Amber shares why social media monitoring is so important and what you need to monitor to get the most value out of your social media activities.

You’ll find out why social media is the new phone and what this means to your business. Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• How to find out what people are saying, what your competition is doing and what’s happening in your industry
• How to tie your monitoring back to metrics to measure social media results to improve awareness, sales and loyalty
• What the Red Cross does right in social media
• How blogging and social media impact your metrics
• Whether controversy is a good idea on your blog
• Where to learn how to integrate social media into your business

Read the book Amber co-authored with Jay Baer, The Now Revolution, to find out how to be a social company and how to engineer social from the inside out.  And connect with Amber on Twitter @ambercadabra, at Radian6 and on her blog, Brass Tack Thinking.

How do you measure your social media activities? What tips do you have to share on creating a social business? Please leave them below.

If you’re looking for a social media monitoring tool, you’ve probably noticed that it’s quickly becoming a confusing landscape. For those who are new to social media and looking for tools to manage their presence, it’s difficult to know how to compare one vendor to the next. Here’s the skinny on where Radian6 fits into the picture.

Where does Radian6 fit into the social media measurement landscape?

Radian6 helps brands ensure that no post is missed.

We offer unequalled coverage of the social web and provide metrics to measure what is being said, and by whom. —David Alston, CMO Radian6.

Primarily, Radian6 is a monitoring tool. It can help you monitor brand mentions across the social landscape and the new Engagement Console offers you an end-to-end presence management tool.

Radian6 Dashboards

For consideration: Think about how much “noise” you have in your space. In order for monitoring to be actionable you want to keep in mind that for industries and brands that are targets for spammers it can take a considerable amount of work to filter and find the “meaningful” conversations. I experienced this problem myself, as CareOne and the entire debt relief industry are hounded by spammers and it required intervention from Radian6 to get it in line.

Tip: Many people start by putting in keywords that are used in SEO and paid search. To narrow your results, sort them by comment count. Because comments indicate more engagement, it’s more likely that the conversations are meaningful. Look for other words that are used frequently with your keywords and add them as modifiers to narrow your results to conversations, rather than spam bots.

The Engagement Console is a real-time social web client—more complete than Twitter.

What are Radian6′s greatest strengths?

“Radian6 offers users comprehensive coverage of discussions on the social web, covering hundreds of millions of blogs, comments, the public Facebook API and the full Twitter firehose. In addition to this coverage, Radian6 is scalable within an enterprise, allowing online comments to be assigned within the business, to customer service, sales, marketing and so forth. Radian6 also integrates with other enterprise applications like Salesforce.com and analytics like Webtrends, Omniture and Google Analytics.” —David Alston

You can scour more than 150 million public sites and sources including blogs and comments, forums, mainstream online news publications, public photos and videos.

In the landscape of monitoring tools, while competitors are on the rise, Radian6 has had a very comfortable and secure position in the market. I think this is because of two things. First, they entered the market early and got popular social media bloggers to test them out and recommend them. Second, they quickly gained popularity among enterprise organizations with big brand names as being the go-to choice.

For consideration: Radian6 is a very comprehensive tool that gives you a one-stop shop for engaging on your social channels. The workflow aspect is a key consideration for enterprise-level organizations. However, for smaller businesses or teams with one or two people it may be overkill. Additionally, their pricing model can get expensive quickly for larger teams. It starts at $1k+ per month.

Tip: Take advantage of the free tools out there for a while. See what you like best about them and see what they’re lacking. Create a list of absolute must-haves and nice-to-haves. When you’re looking at different providers you can use this checklist to make sure they have what you need. Anything they’re offering that isn’t on your absolute must-have or nice-to-have lists will likely end up being an unused feature.

If Radian6 is integrated with Salesforce, Webtrends, Omniture and Google Analytics, can they provide ROI data?

The short answer is no. Based on the integration David described to me, there’s no way to follow the conversation back to the revenue. The integration was mostly done from a customer service perspective.

“For Salesforce, it’s designed in such a way that, for example, if you find a customer service issue in Radian6, you can link the record of what you find in Radian6 back to the customer record. In terms of Google Analytics, Webtrends or Omniture, you can create an XML report of the 10 terms that get captured in Webtrends that you want to import into Radian6. You can then overlay the Webtrend data on those keywords with the information inside Radian6 and do kind of a pivot to sort by items like time on site.” —David Alston

For consideration: The level of conversion tracking was described by Alston as items like lead forms that are set up as goals within your web tracking software. In my experience, this type of conversion data is nice but unless it was an online sale it doesn’t attach to revenue.

Tip: While Radian6 doesn’t provide ROI data within its interface, it doesn’t mean that you can’t get to it through other channels. You may need to work with a consultant who can help you quickly identify where to connect the pieces to get to revenue.

What are Radian6′s biggest weaknesses?

There are a several things that I think Radian6 could do better.

Up-front Effort for Workflow Features

From a workflow perspective, it’s great to be able to assign tasks and tags to posts; however, to be effective, you need to create a system of tagging up front or you’ll end up with a large clean-up effort later. It was a great improvement when they released the Engagement Console which allows you to write macros. This cuts down significantly on the number of clicks it takes to assign a post and tag it. But it does take a lot of forethought and setup to get that working well.

David acknowledges that this can be a challenge.

“Because the Engagement Console was designed to optimize usage in a team environment, it requires users to think through the tagging, classification and macro systems they would like to use in advance. This takes an investment to create (we call it a “playbook”), but it’s definitely worth it once it has been set up. The latest addition of administrative functionality in the Engagement Console means a single super-user can help pull this all together for the team, thus saving more time.”

Two Interfaces

As a user you’ll find that there are two interfaces for you to use. The Engagement Console is where you manage your social media channels, tag posts, assign them and so on. I liken it to your HootSuite or TweetDeck interface on steroids. This is what you’ll likely use every day. Then you have the Radian6 dashboard which aggregates all of your stats into pretty little charts and you can get data based on specific timeframes.

I found it awkward that the Radian6 dashboard is web-based and the Engagement Console is a desktop app. I would have preferred to have them both as web apps.

No Smart Phone App

For those who manage their presence on the go, there’s one big missing piece of the puzzle. You can’t use Radian6 on a smart phone because there is no app. I asked David about this and he said to “stay tuned” but I’ve been hearing that for over a year now so I’m becoming a little skeptical on their ability to make it happen in the short-term. If I were at Radian6, this would be my top priority. For users, it creates a disconnect from presence management and forces us to use other tools on our phones.

I’d rather look for all of my stats on my smart phone, and using the Engagement Console means I have to get reporting in two locations, which is not my preference.

Pricing

There are three fees. One is a per-seat license. The second is a per–topic profile fee. A topic profile is where you tell it what data you want to pull in. If you want to separate data, there is only so much you can do within one topic profile. An agency managing multiple clients would need at least one topic profile per client and it’s the most expensive item on the list. The third fee is based upon the volume of posts that come into your topic profile.

