Social Media Strategy? Again.

In the time since I posted my reflections on social media strategy, I’ve been jumped buy a few aficionados of the toolset who have been very insistent that it’s of critical importance for firms to have a social media strategy. But their arguments have reaffirmed the contrary.

Primarily, the counterargument addresses the (admitted) caveat: that in order for social media to be used, a firm must have developed an audience, and developing an audience requires a sequence of activities that are sustained over time. That is to say, it requires an plan and a program.

But not all plans and programs are strategic for all firms. You also need a plan and program to order office supplies so that the materials will be available when they are needed. But efficient acquisition of office supplies is not a strategic initiative for may firms – it is a necessary task, and an important task, but not strategic.

A second point of argument is that firms whose primary business is related to social media must take a strategic approach. Whether it is a media company that looks to gain an audience to earn revenue from advertisers or a market research firm that needs a large panel of users to provide data, establishing and maintaining a large pool of contacts is of strategic importance.

I will concede that point readily, but it is only in these instances where social media becomes strategic. In the same manner, an office supply company places strategic value on having the right items in its merchandise selection; but anyone who is not in that specific industry does not.

A third point of the counterargument likens social media strategy to IT strategy – that it is just as important. This is based on the hypothesis that IT strategy is important, which seems to have been swallowed as a matter of course, but which is also not necessarily true for the majority of firms.

IT strategy is like the office supplies strategy, and it suffers from the same problems: having a strategy for acquiring and provisioning workstations and servers, and their related software and systems, is a constant pain point for organizations. In firms that are overly devoted to IT strategy, workers can’t get the software they need to accomplish tasks related to the corporate strategy because it conflicts with the IT “strategy.”

So in this case, it may be true that the need for a social media strategy is, indeed, equal to the need for an IT strategy – but not in the way that it’s intended: from the truly strategic perspective, it’s just as unnecessary, and just as counterproductive, to set a strategy for a supporting service that conflicts with the strategy for the organization as a whole. There needs to be an over-arching plan to provide the resources that workers need, but when the plan is designed and executed in a way that denies the resources to those who need them, its utter lack of importance in comparison to truly strategic initiatives becomes obvious.

I don’t expect this is the end of the argument – aficionados of anything have a tendency to be persistent and impervious to logic – the discussion will likely go on. And it’s good and well that it should.