1. Indexing power – How capable is its crawler (ie. how smart is the indexing algorithm) and server’s computation power
2. Filtering power – In view of the high percentage of spams and duplicated content in the Web, you really need a system to clean and rinse the findings before you will place human eyes on them.
3. Sentiment analysis – It works to screen more important talks from the general mentions. Advanced tools are using artificial intelligence to give you better results in view of slangs, symbols and even multilingual items.
4. Presentation – Some tools allow you to generate beautiful reports readily presentable to your clients or upper management; while other may just export you a spreadsheet file on the raw data.

Consequently their pricing ranges from free, few dollar a month, to few thousands.

So I will suggest you to consider your goals and budget before you will dive into the marketing studying which tool suit you better. HootSuite, Viralheat, AllFacebookStats are few examples for the mass market. For pros you may consider Radian6 and Emailvision.

Sheryl Sandberg on Nielsen Earned Media Figures

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, delivered a speech to the ANA on Oct. 22, 2011. She quoted Nielsen figures that people are: 68% more likely to remember an ad with social context; 2x more likely to remember that ad’s message; and 4x more likely to purchase.

Nielsen conducted a 6-month research on the value of earned media with Facebook in 2010. The study covered over 800k FB users and 125+ advertising campaigns from 70 brands. The research concluded with this statement:

… buying social media is different than buying standardonline media. It’s critical that we understand advertising not just in terms of paid media, but also in terms of how earned media and social advocacy contribute to campaigns.

So this report makes a good tool to convince advertisers to pay a premium buying ads on social networks over other online media. This report also helps Facebook to evaluate its user base. Whoever challenging Facebook’s valuation (US$125/user) is too high for its 2012 IPO, get them to read this report first.

This is a snapshot on one of the report pages:

Report Social Media Marketing Nielsen Facebook 2010

The two red circles I marked in above illustrated the difference between ads with and without social context. Just the little two extra lines below a standard ad yielded all these 68%/2X/4X numbers. These figures indeed forming a firm base on Facebook’s valuation on per user worth.

I see there are several uploads available in scribd. You may download the full report and judge for yourself.

For the personal class you are not aiming for much commercial purpose. Your goal of using such a tool is to better organize your effort over different social networks. Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and even Sproutsocial are among this list.

If you are using the networks with commercial purpose, you would care more about effectiveness of your effort (analytics and insights), available function for team collaboration and management of multiple marketing campaigns. So you will move onto professional or enterprise version. Naturally more features you are asking higher the fee will be asked for.

If classifying by fee level, I will say US$50-$1,000 per month are professional, and anything from US$1,000 up per month are for enterprise application.

So back to the issue of “how to choose which networks”, you will have resolved it partially once you defined your purpose and budget. Because each of those tools have a finite set of networks supported. You will find that some networks are not supported by any of those tools for their lower commercial value for marketing.

Being the founder of jaccofashion.com, an e-tailer on women’s fashion clothes, I think I can share some thoughts with you in this regard.

Likely those “partners” are not splitting any sales commission with you because their profit margin has been too thin to allow a further cut.

So you are simply targeting the wrong group of partners: people offering cheapest price on certain kind of products. They are offering cheapest price for reasons either their sales is so small that they are cutting price in hope to survive, or they are well financed but just wanting to catch a certain market share in shortest possible time. Either way, there is no room for a sales partner.

I understand that your “cheapest price” is an essential way to draw traffic. But only those e-tailers on a thicker margin can share revenue with you. You can find that class of merchants easily from affiliate program sites like commissionjunction and shareasale.

You will need to think of a smarter way to blend them well and get both of them working for you.

In the mean time, you may send me your website privately so I will see if I can advise further.

If you intend for consumer product selling you should start from eBay, Amazon or anything similar (eg. Etsy or iOffer). They are built for selling and buying on B2C and C2C class.

Next, or in the same time, you can promote your eshop(s) on Facebook. Facebook has the biggest user base from which you can get new leads/customers everyday if you are promoting correctly. Facebook’s Marketplace, on the other hand, is not feature rich for professional trading. That is very much for C2C. It is hard for one to grow a business there with their current settings.

If your intend is going for professional or specialty products, LinkedIn is a better start than Facebook. Like our Woofaa’s social media monitoring service our LinkedIn profile always gets more inquiries than our Facebook Page. LinkedIn is a B2B network.

Twitter and YouTube will be your next social networks to explore for business. By nature they are more suitable for marketing instead of conversion for selling. There are hundreds of other prominent networks like MySpace & Foursquare which can also help business growth. Just each network has its own life and complexity to manage. As a newbie you should be very happy if you can efficiently manage activities over 2-5 networks.