While the initial volume range that comes with your topic profile is reasonably high, you’d be surprised at how quickly you can exceed it. You can use keyword refinement to bring this down. These are all monthly fees that make up your core price. While I think Radian6 is certainly the Cadillac in the space and their price indicates that, it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth the money.

Summary

Radian6 is a great platform that’s equipped with a lot of bells and whistles. From my perspective, it was clear the company is dedicated to continual innovation of the tools. To decide if it’s right for you, you’ll need to look at your list of absolute must-have and nice-to-have features and see if buying the “whole farm” makes sense for your organization. My feeling is that for most one- or two-person operations it may be a little overkill and pricey, but for corporate marketing teams I think it’s a reasonable choice.

Read these posts for more on measuring social media and its impact on brand awareness, looking to track social media metrics and 5 ways to use social data to grow your business.

What do you think? Are you a Radian6 user? If so, what would you add to the list of strengths? How about weaknesses? Did you switch from Radian6 to another tool? If so, which one did you pick and why? Please join the conversation and leave a comment in the box below.

In this interview, we talk about social media marketing, Jay’s experience writing the book and about where this crazy, fast-moving industry is headed.

Mike: Jay, what’s the single most important thing that marketers or business owners need to know to be successful right now?

Jay: It’s a terrific question. One of the things that we talked about a lot in the book is the fact that you have to act quickly as an organization. The example that we use to kick off the book is if you’re at a hotel and you’re having a bad hotel experience—it’s dirty or gross or whatever—historically, you might go down to the front desk, or call the 1-800 number or write a letter.

Now you can just dial up Yelp or TripAdvisor and leave a bad review or a tweet in two seconds. Now that particular hotel has to respond to whatever you’re doing as a consumer. Every customer is a reporter now.

In a world like that—where every customer is a reporter—each employee ends up having to be in marketing. Your company has to move so fast, to capitalize on both the good and the bad, that you really must have an incredibly strong and consistent corporate culture.

We don’t have time as businesses anymore to call a committee meeting and talk about what we’re going to do about this tweet or this blog post or this Yelp review. You have to empower your people in the organization to make decisions that are culturally appropriate for your organization.

We believe that culture is the most important factor around social participation and doing social media right. You have to focus on how your company is going to be social, and less about how your company is going to do social.

Mike: What you’re saying is that speed is the thing you want people to take home, and it’s important for them to respond. Secondly, that every customer or every prospect who has a bad experience is like a reporter. They can let the world know about their experience and that can be a bad thing. Thus, everybody in your organization needs to be like a marketer and respond quickly.

What does this mean to someone who is a small business owner?

Jay: From the small business perspective, where you may not have dozens of people in your organization, it means that you have to be a multitasker. You have to be operating your business while simultaneously listening to the social conversation. Not just from a response perspective—waiting for somebody to mention you—but looking for opportunities.

We talk a lot about the “opportunity economy” in the book and the ability for companies to find ways to interact with individuals on the social web in a way that’s contextually appropriate and relevant.

Let’s say you own a volleyball camp in California. You set up Twitter searches around the search term anyone know + volleyball. You’re going to find people who are asking questions about volleyball—some of those questions you can answer as an organization, and some of those people whom you help with those answers may end up being customers.

Mike: Something else you talk about in your book is how social media is kind of like the new telephone. What exactly do you mean by the new telephone, and what does this mean for businesses?

Jay: That’s actually a paradigm that was started by Amber Naslund’s employer, Radian6. Amber is my co-author and the vice president of social strategy for Radian6, the social media listening software company that many Social Media Examiner folks may have heard of. Her CEO, Marcel LeBrun, developed the metaphor of the social media telephone.

We think it’s particularly apt because customers are increasingly turning to the social web both to punish and praise brands. You see, “Thanks very much Southwest Airlines, Dunkin’ Donuts, Social Media Examiner,” or “Convince and Convert,” or anything else, as well as criticism.

So the same way that your actual telephone in your organization has both good news and bad news on the other end of the line, the social telephone does as well.

The other way that metaphor makes sense is that we believe over time, the same way that everybody in your organization now has an email address and a phone on their desk, everybody in your organization will eventually be active in social media in some way, shape or form. In fact, the guys at CoTweet, a client of mine, really believe that eventually most folks will have two different Twitter handles. They’ll have a personal and a business Twitter handle, the same way that most of us have a personal email and a business email address.

Mike: It’s quite interesting, this metaphor of the new telephone, because if you think about it, you have people now who have iPads, iPhones and Android devices on their person every waking moment of the day and even when they’re sitting on the couch. The only time they don’t really have it with them is when they’re sleeping. So it seems as though the consumer or the customer or the prospect is now “on” all the time.

That’s really a paradigm shift for businesses because customers are active whether they’re on the couch or stuck in traffic. In the past when they were home, they were dealing with personal stuff, and when they were at work, they were dealing with business stuff. Now it seems to be all the time, and means a shift for businesses, doesn’t it?

Jay: Oh, clearly. Social media doesn’t stop at 5 o’clock and it doesn’t stop on Friday. In fact, there have been lots of studies that show there’s actually more sharing behavior on Facebook on weekends because people are using it a little bit more personally and more likely to share content, so you’re exactly right.

If you look backwards, every time new technology was developed, we fundamentally changed our businesses to meet that challenge.

Yet we have not fundamentally changed our businesses to meet the social media challenge in any way. What we decided to do was put together a Twitter account and throw up a Facebook fan page and maybe a blog, and call it good—and that’s not going to get it done.

When every customer is a reporter and it’s a 24/7 world, we’re just scratching the surface of what businesses are going to have to do, so we wanted to write a playbook that shows businesses what they’re going to have to do over the next two to five years to transform themselves from the inside out to meet the challenges of the Now Revolution.

Mike: This is pretty mind-blowing. Talk to me about a story in particular, or a business that you discovered in the process of writing the book that might be doing this right. Is there any particular business that stood out in the process of crafting this book?

Jay: Almost every example in the book is of a small- or medium-sized business. I would say 90% to 95% of the examples in the book are purposely from small- and medium-sized businesses because we didn’t want to write a book for Ford or IBM.

One that I like best is Martell Home Builders. They’re in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. The owner is Pierre Martell, a young guy. They’ve been in the homebuilding business for four years, and while the Canadian homebuilding market hasn’t had the catastrophic declines that we’ve had in the U.S., it certainly hasn’t been an easy road.

When Martell first started out, they had to rely quite heavily on realtors to bring in prospects and help them drum up interest for their houses. That first year, 92% of all of their sales were through realtors, so they were paying commissions, and commissions in Canada are higher even than they are in the U.S.

Pierre decided that they ought to tell their own story, instead of having realtors tell their story. “He was prodded along by his brother, Dan Martell, who is actually the CTO of Flowtown, a company I think you’re familiar with, and some of your readers and listeners may be as well. Dan said, “You’ve got to get on this social media train,” and convinced him to do it.

