Interestingly (to me at least)  I came across a post on LinkedIn the other day by Ashish Kulkarni titled

Does Social Media really work for businesses who are not a Social Media company? Or is it a fantastic waste of time and money?

Its interesting because its a question I’ve been asking myself a lot recently and its not helped by some supposed “experts” telling me things that simply aren’t true or quantifiable. You may for instance have been told to get involved with other peoples blogs because that creates a link on their site which points back to yours giving you a boost in search engine rankings. This is almost always not the case because virtually every blog now uses nofollow rules which mean search engines ignore their links in terms of rankings. I’m just going to breeze past the fact that Twitter was only publicly launched in August 2006 which was a month before Facebook opened its doors to anyone with an email address and that a maximum of 4 years can’t give you a large portfolio to base judgements on.

I have however ran into a few people who have shaken away a little of the dust from my scepticism on the matter. They’re the people who use good old fashioned copyrighting skills to produce engaging and researched material which despite the proliferation of content produced in 140 character long segments seems to be what a lot of people want to read.

I still like a quantifiable result, I’m probably a left-brainer. I like to put in place systems that make people work faster or easier, do something they couldn’t do before or simply safeguard their data which is often far more valuable than people realise. In the end I’m waiting for a social media company to show me a campaign that tracks its results and hopefully gives some hard, measurable results showing that it was effective. Maybe then I can answer Ashish’s question.