There’s much more hype and pointless activity surrounding social media — much less social media analysis — than there are meaningful results.  A recent piece on Business Week, Debunking Six Social Media Myths, is well worth the read, hitting the proverbial nail on the head when it comes to using social media for business.

Their six key points all support the basic premise on which nuance intelligence does business, and therefore, we want you to hear someone else saying it:

1. Social media is cheap, if not free. Yes, many of the tools that can be employed in social media marketing are free to use. .. However, integrating these tools into a corporate marketing program requires skill, time, and money. The budget for an effective social media marketing campaign begins at $50,000 for two to three months. I’m sure companies have spent less, and I know they’ve spent more.

2. Anyone can do it. A surfeit of whiz kids and more experienced marketers are claiming to be social media experts and even social media gurus. Search the bios of Robert Scoble’s 56,838 Twitter followers using Tweepsearch (www.tweepsearch.com), an index of the bios of Twitter users, and you’ll find: 4,273 Internet marketers, 1,652 social media marketers, 513 social media consultants, 272 social media strategists, 180 social media experts, 98 social media gurus, 58 Internet marketing gurus.

How many of them have actually created a successful campaign for clients using social media tools? I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find half a dozen with real track records.

… exactly.  we’re not kids (whiz- or otherwise), we’ve been making impact for a long time, and we “eschew the guru.”

3. You can make a big splash in a short time. Sure, sometimes a social media campaign can produce substantial and measurable results quickly.

… but mostly, it’s a long, steady build.

4. You can do it all in-house. Wrong! You need strategy, contacts, tools, and experience—a combination not generally found in in-house teams, who often reinvent the wheel or use the wrong tools.

5. If you do something great, people will find it. Quite simply, that never was true. Until you can drive traffic to your social media effort, you’ve got a tree falling in the forest, heard only by those standing nearby.

6. You can’t measure social media marketing results. You can use a variety of methods, including mentions on blogs and in media; comments on the content; real-time blog advertising results, and click-throughs to your company Web site.

Read the entire article for details, examples and a 100-comment discussion of the relative merits of this piece.  And beware experts and gurus — anyone with the ego to call themselves such is probably over-compensating for something.