With all the buzz going around these days, I find myself wondering sometimes if there is any getting away from the social media crowd. It seems like everybody has an opinion, and most of them come in the form of Tweets: short, tasty and utterly useless unless seen in a broader context.

Sure, sure – social media can be a valuable complement to your brand, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves: last time I checked, the vast majority of business was still conducted offline.

When comparing “Black Friday” with “Cyber Monday” Bloomberg commented that “online purchases rose 14 percent as of 3 a.m. New York time compared with last year. Forecasts called for growth of as little as 5 percent. While e-commerce orders are growing, they represent about 6 percent of total spending, according to Forrester Research Inc. That mutes the impact of Cyber Monday — the first Monday after the kickoff of the holiday season.”

So, even though e-commerce is on the up, there is still a convincing case for keeping your focus on “business as usual”. The majority of sales still occur in stores, stalls and offices around the globe. Hence, so does brand building, and the people representing your company continue to have a disproportionately large impact on the perception consumers have of your brand.

In spite of the fact that social media seem to be very much at the forefront of the CMO agenda, they are not a cure-all. Like any other form of marketing, social media requires a clearly defined strategy and a willingness to open up that goes well beyond more traditional forms of media. Used wisely, social media can have an impact that goes well beyond merely the adoption of a few tools, but can be a catalyst for change or a strong signal to the external world.

Even though I have at times made a case for the inclusion of social media as a valuable marketing tool (see here and here), it is important to remember it is only a part of the solution. Customer service, branding, PR and marketing are (some of) the other parts.

Leading professional services firm Gartner has been known for years for their “hype cycle”, a graphic representation of the maturity, adoption and business application of specific technologies. In their “2009 Hype Cycle Special Report“, they map various technologies in different parts of the cycle – putting Twitter right before the “trough of disillusionment”.