It makes some kind of cosmic sense that Facebook’s IPO and a U.S. presidential election are taking place in the same year. Each represents a taking stock of something that seemed breathlessly full of hope a few years ago, and about which hard questions are being asked today.

Nor are the two events unrelated. Social media arrived in the corporate consciousness far faster than anyone expected, and by winning the White House through grassroots community-building, online real-time feedback and collaboration, Barack Obama put it there. The corporate world recognized immediately a potential answer to the crumbling economics of mass media.

Four years later, things are less clear. Marketing leaders are by no means abandoning social media—it’s here to stay, and brand engagement is becoming a consumer expectation. But questions are being asked about how to participate, and to what end. Very few marketers today are as certain about it as they were in 2008.

Consider, for example, the difficult problem of return on investment. Branded social media initiatives turn out not to scale very well. The ratio of human resources invested to consumers influenced is almost constant. With advertising, if you get it right, ROI improves over time because of the leverage you can get from that CSI: Miami audience. And once your commercial is shot, your campaign practically runs itself. With social media, it’s just person to person all day long. Many corporations that have taken it on at a large scale have even run into organizational challenges to manage the work, ending up operating practically like publishers.

Then there is the matter of metrics. Although a few potential standards are emerging, social media metrics are still a long way from being a lingua franca, and it’s not easy for marketers to align them with the way they measure everything else. The value of a Like is still something of a mystery. Even the most plugged-in brands still defend their investments in social media in atmospheric terms; there are few acknowledged cases where activity in this space has rung cash registers. It’s still a lot about faith. Just like an IPO.

Realizing that social media has a long way to go, many branded marketers are retreating a little while they figure it out. Most of the social media brand darlings of recent years—Zappos being one notable example—are tweeting less often and being more scripted in Facebook engagements. You can sense in the syntax that the corporate voice is being outsourced or delegated. Strategies are being perfected for taking negative feedback off-line, and risk assessment is affecting even the sharing of good news.

Until marketers decide where this all fits into the process of business-building, there’s little upside in sticking your neck out too far. Between the voter and the investor, it’s hard to say who will be betting on the longer shot this year. But one thing is certain: the payoff will be a lot further down the road than anybody imagined when it all began.

Bruce Philp is a brand strategy consultant and author of Consumer Republic.