First define your goal when you are planning to measure the social media performance metrics on your business. Then go ahead and define actionable performance indicators to effectively measure the results of your campaign and then adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. Social media analytics are all about measuring the results to understand your customers, opportunities for business development, and how you translate your conversations with prospects to make business decisions.

Plenty of great tools are available either paid or free to monitor your social media marketing strategies. Both the free and paid tools offer different features and benefits. IBM introduced one such tool named the IBM SPSS Modeler Professional that helps marketers to find insights of campaigns. You should find such a tool, monitor your customers or prospect’s online activity and their conversation about your products or services to learn how to enhance the social media campaigns further.

The internet is much more than just a channel of communication. In the present scenario, the internet has become the fastest and most convenient way to communicate and to spread the message to the public in a cost effective model. Often called Interactive PR, Online PR or Digital PR, this process is helpful for companies of any size as it is a two-way communication that aims to build better relationships. When compared to the traditional PR, this method helps organizations build reliability with the target audience directly.

VSS data shows that PR spending in the US grew by more than 3% in 2009 to $3.7 billion. Also PR spending in America is predicted to go beyond $8 billion in 2013 with increased usage of corporate blogs and social media.

The important components of Interactive PR include: distributing press releases online with relevant keywords and optimizing for search engine rankings, news wire services, defining a new blogging strategy to engage prospects and customers in conversation about the products or services, effective podcasting, organizing webinars, starting discussions and following up in forums, creating news and events page in the website to cover the old and latest information about the company.

There is a greater demand for Interactive PR services than in previous years and firms of all sizes are looking at the ways they communicate with their prospects and customers. There are companies that do not practice PR on its own and may request help or outsource their needs for Online PR activities. This way they can build an ongoing relationship with the public and the media in a very cost effective manner.

The following are some of the benefits associated with Social Media Marketing, which include: Building exposure to businesses, higher rankings in search engines, increased traffic, qualified leads, new business development and relatively low expenditures. The top social media tools used commonly by marketers are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs.

Most companies are still trying to find the best ways to make use of social media platforms to market their products or services. An Omniture survey indicated that only 14% of businesses use mobile, video and social media marketing as part of their marketing programs. Recently, a number of companies have been outsourcing their social media marketing to specialized digital marketing agencies. Currently, about 25% of companies are outsourcing their social media programs in order to increase ROI and increase sales.

Charts from a CMO survey show that there is an increase of 60% in the overall social media marketing spending from 3.5% (August ’09) to 5.6% (February ’10). There has been significant growth in the field of social media marketing with a gradual increase in the budget allocation in recent years.

Blueliner Marketingis a full service internet marketing agency based in New York with offices in India and Bangladesh. Blueliner help clients place their products and services in front of their target audience through various social media marketing efforts that drive results.

This form of marketing is often referred to as Content Marketing, which is defined as “words and data to create unambiguous content that support meaningful, interactive experiences”, is now evolving as a new discipline. In addition to all your traditional marketing techniques, this form of marketing uses content to achieve higher sales through profitable actions from the customer and prospect sides.

What it takes, is an effective content strategy. Content development, delivery and administration are the three major points that need to be kept in mind when you define content strategy for any marketing plan. Rachel Lovinger explains more about content marketing in her article, Content Strategy – The Philosophy of Data.

Effective content can be a combination of both verbal and visual information that will have a greater impact among your prospects. Define your content strategy in a manner that can be tracked and results are measured by easy methods which plays an important role when it comes to continuous refining and managing content for future.

There are a variety of vehicles marketers can use to deliver content to prospects which include print and online newsletters, webinars, podcasts, websites, microsites, video portals, mobile content, gaming sites, interactive online forms, email campaigns, blogs and social media. Of all, social media forms a major component of content strategy now and content marketing is replacing certain traditional marketing strategies to achieve results in a cost-effective manner.

Research and survey reports conducted by Junta42 show that now 33% of total marketing budgets are  allocated to content marketing and the main area of focus being mobile and social media. Companies of all size are now taking the help of digital marketing companies to fulfill their content marketing needs.

Blueliner Marketing offers specialized services to clients who need a partner to transform their marketing goals to profitable results. Blueliner creates and administers valuable content marketing strategies to meet client needs and deliver higher ROI.

From producers to buyers and everything in between, all of you are powering web 2.0. and everyone will have a role in determining the shape of the next generation Internet. As more people get directly involved in producing content on the web, we all have the option to implement best-practices in ‘digital conservation’.