Mike: Sure, the rationale was, “If we can sell a house without a commission, we just take most of that money and return it to the company,” right?

Jay: Precisely. They started telling stories about the organization in a really fantastic blog, and the blog isn’t really about them at all. It’s about winterizing tips and what you can do in New Brunswick, so it’s really fun marketing—it’s “unmarketing,” as Scott Stratten would call it. Pierre has a very successful Twitter account where he just talks about relevant issues and helps people and does it in a very authentic and natural way.

Martell's Blueprint Blog provides information on what needs to be done to winterize your home both outside and inside.

But then they do some crazy stuff. This is the one that really blew us away. Their foremen, who are actually out there helping customers and building houses, all have GPS tracking devices in their work trucks, so if you’re a customer of Martell’s and you ask, “Where is the guy? He’s supposed to come over here and fix my ceiling,” or whatever, you can dial up the web page and see where his truck is at any time.

They have completely adopted this 2.0, storytelling, authentic, executional approach, and two years later, they went from 92% of their deals through realtors to 12% of their deals through realtors and a 300% increase in sales.

Mike: Just so I understand, they decided to go ahead and blog and create outstanding content that was going to be really valuable to their community—their prospective buyers, if you will—and probably an even larger audience. A lot of people found great value in that, and some of them said, “I want to learn more about these guys,” and that’s how it got started as far as getting the word out?

Jay: Yes, everybody just comes directly to the company.

Mike: And then they employed some really cool full transparency: “If you want to know where we are, this is where we are.”

Jay: Yes, because you’re talking about a huge purchase, and the psychology of homebuying is you’re always nervous. So what they’ve done is humanize the company. They’ve reduced the perception of risk by putting together all these tracking mechanisms and date guarantees, and you can find your foreman, so they’ve created humanization.

As a result, what they have now are direct sales—people come in and say, “I don’t need to hear any more. I want to buy a house from you because I believe in your company.”

One of the success metrics they use is the time to close a sale. When you’re trying to sell a house, it can be hours and hours, and Pierre says that it used to take them three or four hours, sometimes as many as eight hours. He said their new record from somebody walking in the office to signing a house agreement is 35 minutes.

Mike: Their blog has probably enabled them to build a lot of trust with people before they even get to the point of purchase.

Jay: They’re already sold when they walk in the door.

Mike: That’s outstanding. Their profits must have gone through the roof.

Jay: Yes, because that money all drops to the bottom line. Not paying those commissions is essentially free revenue for them.

Mike: What would you recommend for someone who wants to get smarter about social media? Where exactly would you say they should start? What would be some smart tips for a business to get this thing underway wisely?

Jay: Once you’ve moved past the question of “Should we do social media?” and you’ve moved on to “How should we do social media?”, I always then start to look at it through a metrics prism. If you accept the premise that you should be doing social media, to what end? How are you trying to improve your business? Are you trying to sell stuff? Are you trying to sell the same amount of stuff, but have a higher average order? Are you trying to increase loyalty? Are you trying to turn your existing customers into a volunteer marketing army?

Each of those things is significantly different at the execution level in terms of social media programs, so you have to really understand why you’re doing social media, what you’re trying to achieve as an organization, and then put together success metrics that help you determine whether what you’re doing now is accomplishing that.

There’s a chapter in the book about success metrics and how to pick the right ones. If your objective is to create loyalty among your existing customers and you hope they will buy from you again and again, Facebook is a particularly good approach because Facebook is a brand community.

In large measure, your Facebook audience is already converted; otherwise, they wouldn’t have become your fan on Facebook. The people who like you on Facebook are people who actually like you in the real world, so that’s a perfect place to create loyalty, repeat customers and repeat purchases.

Yet a lot of companies think that Facebook is where they’re going to create new customers—that it’s a customer acquisition medium, when quite clearly it’s not.

Mike: It’s a community tool, really.

Jay: Yes, but a lot of companies don’t see it that way. They see social media in general as primarily a new customer acquisition mechanism. I think for almost all companies, it really is better as a loyalty and retention mechanism. So having that sort of clear-headed approach about what you’re trying to accomplish and the kind of metrics that you can put in place and know whether it’s working, I think is really the bridge behavior between “Okay, we’ve experimented” and getting more serious about it.

Mike: I just want to reiterate something you said that I think is ultra-wise—the why and the what. So many businesses aren’t sure why they’re doing social media. They’re doing it because everyone else seems to be doing it. But what’s the real reason and what in the world do they hope to achieve?

Jay: Yes, because it ain’t free, right?

Mike: You’re spending a lot of labor to do it.

Jay: I stole this line from Charlene Li, but social media is not inexpensive; it’s just different expensive.

Mike: So the question is why you’re doing it, and if you really don’t know, then you’re not going to find a lot of value in it because you won’t know whether it’s successful or not. I’m with you 100% on that.

Looking down the road two years from now, which I know is a long time in the world of social media, in your mind how is the landscape going to change for marketers?

Jay: I’d say in three areas. First is decentralization; we talked about that a little bit earlier. Social media will be a skill, not a job. You won’t have a social media department any more than you have a typing department. Someday it will seem crazy that you had one person in your company listening using Radian6 or a tool like that. That will seem insane. Eventually it’ll be on everybody’s desktop and listening will be part of everybody’s job, as will responding.

The second one is integration. We’ll start to see more of a convergence of social and CRM and email and other communication tools, a lot of the R&D being done out there by the smart software company that is trying to bolt together other parts of marketing, which will make it a lot more powerful.

Then I think the third piece that I’m really excited for is optimizing social media; adding more of the science in social. I can do a Google AdWords campaign and figure out whether having a comma in the second line as opposed to a period has virtual impact on results, yet I can’t send two different tweets to each half of my list. I can’t do any sort of testing or optimization other than somewhat anecdotally in social media. That’s an issue, so there are a lot of people working on it as well.

I’m really excited to see where we’re going to be in two years when they really have a lot more sophisticated data and testable hypotheses and things like that. It’s going to make social a lot more like email in terms of having that availability of data and testability and optimizing, which will make it a lot easier for CEOs and company owners to understand whether it’s working, just like we talked about. When you’ve got richer data, you can make better decisions.

Mike: Jay, my last question is if people want to learn more about you and your book, where would they go?

Jay: The book is called The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social, obviously available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders and anywhere books are sold. The website for the book is NowRevolutionBook.com. Also, on Facebook, just search for “Now Revolution.”

You can find me at ConvinceandConvert.com or on Twitter at jaybaer, and on occasion, you can find me on the world’s greatest website, SocialMediaExaminer.com.

Mike: Jay, thank you very much for some really interesting insights that you provided myself and fans of Social Media Examiner today. I really appreciate your time.

Jay: Always a pleasure. I appreciate it.

Listen to the rest of this interview (below) to hear some of the amazing ways Jay promoted his book and how he thinks the world of social media will change for marketers two years from now.

What do you think of Jay Baer’s ideas? Leave your comments in the box below.

