HOW TO: Calculate the ROI of Your Social Media Campaign

Global Web Index We’re delighted to announce the launch of our mini tool that provides anyone with the free of charge chance to view and play with the GlobalWebIndex data, and more importantly to start developing unique insights on social media. With the LITE version you can get a snapshot of what motivates your audience, what they do online, and how they feel about brands in social media. This data has been extracted from the GlobalWebIndex Wave 2 dataset (January 2010)and it is NOT dummy for demonstration purposes only. Currently, the GlobalWebIndex clients have access to Wave 3 (July 2010), hence, we can publicise some subscription only data. Of course, Global Web Index LITE is only a very small percentage of the full set of the Global Web Index data. Feel free to use the data, embed it and share the tool online and don’t be shy to tell us what you think: globalwebindex@trendstream.net

Social Media for Small Businesses: 10 Things You Must Do If you’re a small business owner, you’ve likely heard countless people talk about how small businesses need to have a social media presence. I couldn’t agree more; however, so many of the people who talk about social media for small businesses never provide actionable, “here’s what you can do right now” advice. In an attempt to allow small business owners to easily get started with social media, here are 10 things your small business must do. Though it seems quite obvious, many businesses still do not have a Facebook presence. For those who are unfamiliar with Facebook, individual people develop their while companies and other organizations develop . Profiles and pages are very similar.

Five Ways Nonprofits Can Transform Their Social Media ROI (Retur For the last 4.5 years, I have been providing lots of little tips on how nonprofits can increase their ROI through my Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace Best Practices, but now that the vast majority of nonprofits utilize social media and have been for awhile, I think most of us are ready some more advanced strategies. My Top Five are below: 1. Learn basic HTML. When to Stop and When to Keep Going with Your Social Media Strategy - Alexandra Samuel by Alexandra Samuel | 9:30 AM January 28, 2011 Push through the discomfort: It’s tempting to stop (or never start) using social media when you realize that you are opening yourself up to the world in a new way: “you mean people can write whatever they want on our wall?” But, often rewards await those who push through the discomfort of the unknown. You can always change your settings if you encounter a problem, but in the mean time you may be surprised at the trust that is built with your customer base if you are open and willing to talk about the good and bad sides of your businesses.

The New Media and Social Web Guide for Business and Marketers Social media platforms are not only changing the way we communicate and do business, they’re also changing our level of influence as customers and citizens. Recent events in Egypt, Iran, and Yemen show just how quickly messages can go viral and how much these viral messages can impact world affairs. Social media has given the common citizen a louder voice and more power of influence than ever before. Political leaders who fail to hear the voices screaming through social media do so at their own peril—as evidenced this past week in the Middle East. Why The Facebook Phone Promises To Be The Next Big Thing In Social Media Social Media and Smartphones are two of the most happening technologies of recent times. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that several technology heavyweights such as Microsoft and Palm have tried to make the best of both worlds by merging social media with the latest advancements in smartphone technology. Unfortunate as it is, most such attempts have been miserable failures. The Facebook Phone has been the talk of the town for last couple of years but it hadn’t transformed into a ground reality till few days back. INQ, a social mobile champion, yesterday announced that it will next week unveil its latest smartphone range including the INQ Cloud Touch and the INQ Cloud Q – and confirm many of the rumors about a so-called ‘Facebook phone’.

How Businesses Are Playing Cupid Using Social Media This Valentines Day Love is in the air this Valentine’s Day and some of the biggest business brands have turned to social media to launch their exclusive promotions on this occasion. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are being tapped by a number of businesses including Victoria’s Secret, CBS, Mattel and several others to get a slice of the Valentine’s Day shopping pie. Barbie And Ken – Made for each other! IMO, Mattel’s Facebook campaign to reunite Barbie and Ken serves as a classic case study for all marketers.

Social Media Tracking Made Simple Social media channels have proven to be great marketing tools for companies, but measuring success can be difficult. You may be working significant hours each week to enhance your company’s social media efforts, but how can you be sure that you are tracking everything as optimally as possible? First, it’s important to mention that social media success is not necessarily going to be visits to your website or immediate purchases of your products from social channels. Success can also be measured by engagement with fans or followers and the conversations held within the channels.

What Love Teaches Us About Social Media: 15 Tips Social media, at its core, is about building relationships. The ultimate in relationships is love. Love offers some important lessons for social media proponents. What Keanu Reeves Can Teach us About Personal Branding Shenee is a writer, designer, photographer and pop culture curator. She recently founded You’ll Look Great. She tweets. How Social Media Turned a Brand Into a Revolution As protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square faced off against government forces, they were prepared with this Facebook lesson from supporters in Tunisia: “Advice to the youth of Egypt: Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas.” This exchange (as reported by the New York Times) was part of a remarkable two-year social media collaboration that began with bloggers calling for labor strikes and resulted in an energetic youth movement that is toppling dictators. And I can’t help but wonder in a very public way, was I wrong? Just a few months ago, I declared in “Is Social Media Creating a Generation of Cowards?” that I agreed with Malcom Gladwell’s now famous contention that “the revolution will not be tweeted.”

Cheat sheet: Key principles of social media marketing on Facebook Stash Tea lures newcomers with a sweepstakes and charms them with Tea Haiku Friday. The following is excerpted from Facebook Me! A Guide to Socializing, Sharing, and Promoting on Facebook (Second Edition) by Dave Awl. Copyright © 2011. Used with permission of Pearson Education, Inc. and Peachpit Press. This is part 3 of a 4-part series on using Facebook strategically. • Part 1: Demystifying how Facebook’s news feeds work • Part 2: 15 ways to increase your Facebook stature • Part 3: Cheat sheet: Key principles of social media marketing on Facebook (below) • Part 4: 15 ways to increase your brand’s impact on Facebook

How To Turn Browsing Time Suck Into Social Media Two of the biggest obstacles to succeeding (and by succeeding I mean, being consistently active) in social media are: 1) Feeling that you don’t have enough time to dedicate to it2) Feeling that you waste a lot of time while ‘doing’ social media – getting distracted, clicking a bunch of links etc. How many times have you sat down to spend the 15 minutes you’ve so carefully carved out of your day to spend on Twitter, and then looked at the clock to find that 30 have passed and what have you been doing? Clicking all sorts of links and getting sucked down the rabbit hole of the interweb. What if you could turn that guilty pleasure into productive social media time? Well there is an extremely simple way to do that.