This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

From the Position² Blog This Week: Social Media Monitoring ROI: Metrics For Measurement Monitoring your brand on Social Media is important, but what are the metrics you should measure to discover your ROI from Social Media Monitoring? Read on for more information on the qualitative and quantitative methods you can use to determine the success of your social media monitoring efforts.

Viral Campaign: How to Combine QR Codes With the Power of Facebook. Survey: How Do Consumers Feel About Brands On Twitter? Social Business: 14 Best Practices for Brands to Grow their Audiences in Social Media. Why Marketers Fail: Four Things Mark Zuckerberg Should Tell Every CMO. Research: Is The Tide Turning For Twitter And Facebook? Some Young People Are ‘Bored’ With Social Media. Survey: Retail, CPG Pour Most New Dollars into Online Ads. New Features: Bing Shopping Adds Faster Refinements, Sales & List Sharing. B8: Microsoft Launches Behind-the-Scenes “Building Windows 8″ Blog. Update: Google Analytics Tweaks Sessions and Image Referrals. Panda Penalties: Beating Google’s Panda Update – 5 Deadly Content Sins.

Video of the Week Is Social Media Turning Socially Dangerous? Flash mobs have become a global phenomenon. After starting out as an oddity, they quickly turned into a tool for organizing people with a cause or for inciting chaos. CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reports that some cities, like San Francisco, are cracking down.

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Many of you must be wondering what is a ghost blog? A ghost blog is a blog run and managed by an anonymous author(s). A ghost blog can also be a blog written by a company or person on behalf of another company or person. It could also mean that it is a blog dedicated to ghost and so on…

Ghost blogging means that someone else writes a blog for you. It’s like you hire someone who helps you out on a project, but that person gets no credit for it, and is only paid for the services provided by him or her.

But why hire someone else to write a blog on your area of expertise?  Does this practice conform to blogging best practices? What are the blogging ethics with regard to ghost blogging? There have been many debates as to whether ghost blogs should be taken seriously or not.

Many bloggers believe that a blog should be written by the owner of the blog, but there are so many people out there who have great ideas to share but don’t have the requisite writing skills to express their ideas. These people can enlist the help of ghost bloggers to write for them.

A blog is a component of social networking, which is based on openness and honesty. So would it be ethical for a blogger to hire a ghost writer or ghost blogger to write a blog? Is it fair that the ghost blogger should go un-credited?

Here are some reasons why it is wrong:

1. People reading a blog expect the person listed as the author to be the one writing the post. This expectation is critical, and is a key difference between new and old media (where, this kind of practice eroded the credibility of many marketing tactics);
2. As the owner of the blog, the danger of damage to your credibility and reputation if you get found out easily outweighs the benefits you get from hiding the true author;
3. For corporate blogs, the CEO doesn’t need to be the face of a company online. If your company has grown and the CEO needs to focus elsewhere, someone else could write, or you could set up a group blog, or the blog posts can be from “staff writers”;
4. There are plenty of other social media (and other online) tools out there. If authentic, transparent blogging doesn’t work for you, use a different medium;
5. Social media is built on trust. By misleading people about the identity of the author, you stand to lose the trust when the deception is revealed, especially if you’re projected as an “expert” in the area.

A blog is, after all, channel for an individual’s expression. Ghost blogging takes away this identity of a blog If you are interested in building a long term, sustainable image, want to adhere to the blogging best practices and blogging ethics, you would either give credit to the actual author of your blog or refrain from ghost blogging.

Contributed by Pooja Giri

• Engagement – The cornerstone for social media marketing success (2)
• How to effectively connect with your target audience through Social Media (1)
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According to some of the statistics compiled by econsultancy writer Jake Hird in August 2009

• Around 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week.
• Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the internet is on social media sites.

It has become imperative for companies, big or small, to have social media campaigns. It is predicted that the social media spending by companies will increase dramatically in the coming year. The statistics look impressive, the social networks are growing at a geometric rate, and marketers have taken notice and are incorporating social media as an integral part of any online marketing initiative.

It’s all sunshine, but the most important element that online marketers forget is that social media marketing is all about conversations. It’s a two way communication channel, not the traditional online marketing channel. While creating groups, pages, accounts and forums, marketers forget that they need to connect with the people online. They create groups and just inundate users with the offers and deals. They do not listen or engage the users. Social media is all about connecting and collaborating. Not many people appreciate being flooded with a whole bunch of offers and being assailed with marketers online. This is not only invasion of privacy but it is also detrimental to the firm.

Listening and Engaging are the two most basic rules of social media marketing. People are on social media to connect, collaborate and gather information which might not be easily available otherwise. Listening to the users talk about what they want in a product, engaging them in conversations and understanding their requirements increases the brand influence and brings in traffic to the website which can be converted into sales.

