As powerful as social media is perceived to be there’s still quite a bit of mystery that surrounds it. Brands recognize that they need to be involved, but they’re struggling with assigning a dollar-value on social media exposure and how it equates to revenue. Because there aren’t any tools or systems in place that can spit out data on a company’s return on investment (ROI) for increasing its Twitter followers many businesses find themselves wondering if they’re just spinning their profit wheels in a social media mudslide.

It should come as no surprise that brands small and large share common concerns regarding social media. Even though concerns may be similar brands should be aware that they’ll need to exercise different strategies depending upon whether they’re B2C or B2B. Aside from defining goals and strategies, here are some of the social media obstacles that may confront brands.

1. Choosing the right social media channels.

Brands that know who their target market is and what communities they belong to can integrate those niche social sites into their strategies. Using a blend of social media dominators like Facebook and Twitter with other focused social sites might be a good launch point for some brands. The truth is that the right social channels are the ones where your audience engages itself and that are also right for your brand.

2. Converting fans and followers into customers.

You might be surprised to find out that most of your brand’s supporters are already customers. These people have interacted with your brand on some level and they’re proudly supporting it by liking, following or subscribing to the news that you share. Make it worthwhile for your brand loyalists to enjoy special perks, discounts and sneak previews that others might not be privvy to. Preferential treatment isn’t a bad thing in the land of social media. When word leaks out that your brand awards BOGO offers to Facebook fans each month you can bet that it will be taken advantage of.

3. Creating impactful social media campaigns.

Often brands will find themselves in a creative rut and unable to pull together a meaningful social media campaign. No matter who you are take comfort in knowing that we’ve all been there and this is a challenge that will probably surface from time to time. When you plan a campaign try to build it with your audience in mind, not for yourself. Remember that a campaign isn’t a press release or a widget – it’s an actual strategy. Position, objectives, strategy, tactics and key messages are the core campaign components. Layer in video, blogs, newsletters, PPC and other elements to make your campaign memorable, and sustainable.

4. Managing social media productivity.

One of the most commonly quoted challenges from brands is not being able to budget time and productiveness for social media. Without a plan in place, social media activity can be a major time suck. Execute each social media action with an objective in mind and keep your focus on the task at hand. If you’re responding to customer inquiries on Twitter, only respond to customer inquiries. Avoid jumping over to LinkedIn to see what your groups are buzzing about.

5. Increasing subscribers and fans.

Hands down this is one of the biggest challenges for all brands. Unless you’re a brand that’s been arounds for decades or who has a national presence like Starbucks or McDonald’s, you’re not going to have millions upon millions of fans. Keep scalability in mind and don’t get caught up in what other international brands are doing. Next, remember to share information that your audience would like to know and would appreciate having. This doesn’t mean an endless barrage of details about your brand. It means pulling good, credible data from other sources and funneling it down to your loyalists.

There are plenty of other challenges that brands are facing and will continue to face. This is just a handful to get your wheels turning and to think constructively about how to overcome them.

Let us know what some of your brand challenges are and share with us below.

From Denmark to Detroit, social media is a worldwide phenomenon that seems to be part addiction and part necessity. With Facebook’s recent announcement that it’s hit 500 million users and Twitter’s move toward advertising with @earlybird it’s becoming more apparent that if you want to get the word out about your business you need to step into the social media arena. However, all the excitement about social media doesn’t mean much if you can’t decipher what it means and what it’s doing. Analytics to social media are like a compass to a navigator – if you don’t understand where you’re at you won’t know where to go.

If the thought of analytics and numbers makes you shudder you’re not alone. There are more people than not who feel intimidated by numerical data. The two toughest aspects of social media analytics are interpreting information and deciding what analytic tools best meet your needs. Fortunately, basic analytics doesn’t require a PhD in statistics and the internet is filled with outstanding free tools and resources to help make metric crunching easy. So, if you can’t afford enterprise-level services like Scout Labs, Radian6 or Sysomos, you’ll want to check out some of the freebies below to help you get a grip on your analytics.

Blogs

Use PostRank to help rank your blog content and news and and to determine what your fans are reading, sharing and organizing. It also identifies what your most popular posts are in your RSS feed.

Think of BlogPulse as a search engine for blogs and their posts. It’s similar to Technorati, but it provides additional views such as trending and conversations so that you can see search competitive topics and how other blogs are ranking.

Comments

Beyond standard search for keywords and brand names you’ll want to penetrate what’s being discussed in blog commenting systems too. That’s where YackTrack comes in. Simply enter your keywords or terms to see a nicely organized list that you can drilldown to get specific mentions from.

Branding

One of the more substantial branding tools available is Social Mention. It aggregates user generated content from across multiple social media platforms and streamlines outcomes into a very simple and easy to interpret web page. The one thing Social Mention doesn’t do is show a report over time. A work around this missing feature is to create an Excel spreadsheet and manually enter daily data that you gather. Otherwise, it’s a great (and free) tool.

