In the presentation he looks at the various questions being asked by clients and agencies about measuring ROI for social media campaigns. I have recommended this as I particularly liked the tongue-in-cheek manner in which he has written it and the amusing speech bubbles he uses to get his point across.

He examines the elements which are easily measurable and then he scrutinises the other things a client should consider when looking to determine the ROI.

If you like what you see, you can also check out his blog here.

Are you measuring the ROI for your campaigns? If so what tips do you have?

Revolution magazine reported an interesting story this week that my beloved Liverpool FC is now officially the first English Premier League team to have reached the 1 million fan mark with its Liverpool FC Facebook page. Those of you that know me well, will know that I am a huge fan of the club and now also its Facebook page.

The club has used Facebook brilliantly (since May) by engaging in conversation (each post receiving around 900 comments), giving behind the scenes interviews and making interesting documents available to download only through its group. Not only that but it has made sure that a fan can get to all of it’s other social platforms straight from it’s group by enclosing all of the links, something which many brands seem to forget.

In truth, Facebook and Twitter are now hugely influential channels for the club and it appears to have now directed its communication strategy towards engaging with the fans on a more personal level. The club in essence is asking and giving fans what they want – good, interesting and bespoke content. In my view this should be commended.

I wrote a post a while back where I compared how Liverpool FC and Chelsea FC used Twitter. The two clubs had two differing strategies for using Twitter. Now, as expected I am not a fan of Chelsea’s fan page but I have had a look and it has around 395,000 fans. Not bad either but it does seem that although Chelsea are winning the football battle in the league this year, Liverpool is winning the social battle.

As of writing Liverpool’s page has more than 1,004,824 fans and growing by the minute.

I definitely think it is time for the newspaper industry to start evolving and looking for potential revenue streams. However, I don’t think this is the answer and I still think that paid for content simply won’t work on news across the board. That said, I can see people paying for a really topical story, which is published as an exclusive, such as a one-off video of a really high profile/important event.

An article in Brand Republic states the survey identified:

“91% of UK consumers would be unwilling to pay for news online and 90% would be unwilling to pay for news analysis. Of those aged 16 to 24, 86% would never pay for news online, while in the 45 to 54 age sectors, 96% said they would not pay.

“In addition, only 5% of UK consumers would be happy to pay for each piece of news content online, while just 4% would be happy to take out a subscription for online news content.”

These are interesting statistics and they certainly represent some of the people I have spoken to also. The survey also found that almost half (46%) of people said they would pay for music and TV (43%) downloads and I have to agree that I would (and do) pay for these too.

I think it’s safe to say that the public have spoken here as 90% is pretty convincing. Rupert, I suggest you review your online strategy now before it’s too late!

The first book I read was Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaksi. This book is an easy to read life story about somebody who grew up with a real dad who is a teacher (poor dad – although not that poor) and his other rich dad who is the father of his best friend and a serial entrepreneur.

Robert takes you through the life lessons his rich dad teaches him and explains how you need to go through life looking at things slightly differently.

One of the most interesting things I found in this book – is having a can do attitude with everything and not being afraid to take risks. Robert’s opinion of money and business is very refreshing and it made me feel that we should all take risks at some point in our lives. He continually refers to how our society tries to make us all great employees but not great employers.

I recommend this book if you fancy reading something which will give you a different take on business and money.

This is all part of my plan to continue developing my business skills by reading one book a week. I like books but I might take a leaf out of Dave Fleet’s (pardon the pun) book by listening to more audio books too as this will help save time.

It is no surprise to any of us that the housing market, although picking up a bit in recent months, is still suffering from the dreaded R word. Many first time buyers have been struggling to get mortgages from banks and even long term property owners are finding it costly to sell. Well things might be on the up as some clever little chaps (which I met recently) have come up with a new concept on private property sales and buying or renting for that matter.

Bethemiddleman.com does exactly what it says on the tin, it allows the user to be in control of the sale (etc) of their property. It describes itself as:

“a brand new property portal aimed at the private housing market. Whether you want to BUY, SELL, RENT, LET or ROOMSHARE, Bethemiddleman.com makes it easy.

The service is free to use and could save you thousands depending on how much your property is worth. The guys who created it aren’t bothered about you marketing your property elsewhere, so on the face of it it looks like a win/win.

Gary Hartley, co-founder of Bethemiddleman.com told me:

"BeTheMiddleman.com aims to provide the housing market with a cost saving alternative to estate agents. With more than 90% of home buyers looking online when searching for their dream home it makes sense to provide a property portal that empowers them with the tools they need to buy and sell their homes. We promote their properties on a network of other property portals for free too, allowing them to reach millions of potential vendors.

"We are advertising regionally offline initially to forge some traction, then we aim to move to national advertisements once we are more established. Social media in particular plays a pivotal role in us maximising our audience reach. We’re using our blog and Twitter stream to forge strong relationships with other property experts. We’ve kept our whole strategy transparent, opening the site up to Beta users first and often replying directly to feedback to find out exactly what they want.  For us it’s not about huge marketing spend, it’s about interacting with the right people (our users) and building the right relationships to create a fantastic service.”

Now to be honest it’s a very new concept and the site has only been going a few months but its already getting serious amounts of internet traffic. However, personally I do think it needs more properties on it in order for it to get to that all important tipping point.

The site uses several social tools such as it’s blog, which provides tips on how to market your property, Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook. To be honest most of its marketing strategy seems to be completely focussed towards organic search and social media and I think the team should be commended for getting it right. They are listening to what their customers want first rather than creating something people don’t want use. If a company uses its feedback properly and engages with its customers it is usually onto a good thing.

Is this going to kill the regular high street estate agent? In my opinion, not yet, but it is a great concept and if they manage to obtain critical mass it could come become THE site for selling or buying your home. After all it’s free – what do you think clever idea or not?

Duncan one of my good friends over on the Rising Music blog comments:

“With one these decks coming in at roughly the price of two mk3’s (£1,499 each!) I think Pioneer is going to have a hard time shifting these to its core clients – Bedroom DJs.”

I think Duncan has a point but I am sure it will drop the price after a year or so and then these will become mass market like the 1000s.

They redeveloped our website and improved its search engine optimisation. They are now currently advising us on our media relations and since we used their services we have seen an increase in our overall web traffic of more than 50%.”

Adrian Lee, Commercial Director, NG Developments

Having read some of these blogs for the last couple of months, I can honestly say that the work that these guys do can be truly inspiring, so I have to officially doff my cap to them all for sharing their experiences online.

Some of the stories these writers share are as interesting as they can be shocking. I have read a few posts recently talking about hoax callers which just makes me feel sick to know people still call ambulances out on emergency calls when there are people who so badly need them.

Please note this list is just based on my personal preferences and not on any complicated metric system.

If you think you have a blog which would be a good to add to this list, please feel free to add a comment and share it.

We have created this cost effective package, specifically for small businesses, which need a good site which is built with sound internet marketing expertise at its core. You get to tap into our team’s marketing knowledge and use this to help build your business.

We all know that to do this you need to be writing good quality content and including essential keywords and phrases that make it easier for the search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, to match potential customers to your product or service. Research has shown that if you are in the top three of Google searches you can increase your revenue by up to 40%.

Maybe you should consider tweaking your website copy and content.