getting frustrated the past few weeks after hearing stories of people and organizations launching a new Facebook group or adding a blog to their website and claiming to be taking part in the new world of social media. The problem isn’t the fact that they are making an effort or getting involved, it’s that they are taking these actions in isolation without considering how the actions fit into their organizations broader strategic goals and objectives and creates member value.

In order for social media, or any other tool, technology, program, etc., to be successful it needs to be part of a larger plan or strategy. So what is social media? To me, it’s a means to an end, not an end in itself. I found this recent quote from Valeria Maltoni’s Blog: Conversation Agent to be extremely relevant, timely and similar in sentiment:

“Social media is a tool, just like the telephone is. It’s not even marketing — in the traditional sense, marketing is dead.

What social media does is simply allow you to do one thing: communicate. That’s it. Social media is not the conversation. It’s the room in which you hold the conversation. It still comes down to saying, doing, or producing something valuable for your customer. Companies which forget this will simply throw money down the social media hole. Companies that get it will find social media a valuable tool — if they they are prepared to stick it out and learn how it works.”

The first sentence warrants repeating: “social media is a tool.” Of the many definitions that exist for the term “tool” one of them is: “the means whereby some act is accomplished”. The challenge with having a variety of tools at your disposal is knowing how to chose the right tool for the task. More literally, you can hammer a nail into a wall with a screwdriver, but wouldn’t it be a lot more efficient and effective if you used a hammer instead. If you subscribe to Valeria’s thinking, which I do, social media is simply a tool that enables a conversation to take place. To take this a step further, conversations are the fundamental building blocks of community, because it having a conversation implies having something to talk about like a shared interest.

While I am not trying to downplay the impact or criticize social media in general, I do want to call into question the way people and organizations are leaping into the use of it without considering the implications and obligations of doing so. The broad availability of these tools and lack of the typical barriers to entry further exacerbate the temptation to leap before you look. There are short and long term considerations that need to be weighed and balanced related not only to the what, but also the why and how. There is definitely room for experimentation, trial and failure, and doing things differently, but I think the fundamental rules of business still apply - know your market, provide value to your stakeholders, make your service/product easy to use, focus on the benefits - however, if you fail to plan, plan to fail.

You don’t have to have a perfect vision of the future in mind to be successful but you have to have a general idea of where you want to go or you’ll never be sure that you have gotten there. Let’s start thinking deliberately about what we are trying to accomplish and how we are trying to do accomplish it instead of throwing ideas out with no expectations or criteria for success. Anybody can launch initiatives that attract a large percentage of their member-bases, but it takes real strategy, focus and commitment to create viable communities that are sustainable and create value for the member and the organization alike.