Perhaps more of an entertainment tool rather than a true metric evaluator, How Sociable measures your brand’s keywords throughout 32 different social media sites. There’s some confusion around the ‘visibility score’ that How Sociable has developed and not all data appears to be accurate. For example, if you run a search on iPhone it yields a visibility score of 9,453 and a Google PageRank score of zero. Odd to say the least. Looks like brand visibility metrics might have a few glitches, but it’ still worth exploring.

Trends & Topics

Head over to Addict-o-Matic and enter a unique search term, brand or product name or just about anything and it will perform a search that delivers the buzz (or results) broken down by social media platform. It’s a very convenient snapshot that let’s you look at your social reach and the social sites where you have more presence in comparison to others.

Twitter

There are so many Twitter tools available that deciding which one to use can be a daunting task. For the purpose of benchmarking your brand against your competition, Twitalyzer is ideal. It shows you what social media strategies are working and what’s not, which makes it easy to adjust social media campaigns to maximize better results.

The power of influence is a core component in any social media campaign. Knowing who has better reach and strength and engaging with them can help persuade your audience to promote your brand. Klout measures influence as it relates to your brand through Twitter. You can identify which customers and communities are more likely to become brand evangelists and work with them to drive conversations.

Another hand Twitter tool is TweetStats. You can graph how many tweets per hour, day and month, as well as look at your tweet timeline and reply statistics. TweetStats is a fantastic way to track your level of interaction and look at areas that need improvement.

Google

Google Analytics (GA) may leave you feeling unnerved, but it actually does a tremendous job on tracking numbers and data. We’ll save GA how-tos for a future post. In the meantime, use PageRank Checker to see what Google thinks of your site. Using a scale from zero to 10, with 10 holding the most authority, you can run a quick search to find out how you rank.

In order for GA to actually work on your website you need to install tracking code on each page that you want the Google bot spiders to crawl. To make sure that you’ve set-up your code use SiteScan to confirm that you’ve performed a correct installation. Although SiteScan and PageRank Checker aren’t direct analytic tools they are helpful in gauging Google-related tasks and standards.

Competitive

Quarkbase has been touted as the ‘imdb.com for websites’. By entering a website’s URL you are presented with names of people associated with the site, traffic data, social popularity, site description and sites that are similar. This is one of the best free competitive research tools available. Data can be used to help you better position your brand and establish goals and objectives.

There you have it. Granted, there are so many tools, free and paid, that accessible on the web, we hope that this short list gets you moving in the right direction.

What are some of the other free tools that you’re using? How do you make them work for your brand and what do you like best about them? Share with us.

If you’re looking for a Twitter solution that combines both marketing and management then you absolutely must check out Market Me Tweet. Before you roll your eyes at the thought of yet another Twitter tool you’ll be happy to know that Market Me Tweet is a true stand-out from the pack of Twitter apps that have permeated the social media realm. What sets Market Me Tweet apart from the competition is its branding capabilities and that’s good news for businesses small and large.

For the most part, Market Me Tweet is similar in scope to the Hootsuite dashboard and its functionality. Users can integrate multiple Twitter accounts to track and tweet too. It can monitor keywords, schedule tweets in advance, track conversation threads, follow and unfollow users, autotweet RSS feeds and much more. As previously mentioned, the big difference is that it allows users to ‘brand’ their tweets.

For instance, if you’ve ever sent a tweet using a tweet client like TweetDeck, Tweetie or Hootsuite, you’ve probably noticed each tweet is labeled with a backlink to the application used to generate the tweet.

With Market Me Tweet you have the ability to customize your own branded backlink that not only features your business, site or blog name, but let’s you choose the URL to link back to. In essence, you can optimize your brand and drive traffic back to your site.

The benefits of being able to brand, optimize and create backlinks to each of your tweets is a home run for your online social presence. For every single tweet that you send and that someone else retweets you’re creating additional exposure via a customized backlink. Incredible!

Of course all amazing tools come at a price, but the nice thing is that Market Me Tweet is reasonably affordable. There are several monthly price plans available to suit your individual or professional needs. The investment that you make will pay back in spades, especially when you consider how many backlinks your tweets will be generating throughout the Twitter-sphere.

Are you already using this revolutionary tool? What type of success are you seeing? Drop a line and keep us posted.

Back in the day, press releases were the primary means of communication between business enterprises and the media. However, the advancement of the internet has made the traditional format of a press release less effective as journalists, press members and readers crave small chunks of succinct details that incorporate social media, linking and multimedia to make it more digestible and relevant. Compare this to the multi-page press releases that dominated newsroom fax machines in the past and it’s pretty clear that the way information is assembled and received has changed.

