Many organizations have embraced online marketing and e-commerce, thanks to the advancement in technology. To make things even better, they are now going all out in using social media as one of their tools to sell and market their brands.

Many consumers also use the social media as a sharing tool.

They can share the items they have purchased with their friends and there are several companies out there to help customers do this. The companies make this a free service – one will just need to sign up and one can adjust their privacy settings to ensure that the price of the items they are buying is not disclosed. So all the buyers need to do, is to share what they are buying with their friends and where they will make the purchase.

Using social media is not rocket science.

In fact it is user friendly. Sadly there are some businesses out there that are struggling to adopt this great marketing tool. This is simply because they try to link the relevance between the social customer relationship management and social media.

There are three stages that should be focused on when organizations decide to make the move to social commerce. They are the recruit stage, the engage stage and finally the convert stage. These have been seen to be the shortest path in achieving true social commerce.

Stage 1: Recruit

The first step that such organizations must take is to try and understand how these social channels will work for them in terms of marketing and selling their brands and products, making them first among their equals in the market. The recruit stage deals with of the authored content and giving rewards and some incentives to their customers.

Stage 2: Engage

The engage stage on the other hand uses rich media, participatory contests and email sign ups. This social marketing stage can help all those in social media explore the benefits they may accrue due to moving on to social commerce.

Stage 3: Convert

The convert stage has several points under it such as the end to end reports, customer relationship management and e-commerce integration, making public offers.

Social commerce focuses on a general path that includes a sort of outreach followed by sharing of information, starting up conversations, allowing people to share their experiences making offers and finally the good old fashion word of mouth sales. Following this path can help the businesses use the modern communication methods to their commercial benefit.

What challenges have you found?

Related articles

• Are companies listening to their social media accounts? (socialmediatoday.com)
• Ideas To Make Social Media Part Of Your Marketing Mix (webguild.org)
• How to Measure Social Media’s Impact on Customer Retention (socialmediaexaminer.com)

Links drive the web. For users and search engines, it’s like the central nervous system. Learn how to build links for business using your personal hi-touch.

Tracking social media is a two-fold approach.

(contextvoice.com)

Know this: social media is a ‘media’ (press) darling. Consider how many posts and references show up for social media every hour, everyday. SEO, or search engine optimization, on the other hand – has been around a lot longer, but doesn’t get as much credit or love these days. Perhaps our friendly journalists think they are the same? Hope not. The professionals who understand the difference between user intent, tactics and overall strategies for the two forms of online marketing (drawing the line here), are clear that they both can have solid impact – for really any business. SEO tends to be easier to track for many (keywords to conversion as an example), social media – not. But, if you cannot answer the “what and the why”, you’re not doing great in either, or you are just getting started.

It’s hard to track real ROI with social media marketing. (Really?)

For most businesses the best sales and marketing campaigns involve forming strong relationships with customers/clientele. It’s because of these relationships that companies can flourish and grow as they build trust and loyalty with their patrons. As a result, it’s no doubt social media marketing found its way into the business arena. Effective networking is a key factor to implement in order to grow a business; and social media provides that opportunity. Yet how does a business know if its social media marketing campaign is effective? How can the level of success be measured? The answer is two-fold.

The first.

This is arguably the most important task to accomplish when deciding how to use social media marketing for your business. Determine your objective(s).

What is it you want to accomplish with your social media marketing efforts? And, do you know what is going on right now in your marketplace (conversation)?

Whether your business is a PR firm, recruiting firm, nonprofit organization or a simple ice-cream parlor in a small town, there is something you want/need to accomplish with social media marketing. It could be as tangible as increased sales and profits or less tangible like getting responses from customers about how to make improvements or getting success stories and testimonials to increase your credibility profile. Maybe your purpose is simply to increase your product’s brand awareness. Whatever your objective is, that will be what is weighed in order to measure your social media marketing success. Without a clear picture of your objective, the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaign can never truly be measured. We think in terms of baselines to compare with as you grow.

The second.

When you want to measure the ROI on social media marketing efforts, the second option is probably what is most commonly meant when the question is raised. That is (analytics) “tracking”.

With pay per click or sales tracking a business owner has a tangible means of measuring; however, with social media tracking it is much less straightforward and the method depends on the site and approach.