Yet something was missing – the hard business case for social media.  Like most companies, Cisco knew it was benefiting from social media, but it couldn’t prove it.

The launch of a new router using only social media would provide the proof Cisco’s marketers were seeking.

The results surprised even the social media enthusiasts. With this single project, the company shaved six figures off its launch expenses and set a new precedent for future product launches.

“It was classified as one of the top five launches in company history,” said LaSandra Brill, senior manager, global social media. “It was the crossing the chasm point for us in the adoption phase of social media and helped us get over the hump of internal acceptance.”

Router Launch: Promotion Through Play

Up to that point, the traditional product launch went something like this:

• Fly in more than 100 executives and press members from 100 countries to headquarters in San Jose, California
• Take a few hours of the CEO’s or an executive’s time to prep and present
• Distribute well-crafted – but static – press releases to key media
• Email customers
• Run print ads in major business newspapers and magazines

For its Aggregated Services Router (ASR) launch, Cisco aimed to execute entirely online leveraging social media, and in doing so, engage network engineers in a more interactive, fun way.

Cisco met its audience where they were – in online venues and the gaming world. Here’s how:

Second Life – The company built a stage with big-screen monitors, chairs for the audience and palm trees for its flagship launch event – entirely in a Second Life environment. It then piped in video of executives presenting the ASR.

Network engineers or the press could board their own “personal transport device” to surf through a virtual router.

To generate pre-launch buzz, the team held a concert in Second Life featuring eight bands over seven hours.

An executive presents the new ASR in a live Second Life event.

A 3D Game – More than 20,000 network engineers learned as they played a 3D game, wherein they “defended the network” using the ASR. (Research shows that 17% to 18% of IT professionals play games online every day.) Top scorers went on to a championship round with the winner bagging $10,000 plus a router.

“If they’re playing games, that’s how they want to engage and that’s who they are,” Brill said. “How do we make that applicable to what they do at work?”

YouTube – Video gets eyeballs. Cisco’s “Future of Shopping” is up to 3.3 million views.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDi0FNcaock

Additionally, the company heavily used video to educate customers and the media about the ASR, encouraging them to pass along links via social sharing.

Video conferencing – The company’s next-generation video conferencing technology, Cisco TelePresence, brought customers together at local offices around the globe. Executives back in San Jose could see the audience’s facial expressions and vice versa.

Mobile – A video datasheet engaged engineers on their mobile devices.

Facebook – Hardcore network engineers could connect on the Cisco Support Group for Uber User Internet Addicts. How addicted are they? One member shared that he networked his community swimming pool so he could stay connected poolside.

“It allowed them to connect with Cisco in a new way, and build preference and customer loyalty,” Brill said.

Social Media Widget – Cisco assembled videos, collateral and images in a widget format and embedded it into “social media” news releases and launch pages. Bloggers and others could spread the information easily with the embedded code.

Cisco blogs – Videos and other content engaged bloggers and customers, encouraging viral pickups.

Online forum – Cisco seeded its Networking Professionals Technology Community Forum with launch-related discussion topics and gave customers an “Ask the Expert” function.

The whole campaign spanned three months with the launch in the middle. During pre-launch, launch and post-launch, Cisco kept the audience engaged by encouraging discussion with and among its audience.

Reaching 9,000 People

Compared to traditional launches of the past, the ASR launch delivered eye-opening numbers. More than 9,000 people (90 times more than past launches) from 128 countries attended virtual launch events. Without travel, the launch saved an estimated 42,000 gallons of gas.

Plus, top executives spent only about an hour recording the video presentation.

Print ads were largely replaced with media coverage, including nearly three times as many press articles as a comparable traditional launch, more than 1,000 blog posts and 40 million online impressions.

Yet Cisco wasn’t the only one recognizing the impact of the campaign. In fact, the company earned a Leading Lights award for Best Marketing.

Taken alone, the reach of the campaign impresses. But consider this: The whole launch cost one-sixth of a similar launch that used traditional outreach methods.

Social Media: The New Norm

The ASR launch effectively tore the lid off social media at Cisco, which now truly walks its talk regarding the power of networks. Since then, social networking comes standard with every product launch and print advertising funds have largely moved to social activities.

And media like video, Facebook and Twitter keep customers and the press engaged continuously. Cisco now runs live public Q&A sessions showcasing John Chambers, Cisco’s chairman and CEO, as he answers questions coming in via Twitter.

Live TelePresence sessions bring executives and customers together for face-to-face virtual meetings.

The company’s chief technology officer, Padmasree Warrior, communicates with nearly 1.4 million followers on Twitter.

With subsequent launches, the company has realized even greater ROI – now seeing costs just one-seventh of those before. But the networking company keeps pursuing even greater returns with social networking.

“Now that we’ve got that buy-in, we need to just continue to show the success of one campaign over another,” Brill said.

Tools like Radian6 and Symphony help the core social media team, now eight people, measure the impact relative to cost of each campaign. After every campaign, the team just sets new benchmarks to beat.

“Social media doesn’t replace the need for white papers or sales interaction. I think it helps accelerate and shorten the sales cycle,” Brill said. “There are studies out there that people who are involved in communities and engaged with the brand are likely to spend up to 50% more than those who are not. We want to try to prove that.”

What success have you seen using social media for launches of new products or services? What worked well and what didn’t? Leave your comments in the box below.

“None of [the team working on this project] felt artificial intelligence was going to come to their aid any day soon,” says Jim Sterne in his book, Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment.

That should give you some idea of the state of social media analytical tools, particularly for analyzing market sentiment. With a few exceptions, they are practically nonexistent.

So why did Sterne write a book about measuring something with nonexistent tools? I finally found the answer to that question on page 156: “I try to avoid getting deep into specific tools in my books. They change so fast that enumerating specific systems or services ends up more confusing than not over time.”

So if you want a book that actually contains detailed instructions for using social media analytical tools, you’ll have to keep waiting. This is NOT that book.

Sterne’s book tells you WHAT to measure and what NOT to measure. And he gives very general advice on how to do it without going into too many technical details.

He gets off to a good start by quoting J. C. Penney: “Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I’ll give you a man who will make history. Give me a man with no goals and I’ll give you a stock clerk.”

So don’t even start a social media marketing campaign until you set some goals. What do you want the campaign to do? What results do you want to see? Which key performance indicators (KPIs) will you measure?

To make it very simple, Sterne proposes the Big Three Business Goals:

• Raise revenue
• Lower costs
• Increase customer satisfaction

That’s it! You really don’t have to worry about anything else.

“If the work you do does not result in an improvement to one or more of these Big Three Goals, then you are wasting your time, wasting money, spinning your wheels, alienating customers, and not helping the organization. You can always think of something to earn more, spend less, and make customers happier.”

Social media can absolutely help you lower the cost of doing business. You can use Facebook and Twitter to survey your customers. Who needs focus groups, questionnaires, and expensive market research reports?

Your team can search the Twitter archives for any mention of your company or products, respond to the comments they find, and build a global, first-class customer service department.

