By Guest Blogger, Mike Cooperman

Using social media to make marketing decisions is a great idea – if you know who you’re listening to.

A few weeks back, I had to take a new headshot for an upcoming speaking engagement.  I brought two shirt and tie combinations to the shoot – a blue shirt with a pink tie and a white stripped shirt with a black tie with blue designs.

Prior to the shoot, I thought I’d conduct a little social media experiment.  So, I posted a picture of both shirt-tie combinations on my Facebook page and asked my friends for feedback.  The result? Blue shirt, but do it with the black tie (except my buddy Dan, who wondered if they could get another head – that’s what friends are for).

What’s the point? I knew I wasn’t simply asking a bunch of 18 year old goth teens for their opinions. As a result, I got good information.

So what happens when you don’t know who you’re listening to?  Ask the guys who bankrolled “Snakes on a Plane”.

There are many companies trying to figure out a way to use social media.  Most are using it defensively – monitoring blogs for customer complaints and potential “red alerts.”  Others are using it to generate offense – getting their company’s message out to consumers through Twitter or Facebook.  Both are important.  But both are tactical.

If you extend the football metaphor, there’s a third phase of the game – strategic planning.  Prior to every game, the coaches draw up a plan, and then execute it in practice.  The teams with the best strategic plan, and the teams that execute that plan on the field, achieve not just short term wins, but long term success.  THIS is where social media is heading.

Ask General Motors.  As part of their effort to re-brand, they recently launched the Chevy Volt – the first plug-in hybrid.  Their challenge?  From the moment they showed the production version of the car, the blogosphere hated it.  Reading a few blogs, it was apparent that the primarily source of the angst was that the Volt wasn’t nearly as sporty as the concept they had shown the world the prior year.  If they had simply been monitoring the blogosphere, someone may have had to hit the panic button.  However, upon further review, using the blogosphere as a rich source of analysis, they were able to identify that all the negative conversation was coming from professional bloggers, while there was actually a tremendous amount of positive discussion from the average consumer.  Turns out the average consumer was less concerned about whether the car looked sporty and more concerned about the fuel economy and the increased functionality.

So, if you’re trying to figure out if that new show with Courtney Cox is going to fly with women over 40 (it will) or whether Gen Y Teens will pay more for “green” products (they won’t), you may want to do more than simply monitor internet chatter.  There’s an old sports quote that goes something like “If a coach starts listening to fans, he winds up sitting next to them.”  As the coach of your brand, it pays to know who you’re listening to.

Guest Blogger Mike Cooperman is the Sr. Director of Marketing for J.D. Power’s Web Intelligence Division.  And yes, he actually asked his friends on Facebook what to wear.