note to self: check this service out.

Small changes with a big punch coming next week

Posted by Gina Bianchini on November 11, 2009 – 2:00 pm

One of the more interesting challenges of growing a social platform with base of passionate Network Creators is how to communicate the less visible success factors that make a Ning Network a hit. In the case of performance, the data is black and white: if your Ning Network is light and fast, you will grow. If it loads slowly, it won’t.

Performance optimization is also one of those funny things that require trust and a close partnership between you and us. Namely, we must make your Ning Network as fast as possible while still balancing giving you as the Network Creator the flexibility to add all the things that make your Ning Network the exact right social network for your interest or passion. These include third-party widgets, videos, images and especially your own design.

Layer on top of this the fact that Ning Networks exist for every purpose under the sun from lightweight entertainment to support, business networking and professional content across the globe and whatever change we make will be disruptive for someone, even if the feature is used by a small number of people.

For example, the limits to the number of text boxes and types of content you could add to your Main Page this summer weren’t designed to limit your creativity, but to ensure that you could grow your Ning Network into everything you wanted it to become. Speed is the secret component to making this a reality. Any great product needs to be fast or it is not great. And we want your Ning Network to be great.

To this end, over the past month, we’ve identified a set of small changes to the experience on your Ning Network that will pack a huge punch on making your Ning Network fast for members around the world.

Here’s what we’re changing this Monday, November 16th:

Content visible to “Friends Only” won’t show up in Main Page Latest Activity. You’ll still be able to see this content if you click through to your friend’s My Page, but it won’t be an option on the Main Page Latest Activity.

You’ll see a “Send a Message” link instead of an “Add as Friend” link on the detail pages for content. If you click “Send a Message” when the person isn’t already your friend, you’ll be prompted to add them as your friend first.

Pagination is changing to “Previous” and “Next”. When you’re checking out photos or another feature with more than one page of content, you’ll see buttons for “First,” “Previous,” “Next,” and “Last” rather than a button for a particular page like “19.”

Strange as it seems, this set of small changes will pack a punch from a performance perspective. As we get data on the improvements we’re seeing after these changes, we’ll look to share them here on the Ning Blog for all to see. In the meantime, as we get close to the final date of launch, we’ll post it here.

Thanks!

Emerging Tech Talk #36 – Christopher Penn about Google Wave

September 30th, 2009 by Dan York

What is most interesting about Google Wave? Back in June 2009 at an event happening near the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, MA, I had a chance to sit down with Christopher S. Penn and get his thoughts about the recently-announced Google Wave and how it might be used as a communication tool. As I listened to this recording today, I was struck by how much of it was echoed in a recent blog post I put up about the need for distributed and decentralized systems – we do need that distributed/decentralized approach. I know that while the Wave protocol is published, federation is not yet possible with Wave. Let’s hope it comes soon.

While I know that Chris’ views on Wave may have changed in the 3 months since we recorded this session, I thought the points he makes are great. More info about Chris can be found at:

• http://www.marketingovercoffee.com/
• http://www.christopherspenn.com/
• http://twitter.com/cspenn

Thanks, Chris, for agreeing to do the interview – and should we have the opportunity to do another one, I’ll try to get it up online sooner! My apologies for the delay.

You can download or play the podcast here (in Quicktime):

 Emerging Tech Talk #036 - Christopher Penn about Google Wave [9:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Alternatively, you can watch on YouTube at:

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• subscribing via iTunes
• subscribing to our YouTube account (if you are a YouTube user)
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Thank you.

This Voxeo podcast can be found on the web at http://blogs.voxeo.com/ett. If you have comments or feedback about this show, you can either leave comments here on the show blog site or email Dan York.

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  HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI

  October 27th, 2009 | by Christina Warren

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  Last month, we reported on a survey that found that 84% of social media programs don’t measure return on investment (ROI). The comments in that post indicated that a lot of individuals and businesses want to be able to measure the ROI of their social media strategies and campaigns, but they don’t know where to start.

