This post first appeared in Minnesota Business. Here.

Yesterday afternoon at the Best Buy corporate headquarters, the local social media faithful arrived to hear from one of its titans, Chris Brogan. It was a lovefest. The robes were pressed, the members of the choir took their places, and Brogan, the choirmaster, took the baton for a somewhat rambling, often irreverant, and thoroughly Kool-Aid dripping two hours. What follows here are my musings, which I must stress has absolutely nothing to do with the gracious hosts of yesterday’s event–the LaBreche agency (dear friends) and this magazine.

Let’s be very straight about something: social media is having a hard time growing up. Its promises have, for many reasons, not penetrated company board rooms or the executive suites. While this is shameful because of the many opportunities social technologies and practices can have on an enterprise, the professional social media crowd has yet to make solid business arguments as an industry. There were few if any major company executives in the room yesterday. This is the non-existent elephant in the room. And is par for the course for these type of events.

I would like to posit several arguments here that may help rectify this problem.

Social Media Isn’t Marketing – Social technologies are pervasive throughout organizations. Consumers too experience enterprises from myriad points – from call centers to sales organizations to retail channels to product developers. Really, any department of an organization is now a “customer-facing” entity. If you accept this premise, then why is social media typically a charge from marketing? I would suggest that the opportunities social technologies present are organizational challenges, not marketing ones, and (as I tweeted from the event) social media won’t be anything special until it ceases to be marketing function and starts to be led as a enterprise function.

Social Intelligence Is More Valuable Than Social Talking – Business executives have a voracious appetite for intelligence into their marketplaces, their consumers, and the performance of their own companies. Billions of dollars are spent on all types of intelligence gathering that can inform incremental changes to a business that can have tremendous financial and quality improvement outcomes. This, to me, is where social media evangelism should begin. Too often we hear that we need to “listen” more to what’s being said about us as brands. So true. However, listening is passive. (“Passive” doesn’t sell well.) Intelligence is the outcome of listening, and while that statement may seem simplistic, I would suggest that until social media experts can deliver all of this listening as proper intelligence, the battle for social media will continue to be an uphill one. It is fact that consumers have lunged into social technologies with incredible speed and as such they are creating an equally incredible volume of first-hand content that must be listened to, filtered, analyzed, shared, and acted upon. When executives realize that social content is perhaps the very best source of real-time business intelligence, then social media grows up.

Social Behaviors ARE Measurable - I heard it again yesterday: social media isn’t as accountable as other forms of communication. Really? There are absolutely wonderful tools out there to make all of this noise measurable. And, yes, the good ones cost money. Radian6 is a wonderful tool for quantifying and, increasingly, scoring the sentiment of what’s being said about a brand. RapLeaf is a firm I’ve used recently to give my clients individual social profiles of their customers (What networks are they on? How do they use them? Are they well-connected?). From these sources, we can learn how best to engage with various customer segments, look at our customers differently from one another, and distinguish intelligent nuances in how they interact with brands. From a product development standpoint, we can use these tools to measure how we need to make incremental improvements to better satisfy customers. All of this is social media.

Did I mention Twitter? Did I mention Facebook? I did not (until now) because that’s not what all of this is about. The changes that are taking place right now in the market are about using these tools to make us better companies and organizations and by using them intelligently and strategically.

What do you want social media to do? What do you want to learn? How can these wonderful tools make us better enterprises? Those are the strategic questions that should keep executives awake at night and us in the busines focused.

Thanks again to Beth LaBreche and Minnesota Business for putting on the event. I am certain it has triggered the right kinds of conversation to push us all ahead constructively.

Uff da, Mr. Brogan.