The Last Waffle - Return on Social Media

For any business, virtual or brick-and-mortar, ROI (return on investment) is of the utmost important. Some companies may have other goals, other mission statements or other priorities, but in order for the business to survive ROI must be positive. When measuring different business initiatives, it is easy to decide which ones to continue and which ones to end. Negative ROI means cut the project (or never start it in the first place).

When it comes to social media, how do we know a business initiative has become a success or failure? Is its ROI positive or negative? According to Aaron Uhrmacher, first you must pick out your variable. For social media initiatives, your return isn't always calculated in dollars. Do you want more clicks? Increase presence on Digg? Keep visitors for longer? Once you know what you want to achieve, you are much better able to A) achieve it and B) know how to measure it.

Innovative Marketing Strategy

In his new eBook, "Dandelion Marketing," Jeremy Epstein discusses the way that social networking and media are used to take advantage of Web 2.0 concepts in "going viral" in the modern virtual business world. A great read. Epstein really hones in on taking advantage of new marketing and business trends

Click here to learn how to "go viral" in today's dynamic business world!

Peaches - Predictions for the Future

Where is the future of social media headed. Will we forever rely on Facebook or Twitter, or will these sites slowly fade away as Myspace and Friendster have. There is a lot to consider including available technologies and consumer preferences.

Two online personalities have attempted to take a guess at what the future will hold. Jim Tobin puts his opinion down as a list of predictions for the future of social media, found here. He believes that sites must have ratings, that content aggregation will be kind, everything will be portable, new tools will replace the old ones and that virtual worlds are here to stay.

Another blogger at Exceed Sales wrote a blog about trends of social media in business, see here. This blogger sees companies expanding social media beyond sales and marketing, developing metrics to measure their success, companies finally figuring out what is working and what isn't and that more companies will jump into the social media ring.

Both bloggers bring up important points about the future of social media in our lives as both people and consumers. What do you all think? Feel free to put your own opinions about the future of social media in the comments.

Nutella - It's Not Quantity, but Quality

As search engines become more advanced, adding more content to search results, web analytics companies must get more creative. In this article, Laurie Sullivan talks about the changing landscape in online search. Furthermore, the introduction and outside the box thinking of Bing has added a new competitor to what was previously known as the Google vs Noone fight. Web analytics can't just count web clicks anymore, but instead must focus on more detailed (but better indicators) of web traffic. Hover-overs, bounces and a slew of other items, may give more info about how well your website is actually performing.

Unfortunately, for many of us (especially in the blogger community), we don't have the funds necessary to measure such fancy variables. Sure, we have google analytics, which is a great, easy-to-use and good program but wouldn't it be better if I could get a sense of which articles stay up on a viewer's screen? This way I could alter my articles to my reader's preferences.

Chocolate Covered - Job Search No 2 through ?

Many of us are college seniors and are working on obtaining that first job. While this may not be an easy task, there are many resources that we have available to us: the career center, careerweb, our professors, our classmates, our parents, etc. But what I always wonder is how would I go about getting a second, third, fourth or hundredth job once I've already left school.

Of course, you can post on sites like monster.com, but those always seem like your trying to find a needle in a haystack. WSJ blogger Henry Chalian talks about the methods that he is using to secure one of his subsequent jobs. Relying on financial recruiters, Chalian commenced is job search. However, as he found out, recruiters are not always as helpful as they lead on.

Whenever you may start looking for a second job it is important that you make as many bets as possible, hold on to those social networks and contacts, and cross your fingers for good luck.

Raspberry - Power of the Wiki-Masses

In an article by John Dvorak, he discusses the inherent issues with spreading knowledge through wiki sources. In a small environment with few contributors, wikis can have more accurate information but as wikis grow the information will eventually be skewed and have errors.

While this may be the case in an unregulated wiki, sites like Wikipedia that have a strong oversight committee tend to override the potential errors that come about. Wikipedia may not be the most trusted source for information, but I find it extremely useful to get background information on topics that I know very little about. Where else could you find summary information that is up to date, easy to access and well formatted?

Pecan - Virtual Teams

During one of my college internships, part of my work was conducted through a virtual team setting. My boss, as well as several team members, were located halfway across the country.

At first, the experience was very strange. You're not sure when it's appropriate to contact team members, you don't know how to contribute in team meetings, and worst of all you can't even put a face to the voice on the other end of the phone. It's extremely hard to be productive when you've never seen the people who count on you.

After reading this article by Jaclyn Kostner and understanding how to build trust in a virtual team, I realized that while there were some areas to improve, the team that I worked for excelled in most of these areas. Several weeks on the project proved that everyone was available, competent, consistent, fair and open to others. This created the ideal virtual team setting.