In most new ventures, businesses measure value by a simple formula:

This is a very versatile formula that has been applied across a plethora of businesses and projects, determining if something will continue, or if management will pull the plug.  The problem with applying this formula to social media is that it is extremely difficult to determine the financial aspects. The costs are fairly easy to establish:

-  Employee/consultant resources & time allocated
-  Design and development time for custom applications
-  Dollars spent on applications, campaigns, monitoring tools

But uncovering the gain is where things become tricky, and it is different for everyone.  At the start of your social campaign, you should have determined some goals and metrics to measure and have some kind of monitoring happening on an ongoing basis that will give you an idea of how social media is affecting your bottom line. For example:

• If your goal was to increase the strength and the reputation of your brand, you will want to look at the breadth and the sentiment of your social buzz. If your messages are being replicated across the web in a positive light, with limited effort by you, you have earned significant positive coverage whereas you previously would have had to purchase it. Thus you significantly have reduced your advertising budget and increased your brand image, resulting in a positive ROI.

•  If your goal is to gain new customers, you have a challenge ahead of you.  New clients may not convert directly from Facebook, especially if you offer a service.  They may talk to friends, do other research, and ultimately convert via your website, making it hard to credit your social campaign as the source.  When on-boarding a client, regardless of the channel, it will be important to understand where they learned about you, and what your most successful marketing channels are to determine how successful your social efforts are.

• If your goal is client service and client retention, then you’ll first need to understand what the value of a client is to you, your attrition rate, and if you can utilize social media to help retain those clients you are at risk of losing.  If your social efforts have slowed the attrition rate, you have a positive ROI.

The take away here has both good and bad news.  The bad news is that there’s no one size fits all, easy formula for ROI; to determine your success will require thought on your part and most likely some numbers for other parts of your company.  The good news is that there are many ways to make a social media campaign successful.  I’d love to hear any examples people have used to determine ROI for their companies!

- Jumping around from site to site to see what CNN and industry publications have to offer
- Developing a list of “influencers” on your favorite social network and relying on them to direct you to the most pertinent information
- Utilizing a social news site, in which the masses vote up the most popular stories

Though each approach certainly has benefits, many people have been gravitating toward social news sites on which others have already sorted through the muck and conceivably save you time.  One caveat though, “news” may be used loosely and tops stories may sometimes be more akin to the National Enquirer than CNN.  Though sites such as Digg and Reddit have been vying for marketshare for years, the newest entrant into the social news world is LinkedIn Today (shown in LinkedIn navigation as “News beta“).

LinkedIn Today aims to capitalize on the social aspects of news sharing – allowing the most popular stories to rise to the top plus the ability to share with your network – while maintaining a business focus and removing some of the random aspects that executives may not appreciate.  LinkedIn Today provides three different views of the news:

- News trending in your industry
- News your connections and co-workers are sharing
- Top trending stories overall

You have the ability to either save the story and read it later, or to look to see exactly who has shared the story and join the conversation. If you haven’t already, you can take take a tour of LinkedIn Today, and iPhone users have the ability to access it from the LinkedIn app.

This is another step in LinkedIn’s strategy to make their site more social, while keeping a focus on their core business audience.  I would love your feedback on if you think they are successful and if you are currently using LinkedIn Today, or plan to start.  For those who are current users of Reddit, or another social news site – will you change your allegiance?

Just for fun, if you have a Google account of any sort, log in to your Google Profile and see what they know about you.  Next click on your account settings (in the upper right hand corner) which will show you all of the accounts you have with Google.

Are you surprised what they know? Or how much of your life your sharing with them – email, documents, calendars, web analytics…Hopefully you are comfortable with what you have put out there, but if you’re unhappy with the information, you do have the ability to change it – in this case.

If you were surprised, you’re not alone and due in a large part to the amount of information that consumers are unknowingly giving away, the Obama Administration has endorsed the plans for a new Consumer “privacy bill of rights.” The announcement was made Mach 16 and has been met with a mixed reaction.

Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said, “Self-regulation, by and large, has been a failed experiment. The majority of consumers are uncomfortable being tracked online and it is time the law gave Americans a choice in the matter.”

Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill has expressed concern over whether privacy controls could negatively affect online advertising and Internet commerce.

Interestingly enough Microsoft seems to be in favor of the regulation, or at the very least is getting out in front of it as the latest version of Internet Explorer (released this month) has a “do not track” mechanism, somewhat similar to adding yourself to a do not call list.

The tech community as a whole has not weighed in strongly on the bill, mostly likely because the content of the legislation has not been revealed.  In all likelihood it will follow many of the recommendations made by the FTC in a report released in December.   It’s also possible that the legislators will looks toward their counterparts in Europe who already have legislation in place .

What are your thoughts? Is the government taking positive steps to regulate the Internet? Or will this not end well?

Ideally you already have a regular campaign in place, by this I mean you are posting to your page several times a week, if not daily, and there’s a method to your madness.  The first thing to review is how people are reacting to your posts – if at all.  Are you getting any likes, comments or shares?  Is it happening on a regular basis or are there certain types of posts that people are more likely to engage with while other posts get no reaction? Work on your content strategy based on the feedback you are getting so that you are driving engagement on a daily basis.

Next use Facebook’s Insights.  This collection of data offers you a wealth of information about your page and the people interacting with it.  It includes the demographics of your fans broken down into age groups, gender and location.  It tells you when people visited your page, what they viewed, and it shows you the rate of fan growth.

