This is late news, sorry.  But I, along with Tac Anderson and LaSandra Brill participated in a podcast last month facilitated by 1to1 Media (a division of Peppers & Rogers Group).  Here is quick excerpt of the podcast (listen to part 1 and part 2), but you will have to listen to the entire thing if you want all the juicy details (it’s almost an hour in length):

What do you find are the biggest challenges when it comes to implementing social media?

Tac Anderson: I think a lot of times there is a lot of excitement and people want to make sure they’re not left behind. But because social media touches so many different business groups within a company, everyone wants to add their piece to it. So the biggest challenge I’ve seen is making sure that the goals are properly aligned with what the medium is for.

Lasandra Brill: Here at Cisco, we’re starting to adopt the Forrester POST strategy (People, Objectives, Strategy, and Tools) for doing that, and making sure that we’re looking at what we’re trying to achieve first before we jump into just what are the tools we want to implement.

Michael Brito: Our biggest challenge is understanding if the people we’re looking to talk to even participate in social media. If they’re not reading blogs, it’s probably not a wise decision to launch a blog. We’ve also adopted the Forrester POST method. They’ve mapped our customer segments -– the people who talk Intel and buy Intel — to various behaviors. That allows us to make sure that we have concrete data and research as we go to market with different projects.

We understand who our customers are, and how they behave online. Then we have to figure out internally what our objectives and strategies are, and then we decide what the tool is. The tool might be a corporate blog, it might be Facebook engagement, or Twitter, or other tools that are available.

Tac Anderson: Sometimes the hardest thing for me to do personally, because I’m such an evangelist for the tools, is to tell people that social media isn’t the right thing to do in an instance. We’re all very eager to prove out what it is that we do, but sometimes it’s not the right tool. You want to make sure that’s clear, because you don’t want to set yourself up for failure.

If you have a chance to listen, please do let me know your thoughts/feedback.