We know about the greening of data centers. Instead of busting out a new tech meme for green coding practices, let’s reuse some older terms. Below are some familiar terms to get you started thinking green in your designs, work-flows and coding practices. This is not meant to be a definition of sustainable web design but it could lead you to more research.

Reduce

Power requirements in web servers are going down. Energy Star compliance for computers was the beginning but data centers are now driving cooling, energy and bandwidth requirements. Hosting control panels are reducing the amount of support required by giving more control to the site owner and site designers. Better designs which include mature, standards-based languages and coding practices help insure we get the most logic from the least amount of code.

Web standards like XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.0 help reduce the amount of code on a page. Emerging standards like POSH and other Microformats help designers write semantically-correct code leveraging existing standards. Spending less time learning new standards shortens learning curves. Shorter learning curves free designers to focus more on user needs and sustainability.

Recycle

Design patterns help recycle code, imagery, and media based on past-project requirements. One example might be shopping cart code that is recycled from product sku to product sku. The same JavaScript is reused while the variables get updated for each product skew. The associated graphical elements, like “Buy Now” and “Add to Cart” buttons might be recycled from other navigational aids found in the site design. Rich Media such as product video introductions can be recycled from product to product using the similar titles, intro and credits.

One key to recycling code is the separation of code from presentation and style. Themes are a great example of site design recycling since a theme can be easily duplicated, and recycled through designer customizations.

Reuse

Hot-swappable hardware such as hard drives are refurbished and disk images are reused across entire server farms. Virtualization software and platforms help optimize the entire process. Even though we’re just in the beginning stages of green design, the techniques we’re employing in the technology sector are amazing. It seems to have started in the data centers.

Data centers themselves are now being located near renewable energy sources and some web hosts are entirely off-the-grid. Just as the data centers were driven to go green by cost-savings, green design is beginning to take hold as standards progress.

Another example of “reuse” is the popular one-click installations offered by many web hosts. Entire websites are now installed with just a few clicks and an ever-increasing amount of code in site designs are reused. Portions of your site design may be reused on other sites such as social networks. Your CSS, product descriptions and contact information may be simply cut and paste between many sites.

In sum, conservation starts with a mindset and we all have the power to contribute in different ways.

Additional Reading

Web Standards Project

Sustainable Web Design

Sustainable Web Community

Seven steps to a green data center

Sustainability Defined at Wikipedia

The industry for Facebook applications has exploded since the dramatic moment when Mark Zuckerburg first announced that he would make the programming that supported the popular social network available to programmers (see “Facebook’s FoodFight: A Marketer’s Data Dream Field“). But although wildly popular (there are currently 19,290 applications available to users) no one has really figured out an effective way to make money off of them. As Skype discovered the hard way, offering customers a free product is poor incentive for those same customers to upgrade at a cost.

The ultimate answer may lie in the pocketbooks of marketers. Although intrinsically a poor source for profit, facebook applications are a powerful, powerful marketing tool. Far less expensive than other internet-based marketing techniques, and far more engaging for customers, applications represent the next major evolution in interactive marketing.

Why should marketers regroup their marketing plans to include a Facebook application? First of all, an application can be far more effective and less time consuming then creating a regularly updated blog, comprehensive new web site, or even search engine strategy. They are also way better at engaging consumers and easier to measure than traditional media, including print advertisements, commercials, public relations, and event sponsorship. With a few clicks, you can asses visitors, daily users, and reviews of your application.

So applications are powerful…but there seems to be a disconnect between the potential for applications and the success corporations have had in harnessing it. Major names including Google, Microsoft, Forbes, the New York Times, Warren Buffet, Match.com, the Gin system, and LinkedIn have all created Facebook applications, but only LinkedIn and the Gin System rank among the top fifty Business applications and no corporate sponsored application has made it to the top 100 applications over all. That is a serious problem, considering the following facts:

• Mass media-like reach is only found in the top 100 applications
• The top 100 applications by daily users range from 3,602,640 for the most popular application to as low as 48,926.
• The top 25 applications alone register a total of 16,761,596 gross daily users with over 10 million of those users coming from the top 5 applications.

Basically, corporate application programmers have thus far failed to capture the kinds of major numbers applications are capable of attracting. On problem is that corporate sponsored applications are not relevant for potential customers. Corporations need to research customer needs when programming the application to ensure that target customers are interested in it. The other major problem is that Facebook was founded on an independent, democratic, anti-commerical culture (see “Has Social Media Sold Its Soul?”). An overly commercialized application is often avoided for its very commericialism.