Facebook, for instance, might be measured by the number of confirmed friends; Twitter might be weighed by the quantity of retweets following a tweet; number of followers acquired in a month; a Web Forum might look at the quantity and quality of its threads. The list goes on and will continue to grow as the world of social media continues to grow and evolve. Free tools like Social Mention helps to capture “sentiment” – another metric that can be used.

The bottom line is this: measuring the success of social media marketing is subjective, and each business must identify what objective it wants to accomplish. When that aim is being met, the business can say with confidence that its social media marketing campaign is effective and is a success.

Next, try some tools that can help:

Tweetburner – BudUrl – track how many times people click on a link you share via Twitter

Twitter Search – powerful search in real time, advanced search helps to drill down and inject yourself into the conversation as well

Tweetbeep – Google alerts for Twitter – free

Google Analytics – free – ability to track traffic, content, referrers (where traffic came from) and a lot more

Swix App – Like Google Analytics – for social media properties

Listen to fellow Jim Sterne - do you agree? (Recently from OMMA San Francisco):

After finishing up a frantic day of closing up business prior to the Thanksgiving holiday, I decided to sit down and catch up on the news of the day.

I don’t watch a great deal of television, but I have this habit of news channel scanning. I hop from CNN, to HLN to CNBC to Bloomberg. This habit sometimes raises eyebrows, but it has some great benefits. Aside from keeping me in touch with the world even though I work long hours, It usually provides me with concrete examples of successful and not so successful uses of internet marketing.

As I flip the channel to one of the generic news stations, I find myself in the middle of your typical Thanksgiving shopping feature. You know the one; a rosy cheeked reporter stands in front of a collage of cashiers and people in puffy winter jackets hoisting bags full of goods. I’m guessing at this point that it’s going to be about how the retailers are going to defy the recession and bring in the customers.

I was right. And to my delight it’s about how a particular retailer uses Facebook. Jackpot!

After I’ve gone over the typical details of an SEO engagement with a customer, and we’ve begun to digress into other internet marketing possibilities, I’m usually asked how Social Media could help them to achieve their goals.

They ask me what’s involved and I talk a lot about social bookmarks, YouTube.com, Twitter and definitely Facebook. I propose various scenarios and we ‘him and haw’ a bit and get back to the task at hand; getting their SEO initiative in order. Maybe I should tell them to watch more TV?

Well, I now have a great story to use that’s relevant to the holiday season and researchable to some extent.

Ok, let’s go back to the news story. The retailer being featured came up with an innovative and effective way to leverage Facebook to increase their Black Friday sales. They advertised incentives directly to Facebook.com users. So what, right? Well, there’s more. The campaign included incentives aviable only to the retailer’s Facebook fans.

So you had to join become a fan to get the benefits. Their fans were allowed to visit the store two hours earlier then non-fans on Black Friday and they also received an additional discount on all purchases.

This is a brilliant example of using social media to affect revenue in a timely fashion, grow their customer base and facilitate an ongoing inbound marketing campaign. Enjoy!

It’s official—air travel is for the dogs, and the cats too. Pet Airways, which offers flights across the country for four-legged friends only, recently partnered with the ad network DogTime Media in order to get the word out about their services and promote DogTime Media’s pet adoption at the same time.

Other pet-focused businesses are taking a similar approach. Many pet food manufacturers, including Whiskas and Purina maintain, have maintain, or sponsor interactive social media sites, complete with online games and videos. Purina Animal All Stars, for example, hosted by Yahoo! Invites pet owners to send in videos of their talented, funny, or unusual pets. The company’s main site www.purina.com, also has games, downloads, and coupons available for it’s visitors.

“People who go to sites like these are people who love their pets and people who are spending time thinking about the products that they buy for their pets,” Bob Shaw, CEO of Concentric Marketing, the agency that works with natural cat litter manufacturer Feline Pine to help socially promote its corporate website, told DMNews in a recent interview.

“From a marketing perspective, we’ve understood that there is an opportunity to connect with consumers around their emotions to connect with pets.”

