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

Last week on ViralBlog among others “The Most Effective Ways To Get ReTweets Are…”, “Understanding Viral Content Marketing” and “Alibaba Group Releases A New Social Network”.

The Most Effective Ways To Get ReTweets Are…

In their strive to gain followers, some CMOs have assigned a community manager from their social agency to manage the brand’s social interactions. Some CMOs have an in-house FTE for that already. But what are the most effective ways to get retweets?

Alibaba Group Releases A New Social Network

Alibaba Group, China’s largest e-commerce company, is beta-testing a new social-networking-product called Laiwang, as the firm expands outside e-commerce to seek other revenue streams.

Understanding Viral Content Marketing

Viral marketing, many talk about it, more and more marketers and brands rely on the great potential of viral campaigns. And many forget about the fundamental assets. It’s just a tool that has the ability to disseminate appealing messages in a short period of time and it’s about great, fresh and appealing content.

Viral Friday: Amazing Screen Technology

A weekly viral video chart of ViralBlog, showing the 5 most popular viral videos, commercials, games or user-generated videos, carefully selected and ranked by popularity, viral impact & spread.

How Brands Can Counter Attack The Recession

Since the beginning of the recession consumers have started to buy less, also known as a buying down behavior. They spend less when the economy is taking a dip, especially fast moving consumer good brands are taking a hit. Their main concern is how to stay strong and get through the recession.

Viral marketing is just a tool that has the ability to disseminate appealing messages in a short period of time and it’s about great, fresh and appealing content.

Very basically viral marketing is a successful link baiting – content specifically designed to gain attention and attracting natural links. A strategy is a must here as well, a great content needs analysis and research of the topic, keywords, and of course a purpose and targeted audience.

Even if the content is so awesome, it won’t spread on it’s own when uploaded to a site or a video portal. It needs a first kick: identify people, blogs, organizations that might be interested to share it.

The influential ones, the better. BUT these are usually more picky about the content. Of course don’t forget about microblogs.

And connect to all of them, the more personal, relevant and targeted message, the higher are the chances it will be picked up, published and…yes, become a viral sensation with millions of views and social mentions, thousands of tweets, hundreds of post and links.

All the above is not a mantra, but may be helpful and the content created will eventually stand as the best one in a particular sector of the industry. Easy, isn’t it?

Sources: voltierdigital.com; slideshare.net

Last week on ViralBlog among others “Avoiding Viral Marketing Regrets”, “How To Analyze Your Social Media Efforts” and “How To Create Your Social Media Strategy”

Why The Future Of Online Is Catvertising?

The advertising industry is changing all the time and over and over again. And the agencies will keep coining new buzz words and trends. Here is one of them -  world’s first Catvertising agency…

Google’s Answer On iTunes Real?

Interesting news from a Venezuelan blog, some rumors and gossips around new Google’s music service. What could this mean for other music services like Apple’s iTunes, Spotify or Grooveshark?

For CMOs & Agencies: Creativity vs. Deadlines

We believe that sharing is caring and hope that this article and especially the video is shared among many CMOs and agencies. A better understanding for creativity vs. deadlines might even fuel mutual beneficial relationships between brands and agencies.

Should Brands Create Google+ Pages Yet?

Google officially launched their Google+ Brand Pages, making the platform a playground for brands and businesses. Some brands reacted to this swiftly but some of the questions of many CMOs – should my brand be there as well? What are the pros and cons?

How To Create Your Social Media Strategy

In order to successfully use social media and to reach brand and business objectives, a social media strategy is a must. Without a strategy it’s most likely that only mediocre results will be accomplished.

7 Ways To A Memorable Consumer Experience

The simple truth is that social media is a big part of how consumers interact with and discuss brands, whether or not those brands are active in social media themselves.

Avoiding Viral Marketing Regrets

Viral marketing is one of the most sought-after phenomena in all of Internet marketing. For business people and CMOs, there are few things sweeter than the idea of their product or message spreading across the Internet with almost preternatural speed and profound impact.

How To Analyze Your Social Media Efforts

Everything is about results and social media is not an exception. With many monitoring tools on the market, both free and paid, it’s much easier to measure the outcome of campaigns and listen to the consumers.

Coca Cola’s Encourage-Meter For Football Fans

Coca Cola boosted the sponsorship of Copa America with a remarkable concept: El Alentómetro; a big screen where fans could watch the next game of the Argentinean football team only if they make enough noise to keep the image on the screen!

