I am so honored and humbled that I have been included in this most prestigious top-25 amongst the most incredible PR bloggers.  Thank you PR Web for including me! Congrats to my fellow PR bloggers for all your hard work in 2011 and good luck in 2012! Check out PRWeb‘s Public Relations Blogs – 25 Essential PR Bloggers You Should Be Reading!

Keeping up with what’s new and interesting in public relations news is important – vital strategies, tips and trends are shared each day that can impact your business.  Whether you’re looking for best practices on press release distribution or simply how to take advantage of social media, these blogs will prove invaluable. To keep up with the hottest and highest quality content, below are 25 essential public relations blogs you should be reading:

PR Squared

PR Squared is a blog by Todd Defren, a principal at SHIFT Communications, which focuses on conversations about social media and marketing.

Brian Solis

Brian Solis, Principal of FutureWorks, gives insights into the convergence of PR, Traditional Media and Social Media at his popular blog.

Peter Shankman

Peter Shankman’s blog looks at thinking about Social Media, PR, marketing, advertising, creativity, and customer service.

Dave Fleet

DaveFleet.com is about communications, public relations, marketing and social media, and the areas where those topics intersect.

Danny Brown

This blog by Danny Brown, co-founder of the SRM group, focuses on the use of social media, PR and marketing,

Conversation Communications

This blog by Arik Hansen, principal of ACH Communications, covers all things related to digital PR strategy and community building.

Social Media Explorer

A blog by Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer, covers public relations, social media, search marketing and many topics in between.

Chris Abraham

Chris Abraham, President and COO of Abraham Harrison LLC, writes this blog on developing news and updates in the world of public relations and social media.

PR in Your Pajamas

A blog about integrating using public relations and business coaching for results, Elena Verlee, tells how integrating these areas will lead to success for your business.

O‘Dwyer’s PR Blog

O’Dwyer’s blog covers PR, public affairs, marketing and the world of communications.

Online Marketing Blog

The Online Marketing blog maintained by the team at TopRank Online Marketing provides helpful information on areas such as SEO, social media marketing, business blogging and online PR.

Influential Marketing Blog

Rohit Bhargava maintains the Influential Markeitng Blog, a site that focuses on information and resources on creating compelling marketing, advertising and public relations strategies.

AimClear Blog

The aimClear blog is a resource for search engine marketing for advertising agency, in-house and public relations professionals.

A Take on Tech PR

A blog by Drew Benvie, managing director of 33 Digitial, that gives insights and information on tech public relations and how it can help you.

Media Culpa

Media Culpa is a blog about media and public relations – with a focus on social media – written by Swedish PR practitioner Hans Kullin.

Buzz Bin

The Buzz Bin provides a point of view on integrated communications, including PR, social media, interactive and general marketing topics.

Spin Sucks

Spin Sucks is the agency blog of Arment Dietrich and covers social media, online PR and all things in between.

PR Couture

PR Couture explores the ever-evolving role of public relations, marketing and social media in the fashion industry.

PRSA ComPRehension

PRSA ComPRehension is a blog on PR best practices from Public Relations Society of America members.

Beyond the Hype

Beyond the Hype conveys the opinions, insights and experiences in public relations and advertising from senior communications counselors at Lois Paul & Partners.

Adam Sherk

Adam Sherk is a Search and PR strategist, helping news and content sites with enterprise SEO and audience development, including social media marketing and other forms of online public relations.

Measurement Matters

Measurement Matters gives insights and information on the areas of public relations, social media and how media analysis and evaluation relates to them.

College Web Editor

College Web Editor is a helpful resource with information about the Web, marketing, and PR in higher education.

Deirdre Breakenridge

Deirdre discusses social networking, blogging, microblogging, podcasting, streaming video, RSS technology and how communications is changing the way that businesses need to think.

Journalistics

Journalistics is a blog dedicated to covering all topics at the intersection of public relations and journalism today.