If you’re used to traditional press release formats its evolution to social media press release (SMPR) won’t be too much of a challenge. Knowing what to include and how to format your SMPR will be a big help in securing media and blogger coverage for your brand’s news and happenings.

The basic SMPR parts are:

1. headline
2. secondary headline
3. overview
4. body
5. facts
6. about
7. multimedia links
8. relevant links
9. tags

Each part has been labeled and is featured in a sample SMPR outline to make it easy to follow along.

1. For your headline, state exactly what’s the SMPR is about. This isn’t the place to use jargon or slang. A keyword or two and you’re good to go.

2.The secondary headline isn’t always necessary, but if you want to add a bit more insight and push readers to read the next line then include it. Follow the same guidelines you used in the headline.

Once you’ve built your SMPR you’ll want to distribute it to your media and blog contacts. There are multiple distribution methods for your SMPR. You can email, fax broadcast, post and link on your website or use distribution services. Distribution services typically come in two flavors – paid and free.Services with payment are very costly ranging in prices from $350 to $3500 depending on length, images and circumference, local, regional, national or international. The advantage of a paid service is that media and blog contacts are kept current and you will often receive specific instructions that pertain to how each individual likes to be approached and contacted. Additionally, you receive access to syndicated newswires like the Associated Press, Reuters and others which aren’t typically available through free services. Newswires are the official method of communication used by most to receive news content. If you’re interested in paying for distribution visit PR Newswire or Marketwire to learn more.

Free distribution of your SMPR can take place via a multitude of sites. Each has advantages and disadvantages. Ultimately, it will be up to you to determine which one is the best outlet for you and your brand. Some of the more popular free distribution sites are PRLog, i-Newswire and Press Release Point. You’ll want to research what’s included in the free distribution service and find out what types of flexibility you have with customizing your distribution list. This will help you get your SMPR into the hands of the right people. For instance, if a site informs you that they distribute to all the major national newspapers you should ask if they have distribution points to journalists that focus on specific content like health, technology or finance.

Also, keep in mind that the SMPR above is a sample only. Feel free to tailor your SMPR to fit your brand’s needs. You many need to go bigger or smaller. It’s entirely up to you.

Have you developed a SMPR lately? What have you included? How are you sending it out? Please share with us.

Incorporating video into your website and social media sites is an excellent way to grab the attention of your audience. Just like most of us enjoy reading books with pictures, we also want to see and hear through a movie. With the average person watching 182 online videos each month and YouTube serving more than 1 billion videos each day it’s easy to see that video is a marketing strategy that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Video Topic & Content

The subject that you choose for your video really depends on your brand, audience and industry. You might decide to showcase a news-themed video about a new product launch or maybe create a how-to or information-based video for your audience. Spend some time researching what your audience would like to watch. Let their preference help to guide you as you develop your script and content. Knowing what appeals to your consumers and following suit can help you convert them into brand evangelists.

Script & Filming

Hands down, the best thing about video marketing in 2010 is that you don’t need to hire an expensive agency with copywriters and art directors to put your video together. That’s not to say having Don Draper and his team of Mad Men available at your beck and call is a bad thing. If you have the budget and the time it’s worth exploring. For the rest of us, using a simple handheld or computer cam is more than ample in terms of equipment. Before you launch your video put together a rough script to help focus on what you want to cover. If necessary, use a tripod to keep the camera steady while recording.

Packaging Your Video

Some popular forms of video include testimonials from satisfied customers, highlight products being used in real-life situations, training videos or walk-throughs to simplify complex processes or extend existing content-like presentations. There are many possibilities when it comes to video. What’s important is that you drive traffic to your video. Try to cross-promote or develop a video series that will get your audience involved and keep them coming back for more.

Video Optimization

Here’s the part where we talk about search engine optimization. You can – and should – optimize your videos. Include keywords in your script, the title of your video and tagging. Word on the street is that YouTube will be launching a feature that makes the audio portion of all videos searchable. By optimizing your video scripts now you’ll stand a better chance of having your audio appear in keyword searches. Don’t forget to include keywords in your video title. Just be conscious of keyword overload. You still want people to know what your video is about. Use keywords in moderation.

Upload & Share

Take full advantage of all the video outlets that you have available. Host your videos on your website and include homepage teasers to let people know that you’ve created fresh video content. Upload your videos to all the major sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Viddler. Make your video available in multiple locations and you’ll give yourself a greater opportunity to appear in user-generated searches.

Monitor, Track & Analyze

Once you’ve gotten past creating and uploading your video you’ll want to involve yourself in its metrics. This will help you determine if it’s a success or a failure. Pay attention to the number of views, comments left about your video, revenue spikes and whether the perception of your brand has benefited.

If you need a little video inspiration, check out Erik Qualmann’s Socialnomics video that he put together to launch his new book. This video went viral and helped put Qualmann and his book on the map overnight.

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Get creative, have fun and test out video with your marketing strategy.