It was a precipitous and entirely avoidable fall.

Liz Claiborne broke the first commandment of branding: Be true to your clients and yourselves.

Claiborne made its name by designing stylish career wear for the millions of women, particularly younger women, entering the workforce. Their pieces were consistently styled and well made, delivering a specific brand promise to the women who stocked their closets with Claiborne ensembles that could be mixed and matched to create multiple outfits from a handful of separates.

Claiborne developed a loyal and trusting following of women who appreciated her collections. But with her retirement from the company in 1989, the brand began to suffer. There was no designer who shared Liz Claiborne’s design aesthetic and without a design leader, the company regressed to a financial leader whose focus was the bottom line, not the hemline.

Design by committee emerged, diluting the Claiborne brand promise in a fruitless pursuit of the youth culture. Their working women loyalists took notice and turned their backs on uninspired and confusing Claiborne collections that were considered fashion forward but not geared toward working women, the brand’s core constituency.

The dispiriting Claiborne story was in sharp contrast to the story that Jay Greene recounts in his book Design is How it Works. Porsche has remained remarkably successful in an industry that has few perpetually thriving automakers. Porsche attributes their success to an unyielding devotion to the design principles encompassed in the very first 911 that debuted in 1963.

Since their very first car, Porsche has remained true to its design DNA by incorporating specific design cues – intakes instead of a radiator grill, a car that always tapers to the rear, open wheel rims to display the strong brake calipers, front fenders always higher than the hood, ignition always on the left of the steering wheel and vertically oriented dashboards – that support their vision of a car that is all about driving performance and authenticity.

Porsche has never varied from a design approach that produces cars that their own designers crave. They never cut corners. They never adopt trends that risk the company’s credibility. And they never try to appeal to everybody.

Porsche designers intuitively understand the desires of their most passionate drivers and develop new cars with them in mind. Liz Claiborne took a different tack and abandoned their brand promise and with it their most loyal clients in pursuit of a younger, more active customer. They alienated their most loyal customers without generating any traction with the fickle and trend conscious youth market who want nothing to do with the company who makes clothes for their mothers.

Porsche has had an endless string of hits, including their Boxster, Cayman, Cayenne and Panamera and reported record profits in 2009. Liz Claiborne has virtually ceased to exist. Breaking your brand promise appears to have severe repercussions. If only the Claiborne executives drove Porsches, they’d understand.

How many other successful brands have hastened their corporate demise by abandoning their core principles and their most loyal customers? Sadly, I’ll bet it’s long. Real long.

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Alec’s approach was so simple and so direct, that it will undoubtedly be copied frequently by other job seekers. And why not? It was imaginative, it was unique and it worked. No reason others shouldn’t push the same envelopes in their job search endeavors as well and take full ownership of their personal brand and determine precisely how it’s presented.

For those imaginative small business owners, you can do the exact same thing when preparing to meet with a client who needs SEO or social media services. Buy the Google adwords for their company name a few days ahead of your meeting. Then, during your pitch, ask them to Google themselves and see your pitch for their precise needs at the top of the page. They’ll wonder how you got the top position, they’ll be impressed that you know how to manipulate the page rankings and you’ll have demonstrated your capacity to outimagine your competitors.

Bottom line, for a few dollars and a few minutes of your time, you and your firm can appear distinctive and memorable. And that’s always a good thing.

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If your business engages in unethical or inappropriate behavior, then you have legitimate reasons to worry about the potential negative impact of social media since social media doesn’t camouflage your true identity, it reveals it.