That said, make sure that your application ties closely with your product offering and branding. Post-It’s free desktop widget, which allows users to post digital “Post-It”-branded notes on their desktop, is an excellent example. Remember, any positive association consumers form with your bond is one step further towards increasing sales and market share.

The once mighty must during web 1.0 has returned – The Industry Standard. Starting in 1998 it quickly rose to sell a record 7,558 advertising pages in 2000, making it 300 pages. The unfortunate victim of the dotcom crash it was bought up by IDG in bankruptcy court for $1 million and left to sit till now.

“We found that the brand had quite a bit of equity left,” says Derek Butcher, General Manager of The Industry Standard. “People remembered what the brand stood for before. Still, there’s obviously going to be a new generation of people who have no idea what it is.”

“We’ll have news coverage, but mainly from other sources such as IDG and bloggers,” says Butcher. “The area where we will try to differentiate ourselves is on the analysis side.”

Their motto this time is Predict the Future and they present a new way to consider the future. It’s by getting registered users to predict news stories and even suggest things to predict. Beyond valuable to any internet marketing and analysis.

They give users $100,000 in credits at registration to place yeah or nay bets on stories and new technologies. If things go the way you chose to predict you get more credits. Topics range from what will Yahoo, Google and Facebook do to Ad spending will shift from impression to performance-based marketing in 2008. If you predict correctly you can then apply them to prizes and increase your web cred. “The cool thing about prediction markets is that they do seem to be pretty accurate,” Butcher says. “It’s an effective way of forecasting.”

It seems that TIS is just in time to propel us further towards the next phase of the web or web 3. Building on the web 2.0 social networking phenomenon, folks argue web 3 is shaping up to be a phase of recommendation, customization and with the increased influx of ad revenue formally with television, rich, glossy and fast.

TIS out of the gate, looks and acts great. The site is well designed and implements a lot of the social networking standards we’ve come to enjoy. The bulk of the analysis is top notch and the breadth of the writers is wide and concise. The topics range from what company will be acquired next to what’s new in search engine optimization to technology infrastructure topics.

It should quickly be bookmarked by anyone in the technology industry and those like myself should also register, so you can start predicting. For the ability to predict the future is always valuable for business. To bad the Industry Standard had to go away for all those years.

Considered one of the longest campaigns in American history, beginning nearly two years prior to the election day. The 2008 race for the White House is crowded and full of interactive PR, social media, new internet marketing, new avenues of media revenue and voter attraction.

Diverging from previous campaigns where a candidate was considered progressive if they had an online presence, in 2008 it is imperative for a candidate to have a focused online strategy. If a candidate lacks complex online marketing strategies and an army of social networking minions applying web 2.0 efforts they are behind the curve and if they don’t have an online presence they might as well concede the race.

Largely pioneered by Howard Dean in 2004, the battle for voters online has become a hotly contested one. Each of the major Democratic and Republican candidates has established a web presence and has made it a vital part of their campaign, garnering record online contributions to their campaigns (Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Edwards, Barak Obama, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney).

Primary results aside, Congressman Ron Paul is leading the charge in this web 2.0 world: in two months, a user video for Paul caught 16,000 views, making it the sixth most popular of 2007; he’s got a Twitter feed and a Justin.tv lifecast; 5,589 fans on Facebook; and a staff that makes a clutter-less or seizure free MySpace page. Yes, Ron Paul has it all 2.0 and it’s translating into dollars. On Guy Fawkes Day, he set a record for one-day fund raising by a Republican, gathering $4.2 million from online sources. Six weeks later he hit $6 million in one day.

If we look at the other side of the coin. The Democratic Senator Obama raised $6.9 million—more than a quarter of his total—over the Internet from more than 50,000 online donors, a base of supporters his campaign hopes to cultivate into regular givers. Obama is also setting records because the campaign contributions that he is receiving are coming from small donations online and adding up to big dollars. His campaign said 90 percent of the online contributions were for $100 or less. Not to mention the user generated “Obama Girl” and the viral support it generated for him. Remember the Sopranos video spoof Hillary posted on her site that went totally viral? Some might argue it was a first of its kind and that it is more valuable than bigger budget TV ad’s.

In what is shaping up to be a huge year for youth turn out, having a strong online presence is vital to reaching possible like minded individuals. Perhaps the electoral college is proving necessary after all. With it being harder to get the attention of everyone, the candidates are having to reach further into the web 2.0 fabric to garner support.

