Thanks for taking the time to comment – I greatly appreciate the feedback!

I definitely agree that there has been a great deal of “Fire. Ready. Aim.” when it comes to social media and strategy. Personally, I can't remember how many (too many) conversations I have had with business owners and C-level executives that started off with them telling me “We have to get on Facebook/Twitter!” only to have them admit that their desire was driven by an article they had recently read about social media.

But we are early in the learning curve and I am hopeful that we can learn and improve – intuitively social media makes sense but if we are investing limited business resources, it needs to make dollars and cents. (Sorry, that was a bad pun.)

Best,
Pat

I think social media such as blogs are great for softening the market and generating leads for BtoB. But you have to work at it and be honest about your objective.

The weakness of social media at this stage is the difficulty of tracking and proof that the social media strategy achieved the objective at an acceptable cost. We must work harder to reinforce belief with more actionable information. And therein lies the challenge.

As always, thanks for sharing! And I agree with you – I think 2010 will be a watershed year (for some) as they figure out how to leverage social media.