This is a draft of chapter 10 of Social Marketing to the Business Customer by Paul Gillin and Eric Schwartzman. This chapter focuses on how to calculate ROI of social media and Internet marketing programs in general. I’m particularly interested in your feedback on this chapter because it presents some new ideas I’ve been playing with about how to calculate the ROI of almost anything. My biggest concern is that these ideas are overly simplistic. They do assume that a company has a rich set of historical data to work with, which is often not the case. They include Indium Corp., 1900%. MORE >>

The demand to build online communities has been accelerated by the fashion of social media. Consequently the roots and best practices of moderation are often overlooked due to the pressures to perform. However, online community building requires skill -a cultivated skill - in order to create a productive and safe environment for information exchange. We believe that the act of building communities for business is a strategic initiative that can fuel the lifeblood of an organization. Maybe there is a new hot issue brewing within an industry. MORE >>

A major frustration for people trying out Twitter for the first time is figuring out how to get anyone to respond. They set up their Twitter account, tweet a few times and wonder why no one responds. While tweets are public unless you protect them, they probably won’t be seen by anyone unless they’re following you, they do a search for something you mention or you’re on a list. While it’s ok to post your blog posts to Twitter, etc., people are only going to listen if you provide valuable content. Then, it’s ok to throw in a promo or your own stuff occasionally. MORE >>

We often discuss in this blog how B2B marketing is becoming more complex, and how to manage this complexity. Marketing is getting involved in many more areas that touch the customer along the buying process, multiplied by a dizzying variety of new tactics, online communications and engagement platforms. have always liked frameworks to make sense of this complexity, and add some structure to identify focus areas and value drivers, dependencies and hierarchies - all to make complexity a bit easier to manage. But that's content for another blog post. Let me know your thoughts about this framework. MORE >>

Social media marketing is a broad term that covers many underlying forms of marketing and measuring it requires a cross-channel, integrated and customer-centric process. However, one can also look at social media measurement from a vertical perspective, while not forgetting the main overall goals and integrations. Social media marketing metrics explained. Social media marketing Web analytics David Berkowitz Jim Sterne key performance indicators social media marketing social media metrics web analytics MORE >>