For anyone who has ever wanted more information on Social Media and its impact on how we consume and share content, here are some favorite videos from Socialnomics that just might amaze you.

Social Media Revolution

Social Media ROI

Kudos to Socialnomics for gathering such comprehensive information!

A few weeks ago, I was asked to share some of my favorite social media tools with iMedia Connection.  Here is a re-post of that article and a few of my favorite applications - some free and some paid - that are worth their weight in marketing gold.

Article Highlights:

• Social Mention gives a great snapshot of blog, forum, and microblog buzz, sentiment, and keywords
• Radian6 and Alterian’s SM2 offer solid analytical tools, easy-to-use interfaces, powerful data retrieval, and more
• Quantcast and Compete are both free resources for basic metrics such as site/blog traffic, user demographics, page views, and unique visitors

In many ways, 2009 was the year of the “a-ha!” moment for social media marketing. While many people long-involved with social media and word-of-mouth marketing knew it was only a matter of time for the masses to embrace this type of marketing, others were just starting to get their arms around the importance of establishing and leveraging their social footprint to build engagement, dialogue, and awareness.

As more companies, brands, and individuals are building their social media presences, the universe of online tools — which used to be somewhat more limited — continues to expand on a daily basis. Not only do we have more choices in how we place content and measure social media, but the tools available to us also change and improve just as frequently.

To provide a little background on me: I run a social media marketing agency (KARMA Media Labs) that helps organizations and individuals connect with their target audiences and build word of mouth in the communities where they live. In order to find these audiences and strike a chord, it’s important to be armed with the right tools to listen to what is being said, find the right influencers, communicate with your audience in a way that is relevant, and provide content that is likely to be shared.

The following is a list of some my favorite tools and sites — some free, some paid — that have been worth their weight in gold in not only finding that desired audience and key influencers, but also putting the right content in front of them to build conversation and word of mouth.

Read the rest of this entry at iMedia Connection

You’re a company, or a brand, an artist, or a marketer who wants to promote your cause and you want a presence on Facebook.  You’ve seen it done before, but you just don’t know what your options are.

Should you create a Facebook Group?

Or is a Fan Page your best bet?

In the past, Fan Pages and Groups both had a similar problem: they tended to get initial fan interest, but couldn’t keep fans coming back for more.  There was a lack of social functionality and value for both the fan and the cause.  In essence, the Fan Page and Group used to act like the Facebook version of the brochureware web site back in the day. That now seems to have changed.

While the new redesign of Facebook has infuriated many of its users, it has also created more benefits for marketers and those who want to engage with their audiences and fans.

Facebook has thoroughly revamped Fan Pages in the past few weeks to offer much more viral potential with their built-in news stream integration and dissemination features: any action is seen by each users’ friends and actions are more easily shared.

While the Facebook Groups page still looks and feels the same, the Fan pages have been improved to look and feel more like user profiles.  These new features have driven a lot of users to them while making Facebook Groups a much less influential and used communication tool than before.

Some things to keep in mind if you’re considering a Fan Page:

• When updating your wall, your updates will be included in all your fans news streams
• Fan page editors can update their fans about new content, promotions, upcoming events, and more.
• Fan page editors can send messages to either their entire fan list or segment their update to targeted fans
• Messages from fan page editors appear in their inbox “Updates” tab
• Fan page editors can click on a tab called “insights” which gives information on fan page views

We suggest before starting a Group or Fan Page, you should thoroughly read through Facebook’s FAQs:

Facebook Pages: http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=175

Facebook Groups: http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=414

With Facebook’s recent redesign of user home pages and updates to the Fan Page template (and very few updates to Groups), we at KML couldn’t help but wonder if the Fan Page is future home for any and all who want a Facebook presence to interact with their fans and audience.

And if so… how long will we enjoy that feature for free?

Not a week goes by without my seeing yet another article or blog post bemoaning the fact that social media marketing cannot be measured or touting a new, “revolutionary” way of measuring word of mouth (WOM).

I really enjoy this lively debate but my own experience at KML and beyond has made me a believer: social media marketing can be measured and most campaigns can be evaluated on an ROI basis.

