Value of Social Media and Listening Posts – Ask a Marketing Expert

Question 1 – What is the Value of Facebook Fans, Twitter Followers, and Linkedin Connections?

Here’s another question that came in from my blog — What is the VALUE of a fan, follower, connection, etc to an organization? How do you assess this value? How can you measure the ROI of engagement, brand sentiment and other squishy outcomes of social media marketing?

Answer 1 – Barry McLawhorn

Mark Zuckerberg Just Doesn’t Get It! (…or, worse yet, maybe Facebook just doesn’t care)

Zuckerberg just doesn’t get it! Facebook is our voice and our broadcast network not his.

The only reason Facebook has 500,000,000 users is because the members of Facebook (i.e., free contenet creators and “broadcasters”) use Facebookas a conduit to share, connect and discover what THEY want.

The more Zuckerberg tries to control the behavior and the variety of choices that the users of Facebook have for freedom of expression, then, the less valuable the conduit becomes and the more risk the Facebook brand incurs.
Mark Zuckerberg Just Doesn’t Get It! (…or, worse yet, maybe Facebook just doesn’t care)

On a scale of 1 -10:

How annoying do you find the Facebook ads at the top of your wall?

How much of an invasion of your privacy do you find Facebook’s new practice of displaying very specific data at the top of your page?

How much of an identity theft risk do you feel that displaying this personal information causes?

How can Facebook monetize their visitors, while not interferring and annoying us?

Barry C. McLawhorn
BedRock Viral Marketing & Associates

Answer 2 – Cherie Tripp LeJeune

I rarely pay attention, what I hate are all the ads that are the lead in’s on You Tube.

Answer 3 – Dr. Angela Hausman

I find myself using RockMelt a lot for social network interaction because it eliminates the ads from before and in the middle of Facebook pages. It still has the ads on the sides. However, with RockMelt, I can also see updates to Facebook without going to the Facebook site, in which case I eliminate seeing Facebook ads altogether. This is likely to be the face of Facebook in the future, meaning companies will get no value from doing Facebook ads. You can see more about how to use Facebook more effectively in my recent blog post at: http://hausmanmarketresearch.org/879/facebook-business-marketing-is-spam/

Question 2 – Importance of Listening Post

‘m working on a presentation for AMA -DC on listening posts. Do you have a listening post? How important is the listening post to your firm? What software are you using to listen? How is your firm using its listening post? How effective is your listening post? What changes do you plan in the coming year regarding listening?

Answer 1 – Cherie Tripp LeJeune

Smart donors should be assessing the social media of the nonprofits soliciting them before they give. The dialog and exchanges reflect the energy that exists in an organization, which is very, very important. On the flip side need to make sure that it is not all “bla, bla, bla.”.This also applies to listening posts by organizations for it is delivers more measured results that can be used pursuing donors.