Not only will this increase brand loyalty, but a company might get some great ideas and can innovate better. When a company develops a service or a product keeping the customers requirement in mind, it can seldom go wrong. Positive word of mouth marketing is the best kind of marketing a company can ever get.

Online marketers should understand the social media demographics and ‘socialnomics’ before starting a social media campaign. Social media marketing should be used cleverly and skillfully to achieve the best results online.

Contributed by Maanasi R K

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Brands these days use Social Media to increase their credibility; it has revolutionized communication across all levels. It has given people and businesses a platform to share their views with the world. Engaging with consumers adds value and helps strengthen a brand’s identity. This is almost as effective as word of mouth but has an impact on a  larger number of people. Social Media plays a significant role in influencing the buying decision of consumers since people now search, read, review, discuss and then consider before making a purchase.

In order to build an effective brand communication through Social Media, you should be aware of your audience. This makes it easier to focus your activities across various Social Media channels. These channels can be categorized in this way:

Social Networking – With the advent of sites like Facebook, Orkut and LinkedIn, people have found a new way to stay connected with friends, colleagues and acquaintances. These sites can be used to target potential customers and prospects by sharing articles, videos and other interesting business links. This helps to establish relationships with customers and increase credibility.

Bookmarking – Increases brand visibility and enhances Search Engine rankings. Bookmarking web links of a home page and other sections of a website can improve search results in Google.

Micro-blogging – Twitter is the most popular site for micro-blogging. It is an interactive medium and is a powerful way to spread messages faster. To increase followers on Twitter, one needs to frequently update status and post interesting tweets. These tweets can include both promotional and non-promotional activity links.

Blogging – Creating a blog, posting interesting videos and articles and constantly updating content helps increase brand awareness. These blogs can also be bookmarked to increase traffic to the site.

Video Sharing – This tool can be used to effectively communicate a message in a few seconds. A well-made video, syndicated across sites like You Tube, MetaCafe and MySpace can help drive traffic and increase awareness of your brand. Creative and interesting videos can help reach out to a wider audience and facilitate viral marketing.

Discussion Groups and Forums - These are places where one can learn how consumers feel about a product or brand. Participating in discussions helps understand consumers well and accordingly position the product.

It is important not to adopt the “one-size-fits-all” approach to reach out to the target audience. you should select the right channel to develop a trustworthy relationship with the audience and get an edge over your competitors.

• Ghost Blogging: Does it pass blogging best practices and blogging ethics? (0)
• Engagement – The cornerstone for social media marketing success (2)
• Twitter Business Guide, Google+ Business Profile and much more… | Best of the Week (0)

Most of us have a profile on a social networking website such as LinkedIn or Facebook and are familiar with the concept of “degrees away from you”.  So, if X is 2 degrees away from you on LinkedIn then you and X (although not connected to each other) share a common connection say S.

The figure below illustrates this:

This can be viewed in terms of a graph where you and X are nodes on a Graph connected to each other through the node S.  In case you and X have more common connections besides S then there are multiple paths between the node “you” and node “X” as shown below:

In case there is no connection between you and a person z, then you and z are points on two separate graphs (out of your network in terms of Linked In).

Now the question that follows is this:

Just like in Graph Theory where one can find best path(s) among a given set of paths based on some criteria (example, shortest distance between two cities connected by multiple routes). Can we choose the best path in case of Social Networking Graphs as well?

In other words, which is the best path connecting you and X in the example above?

To answer this, we need to come up with some criterion based on which we can run a Standard Algorithm to find the best path. In case of LinkedIn, this criterion can be the number of connections that you have.

For starters, we can say that the more connections a person has the higher his/her quality is. This may be modified further to give weightage related to quality of each individual connection as well.  Based on this, each node may be assigned a weight and then the best path can be determined.

Some of the obvious real life problems this criterion will face are that of Quantity Vs Quality.  Some people might have only 30 connections but all of them might be big shots, compared to someone else who has 100 connections but each of them have just 10-15 connections each.

The above example shows how the concepts of Graph theory can be related to Professional Networking media like LinkedIn, etc.  The same concepts can be used in some areas of SEM as well.

There are many other interesting examples about application of Graph Theory concepts. In fact, among the scientific community there is something known as an Erdos number which measures the “collaborative distance” between a person and prolific mathematician Paul Erd?s, which is measured by authorship of mathematical papers. You can read about it here.

Contributed by Ravi Shukla

• Metrics for Measuring Social Media Monitoring ROI and much more… | Best of the Week (0)
• Ghost Blogging: Does it pass blogging best practices and blogging ethics? (0)
• Engagement – The cornerstone for social media marketing success (2)