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The community asked: Is social media a passing phase or fad?

A: Some statistics indicate that some fads last between 18 months and 2 years.

Social media as we know it today picked up momentum, or got “sticky” in the early 2000′s, but started in it’s first wave of innovation in the early 90′s with forums for ebay sellers, etc. Today, a business simply cannot compete, large or small, without customer engagement, because the web has changed our consumer.

The difficulty in embracing public social networking outlets is the current inability to measure the success of your online community. A recent survey from Jupiter Research and Verse Group found that achieving measurable results was the number one goal of marketers in 2009. Which begs the question — If you want to know if your efforts are paying off, what can you do to obtain measurable results?

Marketing, sales, business development, advertising, networking, PR, social media and branding cannot always be put into a box and examined on a spreadsheet. To pretend you can always know the “return on investment” in advance is to fool yourself and fool a left-brain decision maker. Your instincts matter too.