Our CTO routinely joins our meetings and basically says, "Great, we had 5,000 likes on our Facbeook page, how many more widgets does that sell?" That is incred

Our CTO routinely joins our meetings and basically says, "Great, we had 5,000 likes on our Facbeook page, how many more widgets does that sell?" That is incredibly sophisticated thinking for a large co. In my experience, it goes more like this. 1. PR guys pay a blogger with no traffic to write a post. 2. Blogger writes article and gets paid handsomely (The PR guys don't know he has no traffic since they didn't want to offend him by asking). 3. PR guys flog interns to generate chatter via social media. 4. Interns tweet amongst themselves. 5. PR guys get some mathematically incorrect and dubious metrics for some ill defined thing like "social media reach" and declare that said blog post generated 190 million impressions, which is equivalent to (just because) $5 million dollars of media. 6. PR guys claim victory and celebrate. Their superiors wonder what the hell the PR guys actually do for a living and get back to their infighting over budgets and why the sales guys aren't getting more product out. Total cost to big co? Hard to tell, but I'd guess somewhere around $20k when you add up all the salaries involved and the huge fees the agencies charge. But the bottom line is that even the most wasteful social media is peanuts at BigCo. It simply does not matter. [Note: this is not a made up story. The numbers are slightly off because I can't remember them, but that's about it]