  Companies and executives are finally beginning to really jump on the social media bandwagon, and that’s fantastic. However, for social media to fully work (for everyone), businesses and brands need to be able to evaluate the impact their social media use is having, both positive and negative. Measuring social media ROI isn’t impossible, but it can be difficult because many of the pieces that need to be evaluated are difficult to track. This guide is designed to help you track down those pieces and determine the ROI you’re getting on social media.

  ---

  ROI Reality Check

  ---

  Oliver Blanchard’s Social Media ROI Presentation is a witty, fun introduction to ROI in terms of social media. If you’re confused about what ROI is (or rather, how it is measured), in the context of social media, check out his presentation (below), before you proceed with this post.

  Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

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  Defining Clear Goals

  ---

  As a standard formula, ROI is pretty basic, ROI = (X – Y) / Y, where X is your final value and Y is your starting value. In other words, if you invest $5 and get back $20, your ROI is (20 – 5) / 5 = 3 times your initial investment. In the financial sense, ROI is measured purely in the context of dollars and cents, however, the principles can really apply to any type of investment — monetary or not.

  Having concrete goals and concrete baselines is crucial to calculating your return on investment. So before you set out to measure and monitor your social media returns, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to accomplish.

  Once you have your goals defined, you need to gauge the baseline for your levels before starting or changing your social media strategy. For example, if your goal is to increase social media mentions of your company, in order to measure the ROI of any actions taken toward that goal, you need to know where you stand now. You can’t evaluate the ROI accurately without a baseline.

  ---

  Metrics Tools

  ---

  

  Although ROI ≠ metrics, traditional web metrics like traffic counts, number of comments, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc. are an important component when calculating your ROI.

  The trick is to not rely solely on the numbers, but on what the numbers end up leading to. For instance, does your increase in website visitors correlate with higher sales? Are people that find your website from Twitter or Facebook then clicking on your product pages or going to the e-Commerce section of your site? That’s the sort of data you want to be able to look for.

  Back in January, we did a round-up of 50+ Tools for Measuring Web Traffic. Here are some of our favorites and some additional social media related measuring options:

  Google Analytics — It’s free and it can provide a really powerful baseline for a variety of different factors. You can track incoming links and then the activities of the users they send, which can be helpful.

  Omniture — Omniture has a slew of services available for businesses, including components that track Facebook and Twitter metrics.

  TweetMeme Analytics — This is useful if you use TweetMeme’s retweet buttons on your sites. It’s a lot like Google Analytics, but focused on TweetMeme.

  PostRank Analytics — This suite of tools measures social engagement on other platforms and services. What’s nice about PostRank is that instead of just a raw number, you can actually see the messages and comments from other sites that contribute to your stats. This can be really important for sentiment analysis (more on that later).

  HootSuite — HootSuite is a great Twitter manager but also offers impressive analytics. The nice thing about the click data you get from an app like HootSuite (or bit.ly) is by looking deeper you can more easily see if those clicks translate into transactions or impressions on your other sites.

  Be sure to check out our post on Tracking Social Media Analytics for help with these tools and for the type of data you want to look for. Also check out some other reasons to use a URL shortener.

  ---

  Sentiment Analysis

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  Having a metric for something like Twitter mentions is pretty meaningless if you don’t know if those mentions are positive or negative. This is where sentiment analysis is interesting. Sentiment is also a useful baseline to look at before implementing or changing a social media strategy and calculating your ROI.

  We’ve written a lot about different sentiment analysis tools for Twitter and here are some highlights:

  Viral Heat — Viral Heat is an affordable social media monitoring service that includes a sentiment breakdown for Twitter mentions.

  Twendz — Twendz is a very basic real-time Twitter sentiments tool.

  Tweet Feel — Tweet Feel is another real-time Twitter sentiments search-engine.

  Crimson Hexagon — Crimson Hexagon is an Enterprise-level social media tracking tool. The algorithm they use for their VoxTrot Opinion Monitor is really impressive stuff, and will help you determine what consumer sentiment is toward your brand based on social media mentions.

  Sentiment Metrics — Sentiment Metrics is another tool aimed at enterprises or larger businesses. We mentioned them in our round-up of reputation tracking tools last year.

