This is one of my favorite segments from Harvard Business Review about Social Media written by : Andrew O’Connell and Susy Jackson (Directly copied and pasted for educational purposes).

“At some companies, there’s a misunderstanding about what social media is. Traditionally, managers were used to achieving business objectives in departments that make things, sell things, or manage money. While social-media activity is very easily measured, it has little in common with these core business functions.

Social media is a big-picture, interdisciplinary concept that covers an evolving set of digital methods through which stakeholders interact. These methods can become major marketing channels, customer-service delivery channels, and new ways of gathering intelligence. Internally, your team can use social technologies to share information, build relationships, and get work done. Much of this is profoundly important, yet intangible. Intangibles are the enemy of actionable metrics.

Our company used to generate extensive analytics reports. I realize in hindsight that we were looking at them the way we might look at a sales report, despite the fact that our traffic and membership numbers weren’t translating into sales. Vanity metrics are accurate, but irrelevant. Now we view social media as a toolbox that can help us achieve our tangible objectives — such as revenue, sales, customer retention, and growth. We design our social media metrics to reflect that.”