RADIAN6 BLOG — Last week we drilled down into engagement metrics, so this week let’s take a look at awareness and reach. The reach of your brand is, essentially, a measure of the impression your brand is making online: how far it’s moved across the Web and how many eyes, ears, and mouths are seeing, hearing, and talking about it. Now, how do you measure reach? It might seem a little fuzzy at first, but these few metrics can provide a foothold in the practice of measuring how far your brand extends -- and *how* it extends -- out there on the Web...

SOCIAL MEDIA B2B — Today at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas, Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, announced a new ad program for Twitter. These new ads are called @Anywhere. When you find a reference of a Twitter account, you can roll over the link and bring up a Twitter card. It shows if you are following the account or not, recent tweets and other details about the account. You can also follow the account directly from the card. This tool lets you interact with Twitter from the site, without ever going to Twitter.com. You can also sign in to the site using Twitter more easily than ever before. The platform is launching on a limited number of sites like ebay, Yahoo and Digg. B2B companies are using Twitter to build networks of followers and ultimately generate leads for new business, and this new @Anywhere approach is a way to build those networks and make sure the followers are relevant...

VENTUREBEAT — ThreatMetrix is announcing today that it has launched the ThreatMetrix Fraud Network, a service that protects e-commerce companies and social media firms from online fraud. The service can recognize devices -- computers, laptops or phones -- that are being used to log into a site. It associates some 200 characteristics of the device with a user and then decides whether there is any fraud involved. Then it helps the customer decide whether to proceed with transactions related to payments, logins, or the creation of new accounts...

IDG KNOWLEDGE HUB — I have just returned from the Bay Area where last week I moderated a panel of senior marketers on the topic of Social Media within the complex B2B marketing mix. The more I think through the potential for this area, the more excited I become about the contributions that Social Media will eventually make to marketing. What is most promising is that "Social" will help to transform marketing communications into what it should be: a two-way interaction between buyer and seller. Presently, much of our marketing communications is just the opposite: a one-way push of the vendor’s voice. But Social Media is not Marketing...Yet. Mostly, it’s a jumbled mass of dialogue with a lot of static to sort through...

MASHABLE — At last night’s "Bigg Digg Shindigg" in Austin, TX, Digg CEO Jay Adelson briefly revealed plans for a massive overhaul of the social news site. This morning, I had an opportunity to chat with Adelson in-depth about the new Digg and what users, publishers, and the web as a whole should expect. To sum it up, Adelson says the new strategy will "enable social curation of all the world’s content and the conversation around it." To get there though, has re-built its entire site from the ground up, with dramatic changes that will be rolled out over the coming weeks and months...