The current economic climate has everyone searching for ways to save money, and coffee giant Starbucks, whose name is synonymous with the four dollar latte, has been facing price competition from other chains, including Dunkin Doughnuts and McDonalds, which recently announced the launch of a social media campaign.

The campaign, which includes a website with shareable videos and an interactive sweepstakes,and a Twitter account, McCafeYourDay, was to promote the McCafe coffee line.

“We’re having a lot of fun online, and there’s a great dedicated area for McCafé on the McDonald’s Web site with some really quirky fun things,” Sofia Therios, director of marketing for McDonald’s USA told DMNews.com.

It is clear that more and more corporations are beginning to realize the value, and the tremendous impact of social media campaigns and strategies.

How can you really tell if the quality of your blog posts are improving over time?  Unfortunately, while Delicious is a great social bookmarking tool, its interface does not make it easy to extract the information necessary to help track the quality of posts over time…

If you’re blogging to:

1. generate affiliate and content network revenues, the answer is obvious.
2. to drive the bottom line ultimately by positioning yourself as an authority in your industry, you’ll need to routinely publish Resource type posts.

Perhaps the single best metric for tracking Resource post quality is the number of Delicious saves. Something saved a few hundred times is obviously more of a resource than something with no saves. Its not perfect since not everyone uses Delicious, but it is a great relative measure, and the single best metric to track progress over time.

So, What is DeliciousCount and why do you really care?
DeliciousCount is a great tool to help…

… Read For More…

Sites like isitdoneyet.gov which provide
consumers with proper meat cooking temperatures and tips are
becoming more prevalent as government officials have begun to
realize just how effective social media marketing tactics can
be.

“When you begin to work with government people on the
client side, you learn just how passionately they care about the
issues, and the limitations that they have.” Brian Herder,
president and executive creative director of Russell Herder, a
Minneapolis based firm specializing in government to public
marketing for state and local government agencies told
DMNews.com.

Some of the biggest obstacles to any government sponsored
commercial marketing campaigns include accountability and ROI,
both of which can be measured more easily when they are
Internet-based. While traditional commercial marketing
campaigns, which are television and ad-based, have been proven
to be effective, the role of the Internet in the lives of the
American public means that online advertising reaches a greater
audience than most traditional types.

Alan Minton, VP at Track Marketing, an Alexandria, VA based firm
specializing in work with federal agencies including the EPA,
the SSA, or Social Security Administration and The Department of
Justice, believes that direct marketing within these campaigns
is the key to their success.

“It’s not enough to say `we put out 20,000 brochures’
anymore,” says Minton. “The OMB (Office of
Management and Budget) requires measurements and agencies are
forced to show real outcomes.”

In addition to isitdoneyet.com, other successful government
sponsored campaigns to emply social media tactics include the
Minnesota Department of Health Teen Education Campaign, and the
Healthy Eating Campaign sponsored by the CDC.

Came across this URL that breaks down the success metrics for a winning title for Digg.com.

It can also reveal the keyword effectiveness, see that here.

Dan Zarrella is a viral marketing scientist, and the title check for digg can be found here.

It will make you think about how to create more compelling titles, and let you see what Dan says should work for you, based on previous entries and keyword use.

If you are really hard-core Digg’ing… you should get the Digg alerter. You can download that tool here. (Windows)

To stay on top of more stories that may hit front page and go into “hypermode” – use http://socialalerter.com/

There is a lot of “buzz” and “conversation” in your industry. Are you aware of what is going on? Are you able to capture this and build upon it?

You may be missing out if you have not joined the crowd of Social Media Monitoring and Alerts.

Google Alerts is probably the most well known, but there are others. In fact, the coverage of sources is probably the biggest problem or challenge with that tool.

A company like Sentiment Metrics has spent several years designing their blog crawl, spam detection and analysis technologies. They have so far built up a database over over 20 million active blogs, for example.

In addition, they crawl all the leading blog search engines, RSS feeds, video and photo sharing sites, news networks and social media networks.

It can also do more extensive spam filtering. Not to mention ranking your mentions (sometimes referred to as “rivers of news”) by importance in terms of authority and sentiment. They can view mentions by just your region, or a certain age group or gender so we make demographic profiling possible.

Another powerful solution is Radian6, a worthwhile player for massive and detailed information about your mentions online. Check them both out!