The real question is to what extent are social media more or less valuable than other forms of marketing, service, sales, branding, public relations, and so on? We can—and should—find out. Piloting programs with precharted milestones or an end goal in mind allows us to compare and contrast performance at a campaign level and against other initiatives.

Quoted above is an excerpt from Brian Solis' recent article, "ROI Doesn't Mean 'Return on Ignorance'," appearing in BusinessWeek a few days ago. Brian takes on the idea that too many companies are diving into social media without thinking things through - taking the "spray and pray" approach as opposed to planning a strategic entry into the space.

The shotgun approach to social media can and will be chaotic. If you thought the internet was crazy before, wait until your brand is unleashed upon by the world's most social and hyper-connected users. When you don't have a clear goal in mind or an end-result in sight, you'll be floundering when your boss checks-in to see how the company's social media initiative is taking.

Tips for measuring the ROI of social media

The best thing for you to do is to approach social media as you would any other medium. Think about the audience, your approach, your expected outcomes, and the resources invested.

Ask yourself these questions: 

• Who is my target audience?
• How and where will I reach them?
• Once I reach my audience, what action do I want them to take?
• How can I measure the success rate of that action?
• What resources have I utilized to implement this effort?

If you can answer those questions about the social media initiative you are about to undertake, you can prove the ROI of social media.

Take a look at Brian's article and let me know what you think in the comments. Is he firing on all cylinders? Or is he missing something important?

Today is Social Media Day, at least according to Mashable, the leading social media blog. For those of us active in the space, whether it be professionally or on a personal level, social media doesn't need a day of its own--as we're fortunate enough to be involved in this new medium everyday.

However, I do love how Mashable has framed up their celebration, describing Social Media Day as "a day to celebrate the revolution of media becoming social."

And that's really what it is: a revolution. Never before has word traveled so fast or so far. Never before has a single person been empowered to take on a host of giants. Never before have the masses been able to take the reigns of brands and businesses. Social media has changed all of that.

If you're calendar isn't full (and if it is, make some room), take some time to celebrate the fact that we live and work in a world that has been changed for the better through social discourse and hyper-connectivity. Attend a local meetup, leave a comment on someone's blog, or find another way to get in touch with your online community, because without the social web a lot of things would be different.

Happy Social Media Day!

P.S. If you live in Des Moines, you can come out for the #dmtweetup tonight at All Play.

Over the next few weeks, [Yahoo's] 280 million e-mail users will be able to exchange comments, pictures and news articles with others in their address books. The program won't expose a user's contact list to the public, as was done by Google through its social networking application, Buzz. But unless a user proactively opts out of the program, those Yahoo e-mail subscribers will automatically be part of a sweeping rollout of features that will incorporate the kinds of sharing done on sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

To allay privacy concerns, Yahoo said it would give users a week's notice before launching the new features and provide a single button on the site for opting out entirely.

Specifically, the company will launch a product called Yahoo Updates that allows e-mail users to see what other contacts on their lists are commenting about or sharing on sites like Yahoo Finance, Facebook and the photo sharing site Flickr. Updates will initially include 15 sites and partnerships and will eventually expand to include partners such as Twitter this summer.

Long live email. That's the rallying cry of many who are heavily invested in the platform, including Google (with Gmail) and now Yahoo. Yahoo is putting its bets on a new product platform called Yahoo Updates, which will be similar in nature (judging by the article above) to Google Buzz.

Is email the first and original social network, as Jeremiah Owyang describes? Or is the inbox sacred and independent of the relational ties we forge across the ever-expanding, ever-changing social web?

While Google Buzz saw several hiccups across its implementation, I still think it was a resounding success as an entrant into the market. The only problem is that the large majority of Gmail users just weren't/aren't interested in being part of a social network. Will the same be true for Yahoo email subscribers, a userbase some 50% larger than that of Gmail (and the 2nd largest free email provider overall)?

This move by Yahoo looks like a forced entry into the social space, and it could bear the same fate as Buzz. Just as I've said before that not everyone (or every business) should be using social media, I don't believe that everyone should be part of a social network either. In both situations, the entry into the social web is a conscious choice. It isn't something that can be willed upon a set of users, as Yahoo appears to be doing.