Viral Friday: John Lewis Christmas Advert 2011

A weekly viral video chart of ViralBlog, showing the 5 most popular viral videos, commercials, games or user-generated videos, carefully selected and ranked by popularity, viral impact & spread.

The Corporate Social Media Summit Europe

Brands are increasingly starting to realise the importance of social media. But at the moment, many are still chasing the channels and focusing too much on cool concepts, rather than starting to build a long term relationship with prospects, customers and loyal fans.

As a result, when entrepreneurs finally manage to crack the code, so to speak, and get their first couple of viral campaigns to really take off, they can sometimes forget that there’s still work to be done.

See, for all of viral marketing’s potential, there exists a dark side: Once you send something out into cyberspace, it’s out there for keeps. If you screw up the planning, the execution will fail, and fail in a big way.

If you want to avoid such nasty consequences, then check out this handy guide from our experience on how to avoid viral marketing regrets.

Fact Check

This rule is as simple and as basic as they come, yet there are still people who overlook it. When preparing to execute a viral marketing campaign, always, always, ALWAYS make sure your research & statements of fact are legitimate!

Not only will you as a business owner or entity be made to look foolish if you misrepresent facts which can be verified through a simple Google search (which, by the way, you can rest assured that the people seeing your material will perform), but if you stray too far outside the realm of veracity, you can find yourself in serious legal trouble.

Unity is the Answer

No, you haven’t bumped your head and woken up in 1967. It’s just that in marketing, as with plenty of other things, the presentation of a solid, unified front is best. For example, everyone knows about Angry Birds. It’s a viral sensation, and that’s what you want to be, right? If so, then take a tip from them and always keep your campaigns to as few URLs as possible.

Think of it this way: When something goes viral on YouTube, people share a YouTube link. They don’t show each other 50,000 different URLs! Everyone knows that the hilarious cat-playing-piano video zinging around the office like wildfire is on YouTube, and thus, is easy to find, share, and, for the originators of the video, to measure.

This is also true for media outlets, at least until you’re very well established. Fragmented media not only makes media virulence more difficult to achieve, it also makes meaningful data analysis very hard to undertake.

You always want to be better the next time out, and if you don’t know what worked – and what didn’t – from your last campaign, then you’ve wasted your time and money, and you’re back at square one.

Son of a Glitch

Look, this one’s another no-brainer. You can have the best, most awesome, most life-changing viral campaign ever crafted by the hands of Man, but if your technology can’t handle the traffic, all your visitors will see is an error page. This will leave them disgusted, and it’ll leave your wallet empty.

These are not conditions you want to find yourself in, so to avoid this particular viral marketing regret, you simply need to ensure that your servers and other elements of your technical framework are updated and ready to take on the upswing in traffic your viral campaign will bring.

Use Protection

For your source files, that is. If the source material that makes up your campaign materials is left unprotected, people can steal it, change it, and stand on all your hard work to make money that should be yours.

Therefore, to save wads of cash, as well as the time & headache of rooting out material that looks suspiciously like your own, you should make sure that the only thing about your campaign that goes viral is the stuff that you WANT to go viral – viral YouTube spot or Reddit bit? Good.

Raw MP4s & Word documents just bursting with sensitive / proprietary info spread all over the web for anyone to read, copy, or manipulate as and when they see fit? Not so good. The quickest way for your viral campaign to fail is by not taking the time to protect the foundation it’s built upon. Take precautions.

And there you have it. Despite the somewhat lighthearted delivery method, the message behind this article is serious: Use caution and forethought when planning your viral marketing campaigns and you can avoid the viral marketing regrets that plague so many.

Guest post written by Alex Petrovic – Dejan SEO company – Advanced SEO strategist and Link building team leader.

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.

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.

Source: Google Insights

Clearly the term “viral videos” (marked in red) is largely searched by average users and its search volume is influenced by periodical viral hits. But, the term “viral marketing” (marked in blue) is most likely searched by marketers and its search volume, as shown above, is in decline since the beginning of the economic crisis in mid 2008.

So what can we conclude from this data?

First, it is apparent that online viral marketing, being greatly misunderstood and still relatively new, is correlated with the economic trend. When businesses tighten their budgets and limit their advertising spending they stick to “proven” marketing methods and avoid “experimental” marketing.

The term “online marketing” has gained search volume in the same time period. That supports my assumption.

Second, we are now in a crossroad. There are two options how things will turn out from this point.

One option is that marketers will eventually notice the growing demand for viral content and start to supply it to the market.

The other option is that the decreasing cost effectiveness of traditional online advertising channels will push marketers to look into more effective methods and so they’ll end up “experimenting” with viral marketing again.