Finally, get sophisticated by comparing your Facebook insights with your web analytics, or general company data.  For instance:

- Are you reaching a similar or different audience on your website as on Facebook?
- Are you seeing similar spikes in traffic on Facebook and on your website?
- Can you track a Facebook spike back to a specific event such as a Groupon, or other marketing campaign?
- Is Facebook a referral source for your website and/or do new Facebook fans come from your website?
- Did you feature a product or service on Facebook and then see an increased demand for it?

If you are not doing any of this basic monitoring, but rather going at your campaign in a haphazard manner, you are spending your time inefficiently.  Understanding what is effective for you will help you achieve you success on social media, and your overall goals.

Though that’s certainly a choice, these days social media is becoming one of the primary marketing channels, and if you are willing to put your main marketing campaign in the hands of an intern, I wish you the best of luck.

Many people find that success on social media is not easy to come by, and thus turn up their noses and say it doesn’t work.  True, like any other form of marketing, you should pick your medium with care, but that’s all part of the preparation.

Below is a list of questions designed to get you thinking about the goals of your social media campaign, what you can offer your audience and how it will be implemented within your organization.  Though not everyone answers every question, just reviewing the list may be a wakeup call that this is a campaign to be taken seriously and must be planned out to be effective.

Organizational Questions

1. What do you think social media can do for your organization?
2. What do you want social media to do for your organization?
3. In terms of providing content on social platforms, what are you afraid of? What confuses you?
4. Who approves the content before it’s published?
5. How many departments or divisions will be contributing content?
6. How many departments or divisions will you provide content for?
7. How do you engage and communicate with the various departments?
8. Does a distinctive goal for the content exist?
9. How will you prioritize content from one department or division over the next?
10. Who will be responsible for providing content and on how many platforms?

Audience Questions

1. How do you currently communicate with your audiences?
2. How often do you communicate with them?
3. Who provides the content for those communications?
4. What kind of content is provided for the audiences?
5. What do you ask your audiences to do? Do they do it?
6. How does your audience prefer to communicate with you? Others?
7. Have your audiences ever asked for specific content?
8. What kind of content do you think your audience needs? Wants?
9. How comfortable with technology, the web and social media is your audience?
10. What is our audience interested in besides our product?

Content Questions

1. What general area of knowledge to we have that we can share?
2. What kind of expertise or even products can we give away?
3. What can we explain?
4. What type of content from others can we share with our audience?
5. Who can we interview that would interest our audience?
6. What can we have fun with that isn’t a disconnect from our brand or industry?
7. What sensitive topics may we take advantage of to engage discussion?
8. What topics are off-limits?
9. Who in our company connects with customers most naturally?
10. What is our capacity to produce content? Our audience’s threshold to consume it?

Yet many businesses on Facebook find that just creating a page is not a ticket to viral success, and many struggle not only to achieve a fan base, but to create any kind of engagement with the fans they do have. So what’s the secret?

Unfortunately, there is not an easy button for Facebook, but there are some best practices to keep in mind when you are building your Facebook presence.

Traditional Marketing Still Plays a Role
Though most people would love to “go viral” these days viral campaigns are often engineered by marketing agencies.  The lesson learned here is that traditional marketing still plays in role in bringing people to your page, either through advertising, cross promoting on websites, email marketing or in-store signage.

Engagement is your first priority
Once people you have found a way to bring people to your Facebook page, you want them to like what they see so that they will hit that “like” button and become a fan, eventually helping you grow your page organically.

Evaluate your page and grade yourself on how much value you’re are delivering.  Are you are only posting once a week, or even once a month? When you do post, are you encouraging a conversation, or just pushing a sales pitch on your fans? Do you post the same things over and over?

If you are nodding your head then you have some work to do. You need to post regularly to your page, and then evaluate what type of content is working for your audience and what isn’t.

If anyone else has any other basic principles that they have found success with on Facebook, please share!

Certainly if you read Tech Crunch’s article on The Brutal Decline of Yahoo!, you could say that it’s the end of the era of Yahoo! and it seems that it’s only a matter of time before the search super power folds completely.  Hopefully we are not entering the equivalent of the social.com bubble bursting, but think about the evolution: there were an amazing number of startup social services, when they started to show a spark of popularity, one of the giants (Google, AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft) made a move to purchase them and fold them into their ever increasing service offering.  Now you see some of the giants starting to stumble and so they are shedding their services right and left.

However, in the case of Delicious, you have thousands of users that love the product and aren’t ready to see it go, so much so that they are searching for alternatives and are now willing to pay for a service rather than lose the capabilities they have come to love.  In this post by Life Hacker they provide a list of alternatives to Delicious and almost all their suggestions are paid services.  I’ve heard through the grapevine this morning that both Diigo & Pinboard are slow because people are flocking to them and they weren’t prepared for all the traffic.

It’s a curious new model, but this is not the first example.  Take Digg and Reddit. Reddit was at one time one of the lesser known social news sites, but its small fan base was loyal.  So loyal that in July when they asked for users to subscribe to Reddit Gold – what amounted to a donation to help them buy new servers, but didn’t give users extra features – 6,000 users signed up the first week.

A month later Digg, once the king of social news, launched their redesigned site which made many of their users drop them like a hot potato and search for an alternative.  Many found Reddit.

According to StatCounter, a free online visitor stats tool, on August 30 Digg’s traffic plummeted to only 7.6% of 3 million users while Reddit’s rose to 92.4%, despite their request for users to pay a fee.

It will be interesting to see what comes next and if the mindset of the online world that has demanded free services will be more flexible if it means their favorite service is threatened.  What are your thoughts? Is there anything you would pay for?