CMOs integrate social media in their current strategies and are looking beyond sales, which indicates they understand the value of social media. Sounds nice but how do you measure the return on investment?

Whether or not to enter the social space is not even a question anymore. Even if you don’t want to be there your audience most likely will be in that space, talking about your brand. These days the question is towards the ROI of social media. Setting up a whole social media team is quite frightening for brands, because how do you measure the KPI’s and will this directly be shown in the sales numbers?

MDG Advertising made this nice video showing how the industry is measuring the ROI of social media.

Click here to view the embedded video.

MDG Advertising answers the question CMOs are having: how do you measure the ROI of social media? In short, every business has different objectives so there is no standard measurement.

So what is important to know then? Well, having clear business objectives may be an open door but is most certainly essential. Forrester recognizes this as well and recommends 4 factors to consider to measure the ROI of social media:

1. Financial
   Have costs decreased or sales increased?
2. Brand
   Have perceptions of the brand improved?
3. Risk Management
   Are you better prepared to respond to issues that affect brand reputation?
4. Digital
   Has the brand enhanced its digital assets?

The 4 factors indicated above are really relevant, however it only matters if the results are monitored. So yes, it’s really important to set up clear brand and business objectives but don’t forget to keep track of it all.

How do you measure the ROI of your social media efforts? Let us know in the comments below.

Source: Measuring The ROI Of Social Media photo from Shutterstock, MDG Advertising

The importance of monitoring is crucial to CMOs for insights, benchmarks and at the end getting all the success outcomes and the ROI of a campaign.

The following infographic by ODM Group gives examples of handy monitoring tools, most common metrics used and also, for me the most important – what to do with all the social media data that are available. Enjoy!

And how do you use the metrics from monitoring to improve your social media efforts?

Source: ODM Group

This creates a new set of challenges for brands as now consumers have the same ability to reach a global audience as large companies. This includes both their complaints and their compliments.

However, there are ways brands can leverage this and use social media for interaction and promotion, including these seven, simple ways to give customers a positive and memorable experience.

1. Integrate Social Media Into Your Marketing

Integrating social media into your marketing is much more than just setting up a Facebook Fan Page and then putting it in your other marketing materials. Integrating it into your marketing means making everything work together, in terms of visuals, message and target audience.

Marketing integration is about having one voice across many channels. If you can do that, your message on social media will be much more powerful and much more compelling to those who are interested in your brand.

2. Offer Official Channels

One of the problems with social media is that the conversation takes place all over, often times in places you can’t see or catch. One of your goals should be to draw in as much of the conversation as you can under your virtual roof. This way, you can participate and moderate it effectively.

Having official Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. channels and enabling conversation on them draws the dialog toward you. Customers, generally, would prefer to talk directly to the companies they are talking about, or at least in an “official” place for it, especially if they know they can connect with you there.

If you offer that, you will collect much of the conversation and offer a better customer experience at the same time.

3. Approach Others Who Mention Your Brand

In addition to having your official channels, monitor the rest of social media the best that you can for other mentions of your brand and respond to them. You might not be able to prevent people from saying negative things about your brand; but you can respond and either fix the problem or refute any misinformation.

There are many social media monitoring services out there that can help, including Trackur and Radian6 to name two, but the important thing is to respond to customer complaints and questions as quickly as possible, within 12 hours if possible.

4. Empower Your Social Media Reps

From a customer service standpoint, social media is no different from telephone or email support, customers expect answers and fixes.

Empower your social media representatives the same as you do your customer services reps. They need to be able to give answers, fix problems and even, in some cases, provide some basic product support.

If your reps can do that, they can provide a first-class customer experience that even an upset customer will remember.

5. Offer Exclusives to Social Media Followers

Though dealing with angry customers is a major part of social media, energizing happy ones is equally important. One important step is to give people a reason to follow you on social media and that includes offering exclusive content for those who do.

Twitter giveaways, discounts to those who “Like” you on Facebook and YouTube contests are just some of the ways you can turn your existing fans and customers into social media followers.

