ImpactWatch Blog

(Cross-posted from the Bivings Report)

We love talking about Best Practices here at the Bivings Report, and today we’re offering up a very meta look at best practices in company blogs. Every business has a point of view or way of delivering their products and services – and what better way to share that with the world than on their sites? At last night’s June Social Media Club DC event, the panel discussed the strategies and challenges of their respective companies’ blogs.The speakers ranged from AARP, to Jess3 to the Nature Conservancy and their wise words (along with our perspective) could be distilled in the following list:

DO

• Leverage your company’s unique point of view to create great content. There’s a reason your company does what it does: so share it with the world
• Be Authentic. Chances are – if a reader is checking out your company’s blog – it’s because they care about your products, services, or brand. Or maybe they just think the colors are pretty. Regardless, your blog isn’t a sales pitch, it’s a way to share your organization’s perspective about relevant topics.
• Blogging takes a sustained and concerted effort. This means posting content on a regular basis, and not expecting your first 300 word post to get picked up by Mashable. Your blog WILL find its voice and niche audience,but getting there will take work and dedication.
• Great content leads to great SEO (not the other way around). Don’t spend so much time worrying about keywords, and more about what you’re actually writing. Sure, its nice when google picks up your content, but the content itself is what will drive traffic (as well as fame, fortune, and new business leads) to your site.
• Get lots of people in the mix. Allow all types of employees to have a voice. The programmers probably have good advice, as do the upper management. Involving many different authors also allows for more even workload distribution.
• Measure. Web analytics can help you see the full picture when it comes to traffic. Tracking the data over time can show valuable trends. Are old posts still getting lots of pageviews? Maybe that’s a good opportunity to revamp them.

DON’T

• Stop posting if the blog isn’t an overnight success.
• Forget to share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets.
• Aim to sound like your competitors.
• Forget to make sure any guest posts/cross-posted content is OK with your lawyers

A few goodies for the week:

• Social Media Metrics Beyond Small Victories – Engage

• Online Media Monitoring: An Essential Part of Listening – Burrelles Luce

• Try Being Unsocial with Customers First – Destination CRM

-
SEE LAST WEEK’S TOP POSTS

-

photo: soulfish

With everyone on vacation this month, there hasn’t been a lot to read. Here’s the best of August:

• 10 Steps for Successful Social Media Monitoring – Mashable

• Social Media ROI – is this the measurement framework we’ve been waiting for? – Smart Insights

• The 10/90 Rule for Social Media – Sysomos

• Ethics in PR Measurement – Philip Sheldrake

• The etiquette of eavesdropping – Research Magazine

• Rethinking the Value of Social Media: Measurement – WebWorkerDaily

• From WTF To KPI: PR Measurement In Acronyms – Shonali Burke

• Choosing Goals for Social Media – Amber Naslund

• Customized Social Media Metrics Are Important to Measurement – Spiral16

-

See Last Week’s Top Posts

-

photo: Mark Strozier

In a medium that changes every day, best practices from a year ago aren’t going to cut it. So it’s a good thing that new books on social media are rolling out all the time. Here are 5 to catch you up for the school year.

Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment (New Rules Social Media Series) – Jim Sterne and David Meerman Scott
While other books explain why social media is critical and how to go about participating, Social Media Metrics focuses on measuring the success of your social media marketing efforts. Success metrics in business are based on business goals where fame does not always equate to fortune… Knowing what works and what doesn’t is terrific, but only in a constant and unchanging world. Social Media Metrics is loaded with specific examples of specific metrics you can use to guide your social media marketing efforts as new means of communication.

Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web – Brian Solis
Engagement is shaped by the interpretation of its intentions. In order for social media to mutually benefit you and your customers, you must engage them in meaningful and advantageous conversations, empowering them as true participants in your marketing and service efforts… There are thousands of customers waiting to hear from you about your business and vision. It’s the minimum ante to create a vibrant and loyal online community. When you engage, you will build an authoritative social network that increases your visibility, relevance, influence, and profitability. It’s time to Engage!

Preorder these next three and they’ll arrive by the time you get through Solis & Sterne.

The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success – Lon Safko
The Social Media Bible, Second Edition (www.TSMB2.com) is the most comprehensive resource that transforms the way corporate, small business, and non-profit companies use social media to reach their desired audiences with power messages and efficiency. In this Second Edition, each of the three parts – Tactics, Tools, and Strategies – have been updated to reflect the most current social media trends.

Social Media ROI: Managing and measuring social media efforts in your organization – Olivier Blanchard
No abstract available yet for this book, but Olivier is well known for his no-nonsense advice on ROI calculation. I’m sure the book will be a valuable resource for businesses that want to know exactly what they are getting out of their social media efforts.