In any case, I’m positive that very soon, the interest in viral marketing will rise again. Why am I so sure that this will happen? Well, additional data that Google Insights For Search supplies is rising searches. Let’s take a look at rising searches related to viral marketing:

Source: Google Insights

This data shows the trend since 2004. However, “Breakout” means that the increase in search volume for the above terms exceeds 5,000%. Additionally, long term trends are normally stronger than short term trends. I believe that this case is the same.

Lastly, the more we see, hear and learn about viral marketing successes such as the recent Old Spice campaign, and the clearer the marketing value of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter becomes to the average marketer, the less “experimental” viral marketing will be perceived and will become the mainstream marketing method if not for all the reasons above, for only a simple one:

If computers represent the brains of the Internet, viral content is the heart!

IKEA’s showcase video, viewed 115,000 times on YouTube since November 18

Without breaking the bank on exorbitant budgets the agency managed to create a ripple effect of buzz and engagement, that would not spread just throughout Sweden, but throughout Europe and beyond.

The agency, which has a long-standing relationship with Ikea (dating back to 1996), used one of the most popular and basic functions on Facebook, tagging pictures, and used it to IKEA’s advantage to promote its showroom products. After creating a Facebook profile for the store manager, Gordon Gustavsson, the team then uploaded IKEA showrooms images to Mr. Gustavsson’s Facebook photo album over a two-week period.

Facebook friends of Gustavsson were then encouraged to tag items in the photos with their names, for a chance of winning that object for free.

As word about the campaign spread, the photos were tagged within seconds of being uploaded and requests came rolling in for more pictures. People used their Facebook profiles, newsfeeds and links, email and other forms of word of mouth to tell their friends and family.

The photo tagging promotional giveaway took off like wildfire making the Malmo Ikea store widely popular in just a few weeks. Throughout the world blogs have picked up the story, like Marketing Media in Russia, Ninja Marketing in Italy, La Voz de Galicia in Spain, TV Internety in the Czech Republic, Bright and Molblog in the Netherlands, Brand Republic & eConsultancy in the UK, Mashable, iMedia Connection and CNET in the USA.

“Instead of just looking at a banner with furniture, we got people them to personally promote IKEA” said Forsman & Bodenfors on their YouTube video.

The audience for online video sharing sites like YouTube and Google Video continues to grow swiftly across all demographic groups, far outpacing the adoption rates of many other internet activities. Fully 62% of adult internet users have watched a video on these sites, up from just 33% who reported this in December 2006.

Online video watching among young adults is near-universal; nine in ten (89%) internet users ages 18-29 now say they watch content on video sharing sites, and 36% do so on a typical day.

Over time, online video has become more deeply integrated into daily life, and has started move into the spaces that are typically reserved for traditional television viewing. Overall, 19% of internet users say they use video sharing sites on a typical day. In comparison, just 8% of internet users reported use of the sites on a typical day in 2006.

Broadband connectivity has helped to set the stage for high-quality viewing experiences and broaden the appeal of online video content. Fully 63% of American adults now have high speed connections running to their homes.1 Among broadband users, 69% watch video on sharing sites, and 23% do so on a typical day.

Television and movie watching are now an online experience for a third of internet users

While much of the content on video sharing sites is user-generated, there is also a growing archive of professional content available through YouTube and newer network-sponsored video portals like Hulu.

Efforts to lure viewers to these portals appear to be paying off, as more than a third of internet users (35%) now say they have viewed a television show or movie online. In comparison, just 16% of internet users said they had watched or downloaded movies or TV shows when asked a similar question in 2007.2

As internet users become accustomed to regular on-demand video viewing online, many are choosing to watch from the comfort of their couch. Among those who watch TV shows or movies online, 23% say they have connected their computer to a television screen so they could view video from the internet on their TV. That amounts to roughly 8% of all internet users.

These findings, which come from an April 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, illustrate the pervasiveness of online video and mark an important moment in the evolution of America’s television and movie viewing habits.

The use of video sharing sites currently outranks many other headline-snatching internet pastimes among American adults. Watching online videos on sites like YouTube is more prevalent than the use of social networking sites (46% of adult internet users are active on such sites), podcast downloading (19% of internet users do this) and the use of status updating sites like Twitter (11% of internet users do this).

Also in our video and viral tracking company ViralTracker we see a growing demand for measuring the reach, impact and engagement of online video´s. So we do trust 2009 and 2010 are going to be fun years.

Watch the full study by Pew Internet. There´s also a free PDF available.