Last month, we reported on a survey that found that 84% of social media programs don’t measure return on investment (ROI). The comments in that post indicated that a lot of individuals and businesses want to be able to measure the ROI of their social media strategies and campaigns, but they don’t know where to start.
Companies and executives are finally beginning to really jump on the social media bandwagon, and that’s fantastic. However, for social media to fully work (for everyone), businesses and brands need to be able to evaluate the impact their social media use is having, both positive and negative. Measuring social media ROI isn’t impossible, but it can be difficult because many of the pieces that need to be evaluated are difficult to track. This guide is designed to help you track down those pieces and determine the ROI you’re getting on social media…
Read on at mashable.com
TwitterTwitter’s “suggested users” list is a Who’s Who of Twitter celebrities, featuring the likes of Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Ashton Kutcher, John McCain, Martha Stewart, and others with millions of followers. The New York Times claimed that a spot on the list would guarantee 500,000 additional followers and reported that social media guru Jason Calacanis had offered $250,000 to be listed.
Last Friday, Twitter did something remarkable. It added a number of well-known social entrepreneurs and innovators to this list, among them Social Edge, Skoll Foundation, Kiva, Matt Flannery (Kiva co-founder),Acumen Fund, Jacqueline Novogratz (Acumen Fund founder), charity: water, GOOD Magazine, Kjerstin Erickson (FORGE founder), and Room to Read. Not knowing what was going on, Kiva’s Flannery thought there was a spam attack and complained about the 500 new users a minute he was getting. But not for long… Read on at cnet.com
A recent survey from eMarketer.com seems to show that U.S. executives are warming up to social media usage in the workplace.
Out of 438 management, marketing and human resources executives polled, 81% saw social media as being useful for both brand-building and enhancing customer or client relationships. Just under 70% see it as a valuable recruitment tool, 64% think social media is useful for customer service, and a lower sampling at 46% saw it as improving employee morale.
Asked how they themselves actually used social media in the workplace, respondents listed brand-building as their top goal (82%), followed by networking (60%), and a long tail of other reasons including customer service, sharing project information, monitoring their competitors, prospecting for sales, research, and other… Read on at mashable.com
In an unusually robust collaboration using Facebook Connect, the Huffington Post is launching a feature on Monday called “HuffPost Social News,” which lets readers create a personalized social networking-like news page on the Huffington Post itself. While the Huffington Post had already been using Facebook Connect since January–which allows readers of the site to log in using their FacebookFacebook identity to interact, which is mostly used to leave comments–this use essentially takes Facebook Connect and puts it on steroids. “We are looking at HuffPost Social News like a ‘digital water cooler,’ because we see news going in that direction,” said Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief and Co-founder Arianna Huffington, in an interview with me this weekend. “We did this, because we are interested in real identities having real conversations about news.” While the use of “social news” will be seen by some as simply a clever PR term, this kind of innovative deployment on the Huffington Post is actually a very big step for the site, especially as an opportunity to bind its readers to it more closely, presumably increasing engagement and traffic… Read on at allthingsd.com
The site, called Know Your Mojo, is a promotion for the new Yahoo homepage: once you’ve received the result, you also receive ideas for new content to add to your personalized Yahoo homepage. The full result set is: Headliner – Crowd Pleaser – Cheerleader – B.F.F. – Party Animal – Private Eye – Concierge – Word Whiz – Lone Wolf – Name Dropper – Matchmaker – Wall Flower – Novelist – Shadow – Scenester – Tweethead
What kind of TwitterTwitter user are you? Let us know your result in the comments.
GoogleGoogle today released a host of new gadgets and an “Update” feature to its customizable home page offering, iGoogle, in the U.S. that mirror many of the functions on social networking sites like FacebookFacebook and TwitterTwitter, such as the ability to share story links on status updates, play multiplayer games and comment on photos and videos. The additions were made in response to users’ demands for more features that allow them to connect with their friends, according to Google’s VP of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, further evidence of how social networking features are becoming standard fare. In fact, if you mashed up Twitter’s status updates and Facebook’s news feed together, iGoogle’s new “Update” feature would be your end result — except it lacks Twitter’s real-time capabilities… Read on at gigaom.com
Microsoft may be opposed, but the campaign to kill off Internet ExplorerInternet Explorer 6 has gained a powerful ally this week: GoogleGoogle’s OrkutOrkut, the leading social network in Brazil, has vowed to stop supporting the browser. If you visit Orkut using IE6 today, you’ll see a warning message that says Orkut is ending support for the browser, while recommending other browsers to try: Internet Explorer 8, ChromeChrome, and FirefoxFirefox. Given that Chrome is Google’s IE challenger, it could be seen as generous that Google would push IE8 ahead of its own product. Nonetheless, the greater effect is to push many Brazilian web users away from the outdated IE6 and consider the benefits of a modern web browser: a move that’s good for Google and great for the web design community… Read on at Mashable.com
Is it easier to talk to your online buddies than your friends out there in the “real world?” Do you feel like you know more about what’s happening in the lives of your FacebookFacebook and MySpaceMySpace friends than with those who don’t have accounts or don’t bother to update them? According to a recent UK MySpace study of over 16,000 social network users, these sorts of feelings are common among today’s younger generation. The study revealed that a good portion of this group admits to feeling more comfortable sharing and communicating with friends online than they do when logged out of cyberspace… Read on at ReadWriteweb.com
DiggDigg’s been busy lately adding new features—some loved, some not—but they seem to be having a positive effect on overall. In June, comScore estimates the site brought in 8.8 million unique visitors in the U.S alone, up 31 percent over the preceding three months. That accounts for the change all of a sudden? Well, by Digg’s own admission, once it introduced the Diggbar it saw an initial lift in visitors just as a result of people passing around short links. And it’s been getting even more aggressive on that front lately, having to reverse itself at times. But it’s not just the Diggbar. The site launched a decent search feature in April (which always helps generate more traffic) and Facebook Connect in May… Read on at TechCrunch.com
In today’s blog post by Chief Strategy Officer Mike Maser, DiggDigg announced that it will be rolling out its beta ad program later this week. In addition to the community’s existing banner ads, the company is launching an initial set of ads to appear in rotation with regular content. From here, users will interact with the ads in the same way they interact with articles – by digging, burying and commenting on them. Advertising with a high number of Diggs will fetch lower ad revenue and buried advertisers will be charged more. ReadWriteWeb covered Kevin Rose’s suggestion for this advertising system in April. The program will be launched this week for testing to a select few users before making a public release… Read on at ReadWriteWeb.com
Last month, we reported on a survey that found that 84% of social media programs don’t measure return on investment (ROI). The comments in that post indicated that a lot of individuals and businesses want to be able to measure the ROI of their social media strategies and campaigns, but they don’t know where to start.
In an unusually robust collaboration using Facebook Connect, the Huffington Post is launching a feature on Monday called “HuffPost Social News,” which lets readers create a personalized social networking-like news page on the Huffington Post itself. While the Huffington Post had already been using Facebook Connect since January–which allows readers of the site to log in using their 
Microsoft may be opposed, but the campaign to kill off 