A Grande Guide is a series of simple, easy-to-follow e-books created to allow readers to become proficient on a single marketing topic in the time that it takes to drink a "Grande" cup of coffee. Produced by Eloqua, often in concert with outside subject-matter experts, each booklet follows the same format: what it is, why it matters, what are the best practices, what tools to consider, what it looks like in action, and where it is headed.

This Grande Guide is all about social media, but with a twist: We focus exclusively on the unique needs and interests of CMOs. Lastly, we acknowledge that "media" is a plural noun, and therefore should require a plural verb. However, for readability we have treated the term "social media" as singular–don’t call the grammar police.

The surplus in social media "experts" has led to a surplus in social media definitions. We like the definition supplied by Harvard University instructor Nicholas Lamphere in his viral presentation Harvard’s Must Have Guide to Social Media, which states: "Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media use web-based technologies to transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues. They support the democratization of knowledge and information and transform people from content consumers to content producers..."

We see social media as a paradox. Its promise is simple: converging friends, colleagues, partners and customers into one digital melting pot. Yet the rate of progress is so rapid that it has the potential to leave behind those not paying close attention. In other words, social media could quickly become anti-social for those not keeping pace. And the priorities placed on most CMOs are so intense that daily social media responsibilities are often handed off to younger workers, so-called "digital natives."

One last thing to remember: Social media applies reach and exposure to natural behaviors previously considered private. The collapse of walls separating public from private is affecting social memes. It is, unequivocally, altering the very nature of human-to-human and business-to-human interactions. As such, senior marketers must be an active, engaged participant on the social Web.

Because social media moves at breakneck speed, and because each network is essentially a sub-culture with its own peculiar language and mores, many CMOs have effectively “tuned out.” They either relegate social media to junior staff, build a “bare minimum” presence (e.g., a Facebook page or Twitter handle), or farm the responsibility out to another department entirely. In fact, Econsultancy found that social media was owned by a digital marketing team in only 35% of companies is social media owned by a digital marketing team and 10% of companies “don’t do any social media” at all. This is a colossal mistake, not only professionally, but also personally. Here are several reasons why CMOs need to understand social media personally:

Social media is the nexus of customer support, public relations, brand awareness, lead generation and even product development. No company can afford to ignore or minimize a medium that touches all levels of the sales funnel and all stages of the customer lifecycle. Effective social strategies reduce churn, spark word of mouth, create demand and accelerate deal-flow.

According to Nielsen, Internet users spend more than twice the amount of time on social networks as on any other online activity. Your buyers are active on the social Web. In fact, they spend nearly 23% of their online time on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Although social media may be the engine for many of your marketing efforts, the fuel for that powers it is content: testimonials, videos, widgets, ebooks, guides, whitepapers, infographics. Below is a framework for a healthy marriage of content and social distribution. We call the infographic, “The Content Grid.”

Organized, executive-sponsored social engagement models provide companies with rich opportunities for intelligence-gathering, internal communications, public influence, competitive insights, customer service and media relations. Conversely, ad hoc programs can ultimately damage companies in all of these fundamental areas. Social media is a double-edged sword–and the larger the organization, the deeper the cut.

Businesses need to understand social media because, quite simply, consumers expect companies to be present on the social Web. It is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s truly a “must have” capability for all organizations.

While the channels, language and culture may be new, the way smart companies approach social media borrows generously from traditional marketing and communications. For example:

Roadmap: Facebook’s roadmap changes frequently and requires administrators to stay informed. (An excellent resource is the AllFacebook blog.)

Privacy: A small, but high profile, minority of Facebook members closed their accounts in protest of perceptions of the company’s self-serving privacy policies.

In the spring of 2009, Ford began a social media marketing campaign to highlight the return of the Ford Fiesta to the United States for the first time since 1976.

The Fiesta model has been a major success worldwide, selling more than 12 million cars. But how could Ford raise awareness around a youth-oriented model that hadn’t sold in a region since before most of its potential buyers were born?

Launching the Ford Fiesta Movement, Ford offered drivers 100,000 free test drives across the United States, encouraging the drivers to report their experiences on social media communities like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr (an agile blogging platform which allows users to post from the web, mobile device and/or from existing social media feeds). Next, Ford empowered 100 citizen “reporters” by giving them a Fiesta to own and promote through their own grass roots outlets, with a strong emphasis on video.