Do you think Yahoo Updates will be a success? Will you be opting out before the program launches (or would you opt out if you had a Yahoo Mail account)?

From time to time, we like to remind everyone of the various ways to consume the content that we're publishing at Silicon Prairie News (SPN). We list some of our options on our subscriptions page, but we've recently added some additional ways to receive our content.

If you haven't figured it out by now, the distribution channels for information have changed dramatically in recent years. People aren't visiting authoritative websites to consume information direct from the source; instead they're relying on relationships and tertiary networks to feed that information to them. Whether it's Facebook, Twitter, an RSS feed, or a daily email, you need to understand the tools available to today's media-makers.

One group that has it figured out is Silicon Prairie News, based in Omaha, NE. SPN started a few years back as a WordPress blog that highlighted locals and area entrepreneurs on a somewhat regular basis. WordPress was the perfect platform because it made categorization easy, publishing was a snap, and search engines loved the site architecture. As the blog posts started to roll, the folks at Silicon Prairie discovered that a number of their readers were using platforms like Twitter and Facebook to consume their news, so naturally they extended into those areas, following their readers.

Even after the latest redesign, SPN is still delivering content right. Last week they pushed a post that further explained their new subscription options, now offering city-specific RSS feeds, email updates, and Twitter accounts. What will SPN receive in return for making these channels available? More dedicated readers. What did it take for SPN to put these in place? Time, some development, and a big set of ears.

As customers continue to receive more information from the world around them, these organizations and businesses must adapt to the new distribution model. Figure out how your customers want to stay connected and in-the-know, then give them that option. You'll see them flocking back to you (or subscribing to your daily RSS feed) without question.

We are looking for the best and brightest startup companies in America ... preferably outside Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston, and other technical hotbeds. It's not that we are opposed to those places, just that we want to recognize that technical innovations can come from anywhere.

Here is where you can nominate your favorite startup in any of our six categories. Gather the information needed and anything else you want to include (files, videos, etc.) and just shovel it in. Click on the stars in the upper right hand corner of each nomination to rate them.

Tell your friends about this site so they can become involved, too. Come back often to see the companies that have been nominated, to discuss them with other readers, and ultimately to vote on your favorites for me to visit this summer in my RV. The top 24 companies will be featured in a 12-hour reality television series, but only if YOU nominate and vote for them.

As an entrepreneur on the Silicon Prairie, it's exciting to see initiatives like this one from Bob Cringely (supported by the Kauffman Foundation) that are on a mission to highlight startups outside the Valley.

Cringely is a veteran of the information technology field, spending 8 years as a columnist for InfoWorld and nearly a dozen with PBS working with documentaries. This campaign, "Cringely's (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour," will spotlight startups recommended by the masses and the contributions they make to the U.S. economy.

Ultimately, this initiative will culminate in a 12-hour reality TV series, which Cringely will create for broadcast on a major network. See Cringely's blog for more details, and be sure to nominate your favorite startups. This is another great chance for the Midwest to shine.

Also, thanks to the Kauffman Foundation for continuing to foster collaboration and support for the region's startups and entrepreneurs.

March 4, 2010 from 5:30pm to 7:30pm
Raccoon River Brewing Company
200 10th Street, Des Moines

This is the official launch event for Social Media Club Des Moines, a new chapter of the international Social Media Club.

Join fellow business owners, professionals, enthusiasts, and users as we celebrate our chapter's launch and look ahead towards what the club will offer the Des Moines area as a community resource for social media.

Also, if you haven't done so already, please create a profile on the Social Media Club Des Moines website so our members can get to know you and what you'd like to learn about social media.

We hope to see you on March 4 at Raccoon River!

Though things have been rolling for the past few months, everything finally culminates this Thursday night (March 4, 2010) at the official launch event for Social Media Club Des Moines. People will start filing through the doors at Raccoon River Brewing Company around 5:30pm and we'll have a short presentation about the club at 6:00pm.