The Social Media Management Handbook: Everything You Need To Know To Get Social Media Working In Your Business – Robert Wollan and Nick Smith
The Social Media Management Handbook provides a complete toolbox for defining and practicing a coherent social media strategy. It is a comprehensive resource for bringing together such disparate areas as IT, customer service, sales, communications, and more to meet social media goals. Wollan and Smith and their Accenture team explain policies, procedures, roles and responsibilities, metrics, strategies, incentives, and legal issues that may arise.

Alternatively, you could follow David Meerman Scott around and take notes…it all ends up in a book eventually.

-

photo: RLHyde
*Book abstracts via Amazon.

• Top Five Social Media Marketing Mistakes – BusinessWeek

• How to Audit Your Social Media Efforts: 20+ Questions to Ask Yourself – Sociatic

• Social Media Monitoring Tools Exposed – The Viral Muse

• If you only do one thing in Social Media, it ought to be SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING. – PR Squared

• Matrix: Brand Monitoring, Social Analytics, Social Insights – Jeremiah Owyang

• Manage Your Online Reputation—Before Someone Else Does - Wall Street Journal

• My Feelings About Sentiment Analysis – Intelligent Enterprise

• European PR measurement summit – really? – Liberate Media

• Measuring Social Media’s Impact on the Bottom Line – Winning Business

• Crack isn’t just a waste of time. It’s bad for you too – BrandNet  I thought this headline was funny and went to check it out. Turns out it was actually relevant.

-

SEE LAST WEEK’S TOP POSTS OF THE WEEK

Slow week, but I’m working on the Top Posts of the Year from the past 52 Top Posts of the Week lists. Please add a comment with anything that I missed. Also, Dear Mark Evans, please stop cranking out amazing blog posts every day. It is making the rest of us look bad :)

• How Much Does Social Media Cost? – Sysomos

• The Barcelona Prinicples of Measurement – Katie Paine

• First global standard of proving value of PR created at European Summit on Measurement – PR Week

-

SEE LAST WEEK’S TOP POSTS

-
Follow Hannah Banana on Twitter (if that is her real name).

Follow ImpactWatch on Twitter.

• Three ways to act on your social media monitoring – Social Media Today

• 52 Questions To Ask When Hiring A Social Media Company – Outspoken Media

• Six real ways to measure social media – Meme Burn

• How ‘BT Sarah’ spies on your Facebook account – Daily Mail. [The Daily Mail is often silly-bazilly but this is clearly meant to alarm readers who are less web-savvy. I propose higher webucation.]

• Revolutionizing Corporate Communication: 6 Tips for Integrating Social Media – Huffington Post

• What if Social Media Isn’t Working? Then What? – Sysomos

• 5 Questions You Need to Ask Yourself When Creating a Social Media Report Template – Lauren Fernandez

• PR measurement was never meant to be an exclusive club – Rebecca Denison

-

SEE LAST WEEK’S TOP POSTS

-

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Follow ImpactWatch on Twitter.

-

Photo: Bluedharma

• Where Social Media Monitoring Services Fail – Jason Falls

• What Good are Your Social Media Metrics? – Catchfire Media

• 10 Social Media Monitoring / Analytics tools for Measuring Social Media – Technospire

• Social media monitoring review 2010 – Test 1 results – Fresh Networks

• Social Media Measurement in the Real World – ClickZ News

• Social media measurement: the experts at work – PRWeek

• Implementing social media: brand monitoring – Alex de Carvalho

• 10 Social Media Monitoring / Analytics tools for Measuring Social Media – Mani Karthik

• How will we measure it? Social media vs. advertising – Katie Safrey

-

SEE LAST WEEK’S TOP POSTS

-

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Follow ImpactWatch on Twitter.

-

Photo by: striatic

• Social Media Marketing for Beginners #1: Listening and Brand Monitoring – Conversation Media

• Good PR Measurement Is All About Good Goal Setting – BurrellesLuce

• Picking a new social media monitoring service – Jeff Esposito

• Thinking it Through Some More: More on What Else? Social CRM – Enterprise Irregulars

• Social media measurement: the experts at work – PRWeek UK

• 10 Key Sales Metrics to Track – Amber Naslund

• The Basics of Social Media Monitoring – Social Media Today

-

SEE LAST WEEK’S TOP POSTS

-

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Follow ImpactWatch on Twitter.

-

Photo by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/warrenski/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

• 10 Key Content Performance Metrics to Track – Radian6

• Comparing Social Media Analysis Platforms – Social Media Today

• A little bit of good news from the PR News Survey on Social Media Measurement – Katie Paine

• 5 Easy Steps to Creating Reusable Social Content – Jay Baer

• Scaling Social Media – Chris Brogan

• Defeating the Dark Side of Social Networking - BusinessWeek

• Three Reasons Measurement is Useless Without Goals – Teresa Basich

• Greenpeace vs. Nestle: How to make sure your Facebook page doesn’t become a PR trojan horse – The Brand Builder

• The New Media Metric: How Shareable is Your Content? – BNet

-

SEE LAST WEEK’S TOP POSTS

-

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Follow ImpactWatch on Twitter.

-

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/ / CC BY 2.0