The promise of social media is Social Business Design – the use of tools and technology, not as the endgame, but rather as a means of aligning social media and business strategy.

A social culture shift has the power to elevate your organization by facilitating:

• internal/external connectivity
• the need to deeply understand your audience (the precursor to community development)
• a collaborative approach to managing your brand

But how do we get there?

The Next Step for Social Media

We’re in the early stages of social media strategy – there are still far too many practitioners preaching use of the tools without a connection to objectives, metrics, ROI…or fundamental business strategy.

How to we reach the goal of building social business models? Tom Webster at Brand Savant had some great thoughts in a recent blog post titled What’s Wrong with Social Media Strategy:

“Social media’s next act has to be through the corporate HR director’s door, and ultimately the CEO’s door. To get there, however, social media has to prove itself by more readily embracing effectiveness metrics (not just statistics) to raise its profile in the organization. Give the CEO the numbers to justify continued social media engagement, and that engagement will continue–and ultimately be the Trojan horse for what human business can become.”

What do you think? What are some of the challenges of delivering on the promise of social media?