I’m also seeing a growing number of tech-savvy marketers finding their way into strong influencer and decision-maker roles, which is also promising.

What I don’t see yet, and it’s a little troubling, is a faster pace of agile execution. I know the speed of change in the marketplace is confusing—there are always new platforms, new technologies, new opportunities, and it’s hard to keep up—but it’s been this way for the past 20 years. Today it’s social media, but yesterday it was CRM, and SFA, and CMS, and SEO, you get the idea. It’s time marketers adapted to the environment with strategies for leveraging new technologies in ways that minimize risk and maximize potential. Instead, there’s still far too much paralysis of analysis.

In the last year alone, I’ve consulted on three major projects that included many months of detailed research, planning, long meetings, and zero execution. One company invited me in a year ago to help them react to a competitor that was making major innovations in social media and attracting customers to hang out in their community groups and events. The client was terrified they were losing a major battle front that they hadn’t seen coming. But they couldn’t make a decision about how to respond.

Despite following strong processes to identify business objectives, critical success factors, use case scenarios—everything in the business consulting toolkit—they couldn’t bring themselves to the point of actually doing something. Even something small, which I advocate strongly as a low-risk way to get the ball rolling. Today, the division I was advising is being sold off. Would social media have saved them? No, but I think their approach to the challenge was indicative of the deeper problems that defined the struggling business: an inability to take decisive action and do something.

The two biggest hurdles to taking action that I see among marketers are technology selection and program ROI. These two issues can stall marketers for months while they research vendors and try to come up with a compelling business case for a social media project. So in the interest of speeding marketers along the path to productive development, let’s destroy these two hurdles. It’s easy.

On the technology selection front, just adopt this simple truth. You are going to fail. So get it over with as quickly and cheaply as you can. The more time you spend planning some monumental RFP for an overarching social media platform, the more costly and crushing your failure will be.
Marketers instinctively know this, which is why they get caught in paralysis of analysis—anything to delay the point of impact. But you can reduce the risk and cost substantially by dramatically reducing the scope of your initial project. Instead of buying a platform to serve your entire customer base, start with one component and serve a test group of selected customers.

There are dozens of low-cost, trial and open source social media components. Determine what form of interaction you think might ignite the community you want to build, and choose a low-cost component to test out your assumptions. It could be a blog. It could be a forum. It could be a small social network. Keep your test case on a small scale and use the project to learn what works and what doesn’t for your community. Your failure won’t look like failure, it will look like agile and intelligent prototyping. And because the cost is low, the worst anyone can say about it is that it didn’t work. But now you’re smarter.

Destroying the ROI hurdle is just as easy. If you don’t already have a clear case for ROI on your project, there isn’t one. If you’re planning a social media marketing campaign to drive customer acquisition, then chances are you already know how to calculate the ROI. If you’re trying to build a community, or drive more market engagement, forget about ROI—you’re in the domain of Brand Equity, and it will cost you more to measure it than it will to get started building something on the cheap.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you can’t measure the value of social media—but ROI is usually the wrong metric, and it’s become a reflexive road block among marketers who are afraid to take action. I don't want to be flippant about this, but marketers need to bring a little balance to the justifiable demand for performance accountability. We do need to be accountable, and we do need to show that we've thoroughly vetted the investments we're making. But when you're in a competitive market that demands innovation, you have to get in the trenches to help innovation along, instead of just throwing up signs to every project that doesn't come with a business case tied up in a neat bow.

The best approach I've seen from a marketing group that needs some space to innovate is to allocate a percentage of their budget to emerging marketing programs—anywhere from 2 to 10 percent depending on your taste for innovation, but I recommend 4 percent as a guideline. Boards that are spouting wisdom about innovative cultures can put their money where their mouth is by sanctioning a small percentage of the budget for programs that may not have a clear cut metric for ROI. Having a dedicated budget then puts a greater focus on how programs are selected, and how performance against business objects should be measured rather than just a slavish devotion to fitting innovative programs into an expected ROI mold.

If your program sponsor or CFO is stuck on the lack of demonstrable ROI, even when you’re putting forward the kind of low-risk, low-cost project we’re talking about here, then let them know there’s another important metric you’ll have to face up to in the future if you can’t find the space to innovate: opportunity cost.