Tools are not strategies

Colin Delaney has an excellent post up on techPresident: Twitter is NOT a Strategy.  Mr. Delaney does a bit of reminiscing:

A classic observation from the early days of online marketing: a website is NOT a strategy. I.e., when you ask the client what they’re trying to do online, and they reply that they have a website — which is of course just a tool, and is probably not doing them much good if it’s isolated from an actual plan to put it to use.

The Twitter fixation currently sweeping segments the news media and the political world (particularly on the Republican side) reminds me of those innocent days of the early web. Not to put Twitter down, because it definitely has valuable uses, but it’s just a tool — and if you don’t know WHY you’re using it, you’re probably not going to get much out of it.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The same is true of ALL tools: they’re just tools, they’re not strategies or plans.  They’re not goals or evaluation metrics.  Neither websites nor Twitter, not Convio nor social networks, not even email will yield results for your organization if you confuse the tool with a strategy or plan to implement that strategy.

Answering a question about what you’re trying to do online with anything like, “build a website,” or, “recruit Twitter followers” is like answering a question about what kind of building you’re trying to build with, “a hammer” or, “a screwdriver.”

As technology leaps forward we’ll have more tools that, when used appropriately and in the context of a well-thought strategy, an actionable plan, and goal-focused evaluation metrics, can take communications, advocacy, and brand-building to new levels of efficacy.  It would be shame to waste all that potential by confusing the building with the hammer.

-Shayna

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