This post is a follow-up to “Why You Shouldn’t Say ‘99.5 Percent Of Social Media Experts Are Clowns.'” Reading it is a prerequisite of this post (sorry, the T.A. said so).

As I noted in the earlier post, Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) recently said in a TechCrunch interview that “99.5 Percent Of SocialMedia Experts Are Clowns.” This post represents a few thoughts on the issue (a majority of this post was originally an email).

As a quick recap, I stated, “The troublesome part of the ‘clown’ comment issue is that, from the outside, when we look at a brand’s social media tactics (their YouTube channel, Facebook page, messages on Twitter, whatever…), all we see are tactics. We have no idea what brand strategy that activity plays to. We have no idea how they want to leverage that activity to move to their next step in their strategy. We just don’t know. From an outside perspective, it’s easy to criticize.”

I agree with Gary’s statement. A large portion of the industry is fluffy b.s. with “experts” who still have much opportunity to improve (even with the basics, in some cases) and evolve (to be clear, I am not an expert.)

Regarding the ideas of conversation, community, the love-fest, etc… all of this is important. But only if it can demonstrate that it is helping to achieve business objectives. The fact of the matter is, all business activity eventually comes back to the bottom line. Socialhas introduced an entirely new process of what it takes to achieve objectives through calls-to-action in the user journey, but again, all the activities within that process are just tactics. With this in mind, the objectives of any business will shift as they evolve within platforms.

What that may mean in a strategy sense is that we could start out with an objective of “building community.” Then we could move to an objective of “engaging that community.” Then we could move to an objective of “leveraging the community for sales” (keep in mind that sales is just an example of one objective as the calls-to-action evolve).

This is why it is acceptable to state that social can sometimes require time to develop to the point that the social media activity is seen as beneficial for a brand; the brand must first build that channel (community) in order to be able to leverage it. In other words, if nobody is on my brand’s Facebook page, posting a link back to my site’s product page, or anywhere else for that matter, will not help achieve any worthwhile objective.

The stereotypical “zen” approach to social media activity is likely to be supplemented with campaign-driven calls-to-action. If that “zen” activity isn’t taking place for a brand, posting calls-to-action is not going to produce results, either. Now, that may differ a bit from a business model similar to that of LivingSocial because people do not have the expectation that the conversational aspect is going to take place. It doesn’t need to.

(I use metaphors sometimes, and “zen” is going to be used to refer to the conversational element of social media for this post. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.)

The conversation and associated community love-fest is not what is valuable in this instance. The offers/discounts are valuable enough that supplemental conversation is not needed to engage an audience. The offers/discounts, though, are for products/services of which the user has interest, so they see it as a value-item, and that’s all they want in the LivingSocial situation.

In most brand situations, thought, pushing only discounts simply doesn’t work with social media. We know this. When that happens, the result is that the brand is seen as spammy; the brand seems to not care about value in its online community.

So, is the conversational “zen” element important? Absolutely.

But how does the “zen” element fall into the overall strategy of a brand that is involved in social media? That’s the question that most marketers do not know how to answer when they go in front of the CMO, and the CMO is not willing to accept the idea that social media is successful because his brand’s Facebook page has 20,000 Page Likes or that they received 86 click-thru’s on the link that was posted yesterday.

This is where we see one major divide in the industry of social media right now. Most practitioners have no idea how to directly track social activity to a hard business objective, especially revenue. Is it possible? Absolutely. It’s been possible for years.

The fact of the matter is that most companies don’t do it because they don’t have the resources, or they don’t know how (and/or their digital and social strategists don’t know how). Keep in mind that this is not inclusive of simply comparing indirect activity trends (and I have no idea if that’s how you were inferring it, either). I am referring to being able to see data that shows the journey of user’s  from a third-party source (Twitter, Facebook, mobile device, display advertising, train station kiosk, etc.) to an owned brand site (or wherever the call-to-action is directed to take place – this could even be a buy-process within a Facebook app).

Without the data, and without taking actionable insight from that data, you’re dealing with hogwash. Social media’s value is demonstrated only when it is connected to a business objective. As was stated previously, the objectives are various depending on what it is that the brand wants to achieve for any particular initiative.

The difference between the “zen” aspect and the “data conversion” aspect is largely made up of the ability or inability to directly track user activity back to the bottom line. Of course, I am not talking about a brand jumping on Twitter and spamming the sh*t out of people to hope that a percentage of users click on the link and make a purchase. But in order for the “zen” to work, the payoff of that activity (a community) must be able to be demonstrated via data directly relative to the business objective.

On the same note of how social fits into the overall business, thinking of social media as silos of networks is dangerous. Social media for business isn’t about Facebook, YouTube, or Tumblr. It’s about meeting business objectives. Any one of those social sites could be part of achieving these, but it’s not about “knowing how to make a YouTube account.”

If a company wants to leverage social media, the company needs to focus on developing a strategy including tactics that will help meet its objectives; the toolsets and social networks used stem from that those objectives . If any particular social networks happens to have the necessary functionality, audience, tracking capabilities (or a number of other factors), then leverage them as appropriate.

Based on these thoughts, I agree with Gary that a large portion of social media folks have a lot of opportunity to improve. We all do. That will never change. Ever.

The main takeaway here is that we can use available technologies to see user journeys from social sites (or any digital platform, for that matter) to a buy-process (or any other digital call-to-action) on our owned web presences. Currently, most brands don’t. Be a trailblazer.

Do you currently have 360-degree digital measurement processes in place? What have your experiences been like so far?

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Brandon Prebynski helps companies build their business. He is currently the social media lead for a major tech company within global emerging markets. Brandon also hosts WebTrends.tv, featuring news, insights, and industry chats with thought leaders and influential personalities of the Web, Technology, and Pop Culture. You can find Brandon regularly contributing to industry-leading publications and books about digital strategy, emerging technology, and social media. Follow Brandon on Twitter (@prebynski), or find out more at his website.