Sterne’s book contains many case studies of companies doing just that. The book’s organization follows the traditional sales cycle:

1. Get your market’s attention.
2. Earn their respect.
3. Get them to like you.
4. Get them to interact with you.
5. Convince them to buy from you.

He devotes a chapter to each one of those steps.

And he brings up some very interesting points. It’s easy enough to count how many followers, fans, and subscribers you have. But do they really read all of your tweets, Facebook updates, and blog posts? How do you know?

Sterne would ask, “Does it really matter?” It doesn’t matter how many fans, followers, and subscribers you have. It doesn’t matter how many people comment on your corporate blog. It doesn’t matter how many people buzz up your news release.

Only one thing matters: did they take action? Did they click your banner ad, visit your website, or pick up the phone and call your company?

If not, you are obviously not engaging them. And if you’re not engaging them, they probably will never buy your product or service.

In Sterne’s words: “While social media becomes more and more important from the standpoint of getting the word out, the impact of that word is still going to be measured by the number of people it drives to your web site, your store, and your wallet.”

Sterne does give many resources and websites, presumably of companies that are developing social media analytical tools. Companies like Omniture, Tealium, and FMS Advanced Systems Group. He calls the FMS tool “nascent,” meaning it may not be ready for prime time just yet.

But it’s up to you to go to the websites, take a look at their analytical tools, and see if they will give you the data you need.

In the chapter on Getting Buy-In, Sterne seems to imply that you should just ask your technical people to develop their own tools!

And did you know that there are apparently robots that can scrape, follow, friend, tweet, and retweet? “When it’s time to tote up how many people had an opportunity to see your message,” Sterne advises, “make sure you’re only counting people.”

But of course, he never tells you how to do that. Are there any analytical tools that can distinguish between a robot and a person? If there are, Sterne doesn’t mention them.

So in the absence of good social media analytical tools, you might just stick with your web analytical tools. Do you get more activity on your website when you blog or tweet? Do your sales increase when people buzz up your blog post on Delicious, Reddit, or Digg?

Try to correlate your social media campaign with metrics available now. And remember, it doesn’t count unless it results in a sale, a savings, or a satisfied customer.

Check out 4 Ways to Measure Social Media and Its Impact on Your Brand.

Social Media Examiner gives this book a 3.5 star rating.

Is anyone out there using social media analytical tools, “nascent” or otherwise? If so, we’d love to hear about your experience. Leave your comment in the box below.

The growth and usage of Twitter is not surprising. Compete.com estimates approximately 21 million unique monthly visitors, and a quick search on Twitter yields a variety of conversations from music, sports, politics, events and products.

For business however, there’s an art to using Twitter, and the most successful at it follow an unwritten set of rules. The following are 5 important tips to follow on Twitter; all lessons that I have learned while working for companies like HP, Yahoo! and Intel.

#1: Do Some Research

Research is fundamental. I suggest that marketers or small business owners spend a few weeks understanding what types of conversations are happening on Twitter and then formulate a communications plan before actually engaging. This will help drive consistency in the messages shared on Twitter.

#2: Determine Your Goals

Not all businesses use Twitter the same way. Some, like @ComcastCares, use Twitter merely for customer support. Dell uses Twitter to sell products or share company-related information. Often, I see smaller, more local businesses use it to build relationships with their constituencies to drive customer loyalty programs.

Whatever your goals are, it’s important to think about what you want to achieve with Twitter before spending your valuable time and resources on it.

#3: Specify Your Twitter Profile

There are many options you can use when creating a Twitter profile. You can create a company-branded account, a personal account or a hybrid account.

Branded account:

A branded account is simply where your Twitter name corresponds with the name of your company, and usually the avatar is your company logo.

Personal account:

A personal account is a little more human and unites your own personal brand with that of the company you work for or own.

Hybrid account:

A hybrid account usually takes different elements from both the branded and personal accounts.

Every business is different, so whichever option you choose, there has to be a level of balance. Branded profiles are great for certain content—for example, industry news, contests, investor relations, etc. Personal profiles are more beneficial if your organization wants to leverage the employee’s personal micro-community or wants to have a more human presence.

When I worked for Intel, I used two profiles to build community: my personal Twitter profile and one I created for Intel. I followed an 80/20 rule that seemed to work perfectly for the community that I engaged with.  On my personal account, 80% of what I shared was conversational (i.e., asking/answering questions, sharing industry-related news, etc.) and 20% was Intel-specific content. The branded account was the opposite—80% of the content shared was Intel-specific and 20% was personal.  This worked very well and click-through rates on links I shared were well above industry average.

#4: Build Social Equity

To be successful on Twitter, you have to build trust and credibility with your community. The end result is an increase in your social equity. That doesn’t always translate to the number of followers, tweets, or retweets you may have either. Rather, it’s more about developing a reputation as a trusted source of information or being seen as an expert in a particular subject.

You won’t succeed in building your equity by pushing out one way marketing messages about your business. Instead ask questions, be personal, and engage people naturally within the community. Otherwise, customers won’t listen to what you have to say and your equity may even decrease.

Buying Twitter followers is not recommended either. There are a lot of companies that will promise you thousands of followers for a very low price. The problem is that many of the followers will never read your content, click through to your links and they’re probably just bots spitting out a multitude of Bit.ly links. Besides, if it becomes public that you did purchase followers, you will be called out by the community and your reputation may be damaged.

It’s not worth buying followers just to increase your “perceived” equity and influence because that’s all it will be, perceived.

#5: Track, Measure and Iterate

Any small- or medium-sized business should invest in a paid tracking service like Radian6 or ScoutLabs to better track Twitter conversations, identify trends, measure sentiment and get a quantifiable snapshot of what’s going on in the social web.

If you want to measure sales, you can simply use a tracking code or coupon code specific for Twitter that will help measure conversions. If you want to measure how much money Twitter has saved your company, you can track how many issues you resolved, leads you gathered, and dollars you saved through Twitter engagement versus traditional channels. If your goal is to handle customer support issues via Twitter, it’s wise to check if there are any decreases in the call volume to your customer support center.

The great thing about using Twitter for your business is that it’s very easy to iterate your metrics and communications plan on the fly. It’s important, however, to remember that your plan should always map back to your goals and objectives so you don’t lose focus.

What Twitter tips would you add? Are you tracking your Twitter activity?  Got a question?  Please comment in the box below.

To take your social media marketing to the max, here are hot social media tips direct from 12 of the top industry masters. You’re going to want to model their priceless advice:

#1: Engage Your Facebook Fans With Questions

“Discussions are the currency of Facebook.  When your fans engage, your fan page comes up in their feed regularly.  A great way to get your fans active is to end each status update with a question.  You can add your own comments to get the ball rolling.  Do your best to respond to fan questions as promptly as possible to keep the discussion alive.” Mari Smith, author of Facebook Marketing

Asking engaging questions gets your fans involved, as seen on this fan page.

