My Director of Client Services, Dan Krueger, just posted about the social media metrics service called SM2 by Techrigy, SM2 – Tracking Conversations in Social Media:

One of the very difficult things to track in the social media realm has been monitoring the online discussions created as a result of digital PR campaigns.

In a typical blogger outreach, we’ve relied on the blogger getting back to us to let us know that they’ve posted in addition to using google blog search to find other posts. We’ve always felt that there are most likely mentions we’ve missed and therefore are underreporting our successes to the client. The same goes for Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc. If a campaign is successful, an outreach will spread virally and one blogger’s post or tweet will be reposted and retweeted by others – which is exactly the type of spread we want to happen and find difficult to track.

I was recently introduced to SM2 by Techrigy. SM2 is a software tool which measures social media conversations. It allows you to build a profile or multiple profiles and then digs up all mentions of that profile as far back as two years. There are many cool features including real time monitoring, sentiment analysis, and customized reporting. I am still learning and playing with what SM2 can do, but it seems to be a very comprehensive tool that can complement the normal reporting and tracking you would use in a campaign. I plan on writing more as I get deeper knowledge of what can be done.

Ellen Ewart has some fantastic advice to the business that is social media-curious but has yet to take the first step towards engagement: listen — If You’re Not Ready to Participate, Listen.

If you’re not already online, check out some blogs before you dive right in. If you’re not using your voice or moderating comments about your brand, chances are that hasn’t stopped other people from doing it. A good way to start is to simply listen and gage what your brand looks like in the online space. Perform a simple Google search to see where you are mentioned.

This is very important to do. It all comes down to measuring thrice, cutting once.  It is also important if you think of yourself as being a brand new gold fish entering a new tank: spend some time acclimatizing.   Here are some questions that Ellen Ewart offers you to ask before you take the first cut:

1. How have others perceived your brand? Is it in line with your corporate identity?
2. Is your logo familiar or trusted?
3. Has anything you’ve done in the recent past been controversial? If so, how have people reacted amongst themselves and has your company responded in any way?
4. Is there consistency in how people interpret your brand?
5. Are there any consistent keywords associated with your brand? Check keywords between sites that mention your brand.
6. Do people believe that you fulfill your brand promise? If not, how far do you fall short?
7. Are there any media outlets that don’t cover your news? If so, identify how to reach that audience.
8. Are your press mentions positioned accurately?
9. Do your employees participate in any conversation about your brand? Do they properly understand your brand’s promise?
10. Perform this type of research on your closes competitors to get a sense of how each fares.

These questions are a gift and you should read the rest of the article and the Bizzia Brandcurve blog as well.

BL and I adore eachother so I was very excited to receive an email from her last night with a link to her latest article on Business Week, Using social media to market your business is a good idea. Just don’t plan on getting your whiz-kid nephew to do it for free — check it out and check BL out over on her blog, What’s Next Blog. Oh, and when BL asks “how many of them have actually created a successful campaign for clients using social media tools? I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find half a dozen with real track records,” I can proudly state that Abraham Harrison LLC has the expertise, the experience, and the track record to boot!  Anyway, here’s the article:

Debunking Six Social Media Myths

For companies, resistance to social media is futile. Millions of people are creating content for the social Web. Your competitors are already there. Your customers have been there for a long time. If your business isn’t putting itself out there, it ought to be.

But before you take the plunge, bear in mind the many myths that surround social media.

1. Social media is cheap, if not free. Yes, many of the tools that can be employed in social media marketing are free to use. These include Google’s (GOOG) video-sharing site YouTube, Yahoo’s (YHOO) photo-sharing site Flickr, the social-network building tool Ning, and content aggregators such as Digg and eBay’s (EBAY) StumbleUpon. Free blogging tools abound too; among them are WordPress, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

However, integrating these tools into a corporate marketing program requires skill, time, and money. The budget for an effective social media marketing campaign begins at $50,000 for two to three months. I’m sure companies have spent less, and I know they’ve spent more.

Building a site that incorporates interactivity, allows user-generated content, and perhaps also includes e-commerce doesn’t come cheap from anyone who knows what they are doing. Even taking free software like WordPress and making it function as an effective interactive site, incorporating e-commerce, creating style sheets that integrate with the company’s branding, takes more than time. That takes skill, experience, and money.