However, if your concern centers around the potential reaction to typical business slip-ups and oversights, then you really have nothing to worry about as long as you demonstrate immediate empathy and care for your clients. And when you make a mistake, as everyone does, follow these simple, proven rules:

1. Apologize. If you screwed up, simply acknowledge your mistake and say you’re sorry. We all  make mistakes every day. And we deal with companies that make mistakes every day. We understand that mistakes are inevitable. However, we expect that if you make a mistake that you will acknowledge it and proffer a sincere apology. Your apology isn’t an invitation to sue you or embarrass you, it’s simply an acknowledgement of societal norms that require the acceptance of responsibility for one’s actions.
2. Resolve to fix the mistake. The apology is a great start, but the problem still remains. You screwed up. You sent the wrong product. You didn’t deliver your proposal on time. You overcharged on your invoice. Whatever you did (or failed to do) still needs to be corrected. So, step up and tell them how you intend to fix the problem and ask them if that effort is satisfactory.
   One of the biggest mistakes I see companies make is offering a solution that benefits them, but not the client. If you failed to deliver your product on time, it’s your responsibility to overnight the product, to get it there as fast as you can. I don’t care if you have to eat the extra shipping costs. I expect you to do the right thing, even if it’s inconvenient or expensive. That’s how you show you really care about fixing your failure.
   If you offer to fix the problem, and your client says “that’s not good enough,” then you’ve got to work with the client to determine exactly how you can make things right.
3. Fix it. Steps 1 and 2 are actually pretty easy. You say you’re sorry and offer to fix the problem. The tough part is actually fixing the problem since this is your final chance to ensure that your relationship isn’t significantly harmed. If you promise to overnight a spare part, you’d better make sure that the part is put in a box, is properly labeled and is handed off to FedEx. Don’t delegate, do it yourself.
4. BONUS STEP: Follow up. Once you’re sure that the problem has been resolved exactly how you promised, make a follow up call (not a tweet or email) to let your client know how important they are and to demonstrate your care and concern. I know that your first reaction will be to ignore the problem rather than revisit it, but you’ll actually enhance your reputation by confronting it, ensuring that it’s resolved and proving your value as a reliable and caring business partner. Pick up the phone.

Typically, it’s best to take the conversation off-line while you’re addressing a client’s problems. After you reach out to them online to let them know that you heard their complaint and that you want to take care of the problem, suggest that they contact you through a Twitter direct message, an email or a phone call so your conversations and ultimate problem resolution remain private.

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Although most of the public missed the online contretemps, last week Nestle Corporation’s Facebook Fan Page was essentially hijacked by Greenpeace activists and supporters protesting Nestle’s use of palm oil and its associated destruction of the rainforest.

Techguerilla provides a handy timeline detailing the escalation of hostilities between Greenpeace activists and Nestle’s Facebook administrator that ultimately degraded into social media warfare.

What lessons can your business learn from Nestle’s Facebook surrender?

You should expect organized attacks from your critics on your social media platforms so you need to prepare your crisis response in advance. Although you might think that you own your Facebook page or Twitter account and hashtag, the community actually has the power to dictate the content of conversations revolving around your brand.  What you can control is your response and your message. You should have a crisis response team identified and prepared to respond to likely attacks before they ever happen. You know where your weaknesses are, and so do your critics, so plan for the worst.

You may not be able to convert the mob, but you can rally your supporters. Although the Greenpeace activists essentially hijacked Nestle’s corporate Fan Page, Nestle still had the capacity to respond and plead their case to their true fans. While they did post a link to a detailed and persuasive written corporate response, it lacked the impact of the Greenpeace videos and unrelenting attacks. Large corporations don’t have to respond with lawyer approved communications, they elect to. And when they do, they don’t look social or engaging, they look monolithic and impersonal. If you elect to participate on social media platforms, you need a social strategy and trained social media participants.

Utilize the power of the social medium to engage socially. Nestle never put a human face on their corporate response. Nobody knows who the inept Facebook administrator was, they had no identified corporate employees respond and they failed utterly in dealing with angry posters, fostering relationships with supportive advocates or engaging their critics.

What could Nestle have done differently, acknowledging that they didn’t have a crisis plan in place, once the attack began?

