Social media for B2B marketing - why do it and how to measure it

As people spend more and more time online writing in 140-character snippits on Twitter, or letting the world know what they're doing on Facebook, job searching or showing off career prowess on Linkedin, or arguing (brainstorming) in any of the countless industry forums, it's becoming increasingly important to incorporate social media into the marketing mix.  Here's the deal, though, marketers can't just "do" social media for the sake of trying to see what sticks.  Each outlet needs a purpose, and most importantly, there need to be methods for measurement in place.

Here's a look at the social media mix for my current company:

Looks like a spaghetti diagram, huh?  These could likely be integrated and managed via a single console (ala using an ESB with a Management Console on the face of it), but let's not dive into the Developer geek think just yet.

Some highlights around our social media mix:
Every tool has a purpose - here are the top three:

• Facebook: engage in "fun" conversations; post events; post use cases and get use cases
• Twitter: engage in relevant conversations; drive people to your site (in our case, currently we're driving people to our blog); while Twitter has a no follow so can't help you rise the SEO ranks, now that tweets get picked up in Google, posting relevant links with content that people might search on can further help drive people to the site
• Linkedin: prove thought leadership; get in front of targeted audiences by being part of the "club" on Linkedin (join the right groups)

Social media don'ts:

• Post the same content on every (social) site
• Let a group or feed go stale
• Use social media for blamestorming

Social media dos:

• Give content that will help people
• Make it easy for your community to find/follow what they want
• Give people information they can just find in that outlet (goes to the first point)
• Talk like a real person!  People surfing Facebook or browsing Twitter don't want to hear from marketers

Measuring social media coos:
There are tools like socialmention.com (a free one) where you can see how social media is moving the needle for your company from a bird's eye view.  Specific things shown here include:

• Strength: how likely is it that your brand is being discussed in social media?
• Sentiment: are people saying good things or bad things?
• Passion: are people going to talk about your brand, and then do it again?
• Reach: how influential is the social media work?

Here's a chart of other ways to measure, and tools to watch from Altimeter:

And with that, I'm off to tweet!