Pick up a coin and throw it in one of London’s media hubs. According to a scientific methodology that includes quantum physics, toast’s ability to land butter side down and the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle, chances are it will thwack a self-styled social ‘meeja’ expert – let’s call him Colin.

Colin has been responsible for some epic social media fails of late. It started off well. After coining the quite brilliant “Woohoo for my froo froo”, he got the sack from feminine hygiene company Fem Fresh. He opened a Facebook page where all of your up-to-the-minute Froo Froo banter was open for discussion. The page lasted a nanosecond before it was “suspended until further notice” because of the tawdry obscenities in the comments thread.

Then Colin got a job as, and this is absolutely killer, a social media ambassador at Vodafone where he was caught slating “mentally retarded” punters who he wanted to give a “pimp slap back hand” to. In virtually the same week, Colin bagged employment at Twitter and suspended the account of Guy Adams, a foreign correspondent for the Independent, for posting anti-NBC tweets regarding its Olympics coverage. In the biggest fail of all, Twitter and NBC were running co-promotional activity and Colin contacted NBC directly to tell them about Guy’s tweet. Twitter apologised but it was too late.

Thanks to Colin, social media is losing some of its currency – literally in the case of the amount of business spend this year according to the Telegraph:

In the fourth quarter of 2011, 22 per cent of businesses polled in the sector were investing in social media marketing. This figure fell to 8.5 per cent in the first quarter of 2012 and to 6 per cent by the second quarter. Pearlfinders, a major business research company, spoke to more than 5000 marketeers around the world about their budgets.

The problem most businesses have is diving into social media without defining objectives. As an afterthought, they assume it’s owned by PR, marketing or sales and don’t integrate it from the ground up into the fabric of every business decision. They might as well put their fingers in their ears, shout “la la la” and give Colin sole access to the big red button that says DO NOT TWEET!

Battle-hardened businessmen are rightly sceptical about the lack of quantifiable box-tickery and voodoo mechanics of social media engagement. If they get tangible ROI from social media, it’s fine, so driving sales and expanding customer bases is worthwhile. But social media engagement is much more than that. How do you quantify O2’s brilliant social media response when it put a human face and said sorry with comedy tweets when its network went down for a few days?

And the moral of the story is? Business needs to integrate social media into its DNA and not give self-styled social meeja ambassadors a free run on the brand reputation of their Fortune 500 company.

And, please, no one give Colin any more work.