1. Respond immediately and cordially. Nestle’s lack of an experienced community manager may have precipitated this entire battle. Their early combative tone and snarky responses fueled anger on their Facebook page and enabled the conflict to attain viral status.
2. Convene an internal crisis response team to review the attack and anticipate their next move. Once the conflagration started, Nestle should have assembled a response team of social media managers, corporate communications and marketing executives to strategize their response and look ahead to anticipate their critics’ likely next step.
3. Shift their focus to engaging the attackers and trying to find common ground for resolution (Olivier Blanchard makes an excellent case for reaching out to Greenpeace rather than combatting them). Nestle’s Facebook page isn’t a battlefield, and they can’t vanquish their foes. Their best course of action isn’t direct and repeated confrontation, but negotiation and appeasement. Had they reached out to Greenpeace to discuss how they could work together to solve the environmental problems they could have mitigated much of the continued anger. Neither side benefits from continued digital warfare, so find a way to reach accommodation.
4. Determine the appropriate message and medium for continued conversation. Nestle responded to their critics with brief statements and a link to a more detailed corporate response. They never leveraged the power of the visual medium to communicate their position. This wasn’t a time for press releases.
5. Prepare video responses to put a human face on the issue and to communicate their corporate commitment as concerned employees, not a compassionless multi-national corporation. Take a page out of Toyota’s response to potentially life-threatening concerns with their cars and respond with video. Toyota put up a series of videos dealing head on with the issues being covered in the media, with corporate spokespeople standing up to defend their position and address specific concerns. Additionally, they recruited independent safety experts and engineers as supporters. Nestle had the same opportunity to respond and defend their position and demonstrate to their fans that they care about the accusations and take seriously their role as environmental stewards. They had a strong case to make, but they never made it effectively.

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The same difficulties frequently arise in marketing and social media programs that rely on intricate and detailed plans but fail to account for cultural realities and ingrained behaviors.

Businesses aren’t sterile case studies. They’re collections of individuals who collaborate around a single purpose. And they typically adhere to the values espoused and demonstrated by their company’s leader, not by a lofty mission statement.

Although you may want every company to demonstrate the customer service attitude of Ritz Carlton, the friendliness of Southwest Airlines, the ingenuity of Apple and the thrift of Wal-Mart, that’s simply not the world we live in. Companies frequently disdain customer service, disregard their employees and customers and focus myopically on preserving a rigid and unresponsive business model.

The difficulty in planning a social media strategy for companies that are controlling, insular and generally unresponsive is that social media doesn’t camouflage their true nature, social media reveals it.

When working recently with a large company in devising and executing a social media strategy, I was confronted with conflicting realities. On one hand, the company seemed eager to exploit the potential of social media in reaching their target audience frequently and inexpensively, but on the other hand, the company’s culture incorporated autocratic control, restricted authority among their staff, lacked any feedback mechanisms and romanticized reliance on historical business processes.

A social media program, no matter how carefully designed, wasn’t going to change any existing cultural artifact. In fact, a successful social media rollout would actually have the potential to damage the company’s reputation by revealing its weaknesses to an audience previously shielded from the company’s true nature.

How can you predict social media failure?

1. Obsession with control – many companies believe that as long as they can control their message, they control their brand and, ultimately, their destiny. Social media shifts control to the participants, not the originator of the message. Companies can listen, engage, converse and interact, but they cannot impose control.
2. Unwilling to commit people to the program – your clients have no desire to develop a relationship with your company. Companies are, by their nature, impersonal entities. However, they may be willing to engage with individuals within your company, as long as those individuals contribute something to the conversation. These relationships take time to develop and rarely deliver immediate results. If nobody is devoted to the program, the program withers and dies.
3. Management views social media platforms as time drains – every office tool can be a time drain if the employee misuses it. They can chat with friends on the phone, they can while away hours in the Internet and they can even waste each other’s time in mindless conversation. Facebook is no different. If your employees use it as a tool, it can deliver results. If they use it to connect with high school buddies, you have a management problem, not a social media problem.
4. Think only in terms of pitching – if management hears the word “marketing” and immediately envisions another channel to pump out self-serving sales pitches, they’re doomed. The “social” component of social media is overriding, yet frequently ignored.
5. Management refuses to participate – It’s not a good sign when senior management refuses to participate in any way on any of the social media platforms. The message this sends to their employees is that social media is irrelevant or unnecessary to management and hinders adoption throughout the organization.
6. Users restricted to certain subjects – As a corollary to controlling the message, if users are restricted from engaging in open conversations and required to deal only with specific topics under unyielding rules, then they’re eliminating the human component and diminishing the effectiveness of the conversation.
7. Social media participation isn’t tracked or measured – It’s universally accepted that companies will get more of anything that they measure, and when they refuse to measure staff participation in social media, they’re sending the message that it’s not that important. The result is preordained: limited participation and effectiveness.

