Business.com recently published its 2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study.  One of the aspects that the study covered was the adoption of social media marketing by both B2B and B2B companies (apologizing in advance for the legibility of the graph captures, they are that way in the report). 

Very surprising to see much deeper penetration of social media by the
business types than the consumer driven companies.  But the former had more use in 11 of the 14 categories covered.  B2B companies are much more active than B2C companies.  They have significantly higher usage of social media sites, micro-blogging, blogging, and off property monitoring and participation.  And based on some reports the B2B crowd is rapidly increasing its spend.

The other big surprise from the study was how well companies measured the success of their social media programs.

 
A previous study back in August by Mzinga and Babson showed that 84% of companies did not measure the ROI of their social media efforts.  The Business.com study shows 60% of the B2B and 52% of B2C companies measuring results all the way to revenue.  Seems like either there are some big differences in the samples of the August Mzinga study and the November Business.com study or marketers are rapidly learning they need to measure the impact of their social media programs.  

You can download your own copy of the report.

There is this big debate about if you should or should not try and determine ROI on social media efforts.  I am clearly in the former camp.

Evan LaPointe, whom I had the pleasure to interact with a bit recently is not really a social media guy.  He is a web analytics guy.  Dare I say an expert.  He was a nice article on Search Engine Land pondering the question if Web analytics is easy or difficult to do. The answer is both.

Money quote:

"But the most important—and hardest—thing to do is tie it all back to the two very simple metrics that drive all business value: revenue and profitability."

Yep. And I think that is why some people don't want to measure social media ROI.  It's hard. 

It's also important.  To quote someone a bit more famous than Evan, "what's measured gets managed."  If you want to improve how social media drives business value you have to measure it's impact on revenue and profitability. 

Christina Warren has an excellent article over on Mashable entitled "HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI."  It's a great roundup of the tools available today and chock full of content.  Including Oliver Blanchard's Social Media ROI presentation.

It's simply astounding how many social media marketing practitioners take the stance that you can not measure the ROI of social media.  It's even more astounding that 84% of social media programs are not measured.  I honestly do not think that I have ever undertaken a marketing program that did not have ROI metrics attached.  Never, ever.  It's appalling.

Why are so many social media consultants/companies/experts so averse to measuring the impact that social media has on business results?  Perhaps they don't know how.  Perhaps they don't like the results.  I really don't know.  A notable exception is Chris Brogan.  He says something to the effect of "sure I measure ROI, that's why they give me money."  Good for him.

The position of most social media types reminds of the time when I did an agency review and the astonishment displayed upon learning that customer revenue generated was the end game measurement of any marketing effort.  The agency folks were aghast.  Measure sales.  As a results of marketing efforts.  Good god man what is wrong with you!

Folks if it is marketing, and that's the general classification of many social media programs, you can measure it.  Measure it all the way to ROI.

A had a wonderful conversation with Shannon Russo yesterday of Kinetix.  Kinetix is a talent acquisition and management company.  As we met at New Media Atlanta much our conversation was about social media used in the world of staffing.

Shannon has some deep knowledge about the industry and particularly the use of LinkedIn.  I do not use LinkedIn often.  Mostly responding to requests that hit my in box.  One of the tidbits Shannon told me is that recommendations matter on LinkedIn.  My reply was a perplexed "really?"

I had never given it much thought.  Asking people for recommendations seemed a little cheesy to me (I think I may have one from a person that called me out on a social network for having none so I asked to him to recommend me).

What do you think?  Do recommendations matter on LinkedIn? 

If your answer is yes I could use some love.

Went to the Lift Summit today and saw Erik Qualman give a great presentation on socialnomics. He kicked it off with this kickin video.

Back in the day we used to joke around that the answer to hitting our quarterly numbers was porn. According to the vid social media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the Web. Perhaps the answer to hitting your numbers going forward is social media.

In addition to creating killer videos Erik is the author of Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business.

An update by Marta Kagen of her popular social media marketing slideshare presentation previously posted on FoG.

Over in my Skribit widget "startup marketing" seems to be a quite popular subject.  I have written several posts on the subject.  Below is a roundup.

Creep Don't Leap. Your startup marketing effort should be scaled slowly.

The Best PR.  Make sure your employees are happy and empower them to do the right thing for the customer.

Marketing Is Not A Department.  To do successful startup marketing every employee needs to make
decisions from the beginning with the potential customer in mind.

Positioning.  A quite powerful marketing concept that every startup should proactively manage.

Markets Are Conversations.  Listen. Talk.

Your Brand Promise.  Just a fancy way of saying what unique value that you
are delivering to the market.

Brand Identity.  The unique set of associations that you aspire
to create for your startup.

Yes Master (The Only Brand Strategy For Startups).  Early stage technology companies should only implement a master brand strategy. 

I am spending the week on spring break with my family being analog.  FoG is being populated for the most part by a series of guest posts.  The first is from Ron Huey of Huey Partners, a full-service advertising agency.

Entrepreneurs are inventors by nature.  They, most often, have a clear, concise vision of the product or service they want to create.  Where that vision can become a bit fuzzy is in defining the overall brand their product or service must live under.

Your brand is a living, breathing entity with its own personality and style. That brand persona is the critical entry point to your product or service.  In fact, potential customers will form ideas and perceptions about your brand before they ever experience your product.  I like to use the analogy of meeting someone at a cocktail party.  Is your brand someone people are attracted to?  Do they enjoy conversing with you?  Do they walk away feeling that you’re smart, engaging, considerate and empathetic?  Do they become an advocate, or better yet, an evangelist for your brand? 

