Alexis Madrigal had a very interesting article in The Atlantic last Friday. In his article he talks about there really being two social “networks,” one is the one that gets all the hype, led by Facebook and Twitter, and the other is what he dubs “dark social” networks, or those that can’t be tracked. Included is email, instant messages and the like. It turns out that 57% of The Atlantic’s traffic and 70% across Chartbeat’s media partner sites are referrals via dark social media. Chartbeat is the company tracking data for The Atlantic and others.

If you think optimizing your Facebook page and Tweets is “optimizing for social,” you’re only halfway (or maybe 30 percent) correct. The only real way to optimize for social spread is in the nature of the content itself. There’s no way to game email or people’s instant messages. There’s no power users you can contact. There’s no algorithms to understand. This is pure social, uncut.

So the social web (web 2.0) revolution didn’t create social, as Alexis points out, instead it structured it and made it trackable.

We optimized powerOne to share via email. While we technically have the ability to know how much it is used we aren’t tracking that data. It would be interesting to know. Furthermore, and again under the heading of “can’t possibly know,” it would be interesting to know how much of powerOne’s success has come from one person showing another person the app. I hear from customers all the time who say they tell everyone they know about the app. Given the amount of conversation on Twitter about it, email and word of mouth has got to be huge.

I spent six and a half years in undergraduate and graduate business school and I can tell you, without a doubt, that the worst taught topic was company vision. It’s clear, in retrospect, that not a single professor I had truly understood it (or at least could explain it in a way I could grasp).

Fred Wilson has a new sustainability post this morning, in which he shared a video of Dennis Crowley, founder and CEO of Foursquare, talking about the time when Facebook announced Facebook Places, Google announced Google Places, and everyone was competing with tiny Foursquare:

Fred goes on to point out that this is why we need a corporate vision. That vision keeps the company on the straight and narrow, focuses it on the long-term success of the business, not a short term roadblock.

Here’s what happens: small company starts to gain some traction, big company realizes it is something they should be doing and makes a build versus buy decision. If they decide to build the technology, whether that’s because small company rebuffs big company or because big company decides just to build their own, little company now feels overwhelmed by the competition.

But here’s the thing: big company has not thought about the problem for years, lived with it and experienced it first-hand. Big company is a mercenary, bent on getting into the space because they think they need to. Small company, meanwhile, lives and breaths this problem every day, talks to customers who live and breath this problem every day. And that’s the competitive advantage: the small company’s ability to solve the problem better than big company.

A vision is critical. Without it, the company gets waylaid by every distraction, every competitor, every decision point. And as for the CEO, if she doesn’t feel it in her gut, live and die by that vision, then the company will never make it.