Marketers have always had their heads easily turned by the next shiny object that comes onto the scene, whether it’s right for them or not.

Two recent articles in Market Leader, the journal of the Marketing Society in the UK, voiced some of the issues I have with social media and digital media use by advertisers.

The first, Social media: Missing the wood for the trees, written by online communications consultant  Robin Houghton, states that a recent study found “that 25% of companies do not respond to customer service questions posted on their Facebook wall, and 65% never reply to questions asked as comments on their posts. Some even delete customers’ questions.”

Since the original premise given by brands getting into social media and setting up a company Facebook page was that it was an opportunity to develop relationships with their consumers by enabling two-way conversation, deleting questions seems rather counterproductive.  So much for good intentions…

It’s obvious to many that marketers simply see social media as ‘cheap’ advertising – and best of all results can be measured – or so they think.

On that point, Houghton says, “. . . the questions of ROI continues to hamper business confidence in social media. Every now and again a formula is created that we’re told measures the value of a Facebook ‘like’, or a particular frequency or timing of tweets is said to have an optimum effect on sales. And yet, as we have already seen, the obvious social media metrics were never intended to measure the success of marketing initiatives.

“As the saying goes: ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. . .”

According to Houghton, “Brand value can be won and lost on the social web and as long as we limit our thinking about social media to campaigns, tool, gadgets and even data, we are in danger of the missing the real opportunity.”

The second article, Social media: Friends, hawkers or stalkers?, also talks about the peril of believing that a ‘like’ is somehow a measure that means something to your brand or bottom line. The article’s author Peter Dann, co-founder of UK developmental research agency, The Nursery, says his company’s research shows that brand perceptions and engagement are still driven by two things – mainstream broadcast media and by actual experience.

He says that when study participants were asked about brand activity they had noticed in social media recently, they could not recall a single example unprompted, except for “heavyweight broadcast campaigns with added-on social media elements. In qualitative discussions on brand activity, social media simply doesn’t get at mention.”

Dann cautions: “Brands should never forget that social media users don’t really want to be their friends – they just want material rewards. . .

“Because Facebook was primarily a social network for your friends, when it welcomed brands on board brands tried to behave like friends and most have never got out of the habit. But people don’t ‘like’ brands or follow them because they actually ‘like’ them – just as Facebook friends aren’t real friends – so Facebook likes aren’t necessarily ‘likes’ at all.”

Dann concludes by saying that it is when brands forget the commercial nature of the relationship that people resent the intrusion, and it is easier to tune out an annoying TV ad than to ignore unwanted, supposedly tailored messages from brands: “ When these brands start following them around, not on commercial websites but in spaces that they regard as their personal domain (such as their Facebook page), then ‘permission marketing’ becomes stalking and the brand’s attempt at a ‘relationship’ backfires.”

It’s time for companies to tune out the hype about social media and take a clear-eyed look at whether it is really helping their business. Advertisers who are abusing digital and social media should rethink their strategies, take it out of the hands of the IT guys, and put some real marketing communications experts back on the case.

Watch for ‘Not everything that can be counted counts… Part 2’.