#2: ‘Listen’ to Know What to ‘Say’

“The way to make a connection is to talk about what people want to hear.  No-cost and low-cost listening tools help you ‘grow bigger ears’ and then apply what you’ve learned from listening to improve your sales, your service or your future products.  That’s the single most important thing you can do with social media tools.  Free tools: blogsearch.google.com and icerocket.com.  Fee-based tools: radian6.com and scoutlabs.com.” Chris Brogan, author of Social Media 101

IceRocket allows you to track blogs, Twitter and other social media sites for activity based on any date range.

#3: Use Video to Turn Company Mistakes Into Gold

“Even customer service errors present a powerful relationship opportunity.  Create a 2-minute video apology, post it on Viddler and tweet about it as a real-time response.  Give thanks, admit the mistake, apologize, and then WOW your customer to turn the situation around.” Ramon De Leon, Operating partner of a six-store Domino’s Pizza franchise

Watch as Ramon De Leon uses video to turn a company error into a golden customer opportunity.

#4: Leverage YouTube’s Keyword Power

“In February 2010, Americans conducted 9.9 billion ‘expanded search queries’ on Google, 3.6 billion on YouTube, and 2.5 billion on Yahoo! But YouTube users are searching for video content, so they’re less likely to look for something to buy on YouTube than they are on Google.  That’s why I use YouTube keyword tool to get new keyword ideas instead of the Google AdWords keyword tool.  Use your keyword discoveries to optimize your video pages for YouTube users.” Greg Jarboe, author of YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day

The YouTube keyword tool allows you to capture YouTube users with popular search terms.

#5: Promote SMS Campaigns on Facebook and Twitter

“One hundred million users access Facebook from their mobile phones.  So you want to be promoting your text campaigns there and on Twitter.  Send messages that encourage people to text your keyword and sign up for your mobile coupon or get on your alert list.  Example: ‘For weekly mobile marketing tips Text KIMDUSHINSKI to 95495.  Message & Data Rates May Apply.’” Kim Dushinski, author of Mobile Marketing Handbook

#6: Be Your Own Secret Shopper

“Want to know what people are saying about your brand or about the products you sell? Use search.twitter.com and type in the word ‘wish’ in front of your brand name or product.  You’ll be surprised!” John Bernier, manager of social media marketing for Best Buy

Using search.twitter.com, you can easily find what your customers want, for free.

#7: Give Audiences the Content They Want

“The nature of your business automatically creates one or more customer communities.  For example, Graco, maker of strollers and other child products, only occasionally posts product news on their blog.  Instead, they offer articles on general parenting topics such as ‘Leaving baby with a sitter,’ and ‘Becoming a mom … the SECOND time around.’” Marla Erwin, interactive art director, Whole Foods Market

Graco’s blog understands that consumers want insight, not just product pitches.

#8: Syndicate Your Blog Content to Big-Name Sites

“Syndicate your blog content to strategic, high-traffic social sites like your Facebook page, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and iTunes so you can attract new prospects and bring them back to your home base with opportunities for conversion.  Most people miss this easy opportunity to boost visibility and get a lot more traffic.” Denise Wakeman, online marketing advisor, co-founder of The Blog Squad

#9: Engage in Non–Self-Serving Conversation

“Social media is well, social, so you want to do things that have no obvious ROI, like having a conversation.  And if you’re half-decent at conversation, you know not to talk about yourself the whole time.  People are pretty good at detecting when someone is trying to sell them something, and if that’s how you’re using social media, people won’t engage.  Find fun ways that aren’t blatantly self-serving to talk to your community.” Andrew Mason, Groupon founder and CEO

#10:  Choose a Relationship ‘Golden Thread’

“Companies need to choose one business imperative that runs through their entire initiative.  Do you want to have conversations about awareness, about sales and transactions or about customer loyalty and advocacy?  This ‘big picture’ thinking allows greater clarity on whether to engage in specific tactics—and if so, in what form or fashion.” Jay Baer, social media strategist, Convince & Convert

#11:  Repeat Your Tweets

“No matter what you’ve read and what people tell you, repeat your tweets.  If you get more click-throughs, keep doing this.  If you don’t, stop.” Guy Kawasaki, AllTop co-founder and author of nine books including Reality Check and Art of the Start

#12:  There Is No Silver Bullet

“Social media success depends upon your type of audience, product, company, network and environment.  You need to know your brand, your audience, how to communicate within each specific social network or online community and the right tools to use.  Only the last of those is fairly predictable knowledge.” Jason Falls, social media integration expert with Social Media Explorer

Want to Learn More?

If you’re not fully leveraging the power of social media, relax, you’re not alone.  Most businesses are just now getting started with social media.

There’s one easy way to take your social media marketing to the next level.  By attending the web’s largest online social media conference, Social Media Success Summit 2010, you’ll become empowered to use social media to gain more exposure, better engage customers and grow your business.

The great part is you’ll be learning from 24 social media experts (including the 12 mentioned in this article).  In addition to Guy Kawasaki, Chris Brogan and Mari Smith, you’ll learn how Best Buy, Home Depot, Whole Foods, Foursquare and Groupon are all leveraging social media.

It’s the web’s largest online social media conference.  Go here for a free sample and to learn more.

Have you tried any of these master tips or want to add secret sauce of your own? Let the world know! Please leave your comments below.  After all, social media is all about engaging…

Too many companies are reinventing the content wheel for every social outpost they maintain. A better approach is to create a content ecosystem that allows you to repurpose and cascade your best information.

Instead of a series of self-contained initiatives, build yourself a content ladder.

Here are 5 steps to get there:

#1: Understand Taxonomy

If you want a new pair of glasses, the Yellow Pages is a frustrating neighborhood. Look under “G” for “glasses.” Not found. Look under “E” for “eyeglasses.” Nope. Only when you look under “O” for “optometrists” do you find what you need. It’s an example of an industry with poor understanding of taxonomy—the words and phrases used to describe products and services.

Taxonomy is incredibly important in social media because it’s the most direct link between the worlds of social and search marketing. Remember, one of your most important customers is Google, and your content ladder needs to maximize your chances for search success.

When creating and promoting social content, include relevant keywords and search phrases wherever possible. (This is especially important now that Google and Bing are incorporating social content into real-time search results.)

Find keywords and search phrases to include in these three places:

Google Analytics (or whatever website analytics program you’re using)

Look at your keywords report to find phrases that are driving traffic to your site. I recommend using a mixture of your top 25 phrases and some that are highly relevant to your business, but perhaps aren’t sending as much traffic as you’d like at present.

Social Mention (or a paid social media listening package like Radian6, if you have one)

Search for your company or product name (in quotes), and set the pull-down to “all.” You’ll then see a search results page that shows a comprehensive list of places you’ve been mentioned on the social web.

On the left-hand side, you'll see a keywords chart that lists common terms associated with your name in social media. Consider adding some of these to your list if they differ from your analytics results.

