There’s no question that the social media ROI question continues to befuddle business – 41% of respondents to an eConsultancy survey of 1,000 companies and agencies in late 2011 had absolutely no idea of social media’s financial impact. But that inability isn’t the fault of social media as a channel, or the fault of social media software, or the fault [...]

Posted by Jean-Marie Bonthous If every person and brand out there was sailing smoothly with social media marketing, we’d have no reason for conferences and events, blogs and books. Every company has challenges to social media marketing success, some internal, some external. When marketers look to solve these problems, they often look to software first. But software is only part [...]

Posted by Jean-Marie Bonthous Yesterday, HubSpot teamed up with LinkedIn to host part 2 of a 3-part workshop series on how to master LinkedIn for marketing. The second webinar, hosted by Director of Online Marketing at LinkedIn Scott Engelman and HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe, went into detail on how companies can use LinkedIn ads to drive new leads and customers. [...]

Posted by Jean-Marie Bonthous Startups usually succeed because of a single major product or business innovation. Google is unusual in that they succeeded because of two major innovations: their core search product, and their keyword advertising business model. Back in 2000, when Google was wildly popular but generating no revenue, the conventional wisdom was that their business model was uncertain. Then [...]

Everyone is talking about the ROI of social media. Are we able to justify social media spend? Those are great questions. Lisa Arthur on the Forbes blog suggests that we need to take a step back from that level of question and to focus on something more fundamental. No company, she writes, can measure the effectiveness of a social network [...]

Cloud-based online video platform Brightcove has launched = Brightcove 5, with increased mobile support, YouTube Sync, Apple HTTP streaming, advanced analytics for HTML5, and more. “The improvements include advanced distribution methods with more social sharing to help brands get the most mileage, drastically expanded support of mobile platforms, expanded analytics to gauge how online video campaigns are performing, and other [...]

Sysomos has launched the first professional tool to manage Facebook Fan Pages. Whether you have single or multiple Facebook Pages, this tool makes it easier to moderate comments, automate tasks and run reports. As part of beta tests, Facebook Page Central has been used by a select number of companies on pages that have a few hundred to several million [...]

The TIBCO Spotfire Web Player now offers a touch screen experience for the iPad. Developed to support the iPad native multi-touch interface, the latest release of the Spotfire app makes mobile analytics and business intelligence available to anyone, anywhere. This on-demand offering is designed to enable anyone to create, publish, and share custom dashboards or reports for analytics and BI [...]

A presentation by Matt Farlie, and Garry PRzuklenk, both with MarketWire/Sysomos. Topics include “Challenges in Social Media Monitoring”, “the 5W’s of Business Intelligence” (What, when, where, who and why), “Real-World APplucations”, “HeartBeat”, “MAP”. The presentation also outlines the “SMART” approach: Socialize, Monitor, Analyze, Report and Target. To read the original article, click here

A presentation by Sinotech Group. The topics include “What is social media?”, “Give me some numbers….I want to see stats…”, “Unlocking value with social media analytics”, and “A few examples from around the globe”. The presentation focuses in part on the Asian market, and shows that Asians are active online content creators: 40% of Chinese internet users, 50% of Koreans [...]