If you are given an assignment at work, say to create a presentation or to write a report, it is completely within the realm of that project and expected that you would spend time researching the topic and collecting stats, etc before just throwing something together and tossing it out there. You and your boss would have egg on your faces in the conference room if you just slapped some half-complete sentences on a PowerPoint slide and stood in front of the room pretending that you know everything. It’s SOP to do some homework first.
Well, the same holds true for the project called social media. But sadly, many companies are not doing due diligence because they have a pre-conceived notion about what Facebook means – or doesn’t mean – to their advertising or marketing campaign. They pick the youngest person in the office (because social media is for kids, right?) or the one who happens to have time (from the boss’s perspective anyway), and tells them to make it pay off within a few weeks. The boss doesn’t believe it will, and their plan is to prove it worthless and go back to business as usual. But they set it up to fail this way.
If that guy (or gal) quickly creates a page or two on the only social sites he’s heard of, starts announcing the company’s marketing blurbs and advertising slogans, and clicks a bunch of “we can get you 10 thousand followers by lunch” links, he’s going to do that boss a favor. He might as well buy 50 grand in radio spots and have them air silence, because in the long run the results won’t be all that different.
