SOCIAL MEDIA EXAMINER — It’s the Holy Grail of interactive marketing: getting "social media influencers" -- the ones with the voice and the reach, the ones to whom everyone else listens -- to endorse and promote what you’re doing. Recently, my company managed to inspire 60 such influencers to participate in our event, called The Influencer Project, and they even took it upon themselves to help spread the word. People like Social Media Examiner’s own Michael Stelzner, Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Meerman Scott, and others all signed on. We were grateful beyond belief. Some of the brightest minds in social media spoke at The Influencer Project. Why’d they come on board? And how’d we do it?...

THE SOCIAL TIMES — The ever-increasing amount of information flowing through social media forces the members of these networks to compete for attention and influence by relying on other people to spread their message. How is it that certain topics manage to get more attention than others, thus going viral and changing the agenda of an online community? A recent study published by HP Labs suggests that most Twitter users are generally rather passive and that the Twitter users with the most influence on the global stream are those who get off their thumbs and retweet...

HUBSPOT INBOUND INTERNET MARKETING BLOG — "What is the ROI?" is the question that usually follows announcements of new marketing activities. No matter how creative your marketing initiative might be, if it does not result in benefits larger than the initial investment, it is worth a revision. The ROI question has now long been part of the conversation about inbound marketing, email and social media. Yet, it remains less visible in the realm of another marketing channel -- customer evangelism...

PR 2.0 — The competition for attention is focused on social networks as brands vie for awareness and consideration. Establishing a presence in Facebook and Twitter is as necessary as it is trivial. In the great social land grab, many organizations are missing true opportunities to connect with the fifth P of the marketing mix, people. It’s less about communicating with those individuals who are already following you online and more about those who aren’t. To excel in social media, engagement has its rewards but it is through the acts of recognition, empowerment and reward that advocacy extends a brand’s reach across social graphs and social networks, online and in the real world...

MARKETINGPROFS — Though most active users of social networking sites say they visit those sites primarily to stay connected with friends and family, many also want to engage with brands: 65% of such frequent social networking users say they are a fan of at least one brand on Facebook and 31% follow a brand on Twitter, according to a survey from Invoke Solutions. Active social networkers -- those who have at least one active social networking account and frequently engage in social media-related behavior -- say they interact with brands via social networks in various ways...