Social media is merely one of many, many platforms. It’s overused, over-invested in, and over-saturated by brands.

More effective platforms, which I advise clients to invest in before social media include:

Good, relationship-based public relations. Relationship PR is a wildly underutilized platform from which to communicate your messaging. (But blasted press releases by 23-year-old media relations people are just the opposite: way overused, and not effective at all.)

A great list of customer to communicate with regularly and provide value to relentlessly. If you’re sending value, there is no such thing as too much communication.

Your company Web site is a huge missed opportunity for nearly everyone. Does it have customer videos? Detailed descriptions of how customers perceive your value? For service providers, does it detail case studies, offer a large range of free value demonstrating your expertise and ability? For product makers, does it feature the words of your customers and the ways in which your product has improved their lives?

Your product packaging is a more valuable and powerful platform than social media.

So is your product manual for that matter. A perfect product manual would consist of a series of real customer stories describing how they used various functionalities and how their lives were improved as a result.

Of all of your available platforms, social media is about in the middle of the pack in terms of effectiveness.

And yet, we have social media agencies popping up all over the planet. Meanwhile social media stock prices are sinking, growth is slowing, revenue is falling and big brands, like GM, are dramatically decreasing or eliminating their social media spend.

Instead of social media agencies, you’d be much better off going to a customer relationship agency, or a focus-like-a-laser-on-your-real-life-value agency. But then, those agencies don’t exist.

Then again, I do know somebody doing this work at the highest levels.