There is no getting around it – when strategy confronts culture, culture wins every time. If your company culture is too rigid, controlling and unresponsive to support an effective social media program, the best solution is to pursue your standard marketing tactics and ignore the social media channels entirely. No participation is eminently preferable to desultory participation.

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Mirroring the explosive growth of Twitter and Facebook has been the excitement  of companies eager to exploit what they see as another marketing platform able to reach targeted individuals at virtually no cost. Company after company set up Twitter identities and Facebook Fan Pages that immediately began broadcasting endless pitches for their products and services.

These clumsy and ineffectual efforts were summarily followed by claims that these social media platforms were a waste of time for companies trying to build their business and attract customers. But what these companies failed to recognize was that most consumers simply aren’t looking to engage most companies online. We’re already overwhelmed with marketing messages and have no desire to open another advertising pipeline right to our desktop.

That doesn’t mean that social media participants won’t interact with companies, but they’ll to it on their terms and on their time, not yours. This shift in the balance of power to the consumer necessitates a shift in communications strategy for your company. Your focus can no longer be solely on your outbound message but now must recognize and accommodate the need for two-way communications that integrates customer service, not just sales.

So, what are the new rules?

1. become an active listener. Conversations are going on all day that mention your company by name. You need an active listening outpost that captures these conversations and funnels them to the appropriate internal people to respond. Is someone having a problem with your product? Contact them to see how you can help. Send them a link to an owner’s manual. Put them in touch with your company’s 800 support number. Link them to their local retail outlet where they can get the help they need.
   Is someone ranting about your product and claiming that you suck? You have two choices: let them rant and spread their vitriol across the web or step in and attempt to defuse their anger. Will you convert all the ranters to raving fans? Probably not, but without an active listening strategy, these rants will occur without your influence and they will all end badly for you.
2. involve listeners throughout your organization. Most organizations plan only to listen with sales personnel, eager to jump on any mention of their company as a sales opportunity. However, most companies will find that customer service will be a larger priority for those mentioning your company by name. Make sure you have people actively listening and ready to respond from customer service, product development, your executive suite and even your legal and HR departments.
3. respond immediately. Your 800 number is staffed and answered at least during your business hours, and so should your social media channels. You can’t impose communications methods on your clients. They’ll let you know how they want to get in touch with you. Some will phone, some will email and some will contact you through Twitter. It’s your job to be ready to respond immediately no matter how they contact you.
4. empower listeners to resolve problems. If you assign an employee to monitor customer service issues on Twitter, it’s essential that you empower them to resolve the issues that they encounter. There’s nothing more frustrating than dealing with a nameless, faceless and voiceless person who does nothing more than take your name for someone else to deal with tomorrow. Responding with immediacy simply magnifies the customer’s frustration if you instantly tell them that there’s nothing you can do.
5. apologize. accept responsibility. tell them how you’ll solve their problem. Face it, there are times when your customer has legitimate complaints about your company, product or service. It’s unavoidable. Your customers don’t expect perfection, but they do expect you to apologize for their troubles, accept full responsibility and then tell them exactly how you’re going to make things right. And then do it. It’s not complicated, but it’s amazing how few companies get it right.
6. continue the conversation until the customer determines it’s over. I tweeted this week about problems I had with a Sony Reader ebook. A phone call to their support line that took nearly an hour could have been reduced to a minute or two if the support rep had simply asked the right question first: Do you have a Mac or a PC? I was annoyed and frustrated and vented in a tweet that was read by someone at Sony. To their credit, they responded:
   Sorry to hear you’re having a bad experience. What is going on? Can we help?
   I sent them a reply and then… nothing. But I wasn’t done yet. I still wanted to know how they’re addressing the issue of Mac users who cannot upgrade their firmware and therefore cannot use their latest Reader software. Instead I got silence. My conclusion: they don’t have the capacity to deliver exceptional user experiences and their half-assed Twitter response just confirms my perception of their company.
7. don’t forget marketing fundamentals. There is no better time to cement a customer relationship than after you reach out to help them solve a problem. Even if the problem wasn’t entirely solved, you have the ability to appease them if you send them a coupon for your online store, enroll them in your Customer VIP program or register them in your free online training program. You rarely have person-to-person contact with your customers, so don’t blow it. Do something to delight them and remain memorable for all the right reasons.

