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The Community Glue

Penny Power, Founder of Ecademy, looks at Community Managers and what they can do to help their Social network survive.

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Social Media for Business

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Conducting Online Research

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More Money for Social Media

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A new survey from Prospero Technologies shows that 88% of businesses expect to increase their social media spend in 2008. The companies who responded were set to either increase (58%) or significantly increase (30%) the amount of money they invested in these channels.

One concern frequently expressed with regard to blogs and social networking for businesses is measurement. It can be hard to arrive at a solid figure with regard to the cost of such activities - the time, effort and brain power required, as well as the creation of a site and its hosting. Even more difficult is measurement of the return these efforts produce.

While the vast majority of firms in the Prospero survey felt that social media was, or could, work for them, there was a significant variety of metrics employed for justifying and measuring this success:

Only three per cent of businesses used sales of products as a key metric and only 12% used increases in advertising revenue as the way in which they measured the effectiveness of their social media strategy. Forty-one per cent of companies admitted that the ROI of these tools was "unknown". Rusty Williams of Prospero confirmed that direct  improvements to the bottom line isn’t a key driver: "The majority of respondents see engagement with their brand as the most important measure of social media success, while more concrete ROI measures such as sales and new business leads carry less weight."

The report also illustrates the extent to which the commercial world is still in a very experimental period with regard to social media. While blogs were the most popular tool, they’re only in use by 13% of respondents. Companies are using wiki’s, user reviews, RSS, video blogs, widgets and podcasts with no real consensus over the most effective forms, understandable since they don’t know how to measure the impact of these devices.

via. Liberate Media