Conversely, we’ve all met the guy at the cocktail party who, while smart, can’t seem to talk about anyone but himself and his accomplishments.  And while he may have very valuable information to impart, we’re not really in the mood to listen and walk away seeing him as an off-putting, self-centered, know-it-all.  No sale there.

My firm was fortunate to work with MindSpring when they were moving from a regional ISP to a national provider.  At the time, their advertising consisted of a cartoonish drawing of a man whose spring-loaded head was popping off his shoulders.  It was an arresting visual, but the wackiness and crude, haphazard approach of the ad seemed to undermine the credibility and trust MindSpring hoped to instill.

We needed to create a brand persona for MindSpring that captured their quirky, non-corporate culture, but also positioned them as credible, reliable and sympathetic to the plight and needs of the internet user. The brand needed to come off as a friend who was there to help.

Another key to creating a successful brand image for MindSpring was the concept of simplicity. Simplicity can’t be stressed enough and its value has been covered in this blog in relation to the brand identity and brand promise.  We used MindSpring’s iconic blue and yellow colors, but kept our thoughts and graphics incredibly simple.

Regardless of how amazing your product or service may be, remember that your brand image is the crucial entry point. If prospects are intrigued and attracted to your brand, you have a  much greater chance of inducing trial and ultimately selling them on your product or service. 

Somehow or the other I came to be known as a quasi-expert on personal branding.  And with the unemployment rate topping 8% the pace of people coming to me and asking about personal branding has taken quite a spike in the past month of so.  Surprisingly, all of the people that are doing so are currently gainfully employed (those that are not just want job leads, which is a bad strategy).

Also surprising is that they are really coming to ask me about online identity management, which is just one facet of a holistic personal branding effort.  While I may save the broader personal branding discussion for a real expert or a later day, personal branding is essentially the way an individual communicates their unique promise in value in the same manner a company would.  Online identity management focuses on creating a positive and distinguished Web presence of a person on the Internet.

Here are ten steps I recommend to manage your online identity.

1.  Conduct An Vanity Search Audit

Have one of your friends do a vanity
search audit (Google, LIve & Yahoo!).  I recently had a meeting with a young lady to discuss
managing her online brand.  She was a little surprised I googled her
before our meeting.  Even more surprised that I found one of her niche
social networking profiles with a reference to drinking and partying.

2. Clean Up Your Debris

If the audit uncovers anything unseemly, pick it up and discard it. 

3.  Control Your Social Network Audiences

Control is not a bad thing.  Close down your more social social network profiles to your real friends.  You don't want people that are searching for you as part of a background check to see comments from your college roommate on Facebook or MySpace.  Maybe that is just me.  Then again, maybe not.

4.  Be You

Cleaning up your debris and making sure some potential hiring company or business partner does not have full access to all your social networks does not mean losing your personality and becoming some sterile drone (discretion is a good quality).  Be nice, be helpful, demonstrate a little expertise, and above all be yourself.  It is the only way that you can be consistent enough to create a brand of you.

5.  Create Home Base

A place where you put all the stuff that you want people to find out about you. It can just be a collection of links to other places to find you on the Web, an online portfolio, a blog, or all of the above.  You can do this on the cheap with tools such as blogger.com but you don't want a cheap personal brand and…

6.  Home is Really Google

Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst at Forrester Research believes that a company's home page is really google.com. So is your personal home page.  Professionals are googling you. Before they meet you. Before they interview you.  As an example the number one keyword phrase driving traffic to FoG is "Lance Weatherby".  It has the second keyword phrase beat by 100%

In his article Jeremiah points to some research that indicates the top three search results are clicked on 75% of the time.  You want to own those SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) and if at all possible you want to dominate the entire default preference of 10 results.  How can you do that?

7.  Register a Personal Domain

I can not think of a single person that I know that has a personal domain that does not have the number one SERP on a vanity search.  Fifty six percent of the people that search for you are going to click on that number one link.  Own it and control you online identity destiny.

8.  Customize Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn is purely professional and can be effectively managed as a pillar of your online identity.  Personalize your LinkedIn public profile to the form http://www.linkedin.com/in/lanceweatherby.  It will return better search results.  Instructions for doing so as well as other methods to promote your public profile are here.  To expose your profile to anyone using LinkedIn go to the Edit Public Profile Settings and select Full View.  Make your profile as complete as your resume.

9.  Scribd It

Great place to post your bio, resume and other portfolio materials.  Make sure the files you upload are saved with your full name in the file name.  I put my resume up in January.  It is currently the fifth SERP on my name.

10.  Use Niche Social Media

You can use niche sites to fill out your top SERPS.  ClaimID (which I really like a lot), Naymz, and Rapleaf are all online identity management services that could be utilized.  If you are really active and social online a number of niche sites could fill this void.  Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, you name it.  Just be aware if it is searchable people will search and find it.

And everything else.  To create a positive online identity that highlights your achievements and skills you must actively manage your Web presence.  Hopefully these steps will get you moving down that road.

On Friday Patrick Clements tweeted out that I had linked to a presentation about personal marketing.  He could not find it.  Either could I.  Made a comment to me that it was something edgy.  The only thing I could think of was Marta Kagan's social media marketing deck.

But my Startups in 12 Quotes deck attracted a follower that had faved "how we all become ELVIS, a note on personal brands."