Twitter Lists

How your company or product is referred to in consumer-created Twitter lists can yield important taxonomy insights.

Go to your Twitter account, click on “listed” next to your followers count and see how the lists that include your Twitter account are named. Consider including some of these phrases to your master keyword list.

Incorporate these phrases into your social content wherever possible, but only when relevant. Nobody appreciates keyword spam on the social web.

#2: Seek Content Inspiration

Creating successful social media content isn’t just status updates. Take your top keywords (including your company name, product name, etc.) and search for them on Google, Bing, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and SocialMention.

What shows up in these search results? How much photo and video content appears? Content from your competitors? From fans? You’ll be amazed at how many content creation ideas this simple exercise can generate.

#3: Understand Your Frequency Ecosystem

The key to a content ladder is organizing your rungs. Your scenario may vary of course, but for illustration purposes let’s assume you have a Twitter account, Facebook fan page, blog, and email newsletter.

To create an efficient ladder, you must understand the comparative publishing schedules that you typically employ for each of these outposts. Ordered from most frequent publication to least, let’s assume that your program looks like this:

* Twitter (5x/day) * Facebook (2x/day) * Blog (3x/week) * Email (1x/week)

Create your own integrated frequency schedule to better understand how your outposts interrelate.

#4: Test and Track

Create a piece of content (remember to include your key phrases), and post it to the first rung in the ladder (Twitter, in this case). Use a tracking system (I prefer bit.ly ) to determine how popular that specific piece of content was with your audience.

Remember, however, that many factors influence popularity at the individual content piece level. Don’t make assumptions about these factors, test them. Vary time of day, day of week, phrasing, link placement, and other options and thoroughly document your results.

Social media scientist Dan Zarrella has some excellent research on social content best practices.

#5: Tweak and Repurpose

The content pieces that are most successful on the first rung of your ladder should be appropriately tweaked and redeployed on the second rung of your ladder (Facebook).

Test and track content success on Facebook using bit.ly (or number of likes and comments) and add the most effective content pieces to the next rung on the ladder (blog). Note that as you move down the ladder, your repurposing will be more complex—a blog post requires substantially more content than a Facebook update in most cases.

If a piece of content is successful on your blog (measured by visits as determined by Google Analytics, perhaps), add it to the next rung—your email newsletter.

By understanding how your various social outposts can work together at the content level, you can develop meaningful efficiencies. Also, because a sprinkling of the content included in the lower rungs of your ladder has already proven successful on higher rungs, the relevancy and popularity of your content should increase for most fans/readers/subscribers.

Of course, this content ladder approach assumes that you do not have the exact same audience for each of your social outlets, and I believe that to be an entirely realistic assumption. You may have some overlap (especially with Facebook and Twitter), but consumption of status updates and consumption of blog posts and email newsletters are meaningfully different activities, and attract different groups of fans.

What are your thoughts? Have you tried an approach like this?  Please comment below.

This article reveals three important tips you need to know to help build and manage communities.

What Is Community Management?

Previously I wrote examined the different roles for those who work with social media in business.   Among the many roles, the community manager is by far the most important because he or she is on the front lines of communication. Here’s how I define community manager:

A community manager usually manages an editorial calendar for a blog/community, a Twitter account and various third-party social media channels like a Facebook fan page or a YouTube account.

A community manager may also be responsible for managing a social listening platform like Radian6 and filtering/assigning conversations to others in the business unit for a proper response.  He or she may even organize in-person events (or town halls) to get feedback from the community. The community manager is the face of the brand.  Conversations are at the core of the job responsibility.

Over the years, I have worked for several big brands and have learned some valuable lessons about community.  When I refer to community, it’s not just a “social networking” site where users are required to login and create profiles. Communities can be built on Twitter, YouTube and even on a blog where the conversations are happening within the comments.

Here are three lessons to consider when managing a community:

#1: Embed within your community.

During the War in Iraq, there were several journalists from various news organizations who would embed themselves within infantry units in order to get access to “front line” reporting.  The result was that viewers were able to keep up to speed with what was going on several thousand miles away.

Community managers must also embed themselves within the community they serve and become integrated with the community.

The result is the collecting valuable data and insights from the community members and reporting back to management. The reporting is usually feedback on how to improve the company’s products, services or business processes.

Community managers will be successful if they are authentic and leave egos at the door.  Community members are smart and can see right through egos and many times they will call you on it. The best tip I can give to a community manager is just to be yourself.

During my time at Yahoo!, one of my core responsibilities was community management. In order to do this effectively, I had to earn the trust of the community. I accomplished this by taking off the mask of corporate America and doing what comes naturally: being myself.  I invested hours a day just getting to know others in the community and engaging in really simple and personal conversations. It didn’t take long for others to consider me a friend and begin to trust me.

#2: Don’t just focus on monetizing.

The biggest mistake a community manager can make is to start screaming “one-way” marketing messages at the rest of the community. The members will do one of two things: they will either leave the community or call you out on it publicly. Both are bad for business and should be avoided at all costs.

Unfortunately, situations like this still happen today. Brands and small businesses create groups, fan pages or Ning communities for the sole reason of monetization.  There may be some sales as a result, but there is little to no long-term benefit, much less repeat sales. Remember the old saying, “It takes more to acquire a new customer than to sell to an existing one.”

The most effective strategy to drive revenue for a business is to build the community, earn members’ trust and delicately ask for their permission to market your services, a wise proverb from Seth Godin.

#3: Don’t just listen, get the community involved.

Yes, the hot topic today is “listening” and the tools are just about commoditized with new applications launching every month. Building strong customer loyalty is not just listening but also acting—embedding yourself within the community and becoming a trusted voice there.  However, the challenge for every business in social media is to eventually “become believable.” And that means winning consumer trust.

Here is an example during my tenure at Intel how we succeeded through social media after a big consumer marketing campaign:

In May 2009, Intel launched a “Sponsors of Tomorrow” commercial featuring Ajay Bhatt—the co-inventor of the USB. Check out the video here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqLPHrCQr2I

The catch phrase, “Our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars,” aimed to put a human face to the Intel brand.  For a split second, one of the Ajay Bhatt fans in the video rips open his shirt to reveal a T-shirt emblazoned with Bhatt’s image.  We were bombarded with requests for the T-shirt on Twitter, YouTube comments and on our blogs.  We then ran a T-shirt contest through Twitter and gave away 100 Ajay Bhatt T-shirts.

Intel now runs an Ajay Bhatt fan page on Facebook where I see the number of fans still growing today.

Do you manage a community?  What other tips would you suggest? I would love to hear your point of view, please comment below.

By the way, MarketingProfs used a three-tiered approach to craft this study, including consulting with a panel of social media experts, surveying more than 5,000 MarketingProfs readers and asking comScore to mine its panel data.  This approach adds greater integrity and scope to the overall results.

#1: What’s “Normal” in Social Media Usage?