Related articles

• Using Social Media for Public Relations [Lawrence Perry] (ecademy.com)
• Public Relations Resolutions for 2012 (prnewswire.com)
• PR/Social Media Predictions: Who Got it Right? (forbes.com)
• Journalists and Social Media Usage (sixestate.com)
• The best of Beyond PR in 2011 (prnewswire.com)
• PR/Social Predictions: Who Got it Right? (theflack.blogspot.com)
• Public Relations in southern Philippines this 2012 (d) (prworks.wordpress.com)
• Trends in Public Relations for 2012 (prnewswire.com)
• Social Media Statistics of the Day [infographic] (michaelhartzell.com)
• Social Media Marketing’s Purchasing Influence Greater in Emerging Markets (marketingpilgrim.com)
• The rise of social media? Depends where you live. (thebluedoor.com)
• Building Your Social Media Team (ereleases.com)
• Capgemini’s 10 Game-changing technology shifts for 2012 (serve4impact.com)
• Want to Be a Good Social Media Marketer? Don’t Do This. (community.constantcontact.com)
• Social Media Marketing: How To Work Smarter In 2012 (channelship.ie)
• Social media is a competitive advantage for drug companies (worldofdtcmarketing.com)
• Hubspot: 18 Insightful 2012 Marketing Predictions From the Experts (shanecrombie.com)

Thank you very much to Market Wire, Sysomos, CommPRO.biz, and SmartWomanGuides.com for including me in their Top 10 Picks for the Leading Social Media Influencers of 2011 list:

• Top 10 Picks for the Leading Social Media Influencers of 2011 (slideshare.net)
• Understand the ROI of Social Media (dcincome.com)
• Who Are The Top 10 Women Social Media Influencers? (forbes.com)
• Social media is ruining our minds and we have the proof [Infographic] (inquisitr.com)
• 19 Huge Social Media Moments of 2011 (mashable.com)
• 21 Captivating Social Media Stats: How People Interact With Brands [INFOGRAPHIC] (hubspot.com)
• Heatmaps Reveal Where People Look on Social Media Sites [Research] (hubspot.com)
• Social media analytics tools – tested and rated (usefulsocialmedia.com)
• 5 healthcare social media tips that break the mold for pharma, med tech (medcitynews.com)
• What is the ROI on Social Media? You’re asking the wrong question! [Sam Borrett] (ecademy.com)

When it comes to your direct mail campaigns, you’ve probably over-farmed your land.

You’ve been emailing and snail mailing the same donors you have done for a decade. It is time to leave the land fallow and let the lists rest. You have probably responded to lower donations and attention by relinquishing too much power to your direct marketing firm and they have been much more aggressive than you’re comfortable with, sending out many more snail mail and email donation requests than ever before. You used to blame the economy for decreased giving but you’re starting to believe it has more to do with the fertility of the donor list than it does with the economic collapse of 2008–or a lot less than you’ve been led to believe. You realize that the nonprofit space is ever more competitive, but your brand is strong and respected and comes up well in Charity Navigator, so what gives?

Well, in agriculture, it is possible to over-farm your land. Indeed, it is probable, in a couple ways:

Ultimately, you need to do one or more of a couple things: allow the land to rest, either ceasing farming completely or throttling down substantially, though this is impossible if you’re tending only one plot of land; enrich the land you already have with better aeration, nutrition, and pesticides with the expectation that you will be able to increase your yield; rotate your crops within the land you already have with crops that tend to enrich the soil that has been depleted by your main crop, naturally returning your field to a cycle of fertility; or you can expand your fields, distributing your yield over a larger plot of land, reaching into a greater diversity of quality of land, essentially hedging your bets over land of varying quality, durability, fertility, and health, resulting in a more consistent crop that is less dependent on any particular geographic focal point.

What this means to fundraising messaging is that you can no longer beat the same drums and rally the same troops. Not only is the economy in the sort of slump that is putting 100-year-old charities into seizure but there is less barrier to starting a charity or foundation, there is less trust that a charity will deliver the goods to the issues they purport to support, and then there is the Internet, allowing anyone to initiate a financial call-to-action on their own, completely by-passing traditional charities. So, while there used to be a very strong field from which to harvest donations, each crop results in a much lower yield. Deafness to your message because of over-mailing is only one symptom of this “over-farming.” The deafness is caused by direct mail firms stepping up the seven touches to 11, hitting the same lists again and again, going back further historically, and also buying cold lists from other organizations for cold hard cash, all in an attempt to make quarterly forecasts and budgets. This has proven a dangerous game because these are all very short games and the outcome has been devastating: people are deleting your emails and throwing away–hopefully recycling–your physical mailings.

