On my walk home from elementary school back in the early 1960s, I frequently stopped at the corner liquor store and bought a one-cent Bazooka bubble gum. The gum was usually great (unless it had gone all hard), but what I really wanted was the Bazooka Joe comic that came with it. One of those comics has stuck with me all these years later. I can’t say why, but it has. In that strip, Joe is walking down the street at night when he encounters a fellow on his hands and knees under a street lamp.

“What are you looking for?” Joe asks.

“A quarter,” the character says.

“Where’d you lose it?” Joe queries.

“Across the street,” comes the reply.

“Why are you looking here?” Joe wonders.

The fellow answers, “The light’s better.”

The insistence that organizations cannot embrace social media for one reason or another is the equivalent of looking for the quarter where the light’s better: Companies prefer the comfort of message control over the messiness of conversation. We hear Dave Taylor, for example, insist that “modern American corporations, publicly traded companies, cannot change their internal DNA and ‘let go’ of the message to the point where their online ‘word of mouth’ efforts will have any traction or be at all interesting.” And another prominent PR-focused blogger argues that “contracts are the language of corporations,” making it insanity to try to communicate in an authentic human voice.

(The latter is a theory, not a fact, first presented in 1937—Coase, R. 1937, ???The nature of the firm???, Economica, Vol. 4. There are alternate theories. Thanks to David Phillips for that clarification.)

The simple fact is, however, that businesses that adhere to the principles of these naysayers are more than likely doomed to extinction as their customer base evaporates because they’re not conveniently under the street lamp. They’re across the street.

This point has been driven home by the results of “Media, Myths and Realities,” the second annual study from Ketchum Communication and the University of Southern California Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center. The study found that friends and family are the top source of advice for people making decisions ranging from vacation planning to electronics purchases. Advice from an expert ranks highest for decisions around healthcare and the environment.

In other words, word of mouth is the dominant source of impact. Yet most organizations adhere to old models, evidenced by the fact that only 24% of communicators reported having a word-of-mouth program operating in their organizations.

Here’s more:

• Communicators rate their companies’ own Web sites as the most effective way to share news or respond to a crisis, while their audiences score company Web sites sixth among sources for corporate news and seventh for crisis information.
• In the U.S. consumers increasingly dismiss all mainstream media. Even though local TV news continues to rank highest for credibility (consistent with many other surveys), its credibility has dropped from 7.4 (on a 0-to-10 scale) last year to 6.9 in the current study.
• As trust in traditional media wanes, use of social media continues to skyrocket. In the U.S., there has been a 6-point increase in the use of social networking sites over the course of a year, from 17% to 22%. Blog use has also risen 6 points, from 13% to 19%. The use of social media more than doubled among people over 55, suggesting it’s time to stop dismissing social media because “my audience is made up of older people.”

Ketchum and the Annenberg Center offer takeaways from the study, including…

• Treat audiences as groupings of individuals rather than faceless masses
• Put word-of-mouth and search-engine-optimization strategies in place or miss out on tremendous potential for audience reach and sales
• Be wary of the communication flavor of the month
• A company’s own Web site should not be the primary choice when communicating to stakeholders

I’d sum it up this way: Communicate to people where they are, not where the light’s better.