As the freshly elected president of the club, you'll be hearing from me briefly on Thursday night, but also watch my blog for a more formal introduction.

I hope to see you downtown this Thursday night! I'm looking forward to meeting everyone and finally matching avatars with real people. Social Media Club is going to be a great resource for the Des Moines community and I'm excited to start learning right alongside you!

If you're concerned about giving up your personal files or private data to a fresh face in the cloud, Pogoplug could be the answer for you. This device from Cloud Engines allows you to match it up with an external hard drive and then serve your files across the web to whichever device you are using.

I received a Pogoplug as a gift over the holidays and have it happily mated to a 1TB MyBook from Western Digital. Take a look at the video review from the Wall Street Journal for Katherine Boehret's take on this little pink (and white) device.

Watch MikeThoughts.com for my full review on the Pogoplug.

What simple statement about your business or brand — just a quick, clear sentence or two at most — tells your prospects that you are the only alternative for them? Sounds like a response should just jump out at you. Yet most businesses (on- and offline) cannot provide an answer that simply rolls off their tongues or, even more appropriately in the case of e-commerce, appears on their home pages.

Just as Bryan Eisenberg discusses in his post, the idea of having a Unique Value Proposition is nothing new or different. The term was coined in the 1940s. What is different about many businesses today is that they can't articulate their UVP, or the one they do have doesn't accurately describe the business.

As a marketer I see, experience, and realize what happens within promotional teams as they develop clever campaigns that attempt to guide prospects around faults in a product, or derive slick slogans to sell a system that users don't want to pay for.

Wouldn't it be easier if you could convey the true value of your business and customers just lined up to buy? That's what Apple has. That's what Zappos has. That's what Ford is building. Their unique value proposition may not be conspicuous, but it's that specific idea that is driving their growth and consumers' willingness to buy.

Can you describe the value of your business in a single sentence or two? Does that statement get people excited about what you provide?

The problem with HTML prototypes is that they are time consuming and expensive. Building a functional prototype takes a lot of work and in most cases is  discarded once the final build begins. Unless you can find a way of turning your prototype into a working site, this strikes me as a waste of resources.  In my opinion, this cost precludes their use for anything other than the largest and most complex project. However, wireframing does not need to be like that. At Headscape the vast majority of wireframes are hand drawn sketches.

In working on many different websites and web projects, I completely agree that full-fledged, all-out-designed prototypes are a waste of time. Unless you are dead sure how the client is going to react, you'd better be careful how much time you put into a wireframe before showing it off.

If you aren't a napkin artist or would like your sketched wireframes to look a little more polished, try out Balsamiq or Mockingbird, two clean looking, easy-to-use, web-based mockup tools.

I started using Ping.fm last summer - testing it out as a platform that afforded me access to several of my social networks by way of email and chat clients, plus the unique ability for cross-posting updates. In fact, Ping.fm was cross-posting content for users before anyone else.

Now, with Seesmic on a quest to support one million updates per day and preparing to open their apps through their own plug-in architecture, the acquisition of Ping.fm (and the technology it uses to integrate with over 100 applications) makes sense.

The only question I have is whether or not this technology is going to be useful. Are they really expecting someone to have 10-15 networks they need to connect with? Or is this just a means to bring connectivity to more niche networks through Seesmic for the user that needs it?

Chop your WordPress blogging time in half - We've added support for WordPress blogs. Schedule and post updates to multiple WordPress accounts, follow blogs in a home feed, and reblog the posts of your choice!

 

Trending Topics Demystified - Ever wondered, "Why is that topic trending?!" HootSuite now offers explanations. From now on, you can demystify the trending topics with the simple click of a button.

Link & Media Previews - HootSuite users can now preview URLs before opening them. Preview links including most popular shortened URLs, image-sharing sites like twitpic and ow.ly, YouTube videos, and more.

The more I use HootSuite, the more I am beginning to see it as a direct competitor for Seesmic. If you are looking for a single dashboard to monitor and manage social media accounts across the board, HootSuite is worth looking at.