Social Media...what are your thoughts?

What are your thoughts? How do we use the technologies within social media to further promote our business? Why do we even bother about social media when there are so many other technologies we marketers could use?
 
Two questions to ask ourselves:
1)    What are our business objective of using social media?
2)    How do we measure social media according to our business objectives?
 
But really, the main question for me is...Is social media suitable for all companies? Are companies just following the band wagon? 
 
I feel that it ultimately boils down to the company’s objective and its means of competition and how they view social media. If the culture of the organisation is pretty much conservative and bounded by heaps of regulatopms perhaps social marketing is not the right platform for them.

But this is just my opinion. Let me know what you think..