There are several issues that I believe create the brouhaha around metrics and social media marketing.

• Most companies do not take the time to define what their social media goals are in measurable terms to determine what their success metrics are. And many times, agencies are just as guilty.  As one often says, you cannot manage what you do not measure and you cannot measure what you do not define.

• Every social campaign, even for the same brand or product or property, will have different metrics attached to it. Because the objectives of campaigns and the environment and circumstances in which they are implemented will differ, so should their metrics. A campaign may need to focus on conversions to measure its ROI, another may be all about buzz and awareness with yet another’s success measured on time spent engaging with a specific tool or piece of content.  And too often, we see marketers using the same old, and usually irrelevant, online metrics of pageviews, unique visitors, etc.

• Here’s an ugly little myth: “even if you can figure out what to measure with WOM/social media marketing, the measurement methodologies are so unreliable as to make the results meaningless.” Nonsense. Word of Mouth, social media, non-traditional online marketing analytics are just as accurate as traditional offline and online analytics, but because the marketing methods themselves are new, their measurement has not been codified into accepted standards.  And there are sometimes several ways or methodologies to track one specific metric.  This, however, does not make these measuring tools inaccurate but it does make them more likely to be influenced by subjective interpretations.

• Social media marketing measurement tools are developed and released on almost a daily basis and existing methodologies are being constantly refined which will give our industry trustworthy tools much faster in its lifecycle than any other advertising or marketing field before.

Stay tuned for part 2 which will list some of the free and paid measurement tools that we are huge fans of at KARMA Media Labs.

Most people who know me well know one of my biggest complaints is that I have no cell signal whatsoever in my home.  I am in what they call a “black hole” - an area in Los Angeles (yes, Los Angeles!) that gets nothing but garble on not just one, but two AT&T cell phones. I’m that tool who actually drives my car three blocks just to use my phone.

I’ve thought about ditching both phones and going to a different carrier, but the truth is…

I <3 my iPhone.

Imagine my joy over the news today that Skype is launching an iPhone application. Oh Praise Jeebus! While Apple and AT&T have put some restrictions on it (you can’t do ALL your calling with Skype, just over internet via Wi-Fi) still, this could be life changing for this dual cell phone toting gal. With the Skype iPhone app, you’ll be able to make free VoIP calls to other Skype users. If you want to call a landline or cell, Skype provides low cost calls to those phone numbers too.

And the reviews are in: Awesome.

Some people think this might be a step toward the end of cell plans as we know it, and that we’ll soon just be paying for data plans. Others are critical of the application’s shortcomings.  What’s most important to me– it’s one step closer to enjoying my phone(s) in my home and not putting up with lousy service from my wireless carrier.

Whether or not it poses a threat to AT&T remains to be seen, I’m just happy to be able to use my iPhone again.

It appears the naming rights to the tallest building in the western hemisphere (once the tallest building in the world) have been given to a London-based insurance broker that will rename the tower The Willis Tower.  The Willis Tower???

While I don’t live in Chicago anymore, when I did live there the Sears Tower was as familiar to me as a good Chicago Hot Dog. It’s a symbol of the city.  From Facebook updates I’ve seen from family and friends, I’m sensing that others are as disturbed about this as I am.  Which is why I’m happy to see that you can get your Sears Tower venting out on Twitter, as the @SearsTower twitter profile is happily responding to your complaints.

In a mildly snarky fashion (similar to my beloved @thesnuggie), this inanimate object is responding to your tweets with such bitter comments as “Willis Tower is following me. And that’s exactly what you’ll do, Willis. Stand in my 1,450.58 foot shadow”, and “Ahem. Mr. Plumeri. Moving into an awesome building like me isn’t a “bold move.” A bold move is deciding not to wear pants to work,” and the best one yet, “Sticks and stones may break human bones, but new names will never come to define me.”  Good one Sears Tower, good one.

So while the name Sears Tower may be going away, its Twitter profile lives on. I’m looking forward to following my new Twitter friend and seeing it all unfold.

Yes, that happens to be KARMA’s tagline.  But it also defines Word of Mouth — and much like KARMA, it can be both positive and negative.