Ceasing farming completely or throttling down substantially: This is almost always impossible unless you’re sitting on a huge pile of foundation or grant cash. We at Abraham Harrison use email lists all the time and we never reach out more than three times to one recipient over the course of one campaign (one harvest) and then retire it until the next harvest. We sometimes go one step further by retiring some recipients if there haven’t been any recent conversions. Sometimes we allow that list to rest completely, not using it in any other campaigns, either, because the list had been completely over-used. This most often happens with tech blogs and parenting blogs (mommy bloggers, daddy bloggers, etc). Letting lists rest is not optional, it is essential. The only question is to whether you have more than one field in play or can increase the health and yield of your plot through some methods I will discuss below.

Enrich the land you already have with better aeration, nutrition, and pesticides: As an aside, I am trying to get back into shape. This doesn’t only require exercising and diet, it also requires cross-training. Your muscles quickly become accustomed to the same workout routine, the theory being that you need to constantly “surprise” your muscle groups with different challenges–to mix it up. It’s the same thing with messaging as well as farming. How has the state of the art progressed? Are there new pesticides or pest-resistant strains of crops you can use? Or fertilizers? Or farming methods?

Have you been feeding the earth as well as the crops? Well, at Abraham Harrison, we’re working towards the best relationship advice ever: give the gift your recipient wants rather than giving the gift you want to give. It can be tricky. What do the members want that you have not given them? It is a challenge to praise your donors for their generosity, their support, and their sacrifice–effusively–when you feel like they’re being selfish cheap bastards. Is that true? Are you offering tote bags when nobody wants totes anymore? Could you reward your donors in a more public way?

The Internet allows much smaller donors to be actively appreciated for their micro-donations. My favorite podcast, No Agenda, while not a charity, spends well over half-an-hour of its 150-minutes lavishing praise on the people who donate cash-money to support their Thursday and Sunday live show. If you donate more than $33, have a birthday, or do something that Adam Curry and John C Dvorak consider to be PR, you get a shout-out.

If you pay in a few hundred dollars on a single show, you become an official producer, and if you accrue $1,000 in donations over-time, you receive an 0n-air “Knighting.” And their zealous listeners, myself included, eat it up. While this isn’t possible for many charities (why not?), I experience push-back again and again from my past charity clients who are uncomfortable with thanking bloggers who have promoted their cause or furthered their message because “we don’t do these sorts of endorsements.”

The biggest enemy of hallowed and honored charities and foundations is their resistance to innovation and reinvention and their addiction to tradition. Why can’t you shake up your routine? Why can’t you do things a different way? Why can’t you lavish praise on the smallest of donors?

The Internet allows all of these things to be easily and readily tested. Go ahead and play? Go ahead and borrow, copy, and steal things that have worked for other organizations, and don’t be afraid to invest more in your lists than you expect to extract, allowing some good will and equity to be left over after harvest for the next.

Rotate your crops within the land you already have with crops that tend to enrich the soil: I touched on this above a little bit: give more than you get and switch it up. That said, there is more. It is important to not harp on the same thing in your messaging all the time. How hard are you plucking people’s heart strings, and are you plucking the same string over and over? Fear, guilt, and shame are very powerful motivators but they’re also such strong elixirs that they can kill their emotional receptors, pitching the recipient into hopelessness and retreat, “why do I even write these checks anymore? There’s no hope anyway and I am throwing good money after bad, what’s the use?” That is surely two steps too far, to the point where the earth seems salted, a wasteland! That’s a bad place to be and generally unrecoverable, as far as that donor goes.

We have been helping the Fresh Air Fund for years and we were under retainer to amplify their yearly requirements and goals. What we did for them, with regards to crop-rotation, was to break the year into seasonal requests: Winter donations request, Spring search for host families and camp counselors, Summer camp stories and experience-sharing, and Fall thank you campaigns. While only one of those seasons focused primarily on donations, since the Winter Holidays are traditionally the biggest gift-giving season, the other three were hybrid messages. The three other seasons lead with stories of urban children getting into the fresh air, into renewing and enriching Summer camp and host family experiences outside the city, lead with needs of hosts and counselors, and generous thank-yous to everyone involved. These lead messages are also followed closely with opportunity to give, to follow, to Like, and to connect.

