...If you are employed in social media marketing, it is time for a healthy dose of reality followed by some serious soul searching and career planning. Some of you are lucky enough to work in the rare companies that create advocates with great products, service and mission and thus are equipped to leverage social media for marketing gain; most work at companies that have inflated their opportunities in the medium and are floundering with their social media marketing and content strategies.
Here's the way a large number of social media professionals today go about justifying their programs, along with some recent data that may (and should) scare the hell out of you if you work in social media marketing...
All I can say is that I never really did get 'on' this bandwagon in the sense of trying to milk it for money. I've always thought that most of what I saw/see on FB and Twitter is extremely silly bullshit Who has time for such stuff is hard for me to image...especially nowadays with the economy in the tank.
I've always thought that any kind of content should have some real value to the reader whether they're your customer or not. And furthermore that it should be just as much a type of self expression as anything else.
People will make a decision about whether or not they want to 'like' or 'follow' you based on the perception they get of you as a person...or, in the case of companies, by their impression on what the companies really stands for and what they 'do' (and how it benefits people).