Social Media is a tactic and not an overall digital strategy. The majority of digital marketers don’t get this, marketing departments even less, CEO’s even less, and CEO’s in their 80’s even less. When you are Bernie Ecclestone, the 83 year old Czar of Formula 1 and have a net worth, according to Forbes, of $4.2 billion, you can get away with blowing off Social Media altogether. However, Bernie might not be so crazy when it comes to his disinterest in Social Media. In his own words, he can’t figure out how to make money with Social Media since the focus of the business is the tanker full of cash derived from the live events, merchandising, and television rights being one of the most watched sporting events in the world.

It’s not difficult to see why there is so much hate towards Bernie, a man who has amassed billions of Formula 1 money. It is inevitable that he is an easy target to take shots at for being old and not embracing change by team bosses and pundits. However, there is validity in old fashioned values and Bernie was around long before the “build it and we’ll figure out how to make money from it later” generation. Bernie understands cash generated from cash and that mentality is counter to how Social Media usually works even though it lacks 21st century cavalierism(not an actual word). However, cash on cash is a sound model. Let’s look a little bit further into this.

The word Social Media is thrown around a lot and unfortunately by people that don’t have the background or experience to understand it. In a business environment Social Media can be very effective if and only if, a few stars align. Here are some of those stars:

• Is your audience active on Social Media?
• Can you create a conversion event that can generate money on Social Media?
• Does the acquisition cost of the audience through Social Media generate net financial benefit?
• Can you target the right customers through Social Media in a way that will get them to spend money again and again?

Social Media is not a digital strategy. It takes a lot more than a Facebook, Linkedin page, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram account to turn social media into an active revenue generator. However, everyone gets stuck on buzzwords and right now Social Media is the biggest, buzziest (yes we made that word up) word around. Social Media, however, can be part of a much larger digital strategy.

Formula 1 needs a Digital Transformation and the ways to do this are numerous. What all of Bernie’s detractors don’t realize when praising the benefits of social media is that social media without a much larger Digital Strategy is going to be a failure. The main financial goal of formula 1 is to increase the attendance at the races, spend more money on merchandising, and either push the audience to watch it more on TV to increase the value of the rights or digitally transform the business so the fans and viewers can dynamically interact with the show. Is this Social Media? Possibly a part of it, but not the Digital Transformation that everyone in Formula 1 thinks it is.

Social media is a tactic and not a strategy. Bernie seems to get that and like any good leader he understands that there are a lot of different tactics to execute for an overall strategy. If one of those tactics are not going to generate revenue then you look for something else. If social media isn’t it, then another tactic gets executed upon. Bernie, at 83 years old with $4 billion, might take the one option the sport can’t afford, to do nothing.