While we did also have extensive field-expansion strategies going concurrently, as I will discuss below, the crop rotation messaging strategy allowed the Fresh Air Fund to convey much more than just a glimmer of hope, they were able to show, in black and white, the copious success of the program, the long-term relationships that were formed, the real-time joy and happiness that was the direct result of donations of time and talent. They supported the seasonal messaging with direct mail outreaches as well as daily updates shared via Social Media to their followers and friends on Facebook and Twitter.

So, in this case, crop-rotation includes rotating the message, rotating the recipient pool, as well as rotating the medium, from blogger outreach to direct email to direct snail mail, to Facebook and Twitter. In our case, we garnered over 1,800 earned-media-mentioned annually in support of their other efforts.

Expand your fields, distributing your yield over a larger plot of land: My uncle Jack used to own Oscar fish. These fish are omnivorous and are often fed small mice. They are also known to grow as large as their tank allows, though they will not outgrow their tank. That reminds me of many fundraising campaigns and the mindset of many charities and foundations. While they continue to do their best farming the lists and relationships they have, they’re often limited by what their lists are capable of producing in any particular economy or any particular news cycle, oftentimes ceding donations to the issue of the week.

In the case of the Fresh Air Fund, they were limited by a perceived relevance only to the Tri-State Area of the New York metropolitan area, the historical and logical region around Manhattan that traditionally supported the Fresh Air Fund with funds, families, camp counselors, and children. They also relied exclusively on the New York Times as a platform for development, a platform that is becoming less and less viable in the information age.

We decided that the mission, message and ministry of the Fresh Air Fund transcends New York and is compelling to not just the region but also the Nation and the world, and we were right. We started prospecting bloggers globally who were in the same vertical that the Fresh Air Fund historically had success with locally and that wrote in English. Compassion for children surely transcends the Hudson River, right? Why yes! We were able to drive conversation on behalf of the Fund internationally, rewarded again and again when bloggers would amplify their noble message, a message that has been a continued resource for inner-city youth since 1877.

Talk about expanding your field! If you can sing Olly Olly Oxen Free loudly enough to light up bloggers and blogs globally while also lighting up their associated Facebook and Twitter streams and reaching not only their readership, their followers, their friends, and their friends’ friends, you’re definitely taking a very bold and effective first step at bringing the powerful mission of your nonprofit, your foundation, you NGO, or your charity into entirely new and fresh land, raw and uncultivated but also not tough and over-farmed, either. You might have to start at zero with your seven+ touches toward giving, but you’re also not having to deal with insensitivity and deafness to message, either.

And that is to say nothing about the powerful effect that all that global conversation will do for your ranking on Google, Bing, and Yahoo! search, as well as search.twitter.com and on Facebook as well, where 800 million global denizens spend their working hours. The search benefits–the organic SEO–is beyond comprehension when it comes to the sort of due diligence that modern contributors go through before writing those checks any more. Oh, come on, you know it’s true–and why Charity Navigator scares you as much as Yelp! scares stores and restaurants to death.

None of this was even remotely possible before the efficiencies of the Internet. When dealing with Internet communications, you need to understand that this is a revolution and not an evolution. That it is now possible to easily, cheaply, and efficiently access a global market or a hyper-targeted market, reaching them right where they live and not in the hopes that they’ll open the Times on a particular date.

There are hundreds of millions of potential donors who have both never heard of you before or been emotionally abused by your incessant requests for money before. This is fresh meat!

And, while you’re cultivating these new recruits, you’ll be able to lean heavily on your oldest and main lists, allowing them some time to miss you, to rest, and to heal. To paraphrase Dan Hicks, how can they miss you when you don’t go away?