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It’s time to counter a growing sentiment among social media types – including some nationally recognized practitioners who really should know better  - that trying to justify your company’s decision to pursue a social media strategy based on ROI is somehow foolish.

Now, these same high priests of social media don’t ever suggest a better alternative or method to determine whether or not your company should pursue a social media strategy, they just insist that you’ve got to do social media because it’s just so darn important, and besides your competitors are.

If their argument sounds like your teenager’s argument insisting that you’ve just got to let him stay out til 2am because everyone else is doing it, well, you’re right.

However, unlike gullible parents, the executives who make investment decisions aren’t easily duped, they don’t jump on every trendy b-school bandwagon and they’re not scared of your newfangled technology. They want more than breathless claims. They want proof.

Twitter is that thing Ashton Kutcher and Oprah play with. Facebook is the place where their teenagers waste their entire evenings. And your preoccupation with these platforms doesn’t convey cutting edge marketing savvy as much as it does pointless obsession.

If you want corporate buy-in and investment, you’ve got to demonstrate how your social media strategy will generate positive returns for the company. In real dollars, with real timelines.

The ROI opponents claim that there’s simply no way to really measure ROI. After all, they claim, How can you put a dollar value on a blog post, a blog comment, or a single tweet? As if that level of granularity is the measure that anyone is looking for.

Or they simply attempt to redefine a financial metric that has been commonly defined and routinely accepted for decades.

Reading just a few recent posts by legacy ROI opponents, I’ve seen ROI redefined as:

• Return on Impact
• Return on Impressions
• Return on Importance
• Return on Influence

And, my personal favorite for its absurd complexity and impenetrable formula: ROI should really be referred to as Return on Conversation whose formula is:

(B • I) (m+s • r)/d] / [O/(b + t + e)]

Brand Equity times the Intent of Communication times (Message plus Suitability times Reach) divided by Sustainability OVER Outcomes divided by the Cost times (the Budget plus Time to Produce plus Experience)

I believe the result is actually measured in Schrute Bucks.

The reality is that ROI is much simpler than that. You only need to know two numbers: how much you gained from your investment, and the total cost of the investment itself. That’s it.

ROI = (Gain – Cost) / Cost

If you spent $1000 and saw an increase in sales of $1500, then your ROI was:

ROI = (1500-1000)/1000 = 50%

I think I know where the disconnect is. Social media engagement typically generates an action that is non-financial in nature. You collect Twitter followers, generate retweets, get comments on your blog, add new Facebook fans, attract YouTube viewers or generate click-throughs to your website.

However, These aren’t ROI. How do I know? Because my banker won’t take Twitter followers in lieu of a check. Clear enough for you?

I don’t want to diminish the importance of engagement with your clients and your prospects. I’m a huge adherent of social media and I recognize its transformative potential, but only if it’s used strategically, with specific objectives that you can track and measure.