As a rule, a $50,000 to $100,000 budget can cover the creation of a simple multimedia microsite that becomes the center of an online community. Add in some widgets to help distribute the content and form a credible group on Flickr, Twitter, or Facebook and other networking groups to enhance the community aspect of the campaign. Complex functions add to programming and design costs.

A high-yield, highly targeted blog advertising campaign to kick off and support the program will cost an additional $25,000 to $100,000 a month. Advertising through Google’s AdWords, e-mail support, co-registration, and other tools that drive traffic would be additional costs.

2. Anyone can do it. A surfeit of whiz kids and more experienced marketers are claiming to be social media experts and even social media gurus. Search the bios of Robert Scoble’s 56,838 Twitter followers using Tweepsearch (www.tweepsearch.com), an index of the bios of Twitter users, and you’ll find:

• 4,273 Internet marketers
• 1,652 social media marketers
• 513 social media consultants
• 272 social media strategists
• 180 social media experts
• 98 social media gurus
• 58 Internet marketing gurus

How many of them have actually created a successful campaign for clients using social media tools? I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find half a dozen with real track records.

A successful social media campaign integrates social media into the many elements of marketing, including advertising, digital, and PR. Opinion and theory are no match for experience, and the best social media marketers now have more than 10 years of experience incorporating interactivity, blogs, forums, user-generated content, and contests into online marketing.

Video contests by companies hoping for viral buzz and Google juice are as plentiful as mosquitoes on a humid summer night. But, like their insect counterparts, most video contests suck.

It’s the rare video contest that gets as many as 2,000 entries. Many, like Denny’s (DENM) recent disastrous effort, get fewer than 10 entries. Apparently, 48 Denny’s breakfasts over four years wasn’t a big motivator.

3. You can make a big splash in a short time. Sure, sometimes a social media campaign can produce substantial and measurable results quickly.

Social media is great if you’re already a star, but that doesn’t happen overnight. Amid the recent launch of my T-shirt design business, Pawfun.com, I have relied heavily on my 4,000-plus Twitter followers and 120,000 readers of my What’s Next Blog, which I’ve updated as often as five times a day since 2003. Because that network already exists, with not one dollar spent on advertising, we were able to generate more traffic in our first three days than some major companies get after years online.

ZapposChief Executive Tony Hsieh, whose company has millions of customers who are evangelists for the great service that built the brand, quickly became a Twitter star, with more than 32,000 followers. When Dell (DELL), JetBlue Airways (JBLU), the Chicago Bulls, and other love-’em-or-hate-’em brands joined Twitter, they immediately developed huge followings.

Tweets can be used to drive traffic to articles, Web sites, contests, videos, and so on—if people already care about your brand, or if you have a truly original idea that people will want to share with their followers.

One recent example of a Twitter-generated success is Savvy Auntie, a community for aunts, godmothers, and “other women who love kids” that was launched six months ago by Melanie Notkin. She has counted on Twitter to drive traffic, help her find suppliers, products, and even investors. She developed a Twitter following before launching her business, then tapped into it for help when she launched.

4. You can do it all in-house. Wrong! You need strategy, contacts, tools, and experience—a combination not generally found in in-house teams, who often reinvent the wheel or use the wrong tools.

It is rare indeed to find an in-house team that can not only conceive and execute a social media campaign but also drive traffic to it with effective e-mail segmentation, search optimization, blogger outreach, blog advertising, Google ads, and more.

5. If you do something great, people will find it. Quite simply, that never was true. Until you can drive traffic to your social media effort, you’ve got a tree falling in the forest, heard only by those standing nearby. A great number of tools can drive traffic, including StumbleUpon, Digg, and Twitter, but nothing works better than word of mouse—one friend telling another, “Hey look at this!”

6. You can’t measure social media marketing results. You can use a variety of methods, including mentions on blogs and in media; comments on the content; real-time blog advertising results, and click-throughs to your company Web site. You can get very precise statistics from a variety of sites, including Google Trends, Twitter search, Google Analytics, BackType, and Compete.

The tools are there. The gurus who know how to use and interpret them—not so much.

Ochman, president of Whatsnextonline.com, has been creating new media marketing and online brand strategy since 1995 for companies including IBM, Ford, McGraw-Hill, Budget Car Rental, Stacksandstacks.com, and American Greetings. She tracks online marketing trends and campaigns in What’s Next Blog.

