social media | Social Signal

When you're talking about yourself, your brand or your organization, you may have first-person credibility... but you also have a pretty obvious conflict of interest. Add that to the growing distrust of advertising and public relations - in fact, of institutional communications generally - and you have a challenge.

These days, your audience is putting much more trust in their personal networks: their friends, family, neighbours and colleagues. When they hear a personal message from someone they know, it punches through in a way that organizational communications can't.

Many organizations want to know how to get started with social media, or how to take it to the next level. All too often, the answer they get is the name of a site or platform: Create a Twitter feed! Set up a Facebook page! Build your network on LinkedIn!

While it can be very helpful to know about different platforms, no one platform is right for every organization. To make good choices about where to spend your social media dollars, you need to be clear about what you want to get out out of social media, and how you're going to do it in compelling way.

Asked on LinkedIn: Your thoughts about ROI with social media would be appreciated

Your best bets for quantifying ROI are:

1. Direct sponsorship/revenue: Think beyond advertising and premium fees to other ways of earning revenue with social media (product sales, licensing fees, sponsorships). These can be priced by other examples; the dollars that you earn this way will be directly trackable.

If you've ever wondered whether social media is funny, check out the reaction to Rob's Teh Funny Northern Voice keynote. The Twitter backchannel is reprinted in text below.

These tweets are in chronological order, so you can follow the thread of the conversation. In related news, we'd love to hear of a Twitter search tool that lets you sort results in chronological order; flipping the order from the reverse chronological results given by Twitter's own search was quite a chore.