ROI doesn’t become ROI until it does one of two things: increases revenue or reduces costs. Those are financial impacts that are real, measurable and put a grin on your CEO’s face.

Determining ROI isn’t a laughing stock metric in the corporate world. Calculating potential ROI demands that you create a strategic plan, consider alternatives and project likely actions and returns from your program. It compels you to define precisely your plan’s objectives, put them down on paper and support them when challenged.

Simply saying that we need a social media program because our competitor has a social media program is absurd. What if their program is drains their  marketing budget without any noticeable effect? Do you want to copy that?

If you want funding, you need to justify your program with more than intemperate claims that we’ve just gotta do something. What’s your goal? To increase revenue or decrease costs? How will you do it? Who will be involved? How much time is necessary to invest? What technology platforms will you support? How will your program fit into your current operational structure? What do you want your conversational partners to do? How will your success be tracked and measured?

If you don’t know the answers, you don’t deserve the funding. Social media marketing is no different from any other marketing, it just uses new channels and has interactivity built-in. If you can’t tell me how you intend to leverage the medium and generate a positive return you can always try again next quarter after you learn.

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They could write a powerful and inspirational mission statement professing their devotion to essential core values and tout their commitment to clients and community.

In a word, they could lie.

They were able to craft their own deceit because there was no simple, inexpensive and effective way for any single customer to counter their message. What’s a wronged airline passenger to do when the airline bumps you from a flight, loses your luggage or confines you for hours on a frozen tarmac? Before social media, you simply had to take it. Grudgingly, angrily and frustratingly you simply had no ability to counter the beatific corporate message.

Not anymore.

If there’s any aspect of your business that sucks, you can expect these deficiencies to be magnified, not eliminated, through the effective deployment of social media.

While many large companies believe that they can continue to manage and control their message through social media channels, they’re in for a rude awakening. The explosion of social media platforms and their rapid embrace as a tool of retribution by an increasingly savvy and knowledgeable public means that they control your message, not you.

Want proof? United Airlines – with annual revenues of $17 billion and a massive marketing budget – could not control their corporate message when confronted by a single implacable passenger with a broken guitar. When Dave Carroll, a Canadian musician, could not get satisfaction from United for their baggage handlers breaking his guitar he wrote a clever song, shot a video and posted United Breaks Guitars to YouTube where it has accumulated over seven million views and nearly 25,000 negative comments from similarly disgruntled passengers.

While Dave Carroll’s effort received international attention, there are thousands of similar stories emerging every day on blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages. Legitimately unhappy customers who are simply fed up with poor service, lousy products and an uncaring or inattentive company and who decide to let everyone know exactly how rotten you are.

Social media has permanently shifted the balance of power from deep pocketed corporations to passionate and sophisticated social media participants. Got flaws? You’d better fix them.

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The explosive growth of Facebook and its use for both personal and professional networking has revealed some cautionary tales from individuals who didn’t anticipate the damaging potential of too-familiar, vulgar or offensive profile content.

The destructive potential of an artless profile was revealed last week in a post written by Cleveland blogger clevelandsaplum. Her post detailed a candidate search for an addition to their public relations staff. After the first round of interviews, one candidate stood out as the clear favorite. But when the staff did a quick Google search and checked out his public Facebook profile, he lost any chance of being invited back.

Visible to anyone with access to Facebook, and shielded from no one was this stunning paragraph:

About Me:
I am awesome. I run sh**. I had relations with your girlfriend, and yes I got it on tape. I scoff at those less fortunate than me (read: everyone else). I tend to laugh at the handicapped as well as foreigners. I am a firm believer that women are without a doubt the weaker sex. I know more than you. I am a ridiculously huge deal. I’m utterly gorgeous, you (most likely as a result of terrible genes or an unfortunate run-in with the business-end of a shovel) are not. I make fun of ugly people, because they are ugly and they deserve it. My social life is clearly something that you will never experience because you are ugly, unpopular, or a severe combination of the two. I throw sh** onto my neighbor’s porch because I am better than them and they can’t do sh** about it. My friends are also better than you and they will let you know it. I break other people’s stuff. I do whatever I want without any regard for the repercussions. I intentionally ruin the environment via littering, not recycling, and other harmful action. I am an ass****.

