In 1775, when Boston silversmith Paul Revere famously rode northwest to alert the countryside that British troops were on the move, Boston tanner William Dawes, bearing the same message, rode not so famously southwest.

When the British arrived in Lexington and Concord, they did not meet many militiamen from the towns Dawes visited. Why? In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that whereas Revere was a “connector,” blessed with “unique social skills,” Dawes was an ordinary man lacking Revere’s social network.

Today, we’d call Revere an influencer. He’d have thousands of Twitter followers and Facebook friends.

He’d belong to the “Don’t Tread on Me” group on LinkedIn. Rather than knock on doors, he’d tweet “@samueladams @johnhancock Citizens, militia, resist. #redcoats #toarms #bostonpostroad.” Sound crazy? Consider that #Egypt was 2011’s most used hashtag and that Arabic-language tweets soared from 99,000 a day in October 2010 to more than 2 million a day by the following October as the revolutionary movement took hold in that part of the world.

The power of social media — or, at least, its potential power — is not lost on American companies. Many are using it successfully for everything from new-product marketing to employee collaboration to innovative and very effective forms of customer service. But most companies are struggling mightily to turn nascent, ad hoc efforts into something resembling an actual strategy.

Clearly, social media engages enormous numbers of people: how else to explain how Starbucks got 8,006,349 Facebook “likes” (as of early December 2011) for its Frappuccino. That’s a lot of thumbs up for water, salt, erythritol, xanthan gum, carrageenan, maltodextrin, citric acid, milk, and coffee. More broadly, the numbers on social media adoption are spectacular. As of December, Facebook claimed 800 million active users worldwide, with 50% logging on every day. Twitter reported an average of 460,000 accounts created per day late last fall, with an average of 1 billion tweets per week. As of November 3, 2011, LinkedIn had 135 million members in more than 200 countries; two new users join every second.

That action is not just limited to consumers. A survey of 4,261 global executives conducted by McKinsey late last year found 72% reporting that their companies deployed at least one social technology. A November 2011 Towers Watson study of 604 global organizations found 69% planning to increase their use of social media tools over the next 12 months.

And, while Coca-Cola claims top honors for Facebook fans (32 million), it’s not just giant companies that are staking a corporate presence in the social media world. A November 2011 survey by Social Strategy1, a social media data-mining service, found that 63% of small-and-midsize-business owners have a social media presence: 61% on Facebook, 48% on LinkedIn, 37% on Twitter.

To date, however, much of this activity has been akin to an aspiring actor having a professional head shot taken: it’s standard practice, but it doesn’t guarantee you’ll land any roles. As they rush to put their best faces forward, companies increasingly want to know just what they can expect to gain for their trouble.

ROI Is Where You Find It
According to a recent IBM report on social media, the top social media challenge for companies is “establishing an ROI strategy.” However, many experts caution CFOs against insisting upon traditional metrics to determine ROI for such a young technology. As Forrester Research principal analyst Nigel Fenwick says, “If you were a CFO back in the early 1990s and I came to you and said I wanted to implement e-mail, and you asked, ‘What’s the ROI?’ could you have gotten an answer? Social media has become table stakes.” Or, as Kelly Dempski, director at Accenture Technology Labs, says, “There are 800 million Facebook users. That’s not a fad.”

According to Justin Fogarty, social media manager at Ariba, a business commerce network, CFOs should avoid relying on what’s easy to measure. If, for example, “you start incentivizing around website visitors or page views, people will [find a way to] hit those numbers. But did they do it by finding the right customers, or by cheap tricks?”