Among the boatload of ways you can slice and dice social media from a business perspective, there are these two: Your use of social media can be organic and it can be campaign-based.

I raise the issue because I’ve noticed an increasing number of posts suggesting that social media doesn’t lend itself to the campaign mentality, a vestige of old-marketing thinking. “Dude, you just don’t get it,” chide the purists. “Social media isn’t about pitching products, it’s about community, it’s about real people having real conversations. Nobody cares about what you’re trying to sell.”

In fact, a new survey from Knowledge Networks suggests social media in general isn’t an effective marketing medium, given that survey respondents indicated they don’t turn to social networks for help with purchase decisions and aren’t inclined to buy from companies that advertise on social sites.

I don’t put any credence in the study because, like so many others, it asked the wrong questions. Of course, plenty of campaigns go awry, usually because the marketers and communicators behind them apply old-school approaches to a new and different medium. That doesn’t mean a social media campaign can’t be successful.

I like Princeton’s Wordnet definition of a campaign: a series of actions advancing a principle or tending toward a particular end. In a marketing campaign, that end is usually something like increased sales, a certain number of sales leads, that sort of thing. In the case of Ernst & Young’s recruiting campaign on Facebook, the end was the hiring of a set number of employees and interns.

Consider some of the other successful short-term social media campaigns executed in the last couple years:

• Twesitval—A grass-roots campaign to raise money for Charity:Water by collecting donations at a series of concurrent tweetups held around the world. The effort has raised about $250,000 so far.
• Mentos Geyser Video Contest—After EepyBird’s video of geysers of Diet Coke erupting from bottles after Mentos candies were dropped into them, Coca-Cola issued a dismissive statement while Mentos launched a contest on YouTube that attracted media attention, tens of thousands of views, and considerable conversation.
• Instyle.com’s Hollywood Makeover—Upload your photo and try on the hair and makeup styles of the stars, then share the results with your friends. You can participate on the Instyle.com website, but it started as a Facebook app that saw 185,000 installs in the first six weeks, with 78% of those installing the app belonging to the target market of women aged 18-35. Nearly half of the user base returned more than 25 times, experimenting with an average of three hairstyles on each visit.
• Frozen Pea Fund—Another grass-roots effort that raised money for cancer research in support of Susan Reynolds, diagnosed with breast cancer and a member of the community that came together to launch the campaign that has raised tens of thousands of dollars.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica—Last year, I worked on a social media campaign for Encyclopaedia Britannica designed to raise awareness of a program that let bloggers get free accounts and link to Britannica articles in their posts.
• Ford Fiesta Movement—Thousands volunteered but only 100 “agents” got Ford Fiestas to drive for six months while engaging in their communities about the experience.

As the division coordinator for the social media category of IABC’s international Gold Quill Awards, I saw several other compelling campaigns that worked quite well. All these campaigns shared one common characteristic: They tapped into communities with a call to action that was something people would actually want to do. Because they want to do it, they’re also inclined to talk about it and share digital assets with others in their networks. Slapping an ad on a social site is not a social media campaign—it’s a traditional campaign on a social site. That’s why Knowledge Networks’ conclusion is so laughable, that social media marketing doesn’t work because people don’t make purchase decisions based on social site advertising.

Organic engagement in social media will have greater long-term payoff for an organization, and can even bolster shorter-term campaigns. A growing number of organizations are seeing the value of having real flesh-and-blood employees participating everywhere from Facebook to Twitter, becoming full-fledged members of the communities in which they participate and, consequently, trusted representatives of the companies for which they work. Dell, Sprint, GM, Embarq, Comcast, The Mayo Clinic and a host of others are well represented through the online activities of employees.

These and other companies are also inviting conversation through blogs, Facebook fan pages and groups, YouTube channels, and other catalysts to engagement. They provide assets like videos, widgets, and social media news releases that others can use to share content they care about. All these channels can be brought to bear to support a short-term campaign, as Scott Monty did on Twitter in support of the Fiesta Movement. Scott has been able to keep his personal network involved and inject news updates as they occur into the conversation, giving people more to talk about, as in this example:

(Interestingly, the idea that long-term, organic engagement can support short-term campaigns is one that Todd Defren discussed in a post today, which went live just as I was readying this post for publication. In light of Todd’s post, I almost scrapped this one, but then figured, what the hell, it can’t hurt to have two posts reinforcing this point!)

Contrary to Knowledge Networks’ assertion, social media campaigns can work just fine. It’s the bad ones that fail. If you’re going to launch a social media campaign, keep in mind:

• Give people in existing communities something they’ll actually want to talk about
• Provide a call to action that will be of genuine interest to those you’re trying to engage
• Make it easy for people to share what you give them
• Invite your employees who are engaged organically talk about the campaign
• Listen to what people say about the campaign and make mid-course corrections
• Be authentic. Yes, it’s a campaign, but it’s also interaction between your company and individual customer.