The tweets were predictable: “Somebody just dropped an H-Palm,” “HP saves Palm,” my own “New lease on life for WebOS,” and some contrarian views, including noted tech blogger Om Malik’s assertion that “hp buying palm makes no sense to me.” Yes, the news about Hewlett-Packard’s $1.2 billion acquisition of struggling smartphone manufacturer Palm (official transcript from HP conference call available here) temporarily gave mobile industry watchers something to tweet about other than Apple (which made smaller waves of its own yesterday and signaled its intent to take on Google in mobile search by buying mobile assistant app maker Siri).

The HP acquisition is certainly a game-changer for Palm, saving the company from the looming prospect of oblivion, but it’s not yet clear whether it represents a dramatic realignment for the industry. As Forrester Research’s Ian Fogg and Current Analysis’ Avi Greengart pointed out yesterday, the combined HP/Palm is a stronger entity, but faces the same competitors as before, in the same increasingly heated battle over the growing overlap between computing devices and mobile devices.

This is a battle in which Apple arguably retains a significant lead. In a well-argued post, Creative Strategies president Tim Bajarin succinctly described Apple’s advantage as follows:

Apple did not just come out with a new smart phone. They delivered a complete solution that included hardware, software, and services. More importantly, they controlled the complete customer experience. This is very much at the heart of why Apple is so successful with the iPhone.

Yes, HP now has hardware and software expertise under one roof, and yes, there are personnel synergies (Palm alumni in HP’s Personal Systems Group), but hardware and software are still just two sides of the mobile triangle. The missing piece is content, and that’s a key part of what generates Apple’s appeal. On the HP conference call, JPMorgan analyst Rod Hall asked Todd Bradley, the EVP of HP’s Personal Systems Group, to talk about HP/Palm’s content strategy, and Mr. Bradley responded as follows:

Our focus is to provide connected devices that enable people to safely and seamlessly connect to that information that is important to them, be that entertainment or work or personal data. So I don’t think we are content creators, but we are access providers.

Better distribution and stronger marketing support will certainly help Palm’s prospects, but they only get you so far these days. As InformationWeek’s Eric Zeman put it:

HP’s buy-out of Palm does not improve the developer story at all. Without developers who are committed to writing apps, webOS can’t have a future — or at least can’t have a future that is as full and rich as its competitors.

Therein lies the challenge. Now the industry will wait to see how successfully HP/Palm can meet it.

If you accept that your company needs to be involved in social media—as most marketers do—then it’s important to figure out where social media fits within your organization.

Tempting as it might be to compartmentalize social media, most companies find that it gets assimilated into various functional teams, including marketing and communications, sales, customer service, human resources, IT and executive management. Firms from Ford Motor Co. to Dunkin’ Donuts to Hewlett-Packard describe social media as a cross-organizational discipline that touches a wide range of functions.

Best Buy, for example, encouraged hundreds of employees to engage with customers who have questions about the company and its products through Twitter. Dubbed Twelpforce, the feed not only deals with customer service issues that arise through social media, but also functions as marketing vehicle, resulting in tweets like this:

While some businesses, like Best Buy or HP, have attempted to integrate social media across the organization, that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be a dedicated social media department, or at least an individual in charge of the company’s overall social presence. This is essential, particularly at larger companies with complex structures. This person or team needs to work closely with other departments that participate in the social media effort. Promotion and customer service on Twitter is good, but disseminating information learned from Twitter across the organization to drive results is better. See this recent article from our newsletter for more on measuring ROI on social efforts.

In my recently published report, “Where Does Social Media Fit Within an Organization?,” I discuss in detail how different companies have weaved social media into the corporate fabric and demonstrated success at a variety of levels. A key takeaway:

More and more opportunities will present themselves for companies to use social channels to increase their business. The landscape will change rapidly, so tactics that might have seemed irrelevant in 2009 might be on the table in 2010 or 2011. Stay tuned as social channels evolve and be creative in how they are used within an organization.

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