They can be easily found by reviewing those social media marketing tools readily available in the market, especially those fee-based tools. Most owners of those tools should have done comprehensive and thorough research to identify leading networks before they would commit developing the tools.

Check out what platforms they are commonly supporting and you will see which are the popular ones.

As far as we found out LinkedIn and Foursquare are the second tier after Twitter and Facebook. YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, GoogleBuzz, Tumblr, WordPress, Blogspot, MySpace, Hi5…. are the next choices.

Empire Avenue? Popular in the US only and may be ranked fourth or fifth tier to me. I will prefer spending resources on Gowalla, which is of similar ranking in Alexa but has a bigger international user base.

Having said all that, I usually do not suggest company to cover too many networks on their first few social media marketing campaigns. Only the Facebook Pages and Apps are typically enough to consume few man-months on client side setting up decent things and getting results. Twitter will be bringing in to them another dazzling set of value chain, thoughts, tool and process. After these Facebook and Twitter torture, oh I meant tenure, companies usually become very cautious in extending to a third or fourth network.

Twitter Tweets on Spreadsheet via API

Woofaa can do the same for retweets and mentions as well. Their service package includes three work sheets for tweets, retweets and mentions separately, plus a bar-chart summary to show all three activities over the weekly time span:

Twitter Mentions on Spreadsheet via API

Tweets-Retweets-Mentions Bar Chart Summary

Woofaa charges a monthly retainer per username. You can request 4 reports over a month, 2 bi-weekly, or a single monthly consolidated report. Contact Woofaa directly for pricing and more details.

Specifically it still depends on the kind of person you are. If you are the kind of people who don’t feel comfortable wearing a name tag on your chest, you won’t sleep well putting up a life profile on those networks, even if you may have limited to show to friends only.

Are the social networks safety for one to show details of his life?

Nevertheless, no matter you like it or not, this is the new way of living. Sharing life profile to a world of strangers is becoming lesser a risk but more a joy in life.. If you check on anyone born in the 90′s, most of them are feeling proud to have networked ONLINE, from people originated from their schools, to people they would not ever know in real life.

That is their way of knowing the world and making adventure. I have kids in school so I know that is happening. In our era the invention of TV was our way of knowing the world and dreaming adventure. Our parents got the radio, our grandparents got newspapers….

The major difference is that our methods are of one-way communication, while the social network is interactive two-way, which is the risk factor our older generation people don’t feel comfortable with.

Have you heard about stories when the TV sets first launched into the mass market? Some people disliked them with a bunch of reasons. Now you see the fact is no one could change that paradigm shift.

Live with it is the better way to stay with the shift. I am making a living from this social media business as a matter of fact. There are both goods and bads on this change. You hare taking a good already from this LinkedIn network, or else how could you ever getting me to write you? : )

Source: my answers on LinkedIn

The challenge is, if you don’t trust the wp.com, where else can you go for a “higher” level of protection and enjoy a free service at the same time?

There are hundreds of similar free blogging platforms around. Just I will trust wp more than other. This trust is built through my years of experience using the wp.com and wp.org with tens of self hosted wp sites. I were hacked few times in the past over different wp sites. In those incidents I was amazed to see how fast the WordPress team could release a patch and to upgrade the core framework against structural deficiency.

I used to have an old belief as custom-made CMS was more secured and hack-proof than free CMS. I had spent much money making custom CMS sites on this belief. Looking back I know I was wrong. How secure a website can be depends very much on coder’s competence. The WordPress team has convinced me that they are the world class top-notch coders in many aspects including security.

Still it is possible, just be prepared in your mind that the task is not straight forward. If you are a novice on both setting up a hosted WordPress site and an e-shop, considering learning the WordPress as learning the MS Words, and e-shop as MS Excel….. Both are achievable, but with different learning curves.

Enough for the scary part, I searched on Amazon, filtered those outdated and picked you this one http://amzn.to/WordpressTutor.

That is a beginner’s guide in setting up a WordPress site. As this has been a common practice to-blog-for-a-shop, you may just practice your first installation for a blog, at subdomain like blog.myshop,com. When you are feeling good on major functions of WordPress, go installing your WP e-shop at www.myshop,com.

For experienced developers like myself, I would use the multi-site feature for the blog and shop. But for novice I will suggest you to install them separately. On one hand it saves your time and hassles to learn and to experience the multi-site feature, on the other hand if you screw up one of them, people can still reach you from the other end.

To install a WP based e-shop, there are many options. Your best choice is very much depending on your inventory type (digital or physical) and size (10 or 1,000 SKU). If you are planning for a big store with thousands of SKU, you better look for stand alone type cart script. Those WP e-commerce plugins are not designed to manage high volume inventory efficiently.