How One Company Assessed ROI on Social Media

By Beth J. Bates, New Media Special Correspondent

In the past, I’ve written about what to expect when attempting to determine your social media ROI. I still believe that results are largely qualitative and for some companies difficult to assign a number. However, I found a great example of putting the numbers to the test.

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Budget Spent on Social Media (Word-of-Mouth) Marketing Growing

By Beth J. Bates, New Media Special Correspondent

Despite an uncertain economy, spending on word-of -mouth (WoM) marketing (including social media) rose 14.2% to $1.54 billion in 2008 according to research from PQ Media and is on target to grow another 10.2% this year. This includes budgets spent on tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

PQ Media defines WoM marketing as an “alternative marketing strategy” driven by “brand ambassadors” (evangelists) online and offline.

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Is Social Media Old News?

By Beth J. Bates, New Media Special Correspondent

I’ve been speaking with several colleagues recently who think that social media has run its course — that no new technology is likely to emerge that makes social media significantly better without fundamentally changing the face of the web as we know it.

I understand this point of view, but I don’t think the phenomenon is in danger of dying just yet. This thing we call social media has encompassed audio, video, blogging, micro-blogging, community building, email … the list goes on. What could possibly come next? I communicate through Twitter, email, Facebook, instant message, SMS texting and social communities, and I’m having a hard time keeping up. But even if the rate of technological change is slowing down, social media is here to stay. On any given day, I use a wide variety of social media tools, and I can’t imagine giving them up:

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Five Reasons Why Accessibility Matters to Government Contractors

By Aaron Taylor

On June 25, 2001, legislation went into effect mandating broad compliance with new federal accessibility standards. These standards, laid out in the Section 508 amendment to the 1973 Workforce Rehabilitation Act, had a huge impact on the way government contractors deliver IT services to federal agencies. Most state governments quickly followed suit with similar requirements.

While there is no law that requires a government contractor — or any business, for that matter — to apply accessibility standards to their own website, there are a lot of good reasons for doing so. Here are my top five:

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Facebook vs. Google – Who Will Win?

By Beth J. Bates, New Media Special Correspondent

Hear the clicking of keyboards and the droning of hard drive fans? That’s the sound of Google and Facebook in a head-to-head grudge match. Each giant thinks that it has the edge on its competitors, but are they really comparing apples and oranges?

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