Looking for ROI in Social Media? Mind Your Metrics
ROI is important for every function in business, but what if it’s measured too hastily? I wrote about social media ROI last week and some of the comments in response to that post highlighted a tendency many have to oversimplify this calculation. Simple is good; overly simple is not. ROI Blah, Blah, Blah, More ROI What if ROI is the thing so many people are distracted by while screwing up

One Reason Not to Hate Twitter’s New Retweet Function
I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about Twitter’s recent changes to how individual Retweets, aka RTs, are retweeted, but there is something interesting here to think about. Aside from adding lists, the changes to Retweets are the biggest change to happen to Twitter came since they changed how @replies worked earlier this year

Social Media ROI and the Last Cookie Conversation
The first push back regarding social media is the dreaded ROI question, right? There’s also been a lot of talk about how conversation and dialogue can’t be measured in terms of revenue too. Maybe that’s true. Or, maybe we’re measuring the wrong things or we’re only capturing part of the picture. Since I come from a communications background I never learned much about web analytics until I took it upon myself to learn. It becomes much e

The Trouble with Blog Influence Statistics
It may be ironic, but I’m not a big fan of statistics when it comes to blog readership.  Not because I’m not interested, but because I’m not convinced the average person understands exactly what a blog is. Even many of us who think we DO understand what a blog is have a hard time agreeing with one another on definitions. Case in point: Seth Godin. He disabled comments on his blog long ago, yet so

Mainstream Media Still Matters
Caution: This post could be construed as gratuitous self promotion because I work for We Seed’s parent company, PEAK6 Online. I don’t even own a television, but tonight I’ll be camping out in front of someone else’s set to watch We Seed on 20/20. I know a lot of us in social media circles like to focus on the interest and influence of social media in the way information spreads, but the growth patterns differ greatly. Social media is great for long-term growth and facilitation of word of mouth, but mainstream media (especially national mainstream media) still packs a wallop and has the ability