Referral Week

Hopefully you find this blog a valuable marketing resource.

But there are many blogs that provide great information and ideas.

As part of referral week here are four of my favorites:

Arment Dietrich’s Fight Against Destructive Spin

John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing

Brand Cottage’s Brand Hearth

American Express’ Open Forum (okay not one site, but a resource for many ideas and articles)

There are many more so please comment and share your favorite blogs so everyone can benefit.

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IIR’s Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies conference will address “Cashing in on the Conversation”.  To learn more visit http://bit.ly/d7mUWG and use code XM2205SMB to save 15%.

Measuring The Impact of Social Media

The attraction of social media is based on its ability to reach an audience with few out of pocket costs.  However, social media does require a financial investment through an employee’s hours and opportunity costs.

As a result, companies need to know how their social media efforts are making an impact on their business.

Part of that impact should be measured by social media activity that was generated by consumers, not your marketing department.  By measuring consumer comments regarding your company, you get a good sense about their interest in your brand – good or bad.

Two new tools can help measure this activity:

BackType lets you monitor what people are saying about your company or your competitors.  Its trend section is under development but will allow you to trend activity.

Addictomatic creates a dashboard of things like flickr, digg, twitter, youtube, blogs and other tools to give you a current picture of what is being said about your brand.

The benefit of social media is bringing you closer to your consumer by understanding what they are saying about you.

BackType and Addictomatic are two tools that help make that goal easier.