  ---

  Social Media Product Suites

  ---

  

  These products can be extremely useful in measuring ROI on social networks but are primarily designed for bigger brands and corporations. Still, in terms of all-encompassing tool sets, these tools have the edge.

  Vitrue SRM — We’ve covered the Twitter Pages component of Vitrue SRM (Social Relationship Manager) before, but the whole suite is really dedicated to managing and getting the most information out of your social media accounts. Vitrue does analytics for links posted on Twitter or Facebook and can also plug into third-party services like Omniture and Google Analytics. Vitrue SRM is basically a CMS for controlling and monitoring your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

  ContextOptional — ContextOptional offers both a Social Reporting Dashboard for monitoring engagement and activity and a Social Moderation Console for Facebook.

  Salesforce.com — Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 line of products is really designed to integrate Twitter and Facebook results and pages directly into a company’s CRM. Although this isn’t ROI in the most clear-cut terms, by improving customer service and getting a handle on problems quickly, brands can save themselves from potentially costly mistakes. Those savings can be taken into account when computing your ROI.

  ---

  Making the Data Usable

  ---

  This is the hard part. After you have defined your baseline, you need to take the metrics from your monitoring tools and see how they correlate to higher sales, better customer retention, or whatever your primary markers for output are.

  If your ultimate measurement is sales for instance, look at your sales level. If it has increased, look at the number of referrers on your e-commerce site (assuming you can track this data) from your website or Twitter or the number of coupons used that were given away in a Facebook campaign to start calculating which sales stemmed from your social media campaigns.

  Do you see any trends? Is traffic up to your store after posting on Facebook? What about Twitter? Does store traffic correlate with more sales when evaluating that same data? Does a higher sentiment analysis on Twitter lead to more sales or more visits?

  Finding trends and tracking them back to their point of origin is the key to measuring ROI.

  ---

  What do you think?

  ---

  What do you use when measuring social media ROI? Is ROI the best term for measuring impact of social media, or should something else be used? What have you found to be good indicators of things that work and don’t work when using social media? Let us know!

  ---

  More business resources from Mashable:

  ---

  - 5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Business
  - Top 5 Business Blogging Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
  - 4 Ways Social Media is Changing Business
  - 6 Must-Follow Steps for Selling in Any Economy
  - 5 Small Businesses Successfully Using Social Media

  (Photo Courtesy of Cambodia4Kids on Flickr)

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Tags: analysis, contextoptional, crimson hexagon, facebook, metrics, ROI, salesforce.com, social media roi, twitter, vitrue srm

via mashable.com

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Dan Schawbel is the bestselling author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, owner of the award winning Personal Branding Blog and a columnist for BusinessWeek.

With over 300 million users, no one can deny the power of FacebookFacebook

. In fact, 50% of users log in every single day and spend over 6 billion minutes on the platform. What are they doing on it? Depending on the intent of the user, they’re sharing personal stories and updates, staying connected to friends and colleagues, and even building businesses. Many people only use their profile to keep in touch with friends and family, and form a brick wall so no one else can come inside. This strategy won’t help your career, but if you choose, you can also leverage Facebook to build your personal brand.

If you do decide you want Facebook to support your personal brand, then you will have to capitalize on its openness and the ability to grow your network, one friend request at a time. There are three new features that you should pay close attention to, as you tap into the millions of resources presented to you on the service. Each feature — tagging, Pages and widgets, and real-time search — is tied to a specific personal branding strategy.

1. Facebook Tagging for Networking Your Brand

Networking, as you can probably guess, is the key to forging a strong personal brand and developing your career. As you grow older, you will rely more and more on the “assets” in your network, which can range from your father to a coworker to even strangers you may have briefly met and exchanged information with in the past. Facebook tagging, in my opinion, has brought a whole new dimension to networking. The fact that you can use the “@” symbol when you post on your wall and associate a post with your friends’ names, is remarkable, and is exceptionally useful for personal branding.

