A recent Business Week article cautioned business owners and managers about falling for "Social Media Snake Oil," and the warning is well founded. The concept of having your customers doing your marketing for you is appealing, and there is no doubt that consumer evangelists can have a definite impact on your brand. However, succumbing completely to the siren song of social media can lead one down an ineffective path. 

As the article explains, an entire industry of consultants has arisen from the social media phenomenon, many of whom are undoubtedly not qualified to impart any reasonable advice to a marketing executive. From spam e-mails to engaging blog posts and Web sites, these people can entice a manager into entering into a campaign that may fizzle, or even worse, damage the company's reputation. 

Indeed, even a "successful" campaign can come back to haunt you. Suppose you launch a viral video campaign that gains traction and spreads through the Web. But the message associated with the video isn't what you expected - people are laughing at you, not with you. Your company becomes an object of ridicule, the message spins out of control beyond the ability of a pure marketing technologist to handle. 

Even worse, suppose your campaign antagonizes your customers. One example of this cited in the article culminated in a $10 million lawsuit against the company that had commissioned a campaign. That's not the kind of publicity a company is usually looking for. 

One of the challenges identified in the article is a common problem - it can be difficult to quantify the result of a purely social media campaign. This makes it easier to make promises, and harder for a client to see if they are getting their money's worth. 

Blogger B.L. Ochman said in a post on her blog that she used TweepSearch to scan Twitter users' bios and found that there were 15,740 who claimed to be social media experts, compared with 4,487 in May. As she says, "self-proclaimed social media gurus on Twitter are multiplying like rabbits."

The takeaway is that it is best to go into a new campaign with your eyes open and your radar up. Do your due diligence on a prospective marketing consultant to look beyond their Facebook page and Twitter account to see if they can produce case studies demonstrating longstanding experience with complex analog, digital, qualitative, quantitative, new and mainstream communications programs.