6. Get Personal

Social media is a great chance to communicate with your customers in a personal, seemingly one-on-one manner. It’s a way to allow customers to meet the people behind a brand or a company.

Be personable with your writing in social media and let your followers “meet” the people behind the company, in particular the leaders and managers.

Generally, people connect better with other people than they do with brands. Social media is a great opportunity to do just that.

7. Be Honest

Though social media is a marketing channel, it has as much in common with public relations than advertising. It isn’t a place merely to post a marketing message. It’s a place to be honest and to connect with people.

Whether things are going good or bad, honesty is important and appreciated. If your social media followers feel that they are being lied to or being subjected to spin, they will turn on you. However, simple honesty earns respect and is very refreshing, even in social media.

The more transparent you can be, the better your customer’s experience will be. It’s that simple.

In the end, social media is about making connections. This means giving customers a meaningful way to connect to your brand and a way for you to connect with them.

If you focus on that more than simply using social media to promote yourself and your brand, you’ll likely find that your customers have a great experience and will help you spread your social media presence to their friends.

You’ll also likely find that these customers become more engaged in your brand, making them more involved and more active. That, in turn, makes them much more valuable as customers, regardless of how much they spend.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a company that provides the best to do list app available online. Lior also consults for an international company that specializes in new cancer treatments.

Visual: Go Viral’s Media Youcracy

So calling the identified bloggers that you reach out to “a fucking bitch”, might be new social PR tactics I missed out on?

Maybe I am a very traditional CSO that should upgrade his social marketing skills?

Maybe social marketing agencies should stop being compliant to the WOMMA code of ethics and start to bribe bloggers, buying their attention and next throw them away angry, if they do not offer sufficient guaranteed reach. Like some media and pr agencies sometimes so…

Or let’s call bloggers fucking bitches when do not want to write about another lousy and lame piece of content we throw at them? When will we ever be in control enough to let go?!!

If you are curious what I’m talking about, I suggest you read this article in Adweek or maybe better, the full story at the blog it was about The Bloggess

I can give you one simple example, of what agencies should be telling you, even risking that the brand kicks them out.

In 2009 one of my agencies, SocialMedia8, won the global social pitch for fashion brand Diesel. Wow, awesome, because Diesel is really cool.

In our social strategy – that was very difficult to execute since Diesel tends to be brave, bold, stupid – we explained to Diesel: “Yes, we can get the best 10 fashion bloggers to be front row at your Diesel show during the New York Fashion Week 2010″.

But NO, it does not mean that you can igonore those bloggers until you have your show at the Milan Fashion Week. Diesel, please do believe us, that’s why you hired specialists. This is not the way how to treat bloggers, you will need to open up to them during the fashion shows as well. So make sure to be there for them, in case they have questions during the year.

And don’t ask us how, but eventually Diesel understood that there are 150 fashion brands around, that all think that they are uber cool. But that all these 150 brands try to win the love of the global top 200 fashion bloggers.

So brands should understand that it’s about building mutual beneficial relationships with bloggers, and that brands have to add value to that relationship as well.

Brands tend to control. Brands tend to dominate. Brands tend to buy. Brands tend to use. Brands tend to bribe. Brands tend to think only they are uber cool. Brands tend to push.

Even in the race to become the president of the United States, candidate John McCain messed up and tried to bribe some bloggers in his race against Barack Obama.

Well we have a 125 slides PowerPoint about that here. It has been watched over 65,000 times. Look it up, and see how stupid it is to bribe bloggers.

Well my dear brand managers and CMO’s: think again. So here’s my tip to CMO’s that want to tap into social: Companies like Nestle and Kenneth Cole have already damaged their brand reputation in a very bad way using Twitter and Blogs fully wrong.

PR and Media agencies have already shown several time that do they not uderstand the uncontrolled nature of social media spaces. Bloggers are people that started their blog out of passion. So they can refuse to talk about your products or can refuse to write about lousy campaigns. We call it: power to the people or the right of refusal.

So think behink you link. Think before you act or react. Get a very experienced social marketing agency and listen to them. And do not, I repeat DO NOT let interns mess up your most valuable asset called: your brand.