Let’s say you write a wall post about your weekend plans or a cool blog you’re working on with a few people. You can use the tag feature to have that same wall post appear on their wall, which is great for visibility, appreciation, and for remaining in touch with people. When people comment on that post, whether it’s on your wall or someone else’s, you will be notified through email, so you can continue the conversation and meet new people. That can help you expand your network and stay top of mind with the people already in yours.

2. Facebook Pages and Widgets for Growing Your Brand

Facebook Fan Pages are nothing new, but how you use them and promote them is what really counts. There are thousands of Pages out there, but only the best ones succeed in capturing the attention of Facebook users. You aren’t going to be Vin Diesel or Coca Cola, but you can still make an impact.

Your Page needs a focus and strategy behind it, so first you need to decide what it’s going to be all about. For instance, do you want to use your profile page to build your network to the 5,000 friend limit and then create a Fan Page? Or do you want to keep your profile page for your immediate friends and use the Fan Page to interact with your social media entourage? These are questions you need to answer when building your brand on Facebook.

A Fan Page can contain:

- Event appearances with pictures and videos

- A video introduction or running video blog

- Press features

- Your blog posts via syndication

- Details about your personal and professional achievements

- DeliciousDelicious

bookmarks that represent your industry

- Pictures of you with celebrities from your industry

- Wall posts, including: a quote of the day, event reminders, blog posts, news, etc.

- Your LinkedIn profile

MashableMashable

on Facebook

Once you decide how you want to present yourself on your Facebook Fan Page, what information you want displayed and what widgets you want to use, you should then grow your page to 25 fans as quickly as possible. This will allow you to get a username for your Page, so that your URL will be easier to share, remember, and discover. You should use either your full name (if you haven’t already used it for your Facebook profile) or a positioning statement, such as http://facebook.com/facebookmarketingexpert.

Next, you need to market your Fan Page like it’s your job (because it is!). Here are just a handful of ideas you can use to spread the word about your Page:

- Add a Facebook Fan Page widget to your web site or blog

- Advertise your Facebook Page to targeted employers

- Put your Facebook URL in your email signature, at the end of presentations, and possibly even on your traditional resume

- Write articles and/or blog posts on other sites, leaving your Facebook URL in your bio or byline

- Hold a contest on TwitterTwitter

, where you give out free information or products to people who become fans of your Page on Facebook

- Become part of communities in your niche, on a variety of social networks

- Comment on blogs and instead of using your blog URL, use your Facebook address

3. Facebook Real-Time Search for Monitoring Your Brand

At Mashable, we’ve given you ten free and ten paid reputation management tools, to monitor your personal brand (they also work for company and product brands). But that was all before Facebook released its real-time search engine, which replaced their legacy search engine.

The new search engine identifies results, for each keyword entered, in conversations that are happening with your friends and the outside world. It also searches Fan Pages, groups, applications, events, people, and web results — so you can say it’s truly an end-to-end solution. Aside from using tools such as Twitter Searchtweetzi Twitter Search

or Google Alerts to keep track of personal brand mentions, you should occasionally (depending on your popularity) perform a search in Facebook to see what people are saying, both inside your network and outside.

But what should you do when you’re being talked about?

- For a brand mention by someone in your network: If people are saying something positive, then you should “like” the conversation and possibly leave a comment, such as, “Thank you for the mention,” or a value-add comment such as, “I would like to add _______,” or, “What do you think of _____?”

- For a brand mention by someone outside of your network: You should friend them, because they gave you the opening, and then send them a nice note through Facebook mail thanking them for the mention.

Facebook’s new features present many opportunities for building your personal brand. The tagging feature is a great tool for professional networking, while Facebook Pages allow you to extend your brand and grow it virally. The search functionality is another data point that you can use to keep track of what people are saying about you. There’s no doubt that Facebook is here to stay, so if you start using these features now, you’ll be prepared to be more successful in the future.

More Facebook resources from Mashable:

- HOW TO: Use Facebook for Professional Networking
- 5 Tips for Optimizing Your Brand’s Facebook Presence
- The Journalist’s Guide to Facebook
- Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What’s the Difference?
- HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook