Measuring ROI is an important topic in social media, all the communities that we build at FreshNetworks have very clear ROI cases. This may be increased sales, a specific number of new ideas generated for the business, increased retention rate, traffic to an ecommerce platform, savings in market and consumer research spending… The areas where online communities can contribute to business objectives can be vast and depend on the specific needs of the business. Image via Wikipedia On Friday we posted about an experiment running on one of our online communities

Research Reinvented have polled the Twitterverse (I hate that word!) to find the most influential people in the market and consumer research areas to follow. At FreshNetworks we make the most of strong research credentials, both in our specific online research communities , but also helping all of our clients make the most of the insight they can get from online communities . Rather ingratiatingly I’m one of them and now get to wait to see if I make the top 10. You can read more of our recent research posts from making online research better to

For any brand using social media , an important first stage is to find out what people are saying about you online and then monitor these discussions and conversations. The presentation below, from David Alston of Radian6 looks first at the worries and objections that people can have to using social media, and then moves on to the ten conversations to listen for in social media: Image by FredArmitage via Flickr You can build on these, engage the people talking about you and learn from what they say.

With the publication this month of the Internet Advertising Bureau’s ‘ Social Media Ad Metrics Definitions’ , it seemed a good moment for me to write about the thorny subject, and have a look at some of the controversy around the measurement of ROI in social media. The ROI within social media has long been a bone of contention, and seems likely to become ever more so, with the equally lightning spread of both social media use and savage budget cuts. I’ll ll return to the IAB’s publication later, but in the meantime, let’s take a look at the background

Required reading this week at FreshNetworks has been this great presentation from Mike Trap on what he calls ’scalable intimacy’, the intersection between branding and social media . This is reflected very much in the shift we’re seeing in marketing and advertising, from a (false) assumption that people are defined by the brands they use, to an understanding that brands are defined by the people who use them. For Trap a brand is not the stimulus, but the collective emotional response to this. In other words, a brand is not defined by the product or

Yesterday we posted about statistics from MarketingSherpa showing that a lack of knowledge hampers social media marketing , with 46% of firms who had not adopted social media marketing citing a lack on internal understanding as their main hindrance. Another set of statistics from MarketingSherpa paints a more positive outlook for social media agencies. In September 2008, just as we were recognising the full potential of the economic downturn in which we now find ourselves, they surveyed almost 400 firms asking them about their marketing spend for

common debate among those working in marketing and social media is between engaging people on your own domain - in an online community that you build and manage yourself - and engaging people where they are - out in social networks like Facebook and MySpace or on YouTube, external blogs or forums. There is, of course, a place for both of these things - engaging people in social networks can often be more suitable for campaign-based activities. Image by MattRhodes via Flickr A

There are many examples of big brands in social media (in fact you can find a whole range across different industries in our online community examples), but at the Marketing 2.0 Both have a strong history of customer engagement and have been, to some extent, pioneers in their use of social media and online communities . It’s about people not firms - Image via Wikipedia conference in Paris it was great to hear some real case studies from the people behind these strategies and campaigns.

Our post a few days ago on measurement and ROI in social media, Social Media ROI: Measuring the unmeasurable , prompted a fair amount of discussion. The main thrust of the post, and of the presentation it highlights, is that in order to measure ROI in social media, you need to have a clear and reasoned understanding of what it is you’re measuring and why. It isn’t When building ROI models for online communities at FreshNetworks , we follow an approach that includes the following four steps Identify what success looks like in the online

Again this week, Twitter has been high on the media agenda. Time will tell which are the most appropriate and which have the highest return on investment, but it is worth all brands learning the basics of Twitter usage for marketing purposes and in particular for PR. We wrote earlier this week about how brands should use social media marketing instead of email . As is always the case during a time of innovation, brands are experimenting with lots of different ways of using Twitter. Some successfully and some less so.