Boy you’re ticked. That must have been a rough three months. I don’t know whom you talked to, but not every advocate or social media practitioner feels the way that you described above.

Some advice if I may? And I’ll start out by saying that I still use the yellow pages and call information. I love reading the newspaper and have a hard time texting.

Many in social media are coming solely from their experiences and perspectives. And many, but not all, are relatively young. From their experiences, they’ve come to embrace social media for the way they live every day – which is likely different from the way you live. Certain principles of social media come natural to them. And technology is very much part of their lives. The problem often is, with that, they fail to make a business case for its use because they fail to understand that there needs to be a business case in the first place. They don’t see that it has to go beyond being a cool thing or a neat idea.

But when you write “They couldn’t explain how it all fit into the context of achieving specific goals by communicating well-crafted messages and then using whatever distribution channels could get those messages most effectively and efficiently to a specific audience. That’s what I was concerned about,” you are, in my opinion, missing the point.

If you’re focusing on social media, then let’s stick with that and temporarily put aside “whatever distribution channels”.

You might be too focused on marketing messages and channels and audiences. In many online communities (for example, moms), audiences become tribes. Channels morph into networks. Messages that you push out become then manipulated by those moms.

So, social media is less creating well-crafted messages to distribute down a certain channel to reach a certain target audience and more getting involved with that audience while they are participating in social media. It could be learning what your customers and potential customers want and need by following them on social networks and reading blogs and taking part in online forums. Interacting them can create stronger relationships. From this, an organization can then take the next step in product development and marketing.

BECAUSE THAT DOESN’T MEAN THAT MARKETING MESSAGES, DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS, AND AUDIENCES AREN’T IMPORTANT AND DON’T EXIST.

That’s where many social media strategists fall flat. They fail to understand that online participation is not the whole story and isn’t done just to be nice or cool or to garner knowledge and then do nothing with it regarding marketing. It’s also to turn that knowledge into, well, effective marketing messages that can be distributed through various channels to reach targeted audiences.

Sometimes these channels can be via social media. There’s a guy out in California that is creating well crafted 140 character messages that he’s distributing via Twitter to about 1500 followers…all of whom have signed up to get what can be called marketing updates. Traditional push marketing through social media tools.

That’s just some thoughts for now.

And your blog looks fine – its margins and cloud and that heading.