Today I got an email - yes yesterday’s technology - but in any case it invited me connect to McKinsey. McKinsey, the buttoned up consulting company that publishes in depth, data rich reports about everything related to business. The same company that routinely works with the Fortune 500 of the world. Consultants on top of consultants.

They were offering me the opportunity to connect with them on Twitter (they already have over 3,000 followers), Facebook as well get RSS feeds. Use the widget on their home page to link to their stories.

Several issues. First, the McKinsey clients…has McKinsey determined that their clients are using these tools and they should too? Second, are they trying to figure out how to monetize the social media and creating their own case study experiment?

But most importantly, are we in the communications world again going to step aside and let McKinsey help clients figure out how to derive benefit from Social Media? Thus once again leaving implementation up to us? These are the same guys who hijacked strategy from the agencies.

I’m convinced the social media phenomena is not a minor shift, it is a big change in the ways we communicate. I also believe that those of us in the communications world have a better understanding of what is going on in the social media world and are best suited to figure out how to make it work. However, we are once again at risk, unless we focus on connecting social media to business goals.

This is not about making Facebook pages and designing blogs, it’s about figuring out how to create strategies that connect social media to business goals.