Via Biznology and Socialmedia.biz via Marketing Conversation

Related articles

• You’ve probably over-farmed your donors (biznology.com)
• How to Double Global Food Production by 2050 and Reduce Environmental Damage (obxcommonground.org)
• Integrated Aquaculture (timbuktuchronicles.blogspot.com)
• 400,000 Farmers in Southern Africa Using ‘Fertilizer Trees’ to Dramatically Improve Food Security (scienceblog.com)
• Fertiliser tree systems can double agriculture yield in two thirds of cases in East Africa (nextbigfuture.com)
• Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) (pensci.wordpress.com)
• Trees ‘boost African crop yields’ (bbc.co.uk)

God bless Joe Hall of Marketing Pilgrim for addressing the conversation we’re having all the time with both our clients and our prospects: bottom line ROI on social media engagement and the natural client desire for contextual ad equivalency when it comes to investing in social media. The following is excerpted from Cup of Joe: Social Media ROI? Think Again Genius! — wherein Mr. Hall comes down on the side of “you can’t put a number on making friends and influencing people.  Let me know what you think:

You can’t measure relationships. You can’t put on paper the depth and complexity of the human experience with a brand. Sure you can track web traffic, click through rates, and even your follower/following ratio. But none of that explains real influence.

So then why do CEOs, CMOs, and even brand managers insist on this pointless discussion? Because, too many of us have been enchanted by the tools. Too many of us have been caught up in the hype and glory of amazing technology to recognize that social media marketing is essentially the same old ball game using different tools.

Think about it this way, when was the last time you attended a networking event or trade show and had your boss ask you, “so what was your ROI?”. I am willing to bet never, because those types of events aren’t there to act as advertising channels they are there many times to create relationships.

If you utilize offline social events as advertising channels, two things happen. 1) You don’t make any friends. 2) You don’t create any customers. This happens because instead of coming across as the cool girl or guy that everyone wants to do business with, you come across as the annoying jerk passing out postcard adverts. So why is it that some of us think that social media is any different?

Calculating ROI for advertising is easy because it is based on definite variables that can be measured. How do you measure the emotion from a positive exchange with a favorite brand on Twitter? How do you calculate the feelings of community in some forums? You can’t, and you aren’t supposed to.

What do I think?  Like I always say whenever I meet anyone or speak to anyone on the phone, Mr. Hall is right, however, what I learned from Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus is that you have to always be sure to give your client the gift he wants and not just the gift you want to give.

Your client is the one who is paying you so you need to find a way to offer whatever the ROI is that your client needs to prove to his boss and the board that spending money on you was indeed prudent and worthwhile — because, at least for us at Abraham Harrison, we’re always competing for budget with the contextual advertising team.

While what we do at Abraham Harrison is exactly what Joe is talking about — building brand, buzz, conversation, community, fellowship, relationship, reputation, recognition, attachment, and also touches towards the required seven touches — we still need to make sure they can also move some needles: traffic, visitors, email addresses, followers, friends, fans, donations, new business into the sales funnel, or more money — the ultimate ROI bottom line.

There is a huge requirement to compromise.  To gift the client based on their needs and then, through education, through experience, through general positive secondary effects — such as volume, tone, and sentiment of conversation — of buzz — and how that ubiquity of chatter can directly effect search ranking, reputation, search dominance, keyword dominance, and general increased trust of your client’s brand based on the general acceptance, quantity, and quality of brand focused conversation online.

Thanks, Mr. Joe Hall for your article Cup of Joe: Social Media ROI? Think Again Genius! — I am much obliged.  What do you all think?

Via Marketing Conversation

I got to meet Cece Salomon-Lee of PRMM a while ago but only finally got over my Bronchitis recently so I took the opportunity of being in the desert in some pretty light to do the interview — so, please visit Cece over at her blog and read PRMM Interview #16: Chris Abraham on PR and Social Media:

I met Chris Abraham, President of Abraham Harrison, while he was in a San Francisco late last year. While we were unable to record an interview at the time, I sent Chris some questions via email. Here are Chris’ video responses, as he shares his thoughts about his company, why they don’t consider themselves a PR agency, and what he would like to see in 2011.

Briefly, Chris is a leading expert in online public relations with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and Internet reputation management. He can be reached on Twitter @chrisabraham.

If you are interested in submitting suggestions for future blog posts or would like to be a guest blogger, please contact me.

Via Marketing Conversation

Team Abraham Harrison and I join Olivier Blanchard in bidding adieu to the social media experts, social media gurus, and their band of merry ”curious little cult of personality” pranksters. The king is dead; long live the king:

Sometime between August of 2010 and January of 2011, something changed. Something tipped. Your momentum died. The pendulum started to swing back. More people started to see past the BS than fell for it. At long last, the ratio of savvy to gullible tipped in the favor of progress. And what became clear was that the damage you caused by concentrating your astounding ineptitude, supercharged egos and overpriced bad advice created a wealth of opportunity for those of us who care more about doing good work than in building our own “personal brands,” “content strategies” or affiliate networks. Those of us focused on making social media actually work for the business world rather than earning Fortune 500 bragging rights in the digital “consulting” space, if that is what you want to call it. The beauty of your scheme is that what you broke requires fixing now. That means an increasing amount of work for people with the skill to rebuild social media programs from scratch, and do it right.

