is not to spend your day reading about what other people are having or lunch or – MUCH WORSE – reading their self-aggrandizing micro-press releases.

Last week, I worked with a client to figure out whether Twitter is a good fit for them. This is an organization with a small, incredibly dynamic and energetic staff. On one hand, Twitter could be an excellent tool for connecting with their membership and further illustrating the face that is already on their organization. On the other hand – they have absolutely no time to waste on a tool that can, admittedly, be a time-suck if you just walk into it without a goal or strategy.

Like any form of communication, Twitter is a medium, and its value (or lack thereof) lies in how you employ it.

Many organizations have rushed into the medium without a plan or even a definition of success. Even the (largely self-proclaimed) experts, consultants, marketing agencies, etc., have been guilty of spreading the gospel of the technology without supporting it with a strategy.

That’s probably why more than half of CMOs surveyed in a report published last month by Marketing Profs* weren’t sure of the return on their investment in the social web.

Another full 50 percent didn’t even know how to measure the return of a business blog.

(*To access the full article, you’ll have to register for a free account. Go ahead – it’s a good resource.)

As The Brandbuilder himself, Olivier Blanchard, keenly asserts: ROI is always measured in $$$. Money goes in, money comes out, and a profit or loss can be calculated.

So, if you have to make money with this thing, you look at your participation a little differently. The question changes from whether you should be on it, to whether it solves a problem that effects the bottom line(s). (For those who honor the triple bottom line.)

When you create a new membership brochure, make your website easier to use or expand the stock on your shelves, you have a financial goal in mind. More members. More conversions on the site. More sales. More money.

Whether it’s Twitter or a blog or Facebook or any other mode of communication, you should go into it knowing what problem you want it to solve and how you will measure its success.

Brian Solis gives the following examples of some problems Twitter/the social web can help solve:

I believe this is the direct result of a disconnect between social media activity and a clearly defined end game. We must establish what we want to measure before we engage. By doing so, we can answer the questions, “what is it that we want to change, improve, accomplish, incite, etc?”

Defining a clear strategy can help us reach our social media goals, including:

- Sales
- Registrations
- Referrals
- Links (the currency of the social web)
- Votes
- Reduction in costs and processes
- Decrease in customer issues
- Lead generation
- Conversion
- Reduced sale cycles
- Inbound activity

Those are all things that can be measured, and they all impact the financial health of your business or organization.

I stumbled across this excellent presentation on the difference between using social media tools and developing a social media strategy.

Too often, people in business and non-profits jump into the tools because someone on their board said they should be on FacebookTwitterYouTubeFlickr. Or someone read int he New York Times that social media is the way to go.

Anyone can integrate the tools, but without a clear strategy – including goals and measures of success – most of those folks end up using these mew media to do the same old (ineffective or downright annoying) push marketing. That’s the worst thing you can do in this space.