Stay out social media and blogs. Or step in, but do it with the best experienced social marketing pro’s available.

Think about above examples or look-up how Nestle or Kenneth Cole messed up in the social space. Do you want that to happen to your most valuable asset? Guess not…

Additionally, 97% of the people participating in the survey indicated they felt that social media would be more important or as important as last year.

This is in line with what we are noticing in the market – social media continues to grow in importance and more and more marketers are shifting their budgets in this direction.

The research also looked at what these marketers are looking to gain from their social media marketing. Forty one percent of respondents indicated the primary objective is to increase brand awareness. Twenty six percent uses social media marketing to reinforce other campaigns, such as our work for Mazda for example.

The research was conducted among 521 marketers – of which 51% are in-house and 31% work agency side. You can find all the results in the press release.

So play now, claim your eternal fame and post your Viral Quiz high score in the comments below. The winner of this viral video tournament will win a free 3 month license from our sponsor ViralTracker.

ViralTracker is the powerful videolytics and full social metrics company that tracks your viral and social videos across millions of blogs, social sites, YouTube and +500 other video sharing portals.

Yes you can also upload and distribute your videos with ViralTracker to 20 video sharing portals. Or track your social video ads at a low CPM.

Request the full fact sheet to discover all other benefits.

The Viral Quiz was developed with Netgamix – the collaborative network for trivia & online games.

Enjoy playing the Viral Quiz and meet the winners here in September.

We feel that The Social Media ProBook book is extremely interesting to any CEO, CMO, Brand, PR, Community or Webcare manager. That’s why I decided to share it.

And we will show you a few more interesting free eBooks below…

This Social Media ProBook is a re-imagining to last years award-winning Social Media Playbook. Unlike last year’s basic Playbook, this advanced resource was written for professionals with some working knowledge of social marketing.

The New Rules of Viral Marketing, by David Meerman Scott might be a free eBook that you would like to read.

Customer Service: The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media by Brian Solis is an eBook I like.

Experiencing a rainy weekend again? Here are 20 other free eBooks about Social Media. Happy reading.

Have you detected other great free eBooks about Social, Viral or Video? Please share them in the comments below. or, let us know how you liked the Social Media ProBook.

But after having created a Facebook Fanpage, many struggle to keep people engaged. Many brands are still using Facbook as a push channel, without realising what type of content people really want from brands.

More and more research is coming out, indicating the many reasons why people are interested in interacting with brands on Facebook. These reasons include special offers, exclusive content and simply entertaining content.

The infographic below gives some great insights into the type of content people want to see from the brands they follow. So the next time you are staring at a blank canvas, wondering which product promotion you can push now – sit back for a minute and think about the things people actually want to hear from you.

Have an easy look at several social media sites with Bob Ross, a popular iconic painter and television personality.

Among many in this infographic, I really miss YouTube, Foursquare and Tumblr, but for now on check Facebook, Google Buzz, Instagr.am and others.

And let’s hope that Bob will come up soon with a second edition of this infographic.

Source: Flowtown

Click here to view the embedded video.

44 second cinema version of the ad is not really that special although it connects the product with “Party People” which is the target segment of almost every alcoholic beverage in the market. But the campaign really hits the spot with the online in branded Desperados YouTube channel.

The campaign starts in front of  a noisy party’s entrance. Users are cleverly asked to give some profile information for age verification, location and gender of interest for customization of experience.

Imitation of  native YouTube design with a custom Flash widget has already been used in the past by famous Tipp-Ex campaign. However this campaign utilizes Facebook API to deliver a more social experience.

If users choose to connect their Facebook account with the campaign’s Facebook application, their friends’ photos are displayed inside the video. Although this procedure interrupts the user experience too early (9th second) and takes a long time (risking decrease in attention further sections of the video), it brings user engagement to a new level, by using YouTube’s interface elements for interactivity.

The campaign also leverages virality in an original way by embedding user’s Facebook profile photo to a “tattoo on a stranger in the party” and giving the option to share this photo with Facebook friends.

Congratulations to Heineken for investing in this social media campaign which is an excellent follow through to their TV commercial.