So, Bear Stearns, the investment banking and hedge goliath who can’t seem to get sub-prime mortgages right – whose two hedge funds declared bankruptcy in the midst of some of the steepest drops in the stock market memory — is now declaring itself a guru in social marketing. To be fair, Bear Stearns is a large entity, with competing interests and different individuals, but the comparison was too delicious to avoid.

Nevertheless, as Mike Arrington reports and Bear Stearns hath declared: “Yahoo Must Get Its Social Networking Shit Together.”

What follows is an argument that Yahoo should “get into” the social networking scene by buying Facebook, which follows with some interesting math valuing Facebook at around 5-6 billion sollars.

Now, the glib response (and being no stranger to glib responses, I will give one … now) would be that Yahoo already has Flickr, MyBlogLog, Yahoo 360, Del.icio.us, and 32 other social networking, or socially-related networking technologies (well, perhaps less than 32). They should just get their shit together and knit what they already have into a social networking strategy. Even better: Just remake Yahoo into one giant social networking site.

The problem is — and what makes this a glib response — that it doesn’t recognize a couple things.

First of all, at a place like Yahoo there is probably an enormous amount of corporate inertia to do risky things. Taking what seems like disparate entities with their own departments, and getting them to “come together” under a single umbrella would probably take more guts than any one person — such as their CEO, Jerry Yang, has. Yes, I’m sorry to flog the “Jerry Yang is teh suck” message, but I still can’t believe any one is excited about a vision that is predicated on such vagaries as “speed, clarity and discipline“. That’s like saying my vision is predicated upon being “awesome”, or being “excellent”. But I digress.

Getting Yahoo to actually create a coherent social networking strategy is needed, sure. But actually getting it done is an entirely different matter.

Secondly, it doesn’t recognize a fundamental difference between people who use Facebook and people who use Yahoo — and I’m not talking about demographics (necessarily). Rather, people who use Facebook *know* about social networking, or are curious enough about it to want to know about it. Facebook *IS* a social networking site, and to remind ourselves of one thing — social networking is more than just “members”, which Yahoo already has a lot of already. Social networking is members having a sense of ownership of their identity on a particular service, as well as actively reading, commenting on, updating, and above all interacting with other members.

The folks who use Yahoo right now are from a greater and more diverse cross section of web users, some of whom don’t necessarily “get” social networking, particularly as I have described it above, and others who don’t even want that from Yahoo. I’m talking about people who are using it exclusively for things like news, email, or even classifieds.

Even if you retool everything so that it becomes like Facebook, the problem is that you would need to make it more than okay and acceptable to the Yahoo faithful (if such a word could be applied to them). They would need to embrace it and *love* it, and to affect that kind change in attitude quickly is more than difficult. Its impossible.

So, let’s get back to the Bear Stearns remark, because it actually may have some merit when taken from a user-point of view. Yes, there is money in the Facebook brand and all its tools. But by purchasing Facebook “in toto”, it would also be purchasing its 30 million plus users, who could be cross-pollinated amongst its other social networking properties. By buying Facebook’s users, not only would it give Yahoo instant credibility, it would also be buying *users* would are used to and amenable to, social networking activities.  It would make it *easier* for them to implement an integrated social networking strategy because they would have bought an install base upon which to base it on, and build upon.

Now, the fact that it hasn’t *yet* done so, even after purchases of entities like Geocities (way, way, way back, pre bubble 1.0) all the way up to MyBlogLog makes me less inclined that its able to an integrated anything.  Which leads me back to my original position.

Should Yahoo buy Facebook?  I think it would be a great fit for Yahoo — and it would be even greater yet, if it had the will to do something with it and its other social media properties, and create something out of Yahoo! that is greater than any of its socially-related parts.  In an age where Google seems to be spreading its tentacles farther, wider, and deeper (and more offline) than ever before, Yahoo! needs to live up to its online legacy so that it represents something more than a mishmash of seemingly unrelated web (never mind “social”) properies.