Social networking can help businesses to build communities around their brands and give them a human face. If you say you're available when you aren't, however, a company can be exposed as insincere very quickly. It can do damage, which Time Out London must have seen.

Mary sent this screen shot around a short while ago with the very pertinent question: is this a sign of things to come?

Hello Time Out Facebook Group,
We’ve decided to close down this group. We spend so much time updating www.timeout.com/london and we didn’t feel like we were giving you our very best.

An honest message through their group can only be better than neglecting the group in the long term.

Very few brands actually devote the time they should to their involvement with social networks (during some research I did recently it took Smirnoff 2 weeks to confirm me as friend on their Facebook profile, not exactly the way to make a girl feel special).

This neglect often happens because marketers have limited time and resources, and measuring the ROI for time invested in social networking can be pretty tough. Especially when the objectives are often more complicated than just building site traffic.

Time Out has decided to focus only on their site and their newsletter – which perhaps gives us something akin to an answer. They wouldn't have abandoned the Facebook group lightly, so I assume the decision was made in line with their brand and marketing objectives. The personal communication channel that they feel works best for them is actually directly their website, and then their newsletter.

If you are considering or involved with social media marketing, the question you should ask yourself is probably which channel meets your brand objectives – and whether you're committed enough to the relationship to make it work.

I suspect that measurement would largely have to be done on a campaign by campaign basis, but I would love to hear from you which goals have best been met through social media marketing, and how you've gone about measuring the effect.

If you have an answer please leave it in the comments below...