I found a Forrester slideshow that detailed some results from several blogs they own: including Web Strategist, the Interactive Marketing blog, and Groundswell.

While not a “white paper”, page 11 is an interesting metric that I haven’t seen elsewhere- roughly 70% of the readers subscribe through RSS. This is a very high percentage that I have seen near identical results on our own RSS count vs. web visitors (123  floats around 60-65%)

I also found that the professional categories of the readers were interesting. The two largest groups @ 22% each were Marketing and 10% Interactive Marketing. The third largest was @ 8% - “Independent Consultant”

Apparently the “movers and shakers” are the marketing and consulting folk who have bottom line responsibility and need to prove return on investment. In any case, here is the slideshare with the rest of the information (worth browsing through):

A new study from the Society for New Communications Research focuses on how social media is taking on a primary channel for brands and products. Focusing on “social media power users” (aka influencers), the report includes case studies and information from organizations such as the American Red Cross, Mayo Clinic, Blendtec, and Quicken.

“social media power users,” i.e., communications professionals with a deep knowledge and heavy usage pattern of social media tools including blogs, podcasts, online video, social
networks, and other new and emerging communications tools and technologies.”

Unfortunately the report indicates that public relations and corporate communication experts are evolving into the new media space, but I have to disagree in the fact that most communication professionals are falling behind the curve, instead of in front of it.

Overall the study is fairly well done (42 pages) and highlights some excellent data points. You can download the report for free here.

Of those organizations surveyed, 78% use blogs, 63% use online video, 56% use social networks and 49% use podcasts in their organization’s communications initiatives. The total sample size for the survey portion of the study was 297 communications professionals: 37% of whom were public relations / marketing communications professionals working within an agency, 35% of whom were in-house public relations and corporate communications professionals; 22% were public relations and marketing communications consultants; 4% worked for media companies and 2% were advertising and/or brand marketing professionals.

The research team at SNCR included:

• Joseph Carrabis- CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution
• John Cass- Online Community Manager for Forrester Research
• Paul Gillin- Author of the social media column for Business 2.0 magazine, and The New Influencers
• Richard Nacht- He is the founder and CEO of Blogging Systems
• Greg Peverill-Conti- Vice President at Weber Shandwick Public Relations

If you know of any additional social media white paper resources, please let us know about them!

Social Media Measurement is a key business criteria for on-going success. While the following slideshow is not a whitepaper, it is a very good beginner presentation surrounding the core fundamentals of monitoring a campaign.

This information may be entirely new to you or tried and tested, but an important part working within the social media space is communicating some of these bullet points and opening a conversation around them.

As a resource to our readers, I have decided to create a new category here covering social media whitepapers. I will be adding a good number of resources over the next month, so keep an eye out for more.

Nicholas Reville and Holmes Wilson, co-founders of the Participatory Culture Foundation, wrote the whitepaper Sustainable Public Media Infrastructure. The basic description is best said in the introduction of the paper “A new type of non-profit organization is emerging, one that has never been possible in an offline world. These new organizations are creating permanent, sustainable public knowledge and communications infrastructure that is designed for public benefit.”

It has some excellent bullet points about participatory media on Mozilla/Firefox and Wikipedia:

Mozilla Key Takeaways

• Online, a small amount of resources can serve millions of people.
• Web-based organizations can become self-sustaining in a way that has never been possible offline. When creating a website or building software, costs do not rise linearly with the number of people served.
• Successful social tech projects can quickly transition from being grant recipients to granting organizations.

Wikipedia Key Takeaways

• Non-profit projects online can build vibrant collaborative communities of volunteers and evangelists that would have been extremely difficult and very expensive to organize offline.
• Tiny amounts of money can let smart projects reach enormous audiences.
• Avoiding some types of revenue can help protect the credibility and therefore success of certain non-profit tech projects. Revenue requirements relative to people served may be so small that perpetual grant support is the best long-term strategy.

As a resource to our readers, I have decided to create a new category here covering social media whitepapers. I will be adding a good number of resources over the next month, so keep an eye out for more. The first paper covers enterprise reputation management, a paper by Toby Bell from Gartner Research.

Toby does a good job laying out some of the fundamental ideas that organizations should be bringing to the table. As we move further and further into the information age, we will see more cases of companies using online reputation and brand control covered in the Gartner paper.