As a business, individual or company, you want word of mouth to be positive, but the reality is through new social media platforms and exchanges, consumers have more ways to amplify their experiences– the good, the bad and the ugly.

Take, for example, my recent restaurant going experiences over the weekend.  Not one, but two restaurants (that shall remain nameless for the time being) slipped in extra entrees on our bill, hoping we would not check.  And we almost didn’t.

In the first instance, since we were taking a family member out for their 65th birthday, we didn’t want to cause a scene and just ate it.  Annoying.

In the second and far more annoying instance, a restaurant, where my husband and I are considered “regulars”, slipped in an extra entree, the entree we usually order when we’re there but didn’t this time.  Was this a random error?  No, they figured since we usually get the same thing every time, they’d try to sneak it in.  When we called the waitress over, body language had “oops we’ve been caught” written all over it.  We won’t be going there again.

My point with the above, is as an irritated, frustrated, and somewhat direct consumer, my first inclination was to go wherever possible online to warn people not to go to these two restaurants.  My Facebook and Twitter updates mentioned this annoyance, and look, here I am blogging about it.  I’ve decided to not name the restaurants, but if I truly wanted to cause some damage and give these two places the consumer F%&* YOU, I’d be a little more specific.

Consumers like tell others how much they like or dislike products, services and experiences. eMarketer reports that 65 million adults in the U.S. are talking about products and services and 27 million of them are doing it online via forums, blogs, consumer review sites, social media sites etc. That trend is only going to increase.

Sure, businesses should try to do things right in the first place to garner positive reviews, but they shouldn’t be afraid of the bad ones.  It’s possible many of them can turn this around to be a positive by connecting with their target audience, hearing feedback, and understanding their audience’s perception.

So I’m not sure if Pace in Laurel Canyon or Taste on Melrose will do anything about my experiences to make it better, but if they were smart, they’d not only keep in mind that consumers like to blab about shifty practices, but they should pay attention to what’s being said.

Oops! I slipped the names of the restaurants.  Kind of like how they slipped in those extra entrees.

Social Media Marketing = Word of Mouth = Awareness

Social media is as simple as its component parts – social interaction meets media — the sites, events, communities and resources that enable people to share with each other, collaborate, communicate and reinvent.

Social media marketing is harnessing that media to drive conversation, build awareness and spark word of mouth around a brand, individual or particular subject matter.

Your audience is living in the new media space – on Social Networks (Myspace, Facebook, LastFM), Sharing and Bookmarking sites (Digg, Stumbleupon), opinion and voting sites, UGC and video sites (YouTube, DailyMotion), and a variety of communities and blogs targeting niche interests. For successful social media marketing, it is important to:

1. Find those consumers;
2. Listen to them;
3. Amplify their voice; and
4. Engage them with the information and content they’re asking for.

Why Social Marketing is More Effective.

Traditional Media = Monologue
Social Media = Dialogue

Now, more than ever, consumers have the opportunity to involve themselves in the marketing mix, and they will. As new, digital media became the preferred media of the Millennial Generation, information and content became easier to create, share and manipulate. This democratization has led to an unprecedented interconnectedness both to the world and one another. This real-time, interconnectivity creates a two-way communication channel for everything, always, which is one of its primary advantages over traditional media.

Traditional media is characterized as monologue, slow if ever to adapt and respond. Social media is defined by dialogue, evolving constantly and responding instantly. Consumers have gravitated to and adopted social media because it allows them the opportunity to interact with and engage the people, brands and ideas that matter most to them. And this two-way communication channel requires that brands interact and engage in return. After they are done speaking, they are now required to listen and respond. Those that don’t will be left behind.

Once people are engaged it becomes increasingly likely that they will share and this sharing is the ultimate value for brands practicing effective social media marketing. All of the actions we take online are now shared with our friends – we are clicks away from sharing the links we like, from seeing the clothes and music our friends just purchased, from reading the restaurant reviews posted by our neighbors. And we know this sharing is the most important factor when influencing consumers to adopt a specific brand identity or purchase a certain product.