It is a great point you bring up. Social media is a a marketing effort that requires both systems and measurements. It is also important to define the goal of your social media effort. Do you you want to generate web traffic to your site (most common)? Get them to e-mail you?
Once the goal is defined you need to make sure the downstream marketing will be there to deliver.
No later than morning I met with a builder who had revamped their marketing around their website. They felt that their current campaign was not driving enough real traffic to their communities... The billboard, print add and mailers were all focused on a URL.
The traffic to their site did pick up dramatically but they had not identified the quality of performance of their site. The bounce rate from their home page was 80% (eighty!) compared to an industry average of 45% to 50%. That increased traffic did result in some incremental grow in their leads but the bounce rate stayed the same. After $100,000's spent on marketing their site they are now working on their site... That was an expensive project.
So define your strategy and participate in Social Media once the piece are in place or t least are not working against you first.
Another point about social media is to avoid the Facebook, twitter etc... links on your landing pages it can drive traffic away from your site. Once they come to your site you need to make sure they get to see your product and give them a good reason to reach out and connect!

I like your post Ellen on time management. The bottom line is that we all have numerous projects in a day and so each person and/or company will need to strike a balance. Part of the balance is making it part of the web (spider) of our daily process. All strands work in harmony for an ultimate goal. For a spider its lunch, for us its success in our business model.

@Frederic I am going to agree with almost everything you said except the part about social media links on your landing page. Your ability to continue to connect with visitors to your site is partially dependent on them reaching out to learn more about you with these social media tools. I am not sure exactly what you meant by that statement, but I am just sharing with you my thoughts.
Thanks for the post Ellen

@Jonathan
you bring up a valid point here. What I am saying is that having a link to your social media does not necessarily belong on the landing page.
It is hard enough to get people to drill down into your site as it is. Adding more ways for them to leave your site can be a detriment to what business your web traffic generates.
Let's say visitor A comes to your site and sees you have a fanpage, they click on it. This has them logged in to their facebook account (most browser do that automatically) and an alert that there is a message from a friend shows at the top. They go read that message. Now your community site is 3 pages ago...
Social media links do belong in the site as a way to further the experience/ the research in my view. Nevertheless I would place a priority to have the visitor come deeper into the site and see our product.
Once inside the site then place some links to your social media pages or even make that it's own page... (my favorite - visit our social media pages or on the contact us page) and see how many visitors go to that page to find out about you through social media.
My advice is to try it both ways over periods of time and measure the differences that do or don't exist with the traffic patterns in your site. My only point here is to bring awareness of the risk that having a distraction such as a facebook link on front page can cause and how it can impact your web traffic and therefore you actual website effectiveness. Each will have a different strategy when it comes to that I just feel it is important to understand these unwanted side effects that can be created...

I think this is a great perspective to explore! On one side of the issue, managers could be concerned that there is too much time being spent on social media efforts. On the other side, a strategy may be rolled out, but the minimum necessary time is not being spent to make the strategy effective.
I'm a fan of being able to measure and collect data to better enable teams to make the best possible decisions about next steps. I'm looking forward to hearing about how this monitoring technology works, and how it may change the way we approach our strategies.

I think that the question of if site people will follow through depends on (at a minimum) 2 big factors.

1.) Do they grasp the purpose and potential of social media activity?
and
2.) Are they receiving enough support in their daily tasks to have enough time to allow them to participate?

If the answer to both is yes then you have the formula for success...if not then...well...

Teams definitely need a strategy. You can't just wing it out there. Start out small. When we first launched our blogs we asked our teams to post just once a week. Doing something is better than nothing, but you also need to make sure that the time you do dedicate is not in waste. I don't believe content just for the sake of content is the best approach, but there is no cookie cutter approach so to each their own.

Hi Ellen,
For us to think that the site teams will follow through on Social Media initiatives likely isn't viable, based on the complaint that we still can't figure out how to consistently answer the phone, which has been around a lot longer, and whole companies have surfaced to measure and track that, to no avail, otherwise we would all be much better at it.

On a less sarcastic note, we look monthly at some basic numbers, and results we are or are not achieving with our digital assets. Did we grow the numbers. If no one is reading your blogs, if there are no comments on your blogs, if you aren't adding fans to facebook, if there are no conversations on your fan page and no increase of followers to your twitter account, you can assume that your Social Media Program isn't working.

We focus less on what our staff is or isn't doing and tie our Social Media Marketing initiatives to results and numbers. It is remarkably more easy to manage that way, and requires less time arguing and convincing folks of what they are to do each day.