This one paragraph does not do In praise of the A-List justice, so please go read it yourself. The only problem with the post is that it is nuanced and subtle and ironic and satirical and very snarky – so there is just about zero chance that the cadre of folks dressed down in the blog post with ever truly recognize themselves at all — so, alas, my friend Olivier, you’re doing a Shakespeare, which is to say that all the people who you’re mocking are joining you in mocking themselves without ever realizing it.

Here’s the hint: how psyched are you about SXSW?

However, assuming that your message is getting through, I agree that something shifted and I am excited about doing more business, offering more results, creating more value, and a time when all the wounds that all these social media a-listers inflicted heal and they’re willing to try again — and there, at the end, will be Mr. Blanchard, my agency, and me.

Bravo!

(Via Marketing Conversation)

Juan Perez of IDG asked me some questions about how Abraham Harrison is dealing with the bold, unexpected move, of changing CEOs from Eric Schmidt to Larry Page, in Computer World, in the article Will Page back Google’s enterprise unit?, and I offered my humble opinion:

Chris Abraham, president of the Abraham Harrison digital marketing and social media agency, is also confident in his company’s investment in Google Apps for Business. “If Google had brought in an outsider, there might be more of a concern, but the fact that it’s a co-founder taking the reins is reassuring,” he said in a phone interview.

I just wanted to let you all know that I will be speaking at the upcoming Mesh Marketing conference in Toronto, Canada, on 17 November. (Via Marketing Conversation)

I have a discount code for you use use when you sign up: MESH10off ** – I am very excited as I don’t do a lot of these and because I have never been to Toronto before. Those were the first two reasons but now that I know more about meshMarketing, I am just honored to be part of it all!

Last week I spent two days attending the 2010 North American Alterian Engaging Times Summit since I have been a legitimate crazy-nutso fan of their SM2 social media metrics and monitoring tool since it the tool was called Techrigy SM2.  I have also written testimonials, case studies, testimonial videos, and instructional videos about the product. Anyway, I never really posted about it but I was a little more receptive when Lauren Eichmann reached out to me with her press release.  So, here it is:

Alterian Survey Reveals Brands Undervalue Customer Service Objectives with Social Media

The Engaging Times Summit survey also indicates that 35 percent of marketers say it’s still ‘too early to tell’ about social media ROI.

Chicago, IL – 24 August 2010 – Alterian (LSE: ALN), the leader in customer engagement technology and solutions, today announced the results of its Engaging Times Summit survey on brand socialization, engagement strategy and social media ROI. Summit attendees comprised more than 400 senior-level marketing executives from major brands including Cisco, American Greetings Interactive, Dave and Busters, RAZOR and Western Union.

Results showed that when asked about the most important social media objectives, 24 percent reported that retaining existing customers is the central objective, 26 percent believe driving brand awareness is the most crucial aspect, and 30 percent are aiming for new customer acquisition. Less than one percent cited that the most important objective was to offer customer service.

“It’s surprising that brands are reporting that they don’t highly value deploying customer service in the social media channel,” said David Eldridge, CEO of Alterian. “Many are underutilizing this approach, as all brands need to be prepared to handle their customers’ complaints and act on them. While marketers may have different objectives than those working in the customer service department, it’s important to have a cross-channel strategy and integrate outreach to gain maximum exposure and positive chatter about your brand online.”

Despite a lack of emphasis on customer service objectives in social media, survey results showed that about 90 percent of marketers believe that cross-channel coordination is indeed vital in marketing campaigns. Similarly, a majority of 61 percent of marketers said their brand’s engagement with consumers occurs both online and offline, suggesting that engagement takes place on multiple platforms.

The State of Social Media Engagement
Based on survey results, marketers said they are increasingly viewing social media as a means for engagement as opposed to promotion. Three out of four respondents indicated their brand is either ‘somewhat’ or ‘extremely’ engaged in social media. Only 22 percent reported they are not very engaged, and three percent said they are not engaged at all.

