This video introduces a White Horse aimed at eliminating confusion about social media monitoring products, so that companies can start realizing the value of social media conversations to drive brand growth.

A presentation by We Studio D, from Waggener Edstrom

Barbara French,  in The Customer Collective, provides three guidelines: conduct research to identify the top influencers operating outside the company envelope, use your research to model a typical decision-maker ecosystem, map your influencer categories across the decision lifecycle. For more articles about a related topic, see also The Buzz Starts Here: Finding the First Mouth for Word-of-Mouth Marketing and Social [...]

It’s one thing to debate the potential power of social media marketing to influence product sales but quite another to watch a social media project actually create a popular new product. In his keynote address at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Social Media Conference, Forrester Research’s Josh Bernoff explained how Del Monte Foods did that thing in just six weeks.

Paul Gillin’s presentation at the National Cooperative Business Association

Jason Falls interviews from Mike Troiano of Crimson Hexagon about their new VoxTrot platform, which allows to identify “what are the key themes, what are the relative sizes of these themes” about a given topic. e. They demo how the platform analyzes what people think of the Kindle 2 platform.

eConsultancy lists 20 free, effective online reputation monitoring tools

A reprint from the Harvard Business Review, available for a fee via Amazon

A report by Clay Daniel, for MarketingProfs. Google Alerts, Technorati, Jodange, Trendrr, Lexicon, Monitter, Burner, Twendz, followed by a brief overview of some paid platforms: TruCast, Radian6, Cision, Techrigy, Collective Intellect.