Awareness Quantified: o Facebook impressions + Facebook posts + Tweets and retweets + Twitter clicks + Youtube views + Blog-page views + Online mentions = Awarness. This is a great little video by Ignite Social Media  on the ROI of social media. While it’s quick in nature, it’s a good, high-level look at how social media effects the bottom line in various aspects of business. Transcript (Courtesy of Ignite Social Media). Transcript: Social Media’s ROI is real and measureable at every stage of the sales funnel. Awareness. Consideration. Preference. Intent. Purchase. MORE >>

Blogs, for example, are a very good way for a company to communicate with its customers and having a Facebook Page can be useful to create an internal online community amongst employees, especially the bigger the organization is. '<img class=”alignleft wp-image-2219″ style=”margin: 10px;” src=”[link] alt=”Steve Nicholls Headshot” width=”150″ height=”150″ /> This is a guest post by Steve Nicholls, author of the best-selling  Social Media in Business. Social media is materialized through its many applications. MORE >>

SR: The book came out of a blog post on curation, which got the most comments of any post, so I went with it. EL: We lead traffic to blogs, we’re a discovery tool, it’s a driver to the original content. Panel session with Francine Hardaway (Moderator), Steve Rossenbaum (Curation Nation), Eric Hippeau (Huffington Post), Ed Lambert (Paper.li). FH: Steve, how do you feel about Content Curation and why? There’s no overwhelming narrowness to curation. FH: Eric, when you moved to HuffPo, what was your experience? The really story was happening in the comments. MORE >>

Visual content – in-person events, webinars, video – seem to be the most successful pieces of content, while informational/written pieces – case studies, eNewsletters, white papers and blogs – are also considered very effective as whole. Some of the more specific statistics are quite interesting as well: The top 5 most popular tactics are article-posting (79% of respondents), social media (74%), blogs (65%), e-newsletters (63%) and case studies (58%). There are several high-level takeaways from the report: Content marketing is still very widely used. MORE >>

We use regular people, volunteers on our blog. Discussion: In 2008, the Obama campaign’s online and social media teams set a new high watermark for digital strategy and execution in politics, while also developing concepts and tools that influenced countless organizations, from non-profits looking to fundraise to companies seeking to better connect with customers. The same architects of the groundbreaking digital effort in 2008 have returned for 2012, but the game has changed. This panel is part of Social Media Week NYC. Panelists: Andrew Rasiej , Founder of Personal Democracy Media. MORE >>