Yet the survey showed that measuring ROI is still a challenge. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they are not able to measure ROI when it comes to the socialization of their brand, and 42 percent reported to be only somewhat able to measure ROI.

While some marketers might be on the fence about ROI, the majority (57 percent) said they believe investing in social media has been a worthwhile investment for their brand.  Thirty-five percent claimed it’s still too early to tell, but not a single respondent reported that social media is not a worthwhile investment.

“There are tools available today that help marketers measure the influence of their social media investment, and consequently understand the ROI for their social media efforts,” said Connie Bensen, Alterian’s Director of Community Strategy. “It’s just a matter of identifying what you want to measure and tracking progress in a way that is appropriate for your brand.”

One in five marketers who attended the Summit are indeed measuring ROI in terms of brand socialization, a promising figure for the future of social media marketing. For more information about best practices, visit the Alterian web site for Bensen’s Social Media ROI whitepaper series.

About the Engaging Times Americas Summit
The annual event features thought leadership from some of the Americas’ leading brands, giving attendees the opportunity to learn how major organizations are extending and expanding their brand’s social and emotional connections in a cross-channel way (e-mail, direct mail, social media, web).  The Alterian Engaging Times Summit 2010 was held August 17 & 18 in Chicago and was attended by more than 400 marketers from around the country, including keynotes from Stan Rapp, co-founder of Rapp Collins and Don Peppers from Peppers & Rogers Group.

Other presenters included American Greetings Interactive, Walgreens, Edelman, Western Union, Razor, Mars, Acxiom, Bank of the West, Epsilon, Dave & Buster’s, Cisco, WOMMA, Harte-Hanks, Ogilvy, Peppers & Rogers, 1to1 Media, Covalent Marketing, and Forrester Research.

About Alterian
Alterian (LSE: ALN) enables organizations to create relevant, effective and engaging experiences with their customers and prospects through social, digital, and traditional marketing channels. Alterian’s Customer Engagement solutions are focused in four main areas: Social Media, Web Content Management, Email, and Campaign Management & Analytics.

Alterian technology is utilized either to address a specific marketing challenge or as part of an integrated marketing platform, with analytics and customer engagement with the individual at the heart of everything. Working alongside a rich ecosystem of partners, Alterian delivers its software as a service or on premise. For more information about Alterian visit www.alterian.com or the Alterian blog at www.engagingtimes.com.

There really are social media gurus and social media experts and my Chief Programmer Phillip Rhoades wrote up the best of their genius on his article The Best Of The 60 Ways to Increase Your Influence Online — it is both an interesting article for who and what Phillip includes in the list as well as who and what he doesn’t include.  You can read the original article and full list here via Sam Rosen at Copyblogger.

The Best Of The 60 Ways to Increase Your Influence Online

Sam Rosen and Copyblogger recently hosted a very short conference and had several thought leaders come up with 60 Ways to Increase Your Influence Online. Quite a few of the methods are sort of stock, cardboard, filler, but there are some gems. Here are a few that I really liked:

#3. Mike Volpe. “We share lots of things that most companies would keep internal. By sharing both the good and the bad, you build digital influence.” -@mvolpe

#11. Hugh MacLeod. “We use other people’s stuff or other people’s content to socialize. And your stuff’s either a social object or it’s not.” -@gapingvoid

#22. Shama Kabani. “Create [video] content around your area of expertise and then distribute, distribute with gusto!” -@shama

#24. Johnny B. Truant. “Defy convention where it’s appropriate. Only a few people dare to step outside. And people take notice of that.” -@johnnybtruant

#46. Brian Clark. “Learn to be a storyteller. Narrative — it’s what makes us human. Big media does it great. You have to as well.” -@copyblogger

#51. Shashi Bellamkonda. “Find out from your customers which social networks they are using, and be there for them at the moment they need you.” -@shashib

#52. Gretchen Rubin. “Self-expression is the new entertainment. Get people talking. I had success just asking, ‘What’s your comfort food?’” -@gretchenrubin

#59. Julien Smith. “Get someone else to take a look at what you have that you maybe take for granted and gives you an advantage over other people.” -@julien

Any that you particularly like? Any that you think they completely missed?