In public relations (and I am sure other professions), you often hear people talk about the distinction between tactics and strategy.

Simplistically put, tactics are activities that are executed everyday by PR practitioners while a strategy refers to an underlying approach that drives various tactics. Tactics are easy because they involve bite-sized chunks of activity - things that we can conjure, execute, and (sometimes) measure in short order.

Strategy on the other hand, is abstract - it requires us to have an overarching grasp of the goals we are trying to accomplish as an organization as well as an ideology for how media and communications facilitates the accomplishment of these goals.

In social media the same distinction exists. In some ways it is more pronounced because even though we have made a great deal of progress over the past several years in experimenting with and assessing the potential impact of social media, most of our evidence is still anecdotal and a great deal of our effort still involves execution of different tactics.

Recently a former colleague of mine mentioned that his agency’s social media campaign was going to involve the creation of a Facebook page and YouTube channel for their company. They had already created a MySpace page the previous year but now that Facebook’s usage was surging the agency felt it was time to launch their Facebook page.

The question posed to me was, “Is this the right strategy.”

My immediate question back was, “Well, what is the strategy?”

My former colleague (being a top-tier marketing professional) responded with a framework outlining objectives, goals and how social media fit into the broader scope of the organization’s marketing goals.

When we sat down and looked at the metrics from the MySpace campaign in the context of the strategic framework it raised some serious questions as to whether or not they should launch a branded Facebook page using the same approach as with the MySpace page. When turning to the proposed launch of a YouTube channel, our approach also had a dramatic impact on our perspective of the proposed implementation.

The outlining of a strategic framework also facilitated a debate over how social media activities could best be applied, the synthesis of which was a reconfiguration of the initial framework.

To circle-back to my original point I believe we were successful in turning the agency’s approach from one that was simply a set of tactics to one that conformed more precisely into the organization’s overarching marketing strategy. Consequently, appropriate expectations have been set for what the social media campaign should accomplish as well as targeted measurement indicators.

This is not to say that the primary role of social media should be to support a marketing strategy. Social media can support a wide variety of organizational goals - public relations, human resources, investor relations, etc.

But the main takeaway should be that a clear vision needs to exist for the rationale behind why there is an organizational engagement in social media so we can avoid the trap of being disappointed should the execution of blind tactics fails.

As an aside, for large-market companies interested in support developing a social media strategy I recommend an agency called v-Fluence.