This is a draft of chapter 10 of Social Marketing to the Business Customer by Paul Gillin and Eric Schwartzman. This chapter focuses on how to calculate ROI of social media and Internet marketing programs in general. I’m particularly interested in your feedback on this chapter because it presents some new ideas I’ve been playing with about how to calculate the ROI of almost anything. My biggest concern is that these ideas are overly simplistic. They do assume that a company has a rich set of historical data to work with, which is often not the case. They include Indium Corp., 1900%. MORE >>

Over the last few months we’ve been conducting an in-depth review of the leading social media monitoring tools in conjunction with our sister company, FreshMinds Research. We’ve compared how Alterian , Brandwatch , Biz360 , Neilsen Buzzmetrics , Radian6 ,  Scoutlabs and Sysomos performed when monitoring conversations about global coffee brand Starbucks. We compared over 19,000 online conversations and have written about the following topics: The basics of social media monitoring. How to set up the tools (search strings, comparison challenges and coverage). MORE >>

Top 10 Twitter Tutorials on YouTube. We all know that YouTube is a treasure trove of entertainment, with endless hours of Justin Bieber crooning to tweens and cats playing the piano. But it's also a terrific resource for learning MORE >>

If you're a blogger, you may have been asked to write a guest post by another blogger. Or, you might have offered a guest post yourself to a blogger you admire. Either way, writing a guest post opens you up to a whole new audience and MORE >>

What motivates adult participation within social media? When we look at the psychology of human behavior we can begin to understand certain  motivations which draw adults to social media. Abraham Maslow published his theory of human motivation in 1943. Its popularity continues unabated. Like his colleague Carl Rogers, Maslow believed that actualization was the driving force of human personality, a concept he captures in his 1954 book, Motivation and Personality Maslow’s great insight was to place actualization into a hierarchy of motivation. The hierarchy has five levels. MORE >>