Please enjoy my latest AdAge Global Idea Network blog post, Social Media Are Truly Global — Just Ask a Slovakian: Don’t Underestimate the Reach of Twitter, Facebook: (Via Adage)

Social Media Are Truly Global — Just Ask a Slovakian: Don’t Underestimate the Reach of Twitter, Facebook

Recently, I was a speaker at a conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, called Daily Web. Everybody there was super-connected. Everyone was on both Facebook and Twitter. While I was at the conference, I received invites from my fellow attendees get connected on Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn.

During a break, I was told that there are about 60,000 Slovakian users of Facebook, using a mix of the available Czech interface and the English. They were all much newer to Twitter, but the conference did have a Twitter profile and I chose to create the hash tag for the conference, #dailywebsk. I was told Facebook is beginning to bogart the populations of local Slovakian communities and there are plans to localize Facebook into Slovakian the way that it is localized in the Czech Republic and Germany.

This got me to thinking. All of the Brits I have been meeting in Berlin are more keen on getting my “Facebook e-mail,” the e-mail that would allow them to easily find me on Facebook, rather than asking for a business card. Are cards going obsolete? Or, at the very least, are your Twitter and Facebook credentials more important on your site, your business card or your name tag than your e-mail, phone and fax?

All of my German friends are on Facebook as well, sharing images and adopting the social network with as much dedication and abandon as we do in the U.S. Same thing goes with my friends from Mexico and Colombia. When I attend conferences these days, I am likely to be recognized as @chrisabraham as I am by my name.

However, I admit that I live in a rarefied air and so there might be issues of connectivity, class and access that I am not addressing here. That said, I am still amazed whenever I take some time to click on over to Twittervision to watch a global representation of the whole Twittering world.

Because of the nature of Facebook and Twitter, localization works very well. Since both social networks allow you to easily communicate with your friends, and your friends are generally a lot like you. There isn’t a lot of cross-talk between English-, German- and Spanish-speakers.

There are no barriers, of course, between the different locales and the different languages. The barriers are emergent. Since I have quite a few Facebook friends and Twitter followers, 2,707 and 2,374 respectively, I get a lot of cross-talk between languages, and that pleases me. What makes me even happier is when I visit someone’s Wall, sort of like the publicly visible whiteboard that lots of students hang outside their dorm room. I often see a mixture of Spanish, German and English, all mixed up, according to each particular relationship.

The feeling I have, however, is that Twitter and Facebook are not perceived, worldwide, as American imperialism. And I think this is fantastic. Why is that? I think it’s because Facebook and Twitter created relatively neutral platforms and then got out of the way. This is especially the case with Twitter, which is perfectly inert: 140 characters. No context, only essential conversation.

After being a part of the Twitter community for a little while, the whole nature of it falls away and it becomes invisible, a simple communications vehicle, disassociated from its origins: like the phone, texting, TV, electricity, e-mail, the internet! Who cares who invented these things, after all, when each nation, culture and people ultimately make it their own. And this is what is happening with Twitter and Facebook — people are making them their own.

I really don’t use MySpace very much at all. In fact, I embarrass myself every time I look at my MySpace profile. That said, every band in Berlin has a MySpace profile, just like every other band in the entire world. Globally, you’re likely to see a MySpace address if the band you’re digging on has an internet presence. Even if your favorite global brand has its own website, there’s a good chance that they also have a MySpace address. A couple weeks ago, I checked out three bands here in Berlin and they all has MySpace URLs: Orchestre Miniature in the Park and Tim and Puma Mimi.

None of these bands think about the gross imperialism associated with their decisions; they have adopted all of this American innovation with complete ease. Back in the day, Friendster had a terribly time sorting out its business model internationally. Its success in Asia bogged down its servers while confounding its salespeople on how to make any money from all these community members who were dedicated participants but not generating any local revenue. It was probably because the worldwide ad networks and the global sales of ads were not there yet, focused mostly on the U.S. market. Now times have changed. Here I am in Berlin being served not simply German ads but also geo-targeted ads based on exactly where my data is being served.

I have taken all of this in due course and just considered it normal; however, I realized tonight that it isn’t normal. It occurred to me that folks might not know how thoroughly adopted these Web 2.0 platforms are worldwide. How many people around the world refresh Facebook and Twitter many times an hour at their workplace, the same way everyone does it, even among an ever-growing population in the Slovak Republic.