I have always found your posts interesting and stimulating. This one is no different. I’m sort of 3/4s with you, but I remain a believer in obtaining information about the results from one’s efforts. After all if you were spending money on say Yellow Pages would you want to know if you were getting a return on that investment.
I realise that with social networking there is not necessarily a pre determined cost, but one is spending time and resources doing it and there is an opportunity cost to this activity and one regularly needs to review where to invest money and effort.
I’m aware that in trying to raise the issue about quantifying social networking I get presented with whole plethora of arguments as to why they aren’t relevant, most of which are entirely specious. They hide the fact that these people don’t have even simple quantative methods to ensure they should carry on with their current social networking investment.

Rgds

Laurence

A Platform to Help us to Distinguish Our Quality vs. Quantity Friends, Fans, Followers, and Companies

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Flickr and others have been doing a decent job of providing additional marketing exposure and even in some cases, additional revenue. However, as more and more social networking sites pop up, how do you manage your brand across all these channels? Maybe more importantly, which one of these sites should you select as the one that will help you best reach your target audience? The proliferation of the social media avenues is becoming overwhelming.

This glut of information reminds me of the early 90’s when WWW was adopted broadly by the general public. Every company rushed to have a presence, to the point it became literally impossible to find the right information on the Web. That’s when a better generation of search engines – at first the Yahoo! and then Google – entered the market and helped us find the most relevant information by just typing simple keywords in their search box. If you had asked before Google launched, if there was a need for another search engine – most would have said no, we already have those….

Then came Web 1.0 & 2.0 – Youtube, Flickr, myspace, Facebook, Twitter and countless others have turned everyday people into content producers, influencers and experts. We basically tripled down on the information overload How do you know which channels to select for deploying your social media strategy? How do you know which one is the right channel to let your fans and followers to find you, your products, and services? Most importantly, who is Joe Smith that is recommending that person, that company, that product?

I hope my awesomize.me can accomplish such a mission. The site is not another social networking platform. Yet the portal to all your existing social media channels. The platform helps you, your fans, your potential clients to make an intelligent decision as to which company to connect to or follow via which social media channels and why? It’s free!

Elias
CEO & Founder
http://awesomize.me

Best wishes,
Trish (@Dayngr)
Community Manager at Radian6