What is my Social Media Metrics?

So what the best way to find out the success of your Social Media Marketing Plan or Social Media Optimization Plan - whatever you may want to call it?

Is it the referral traffic you are getting? Is the volume of audience you can target for your marketing message? Is it the no. of registered users on your community site? Is it the time your community is spending on your site? Is the cost of developing/hosting your community site Vs the no. of customers you are acquiring from it? OR Is it a mix of all.

I believe, Social Media Marketing is an entirely new concept and implementing the traditional Marketing Metrics would not be fair. The best way to measure your success is to find out the engagement of your customers with your product/services. Tracking links, sign-ups, downloads, RSS, search engine traffic, online mentions, discussions on your community site would be a good idea to gauge how successful you are. There are no. of tools and techniques, like Google Alerts to high end social media monitoring services, that can be used to track all these. Nos. are one part and the content is another as in social media, your customers are talking not only to you but amongst each other as well. Its important to notice what is being said; who is talking to whom?

The real measure ofcourse would be to know whether your end business objective has been met or not but all these factors would help you to determine how much your social media efforts have contributed to meet your end business objectives.

Loadz of new features to be added to Yahoo! Groups

Yahoo! Groups are constantly improving. Some of the latest releases for the product has been:

• More advanced search and browsing system which makes search updates much faster, and improves the sort order when you browse for groups. For more updates visit Yahoo! Groups Blog.
• Group Labs has launched its first feature or grouplet called "People Map". Groups Labs is nothing but a team of people who have been working on a new way to create features within Groups, features that can be customized by moderators to fit the specific needs of their groups. People Map is a simple application to find out where your group members belong to? For more information visit Yahoo! Groups Blog
• A new technology platform for the site (not quite fully released). We are changing every page of the site but doing so in a way that won't disrupt your existing experience. This new platform will allow us to release features much faster than ever before.

But the exciting news is what is to come in the future. Here is a short list of the features we plan to unveil to you in the coming year:

• New ways for people to share information with each other within your groups: Product Reviews, Services Directory, Wanted Boards, Address Book, Event Planner, and many more.
• Message Boards 2.0: Improving the Message experience within groups in many different ways (e.g. giving members the opportunity to choose which discussions they want to subscribe to, making it easier for moderators to highlight the best content, etc.).
• Ability to charge an optional subscription fee for membership to your groups (we have no plans to get in the middle of the transaction, just make it easy for you to make sure members are paying).
• Photo Album 2.0: An entirely new photo system with massive group storage and stunningly large photos.
• The return of archived attachments: We will process attachments and store them on your group, if you choose this option.
• For our non-English speakers, the ability to select the language you want to view the site in and better handling of all types of character sets.

To read more please visit the Groups blog

Some updates from Yahoo!

Here are couple of updates from Yahoo!

a) You have a simpler URL to remember going forward. yahoo.co.in has become yahoo.in . All the email addresses already @ yahoo.co.in will function as usual without any glitches but all the new email addresses will be registered on yahoo.in. So get your yahoo.in email address now.

b) Second good news is that the Group Labs has launched its first feature or grouplet called "People Map". Groups Labs is nothing but a team of people who have been working on a new way to create features within Groups, features that can be customized by moderators to fit the specific needs of their groups. People Map is a simple application to find out where your group members belong to? For more information visit Yahoo! Groups Blog (http://www.ygroupsb log.com/blog/ 2008/07/08/ try-out-the- new-people- map-beta/) and don't forget to give your feedback.

c) Its time to tickle your funny bone and you must not miss watching the new viral from Yahoo! for its two new domains ymail.com and rocketmail.com. Watch the viral at http://kaunhoonmain.com/

Facebook - More than a Social Networking site

And you thought all we can do from Facebook is to find out old classmates and colleagues. We can do much more than that - its a place to market - be it yourself, your product, your events anything. Facebook is readymade audience - how you tap this audience depends on you. It’s a place to network - personal and professional.

I wanted to write some tips about how to explore it; but realized there is so much written already and there is hardly anything new that I can add so simply giving you some of the links that I found very useful. Hope you will also find them useful:

a) Making Facebook useful - Conglomeration of Facebook best practices on Read Write Web blog written by Richard MacManus

b) A collection of all the useful links about learning Marketing by Facebook from Ronpass. You have flickr photos, youtube videos, related links saved on delicious, ezine articles and much more. Must check out!

c) Top 10 Ways to Use Facebook to Promote your Business for Free from Shama Hyder in her After the Launch blog

d) 12 ways to use Facebook professionally by Judi Sohn on Web Worker Daily blog

e) The Facebook Marketing Toolbox – 100 Tools and Tips to tap the Facebook Customer Base A very useful page to bookmark for marketers who want to add Social Media in their Marketing strategy from Inside CRM

LinkedIn in Plain English

Two of my favorites came together (My favorite networking site Linkedin is being explained by Common Craft - I love their videos) and it was impossible not to blog about it.

Common Craft has a wonderful way of explaining everything in the simplest way and it’s a sheer pleasure to watch their videos.

Linkedin has recently reached the mark of 1 million users in India; still my network has least no. of people from India :(. Check out the Bollywood style party @ Linkedin office to celebrate their achievement.