Lori Witzel, a newcomer to our community, asked me a good question the other day. “Did you get any phone calls? You left me hanging!”

You see, she had just read a blog post I wrote last year called “Social Media and the Big Conversation Fail.”  The summary of the story is that my entire view of social media relationships had been shaken when I realized somebody I had considered a social media “friend,” Jenn Whinnem, had cystic fibrosis.  I felt humiliated that I had not known this collaborator of mine suffered each day.  What kind of a friend is that?

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What is a Marketing Strategy and How Do I Get One

Without a lighthouse, how would ships (prior to GPS) know where landfall was? How would they know that they were headed in the right direction? What would have been their beacon? Think of your Marketing Strategy as a lighthouse… and not a GPS system. Businesses often make the mistake of confusing the two. See, a GPS will give you the exact directions to your exact destination with turn-by-turn accuracy, and while it would be nice if you could create a document/map for your business like this, it simply is not realistic in this day and age. A true Marketing Strategy is simply: a lighthouse. It’s a vision for where you business needs to be and how you’re going to get there (but we’re open to tweak and adjust on the journey).

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Most students of any business course are taught constantly about the importance of having a good Return on Investment. Whether that “investment” is measure in dollars or in time that you or your employees spend trying to do something, we are taught that the benefit must be tangible when it comes back to your business. The problem that many businesses have when it comes to social media is that the ROI is not as simple to measure as putting a discount code into a print ad and then counting the redemptions.

During a presentation at the World Business Forum last year, Charlene Li, bestselling author of “Groundswell” as well as the brilliant new business book “Open Leadership” and a leading mind in how social technologies can be used for business, talked about this in her short presentation to a global audience of business people. At one point she asked all the members of the audience to shake hands with the person next to them. Then she asked them to describe the ROI of that handshake. It was a nice example of where the measurement problem lies – because most of us are not used to quantifying the value of social relationships and conversations

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Mike Arrington at Techcrunch wrote a recent post based on a conversation with a venture capitalist in which that investor said:

“Consumer Internet entrepreneurs are like pro basketball players, they peak at 25, by 30 they’re usually done.”

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