A major branding component of the Ford Fiesta is its highly customizable nature. Empowering those 100 citizen reporters to essentially design their own vehicles was not only fun, but also gave them added incentive to promote their “creation” to their readers.

The results of the Fiesta Movement campaign are striking: User- generated videos garnered 4.5 million YouTube views, 500,000 Flickr views, 3 million+ Twitter impressions, and most importantly, 50,000 interested potential customers, 97% of which don’t own a Ford currently. And as the popular social media site Mashable observed, this was accomplished “all without spending a dollar on traditional media.”

SCVNGR is a recently launched gaming platform that uses a smart phone’s GPS technology to create challenges and rewards that increase a client’s awareness and branding potential. If you played a treasure hunt game as a kid–or if your children play today–then you have a good idea of how SCVNGR works. But not every grassroots gaming platform has funding from Google Ventures and an expanding list of clients that includes Tesla, the New England Patriots, the Boston Celtics, Warner Bros., and The New York Times.

At the Boston Commons Coffee House, participants created challenges for future visitors, including special drinks that you would order, make, take a picture of with your iPhone or Droid, and then upload to SCVNGR. Participants engage with like-minded customers but can also win prizes and other incentives. So, on one hand, SCVNGR users have a fun way to learn about new places, people and brands. But how does it work for the client and how is it different than other “check in” applications like Foursquare?

Think of the check-in as a one-dimensional point, where you just click a button and you’re done. There’s not much room in there to tell your brand’s story or message or create any real engagement.

SCVNGR on the other hand is based around the concept of a challenge, which you should picture as a three- dimensional interaction. You can ask the user to take action, to engage, to create something of value. A photo, an experience, some piece of really valuable, viral social content that they then share with their friends on Facebook and Twitter and, of course, with their friends in the real world. The challenge is just as quick as a check-in, way more fun and can be scripted and customized with audio, video, images text to produce really creative and engaging interactions.

For example, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts created a SCVNGR game to attract local college students. Their pitch was that the students could use SCVNGR to complete various challenges throughout the museum. Over the course of the semester, thousands of students visited the museum specifically to play the SCVNGR challenge.

Or, in the case of last year’s Travel and Adventure Show hosted by the Los Angeles Times, SCVNGR was used to increase overall visits and time spent at the show’s booths and exhibits. Thanks to the social media engagement achieved through SCVNGR, booth visits were increased more than threefold, going from 4 to a 15.3 average. Even more significantly, booth visitors now spent an average of 6.3 minutes at each booth, compared to 1.5 minutes for non-SCVNGR users. Over the course of the conference, SCVNGR delivered a total of 3,539 new booth visitors.

More Facebook. The Facebook universe will continue to expand, exponentially. Over the past few months, the company has announced Places (geosocial application), Deals (local business offers), and Messages (its advanced messaging application). It has also redesigned Groups, enhanced Games and refined its privacy policy.

Social SEO. The Google and Bing search algorithms are placing an increased emphasis on “social signals.” That is, the more popular or “Liked” content is on the social Web, the higher the engines will rank that content. Content creation and social media distribution have never been more important for natural search than they are today.

New Measurements: An Eloqua study revealed that socially engaged clients are 450% more likely to be brand promoters. Meanwhile, a Bazaarvoice study revealed that in 2010, CMO’s measured social media success by site traffic, number of fans/members, number of positive customer mentions. These tactical measures will soon give way to revenue performance indicators. In fact, Bazaarvoice expects 3 of 4 CMOs to begin attributing revenue to social media in 2011.

Social Demand Gen. As capital and human resources assigned to social media increase, so too do ROI expectations. As a result, KPIs are beginning to shift from “awareness” stats (number of fans, number of followers) to business metrics (number of leads generated, amount of attrition prevented). In fact, The CMO Club recently determined that 81% of CMO’s plan to link revenue to social media investment. Expect to see social media monitoring companies unveil more sophisticated, business-relevant tracking and analytics tools in the coming months.

Ethics. Marketers are largely aware of the importance of transparency and disclosure. The Federal Trade Commission’s revised Endorsement Guides brought this vital issue to the forefront of corporate consciousness. Recent high profile press coverage “scraping,” a practice in which marketers use software to extract data from social networks, online communities and other private venues, is shining a light on this controversial practice.