Two important bullet points:

• Time scales on the internet are more compressed and the implications of a negative event can be far-reaching. In many PR and communication issues, there are days, weeks, or months to analyze and create a strategy. Social media often leaves minutes, hours, or at best days to respond.
• Social media is an unfamiliar territory for enterprises, with very different rules for engagement. From our perspective, communication professionals and web savvy marketers need to plan for the change between business to consumer, small and medium business, and enterprise communication. Companies are treated differently in the social media environment- often leaving influencers within an industry to determine the fate of how media interaction occurs.

If you are in the media space and don’t read Gartner’s papers- you should consider checking them out “Policies and Procedures to Manage Enterprise Internet Reputation“.

A lot of CEO and executive members do not pro-actively protect online brand and reputation, but in the case of Willard Marriott, CEO of Marriott International, he has rolled up his sleeves and done the one thing that many executives are not willing to do: be personal and have a conversation with his customers.

Marriott started his online blogging efforts in January of 2007. A year and a half later, he has found success with online conversations: a dialogue that has earned his company four million dollars, and helped his company earn the #1 Best Reputation in the Service Industry. It has also earned his company multiple pieces of news coverage (see MSN video on right sidebar, or here)

Marriott Honored With The Best Reputation In The Services Industry Award. “BETHESDA,MD. - August 12, 2008 - In a recent survey of consumers conducted by the Reputation Institute, Marriott International, Inc. (NYSE:MAR) earned a #1 ranking among all companies in the services category in the United States. Marriott was the only lodging company listed in the top 30 of the “75 most reputable companies in the U.S.”

When the blog was originally launched, the Washington Post covered the news and made the comment:

“Marriott’s entry into the blogosphere is another in a series of steps he has taken to keep his Bethesda company — and himself — relevant in the fast-changing hotel industry, which is adapting to a more urbane breed of traveler who communicates via the Internet and demands a sophisticated lodging experience.”

That statement has been carried through by Bill Marriott. As CEO, he routinely places his personal brand in the proving grounds as the company brand. Consumers are demanding this more and more, as the marketplace tends to connect the qualities of the leader with the qualities of the business being led by them.

From my perspective: This type of reputation starts at the top of an organization. Executives at any organization must lead by example. They must inspire, motivate, educate - while earning a reputation for true leadership and exemplary professional qualities.

On a strategic level: Marriott is not a small brand, the massive hotel chain includes roughly three thousand locations and receives roughly five million unique visitors a month online. That type of audience means that Marriott’s clients are engaging his massive empire each day, and they are talking both offline and online (whether or not anyone talks back.)

Doing an investigation of the Marriott brand on terms such as “Marriott Review”, consumer sites like TripAdvisor have over 1000+ reviews of Marriott. In this case, Bill fortunately has a very rightful reason to receive the “best reputation” in the industry- as negative reviews are few and far between.

Unlike many other CEO blogs, Bill manages to keep a good mix of both personal and business ideas. His blog includes a recent article about the new online language training they offer employees with Rosetta Stone, or his review of the new lobby design being rolled out to 200 branches.

The fact that he (and the company) are present in the online world gives them an understanding of the conversation surrounding them, can benefit from the positive things people say about them, and in a worse case scenario have a faster response to something negative.

Do you know any CEO blogs out there that are producing good results for the company or just happen to have a personal favorite?

In our “100 Days of Social Media” post, several readers wanted to know a few top reasons our site was pulling in an audience. The most basic reason: we cast a very wide net. Sites are made up of many pages beside the homepage and in the social media world, a site becomes more defined as a larger “web brand”.

In the real world, a brand can exist in conversation, on shoes, cars, napkins, and t-shirts (look at NIKE.) In the social media world, multiple points of interaction have created a huge effect on how brands are communicated. One issue is understanding how linking from outside of your site to sub-pages within it and around it (that are relevant), and to the people you are trying to reach.

One of the key reasons social media is relevant: search traffic from Google. Regardless of how many links point at any one page, eventually it will become neutral in relevancy to the keywords that drive traffic. The main 123SocialMedia.com site has roughly twenty keywords that score high results, followed by 200+ article pages that have been optimized and promoted for various search terms that attract traffic. (You can read our article on social media keyword tools to help identify some useful phrases.)

Simply put: When setting up a proper linking for search engine results, an effective strategy is to link to interior pages of the site AND outside sites that carry your brand message.

If you are initially doing this on a new site, the whole idea is to create a pyramid that builds upon the foundation you have. After a page scores for a term, it can push several weaker ones, and lend strength to a few stronger ones as well. It also means that once a visitor is on your site, that they are provided with more options for staying on your site.

