Do you think a social media strategy is important?

I think that if social media as a strategy is a form of electrifying and digitizing the proverbial water cooler communications in a company than yes it is important. People need to talk about their situation among fellow suffragists to feel represented.

it is. and the holy grail of it is: can the business build its own "facebook" arround its social objects? if not, what is the strategy...

Most consumers are so well connected to their social media sites that anytime something happens, they see it instantly!

If you are a business trying to connect and grow your customer base you must be plugged into social media.

That's just one of our guaranteed services that we provide to our clients. Although we specialize in small-medium sized companies, I always recommend it to my larger networking contacts!

Get plugged into where your customers and contacts are or get left behind!

I think it is very important to have some sort of strategy when tackling social media. There are so many sites and they all offer so many different things that it is important to focus on which site you want to be on, and what you want to accomplish on that site. It is very easy to get lost in the midst of all that is going on on these sites, so having either a strict or lose plan on what you want your presence to be like on these sites is vital.

Absolutely, but your social media strategy should be integrated with your overall communications strategy to ensure that you are always consistent not just in what you say to your target audience, but how you say it. Be sure it clarifies the tools you will use, how you will use them, who will be responsible, how you will engage with people and so on. The more detailed your strategy, the less chance there will be for any missteps, which are more likely if you assign social media to an individual or a team to do 'on the fly.'

I've found that companies that have a positive social corporate culture have the most success at using social media a strategy for expanding business activities. Think now mature companies raised on Tom Peters et al excellence and transformation drum call of the 80's have no trouble adopting such a strategy but the greed is good corporate types will find this social business a distraction from bean counting.

There is an old saw in the legal profession: "Don't ask a question you don't know the answer to." (Google it, there's a funny story behind it.)

Organizational endevours portending great risk and reward deserve leadership and managerial attention. The benefits of interal forums, blogs and wikies are bound to the concepts of knowledge management. The more knowledge workers in the organization the more important these facilities can be in expanding and extending knowledge and use of associated intellectual assets.

If an organization is based on routine data/information processing procedures then the eSocial interactions may be profitable in raising the visibility of individual and group perspectives in relation to operations and governance (this applies above as well.) In this context there is high potential for quelling or inciting aborant perspectives...

So strategy matters, but there are limits to what you can know. Forecasting emergent properties of social systems is still more art than science (agent based social simulations will bring in more science over time.) Given the "unintended consequences" rule, a bit more politically correct the "Murphy's Law", monitoring activities and reviewing effects and affects of such systems is crucial to creating and sustaining productive value.