On Friday we posted about an experiment running on one of our online communities , comparing paid and organic search strategies . This is just one of the ways that our clients measure the ROI of their online community - by increased traffic from organic search or significant savings on their paid search bills. Measuring ROI is an important topic in social media, all the communities that we build at FreshNetworks have very clear ROI cases. Image via Wikipedia We spend time during the planning and strategy phases working on the objectives of the online

have a client who once said to me: “We want to use social media to attract more complaints” . This may seem an odd thing to say, all to often attracting complaints is a reason people cite for being anxious about using social media . People use social media for lots of things, but they often use it to express their opinion about a brand or organisation, to tell you where things are good and to tell you where things are bad. Image by ajburgess via Flickr I

Now they have continued their innovative approaches to engagement and embraced social media. They have launched LEGO CLICK , an online community that brings together innovators, designers, artists and creative thinkers to develop new ideas related to toys. Unlike other ideas communities, LEGO CLICK does not (at least not yet) allow users to rank and rate the ideas. Image by Kaptain Kobold via Flickr LEGO is a brand that many people are very passionate about, a brand people love and we’ve written before about how they use segmentation to engage their consumer

In our last post we looked at why every business needs a social media policy . But if you’re writing your social media policy for employees, what should it include? Have a simple and clear policy on how employees should be using social media and make sure you include your employees in the process of drawing them up. Image by late night movie via Flickr And the fact that the most important thing for any business is to have a policy in the first place.

The last post of our guide to Getting Started in Social Media looked at measurements and how brands should be ruthless about ROI. This presentation from Oliver Blanchard is a great introduction to social media ROI and how you should conceive of it and then measure it. This is a model that really rings true in our experience of building online communities. Image by Hey Paul via Flickr It’s also quite amusing in parts and so is Required Reading this week at FreshNetworks

This presentation from Heather Oldani , their Director of PR, is a great overview of how McDonald’s is using social media and online communities. From Twitter and Facebook to their own online communities. It’s an interesting insight into how a brand like McDonald’s is using social media – what they set out to achieve and what actually happened. Image by thomas.merton via Flickr McDonald’s is the world’s largest and fastest growing food service organisation.

There are a lot of social media agencies out there (we at FreshNetworks being one of them!). When a brand is getting started in social media , launching a particular campaign or engagement programme, or just looking for advice and support, it’s important to make sure you choose the right agency for you. Finding the right social media agency can be tricky and to do it you need to get to understand them, their thinking and their work. Image by Dom Dada via Flickr Many doing different things and having different approaches.

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.

few hours later it turned out that things were not quite so simple as ESPN released its internal social media policy. Perhaps the biggest threat to a firm in their use of social media is to not have a policy about it. Of course employees’ use of social media is not as simple as this. Image by smileham via Flickr This week, ESPN, a US sports cable TV network, appeared to tell its employees that they could n o longer use Twitter except to Tweet about ESPN .

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 . Social media allows brands to really capitalise upon this. This is why online communities are important and really allow brands to engage with their customers 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 service, but rather it is defined by everybody who uses, talks