Adopting social marketing has the potential to bring huge amounts of chaos to an organisation as well as the obvious benefits and as marketers we need to find a way to ride the whirlwind and bring about genuine business benefits to our customers.

Most 'younger' companies will already be completely comfortable in a digital business environment where anything might happen. Organisations that dive into social media and let everyone tweet etc seem to be mostly unconcerned about anything that is said in order to get engaged with customers and will have open and transparent conversations about just about anything. Older more experienced people though are having difficulty operating this way. They will worry about the conventions, the technology, the legal implications and, frankly, the fact that many of their employees seem to be wasting an awful lot of time on the computer every day!

The big problem that's slowing social media's full adoption and spread throughout many organisations is that there's no apparent structure - not to what is being said, who is saying it, and no real appreciation that the whole point is to gather information that can be used for the organisation's immediate and long-term benefit.

So, what's needed then is the ability to identify and measure the benefits of these online conversations and social media interactions; what was being said, by whom and to what purpose? What did the customer ask for and what did we say we would do in return? What looks like "data driven" from the outside begins to look like marketing accountability on the inside. Products, services and projects are delivered based on expected, data-driven results. This is where there is real value in establishing a strategic relationship marketing approach where all of a brand's various customer touch points must include some kind of information flow to the marketing database to be mined and analysed in future reports.

None of this can happen without a very real degree of senior management approval, not just budgetary sponsorship, but visionary sponsorship. It takes real vision to get a company to shift from being gut-driven to marketing data-driven. The CRM marketer has to be a mix between a technical expert and a business manager, with technical skills and knowledge as well as management skills and knowledge. They are a mixture of statistical mathematician, technical tactician, business strategist, intuitive genius, and master of communication. This is a new kind of business person and it will take vision and courage for companies to recognise their place within and value to the organisation.

For an organisation to truly benefit from social media, it needs to have an understanding of the place that those channels have within a wider customer-centric strategy and the resources in place to bring it all together.