How often are marketers posting on some of the most popular social sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn?  Here’s a snapshot of the frequency of posts:

• Twitter: Half of the marketers surveyed reported updating at least once per day. Of those, 20.6% actually update several times per day.
• Facebook:  The largest group (33.4%) of marketers are updating “weekly.” However, nearly 30% are updating at least once per day.
• LinkedIn: Only 11.5% update daily with the overall consensus being weekly updates at 25.4%.

What’s hype and what’s fact?

Many of the findings in this report touched on some of the frequent hype-versus-fact dialogue taking place in the social media arena. “Is Twitter more popular than Facebook?” “Do companies with no money use ‘earned’ media the most?” and “Do a lot of followers mean social media success?” are some of the questions addressed in the results.

Who has higher usage stats, Facebook or Twitter?

If you look at the overall number of users, both corporate and consumer (with the exception of certain industries), Facebook comes out ahead of Twitter.

Here are some facts:

The average minutes per visitor on Facebook in 2009 was 182.8 versus only 25.6 on Twitter. According to MarketingProfs, “Part of why time spent on Twitter is so much less than time spent on Facebook has much to do with the design of these sites. Facebook encourages users to aggregate external content on Facebook to be viewed within the network, while Twitter encourages users to link externally, viewing content outside of the network.”

Also, about half of all marketers report that their employers or clients actively maintain a corporate Facebook account, while 42.8% reported their employers or clients maintain a Twitter site.

Who’s using “free” media? Based on the results of the study, “free” media, also known as “earned” media, is not just for small businesses with no money to spend. The data shows that “it takes money to build and staff earned media marketing materials. The word ‘free’ belongs in quotations for a reason,” says MarketingProfs.

This compares “earned media” usage against annual corporate revenue. Surprisingly it shows a steady usage amount across many of the “earned media” tactics, showing that annual corporate revenues are not necessarily a driving factor for “earned media” usage.

“Comparing earned media use against annual corporate revenue, we find a remarkably steady usage amount across many of these tactics. Private communities, share tools, SEO and email have nearly identical amounts of usage across all these levels of annual revenue. Those taking in less than $10 million do tend to rely more heavily on public online communities and blogs, while companies with lots of cash are more likely to invest in PR and viral videos. However, it is surprising how consistent usage is across all these categories.”

Do follower counts really matter?

According to the stats, there are three types of Twitter users, the two primary types being “those that value massive follower counts and those that want a very specific set of people to follow them.” And MarketingProfs points out that a third type of Twitter users might be those that want a lot of followers but have no clue how to get them.

This shows how the number of followers reported by corporate Twitter users is distributed. The steep curves shows that some users care about the quantity of followers while others care more about the quality of followers.

Although the report did not touch on the number of fans on corporate Facebook fan pages, it did report on corporate Facebook accounts and the number of friends associated with them.  Based on the results, only 6% of Facebook fan pages had 2,000 friends or more.

This shows the number of Facebook friends reported by corporate users. Similar to the Twitter graph above, there is a steep curve. This curve shows that very few marketers (only 6%) have been able to reach the 2,000 friend mark, meaning most marketers fall well below this mark.

#2:  Social Media Strategies: The Good, Bad & Ugly

On Twitter, the two tactics tried the most were 1) driving sales by linking to promotional web pages (72.1% tried it) and 2) driving traffic by linking to marketing web pages (54.2% tried it).

On Facebook, the two tactics tried the most were 1) driving traffic to corporate materials with status updates (55.3%) and 2) “friending” recent customers with corporate Facebook profiles (39.2%).

Here’s what you really need to know from the report:  The least-tried tactics often seem to work the best (something to consider next time you plan a social media campaign!).

Here are some interesting factoids revealed when marketers were asked the following:

• Monitoring Twitter for PR problems in real time? While only 50.8% actually tried it, 74.8% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”
• Inviting Twitter users with positive brand tweets to do something? 33.2% tried it, 72.1% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”
• Contacting Twitter users tweeting negatively about the brand? 22.4% tried it, 72.3% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”
• Creating an in-person event using only Twitter invites? 13.5% tried it, 71.8% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”
• Using Facebook user data to profile your customers’ demos or interests? 25% tried it, 73.1% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”
• Creating a Facebook application around a brand? 24.6% tried it, 73.3% reported it “worked great” or “worked a little.”

Counterproductive Social Media Tactics

MarketingProfs’ expert panel weighed in on the counterproductive tactics many marketers are using today.  Below is a list of a few from the report.  Check them out and see if you or your company fell into any of these social media tactic traps:

• Pushing data: Companies that only push out their own messages and continually dump links to their promotions are missing out on the responses of their followers and fans. When they do this, they are missing the opportunity to engage and build valuable relationships.  This is a sure-fire way to lose followers quickly.
• Treating social media as a short-term campaign: It is easy to spot the companies that are not in it for the long haul and not interested in long-term relationships—just like the previous point, they are the ones pushing data and ignoring their followers.
• Thinking Twitter revolves around you: Two great examples of this are Twitter auto-responders triggered by a follow and not following most people following you on Twitter. These actions speak volumes and tell your followers you are in it for you… not them.

#3:  2010 Social Media Predictions from the Expert Panel

When MarketingProfs asked their panel of experts how social media and social media usage will change in 2010 and how these changes will affect marketers, their predictions touched on the surge of Google Wave, the onset of social media integration and growing skepticism overall. Here’s a snapshot of their predictions:

The Surge of Google Wave

One expert predicts Google Wave will “rock the universe” and thus blur the lines of online communication such as blogging and IM. “Efforts to make it easy for people to ‘take their network with them’ across sites will play an important role in the disruption of user loyalty to various sites and services.”

Social Media Integration

According to Jason Baer, president of Convince & Convert, we’ll begin to see more case studies showing the integration of social media with other prominent marketing initiatives. For example, we’ll see more examples of how social media integrates with email, banner ads, direct mail and customer service.

Social Media Growth and Skepticism

Heidi Cool, an Internet marketing strategist, predicts that social media will continue to grow and more consumers and marketers will get in the game.  And with this continued growth will come social media newbies who will introduce more “missteps along the way” (e.g., increase in Twitter spamming) that could negatively affect how we choose to use the platforms. She notes how thought leader Robert Scoble changed the way he uses Twitter due to the spamming issues and many may follow his lead as more missteps surface.  Cool points out that if “too many new marketers abuse the systems by using auto-following services, only pushing content without listening, etc., it will make users more skeptical of business usage.”

More Opportunity to Capture Market Share

David Alston, vice president of marketing & community for Radian6, predicts that more people will continue to use social media platforms to express their needs and challenges with companies (instead of calling or writing in their grievances). Alston notes that businesses that embrace this form of communication will have the opportunity to capture market share from those who don’t. Marketers that make listening and engaging the core of how they market will begin to grow in numbers because it is how word of mouth is powered and it is much more effective.

The report goes into much more detail and is definitely worth a read.  To check it out, go here.

So now it’s your turn.  What do you think of the findings? Have you or your company been victim to the “counterproductive” social media tactics mentioned above?