Beware the social media expert selling a bag full of 'should'.

Everybody can tell you what you 'should' do and you can waste a great deal of time on it. The focus is what you 'can' do. We're moving beyond theory and putting effort behind strategies and tactics that achieve the goals we set.

I'm not saying that forward-thinking is not valuable, it is, as long as it has realistic expectations. Many things that sound good in a speech or on a tweet just don't scale well. You know a broad statement like:

Companies should talk to their customers.

Great, sounds good. But how exactly do you implement that? Which department(s) manages it? How do we measure it? The list of practical questions goes on and on.

Let's talk about scale. If you're a small business how do you scale that down? As in prioritizing online activities over other core business functions? Now let's go the other way, if you're an organization of 100,000+, how do you do it?

Then of course the 'should' factor gets compounded by shiny-new-objetcts. For example, "You should be on X" Where X equals...well, take your pick (Foursquare, Posterous, etc). Really? Beyond the initial statement how does that fit into our broader communications strategy?

I can't tell you how many times a 'social media expert' has said, "You should do this...." and they've only mapped out a strategy or content for a few weeks at most and given little thought to resources

Ok, rant over.

I'll take your bag of 'should' and show you where you 'can' put it. :-)