Although it’s likely that this individual was attempting to be sarcastic and humorous, his description was highly offensive to those who viewed it within the company and it raised flags concerning his judgment and discretion. And in a heated competition with a dozen other qualified applicants, this was reason enough to eliminate him from consideration.

Now, go check out your own social media profiles and see if you’ve written anything that could offend or concern a potential hiring manager.

Then read these instructions to sanitize and protect your online reputation. Customize your privacy settings to restrict access to your personal information. Segregate all of your contacts into different lists, each with differing levels of access to your updates and photos. At a minimum, you should have a Personal list for your closest friends and a Professional list that allows you to connect with professional contacts but doesn’t grant access to all the intimate details of your life. Prevent photos tagged with your name from appearing in anyone else’s feed unless you specifically approve it. And restrict your personal updates solely to your close, personal friends.

Take control of your personal brand and online reputation before you become a cautionary tale yourself.

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He attracted dozens of comments from supportive readers who share his distaste for the MBA scourges who dominate corporate America and insist on facts, data and analysis to support requests for capital investment. After all, we all know that social media is good, strong relationships are beneficial, and any effort we can make to become closer to our clients should be pursued. Unless you do it wrong.

You see, there’s a burr under this social media saddle. If you do it wrong, you can irritate your prospects, alienate your clients and permanently damage your personal and company reputation.

When your CEO asks for an ROI of your social media marketing program, what he is asking for is a strategic plan and analysis of likely outcomes. Without the plan, you and your marketing/social media staff may simply leap into the social media void and flail around aimlessly, without clear objectives or measurable goals. Sure, you’ll be able to brag about the number of Twitter followers you have and the percentage of retweets you generate, but what have you really accomplished?

I admire many of the marketing activities that David has pursued over the past several years. And I agree that his approach – creating interesting, entertaining and highly useful content and then giving it away – is successful for many people and companies. But not all.

It obviously works for David. How do we know? Because he tracks the ROI of his activities. He knows that when he posts a controversial blog entry that gets commented upon across the web he generates more traffic, increases his search engine visibility, receives more comments, and sells more books. Activity = increased revenue. ROI.

The straw man in his argument is his assumption that establishing ROI requires that one track the value of every tweet, blog post, Facebook entry or YouTube submission and then generate a value of that singular activity. No one is asking that anyone do all that to prove the effectiveness of a social media program. No company can get that granular in their analysis.

However, we can demand that marketing departments have a strategy in place and mechanisms established to measure the success of that strategy. If you are going to produce and disseminate free content, you need to know what type of content you need to produce. Videos? Podcasts? Slideshows? Webinars? White papers? Interviews? And where will they be available? On your corporate website? On your blog? On your Facebook Fan Page? On all of them? Then you need to track, analyze and adapt. If the downloads of your white papers overwhelm the views of your online videos, then get busy producing more white papers. But how would you know any of this if you didn’t prepare to measure the effectiveness of your efforts?

And then what are your next steps? How do you extend the relationship with the individual who downloaded your white paper? Do you ask them to become a Twitter follower so you can engage them online? Do you ask that they join your Facebook Fan Page so they can gather even more useful content? And to what end? At some point, your actions/their reactions/the non-financial impact must convert into a financial impact or what’s the point? (hat tip to Olivier Blanchard at http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/)

If you can’t convince your CEO that you have a plan to increase revenues or reduce your costs, then you don’t deserve the investment. Don’t blame their fear of your social media prowess or resistance to trying something new. Their understanding of business fundamentals hasn’t changed. Prove the value of your ideas. Something David’s Harvard Business School audience should understand, even if David doesn’t.

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