The best thing about social media is that most people still are not sure what it is all about.

Especially many businesses.
Sure, they know it has something to do with connect to their customers, but they are not precisely sure how best to do this.
Many believe the marketing department is the best part of their organisation to handle social media, as it is just another marketing medium, right?

The great thing for many “marketers” who now promote themselves as being experts in the field, is that they can claim this based on the flimsiest of reasons.
They claim to understand and be experts on this new medium, with reasons such as:

• they migrated the company from a facebook group to a facebook page
• they suggested adding “share to” links onto the company website
• they have a personal blog that gets commented on at least once a month
• they read the latest stats/graphs/demographic charts and can recite user specifics in a general sense
• they once got the company facebook page over 200 likes in a week, by running an online competition

The truth (i.m.o.) is that the marketing department should stay away from social media in many cases. They are not always the right people for the job, and social media is not just a marketing medium.

Community managers should be employed to help mange your social media presence. These people are usually the ones with a much better understanding of the new landscape.
They can work in with marketing to help make a campaign more successful, but their most important task is to help keep your social media frontier moving forward, especially when marketing have forgotten it while they go off to prepare their next EDM strategy, or website promotion.