<p>Six months ago, your company charged into social media with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts, eager to cash in on the bounty of word-of-mouth goodness that happens when employees and customers sing your praises.</p><p>But things haven't turned out as planned. Facebook "likes" plateaued early, and your head of sales is griping that the few leads that come in from social channels are lousy. What's worse is that customers mainly use Facebook and Twitter to complain, and your customer service organization is in constant fire-drill mode as a result.</p><p>Sound familiar? This scenario is all too common for companies that fail to link social media activity to a business strategy. And these days that's most of them, according to Altimeter Group research being released today.</p><p>The report, "The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Media Transformation," surveyed online about 700 social strategists and executives in November and December, and went in-depth with 26 of them by phone. It found: Only 12% said they're confident that their company has a social media plan that looks beyond the next year. Only half said their top executives are "informed, engaged and aligned" with social strategy. Only one in three felt that metrics used to measure the results of social activities are connected to business outcomes. (Much more common was a focus on follower counts, a metric that has become all but meaningless in a world in which 100,000 Twitter followers can be purchased for $300.)</p><p><a href="http://www.btobonline.com/article/20130306/SOCIAL/303069998/report-sees-lack-of-social-media-business-alignment">Keep reading...</a></p>