I’m sure that in this age of information the other candidates are learning from each others campaigns, and they are trying to get as much influence in as they can before the Nominations in late August and early September. Which will finally bring closure to a marathon run for election day.

Paul or Obama may go the way of Dean, but their efforts illustrate two things: creative and serious investments in social media sites get seen and these online forays into social networking can provide major returns. Marketing Companies, SEO specialists and eCommerce capitalists looking to cue into the same markets should take a strategic long look at the ways these candidates are implementing web analytics and social marketing to gather up the support it will take to bring their parties nominations and a hopeful new address at 1600 Pennsylvania avenue.

MySpace and new marketing.

No one in 2004 ever thought that MySpace and contemporary media platforms where synonymous. But its four years and a $580 traditional million major media buyout later. MySpace, still the highest trafficked Social Networking site with 110 million active users a month. Now in 24 countries, the site is expected to make $800 million in revenue in 2008, the majority of that income will be from the advertising and marketing sectors. Google, recently inked an advertising deal with MySpace’s parent company, Fox Interactive Media for $900 million.

So what’s the problem? Well, its called Facebook and the growing use of the term “MySpace-refugee” that has begun to erode MySpace’s market dominance. Facebook, known for its higher technology, cleaner interface and wider demographic is garnering users at a faster rate than MySpace. The advertising and marketing industries are seeing Facebook as a better bet for their money these days.

MySpace is no longer considered the “sexy choice” for scenesters in the know, as it is beginning to be seen as a traditional media outlet by turning into a portal, like Yahoo, AOL, or worse, Netscape. To be fair, Fox intended it to morph into a portal, but hoped it to be further along in that vision by now.

Some might argue that this is due to the hands off approach by Fox Interactive. With Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe signing new $7.5 million dollar contracts recently, it looks like it will remain that way. DeWolfe says that Fox Media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, reports about once a month and is “very aware of the product road map.”

The struggle is between the chaos of free programming that is de rigeur for MySpace users and the clean cut neatness that most consumer product companies have become used to. “The challenge…is making it more of a well-lighted environment for big-brand advertisers, the Procter & Gambles and Unilevers” said David Cohen, the US director for digital communications for the media buying agency Universal McCann.

Some experts say that it’s just not conducive to advertisers with it’s cluttered, often third party looking layout and it’s just not good from a consumer experience standpoint. Also MySpace is suffering from an image problem, with a deluge of unwanted friend requests, spam and sexually suggestive material. These issues have lost it some users.

MySpace is prepped to counter the trend and holds some heavy numbers to give it some room in this seemingly troubled time. Second only to YouTube in online video viewership and still holding a gigantic 1.3 billion page views a day (which did dip for the first time in December 2007 according to comScore), MySpace insiders are not showing that they are concerned. Instead, they are moving to meet the needs of its advertisers and users by introducing customized features, mobile device services, new security and sighting its growth potential. MySpace has announced an accord with 49 states to tighten privacy restrictions, in response to concerns of child predators.

Despite competition nipping at its heels, MySpace is still far and away the most trafficked internet site and heavy numbers will give it some room in this seemingly troubled time. “Think about the size and scale of MySpace and the opportunity to affect people and the opportunity to play a role in the culture” said Peter Chernin, the president and chief operating officer at News Corp., “there’s really nothing like it”

Weather or not the size and scale of MySpace will remain is yet to be seen. It has a great head start and very capable people at its front. But advertisers and users will be the tale of the tape.

The article discusses how Bangladesh is a rising star in the international economy with industrial analysts from Goldman Sachs to Cisco Systems predicting that it has high potential to follow in the successful economic steps of the giant next door – India.

High turnover, rising salaries, and intense competition for talent have made India gradually less attractive to businesses seeking the dramatic cost savings traditionally associated with offshore outsourcing. On the other hand, Bangladesh has a rising population of tech-savvy workers, thanks to investments in IT infrastructure from the European Union, as well as extensive educational opportunities, which are supplemented by Indian educational institutions.

For Blueliner, the Bangladesh team has been a tremendous asset: bringing solid language skills, programming acumen, and tremendous work ethic to the company. The cost savings, as much as 50% over India, as well as quality work is passed onto our clients who appreciate the lower price of Blueliner’s services.

The entire article can be read here on our site or by purchasing a copy of Crain’s New York Business from newsstands this week only.