SOCIAL MEDIA EXAMINER — Let’s assume you know whom you want to work with, but you just don’t move in their circles. How can you make yourself known without cold-calling (or risking rejection)? Simple. Try networking and nurturing a relationship with social media. This article will help you prospect using the power of LinkedIn and Twitter (together). First, you need to do some housekeeping before you put yourself forward, and by that I mean clean up your LinkedIn profile. Take a good hard look at it and ask yourself the following:...

SOCIAL MEDIA EXAMINER — Are you trying to figure out how social media is impacting your bottom line? Are you already measuring but not seeing the results you had hoped for? One of the reasons measuring the return on investment (ROI) of social media has sparked so many discussions is because it’s not easy. The main barrier to end-to-end measurement is the lack of a true social customer relationship management (CRM) solution. While Salesforce and others are working hard to bring a full solution to market, many marketers are simply cobbling together data they receive from web tracking solutions and social monitoring solutions. Unfortunately, this will only give you pieces of the story...

THE SOCIAL TIMES — The pseudo-transparency of the social web contributes to a common marketing error -- equating visitors with leads. Merely counting the number of unique website visitors is an insufficient method to determine the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. One must examine who the visitors are and what they sought once they landed. LeadForce1, a cloud-based B2B marketing automation platform developer, examined these factors for their enterprise clients, with findings to guide them -- and us -- on appropriate channels to generate leads. The B2B Social Media Report Card concludes that for B2B enterprises...

MASHABLE — Former President of CBS News Andrew Heyward wrote in the Harvard Business Review last year that "every company is a media company," summarizing the idea that marketing is shifting to an environment where advertisers need to produce compelling content in order to succeed. Recent data suggests that this is indeed the case, and that looking at social media services like Twitter and Facebook strictly as lead generation tools might be counter-productive, especially for companies that focus on business-to-business sales...

EMARKETER — While many marketers struggle with how to measure social media marketing return on investment, some businesses are finding at least one hard metric where their efforts have paid off -- customer acquisition. According to a February–March 2010 survey from office services firm Regus, smaller companies see the most success, with nearly half of small businesses around the world having acquired a customer through social networks...