Imagine this basic structure:

In the eyes of Google, you need so many relevant pages linking to any specific page in order to push it to the next level. The basic concept would be best visualized by the graphic on the left- a pagerank 2 item is surrounded by seven pagerank 1 pages. From a very generic idea: the higher the pagerank, the more likely specific terms on the page will rank for keywords in search results.

While 25 pagerank 1 pages may have enough power to create a pagerank 3 item, it is generally easier to create a well-thought structure lower ranking pages that have the ability to promote several important ones.

These basic page structure does not always align or connect with other pages, which is where relevance and freshness of the content become involved. If any one page becomes old by not having enough interesting content before earning some links from the world wide web, the content in the eyes of Google becomes stale and slowly disappears from the search results.

The complicated part of visualizing this whole concept is to realize that pagerank ranges from 1 to 10. When you understand that pagerank needs to have support from different directions to have healthy search engine result for a keyword (commonly referred to as SERPs), then the whole thing begins to resemble a complicated mess of building something out of LEGO blocks that have been pre-assembled by five year olds.

A unique problem to this project building is degradation. Old content pages may disappear from Google’s indexing, creating a foundation for your project that IS relying on a foundation that is slowly falling apart over time. Imagine the diagram on the left with ratings from 1 to 10 (and having a few disappearing sections!)

So how do you fix that?

Reason Two: Social Media Profiles and Anchor Text

The big problem is that most sites do not have too many pages that can be ranked for too many keywords, and some of those disappear over time. A standard brochure site may only have 5 to 15 pages. That means roughly 5 to 50 terms can be placed against those pages based upon the amount of textual information (relevance) on them. Once the basic pages of your site are written to be maximized for a term, you need to have X number of pages pushing them along and supporting them in the “pyramid of power.” If you need to build one of those fancy projects with high ranking in the search engines you need to make sure you have plenty of pieces to build with.

This is where ANCHOR TEXT and SOCIAL MEDIA SITES become important. Anchor text is the word that a search engine relates to a link. If I link to my site and use the words “visit my site“, then the search engine relates 123SocialMedia.com as being relevant to a search for “visit my site”

If I link to my site and use the words “social media training“, the search engines lend some of that relevance to the page I am pointing at. If I had a page that had specific relevance (aka articles or blog post) I could be more specific and get additional relevance. For instance, this post on social media training - things you should read today.

Now imagine there are a thousand social media sites out there that you can build profiles on: these could be Linkedin, Myspace, Facebook, Technorati, Digg, Stumbleupon, Jobster, Squidoo, Newsvine, or hundreds of others.

Each of these social media sites has several main benefits to your traffic strategy.

1. It can serve as a branding point for your information. Every single profile creates a possibility for brand exposure. While an active profile and community presence is more significant, having a profile merely for owning your brand presence on that site can be very helpful to prevent identity theft of your brand, to explore features and conversations on the site, and establish “secondary brand points” in search results.
2. Secondary brand points. One of the largest pitfalls of most companies and professional brands is that they rely on one point of contact- the company site (to maintain a corporate image.) In the world of the social media web, search engines and audience members may be exposed with five to ten additional sites of like-minded content. If someone Googles your brand, they may see your information and nine additional sites. If someone is on a social network- they may see various “people who liked this, also liked A, B, and C.” options. In either case, having secondary brand points allows you to dominate certain keywords and search criteria around your brand.
3. Search Engine Links. A lot of your organic search traffic comes from knowing how linking affects keywords and anchor text. Depending on the social media site (profile, community, or article) there are anywhere between 1 to 10 links that can be established on one page. Some of these links can be pointed at a target site, some of the links can be pointed at other secondary brand points, and all of them can be leveraged to push several sites.

With a grasp of how this organized chaos should be structured, imagine how your new social media world looks in a diagram:

If you take anything away from this article, take these two points:

1. DO NOT GO AROUND SPAMMING THE WEB! Provide useful information about your company and profession. If the community doesn’t make sense for you to participate in… find another community (trust me, there are plenty that are completely relevant.)
2. PERSISTENCE AND A CREATIVE MIND ARE YOUR BEST TOOLS. There are thousands of different ways that social media strategies can be implemented for business. There are no ironclad right or wrong ways of doing things, yet trying to do nothing is a guaranteed way of getting no where.
   

If you have any questions about this idea, please leave a comment. If you have a good promotional technique for using social media let us know about it.