A new post from eMarketer, Americans Want Brands that Inform, highlights the results of a recent Lightspeed Research study, The Global Web Index.

Some great nuggets in this data.  None of this info is Earth-shattering, but it should come as great encouragement for marketers that are pushing for consumer engagement through social media, quality content development and authentic consumer relationship building.

A few salient take-aways:

1. People want brands to enrich them with knowledge, not just provide a product or service.
2. People want (and expect) brands to be present in places other than the place of purchase.
3. Social media engagement fosters trust. When it comes to making purchasing decisions we trust bloggers we read regularly and contacts within our social networks more than we trust mainstream media sources.

For your additional reference, I've embedded a presentation from Anita Caras, Head of Research EMEA from Microsoft, that uses the GWI data.

Future Web, Global Web Index 23rd September 2009. The New Role For Brands

Google has done it again, this time with the launch of an update to the Google Toolbar browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer called Google Sidewiki.

Essentially, Sidewiki allows visitors to submit comments and content related to any given web page as the navigate the page.

Jeremy Owyang gives a great roundup of the new SideWiki platform over at his Web Strategy blog.

Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand also does a great job of describing the new platform and how it functions. 

This is potentially a game changer, and one that marketers need to prepare for as the web becomes even more democratic.

 UPDATE: Kalena Jordan at SiteProNews writes a great review of Sidewiki.

Christina Warren over at Mashable posted an interesting piece citing a recent survey that appeared on eMarketer.

The good news: 86% of companies surveyed are employing social media in their marketing practices.

The bad news: Of these companies, 84% are not measuring the success (or failure) of their efforts.

When I read this, I almost fell off my chair.

Image courtesy of Andy Ramdin via Filckr

I would assume that there would be a higher level of scrutiny on marketing dollars that are spent in the social spaces -  that the C-Suite would demand some level of accountability for these budgets being allocated to a new (and in many cases,unproven) channel.

Add to that - digital marketing, by the nature of its being, is measurable, and there are lots of great ways to easily gauge the impact of your social media marketing campaigns, depending on the goal of initiative. Here are a few:

Brand Buzz / Voice of Customer:
Some social media campaigns aim to generate discussion about your brand and increase your "share of voice".  This word of mouth exposure is often referred to as earned media, and can be more valuable than bought media, as it is perceived as more credible. There are a wide array of social media monitoring tools available to measure brand mentions in the social space and determine whether the buzz is positive or negative.  If your social media campaign's goal is improve your brand profile, you'll want to check out Radian6, Sysomos,Trackur and SM2 (just to name a few).

Social Opt-Ins (Fans, Followers and Friends)  
Tracking the number of social opt-ins can be a great way to measure community-building initiatives. Remember that the key to measuring the real value of these is to focus on the quality of your community members, versus the quantity.  Are your Fans relevant to your brand and vice-versa?  Are they active participants in the online community, posting content and recommending your products to their networks? How large is their social graph, and how influential are they within it?

Link Building
If the goal of your campaign is to generate links to your website, this can easily be measured with Google Webmaster Tools using the "Links to your site" table.  These links are dated based on when they were crawled, so this can give you a good idea of how they correlate with a social media campaign.

Traffic Generation
When the goal of social media marketing is clickthroughs to your website, measure ROI with data from your web analytics software, such as Google Analytics.  Where is your traffic coming from and how does it behave on your site? Is there an incremental difference in the value of traffic from Facebook or a particular blog, conmpared to traffic from bought media?  Does earned traffic spend more time on your site or view more pages than bought traffic?

Sales / Conversions
If you are using goal tracking within your web analytics program, you can easily measure goals, or conversions,  according to traffic source. Another way to do this is to use unique promotional codes and landing pages to identify sales resulting from social media marketing campaigns.

Customer Service / Support Costs
Is your Facebook Page a place where you provide customer support, or better yet, where your customers support each other? Do you operate a community or forum containing product information and technical FAQ's (as in the case of Hewlett Packard's Community Wiki) ?  If so, then there is likely a way to correlate community activity with a decrease in call center volume, support tickets and/or product returns.

As is the case in any marketing initiative, the key to success is to establish clear and measurable objectives prior to developing the strategy or campaign execution.  In doing so, you'll be able to easily implement the tools needed to measure your success with at least some certainty.

Have any examples of how you have measured your social media campaigns?  I'd love to hear about them in the comments...

... as if there was any question. 

Oh, you mean the question in the title of my last post, Does Social Media Impede Sales?  That was rhetorical, and the answer, in case you missed the tongue planted firmly in cheek, is, only if you're not participating.

eMarketer released some market research from PQ Media, entitled Word-of-Mouth Posts Big Gains, reporting a 26.6% increase in US word of mouth marketing expenditure in 2008, in an economy that showed media sales dropping by 3.6% for the same year.  Seems like the C-Level are finally seeing the value and return from investing in the conversation.

These numbers aren't that shocking, nor is it surprising to see that the CPG and Food and Beverage categories lead the spending.  Look for the Health Care and Pharma segment to significantly increase their social media budgets in the two years to come as social media usage become seven more mainstream and regulations ease in the face of a new communications landscape.

Loved this funny from Scott Adams this morning.  Dilbert is always great for some business insight shrouded in dry sarcasm.

Is your brand's absence in social media conversation about your products or services costing you sales? This cartoon reminded me of a Cone study performed late last year that indicated that 93% of Americans that participate in social media expect companies to have a social media presence, and 85% believe companies should be engaging with customers via social media. If your brand isn't present and active in social media, can you justify that absence to your customers? Simply being afraid of opening an honest line of dialogue with your customers could be costing you...