TOP RANK ONLINE MARKETING BLOG — When it comes to businesses leveraging the social web to communicate with customers and improve brand awareness, there’s some good news and there’s some bad news. The good news: 86% of professionals have adopted social media in some way, according to a recent survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education. The bad news: A whopping 84% of survey respondents who’ve adopted social media don’t measure their social media programs. Even worse: 40% weren’t even sure they could monitor social media ROI...

READWRITEWEB — Whether you're Microsoft or Mel's Meat Market, the true power of social media and its impact on brands is really only beginning to be felt. As futurologist Ian Pearson stated in Gartner's Customer Relationship Management Summit earlier this year, the rapid pace of change in technology means that companies need to focus on agility instead of just optimization when it comes to integrating social media and CRM applications. Both affordable and easy to use, tools for monitoring a brand or reputation are essential and keep getting better. Trackur, Nambu, and the social media discussion search engine backtype all come to mind. Creating and capturing market conversations with customers has also improved greatly with the advent of online branded communities such as Lotus Connections and Clearstep as well as Lithium's emphasis on community and CRM. We have monitoring, communities, and collaboration: but something still seems to be missing. We need rules of engagement for social CRM...

Reputation management is essential to both individuals and companies. The more popular your brand is, the more critical it will be to keep tabs on it and the more time it will consume out of your day. If you work at a startup and no one has heard of your brand, or if you’re an individual who has just started blogging, these tools are still useful to you...