Social Media (SM) and Social Networking (SN) are all the rage and Marketers are spending time and money jumping on the bad wagon. But before you rush into rash decisions and build a blog or put your company’s image on Facebook for everyone to see, STOP! THINK! and PLAN!

The tools available in today’s Web 2.0 are attractive. However, they are just tools. No different nor any better than the tools you already have in your marketing toolbox. And like the tools you already have, they will do little to impress your CEO or your client, if they aren’t part of an integrated marketing plan. Think about it: If you are a hammer, you spend all your time looking for something to hit. If you are a blog, you spend all your time looking for readers. A hammer won’t build a house and a blog won’t build a business when they are the only tools used to achieve either of those objectives.

In a recent interview with CNET News, Adam Sarner, an analyst with market research firm Gartner, says that “over 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies with Web sites have undertaken some kind of online social-networking initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes. Fifty percent of those campaigns will be classified as failures.

“(Businesses) will rush to the community and try to connect, but essentially they won’t have a mutual purpose, and they’ll fail,” Sarner said.

Sarner is saying that businesses are unable to balance their interests with that of their customers. To that I add that too many marketers and consultants have become social media and social networking evangelists. It is a mistake to evangelize tools. Instead, we should be creating customer evangelists. To succeed, we need to create integrated plans, strategies and goals that meld traditional marketing with Web 2.0 tactics to achieve measurable goals, including ROI (return on investment as measured in revenues and profits not hits or links). It’s simple. It’s why we succeed in all that we marketers do, and why we fail miserably when we become tool managers instead of marketing leaders.

It’s natural to want to be seen as cutting-edge, which in today’s conversation age means having a blog and a social networking presence on LinkedIn, Facebook or Plaxo. But that presence likely will do more to annoy customers and potential customers if they are created absent a reason for being. Here, briefly, is how to create that reason before you jump into the deep, dark waters of Web 2.0.

Meld SM and SN into the Integrated Marketing Plan

Marketing Plans to be strategically focused must contribute to the overall company goals, not to meet departmental goals in a vacuum. Here are the questions you must ask and answer to meld Web 2.0 tools within your integrated maketing plan to achieve that goal:

• Who are your ideal customers? The ones who deliver the most value? What do they look like? What do they want and need?
• Where do those customers live online and how do we reach them, engage them in conversation?
• What should be the focus of a blog (or a social networking presence)? What content will be of interest to those readers who make up our ideal customers?
• How do we ensure that social media is seamlessly integrated with our other marketing tools?
• How do we drive those readers to our blog and then to our web site, using the blog as a way to interest them in our expertise because of the great content (conversation starters) we create on the blog?
• How do we create content that is not viewed as simply a marketing and sales vehicle?

The Bottom Line: Social Media and Social Networking are about content that readers want, need or desire. They are not tools to deliver marketing messages or sales pitches. They are designed to be about the reader, listener, viewer or visitor, not about us. They are not advertising tools nor or they direct marketing campaigns. They are pull, not push. And they will fail if they are not integrated and if they are not customer-centric, meeting or exceeding customers’ content wants and needs.

Recommendation: If you don’t have someone on staff who understands and is experienced with Web 2.0 tools,  don’t use them until you either hire someone who is or outsource to a consultant who can get you started in the right direction.

Why This Matters: X, with X being integrated planning, = Y, with Y being ROI. And in today’s lean times, those who fail to deliver Y will soon be victims of budget cuts. And without an objective, goals, strategies to meet those goals, and tactics (tools) to achieve the strategies, we shall perish, no matter the tools we use.