Socialnomics – putting an ROI on successful social media campaigns

After my great digital comms/social media training run by the eConsultancy‘s James Matthewson earlier this week, I was prompted to go out and find some concrete stats about the success of brand involvement in social media campaigns. Just came across this fab little Socialnomics video, from the author of the Socialnomics book, Eric Qualman, and however much you think you already know about brands marketing in this space, it really is worth a watch.

Time and time again we find clients hesitant to relinquish control over their brand in the interests of entering the social media space, yet there are countless examples – as the video will show you – of big and small brands who have made the leap (or even tiny step in some cases) and for whom it has paid huge dividends.

However, of course it is far from fool-proof and companies should not throw all caution to the wind, implementing social media marketing strategies with abandon. In fact, social’s greatest strength is potentially its greatest danger – that of instant amplification. Whilst it means that campaigns done well can reap huge rewards in a very short space of time, it also means that those done badly can rapidly spiral out of control in the worst way, with irreparable damage caused to the brand (see the online legend of Kryptonite bike locks, the shining example of one man’s blog causing an estimate loss of $10m).

(A good number of examples of crisis communications in the YouTube era can be found here.)

But there are still a lot of brands out there who have a lot to learn, and they could do a lot worse than start with some Socialnomics.

The iPad – will it blend?

Squeals of excitement yesterday at an Engine Digital Training day provided by the eConsultancy, when trainer James Matthewson revealed his shiney new iPad – fresh out of the box from his trip to the States.

I have long been in love with all things Apple, and finally it seems I have the ultimate toy – a Kindle combined with an iPod Touch. It was just as pretty as expected, and very impressive video/picture quality. Above all it was fun to use. Sadly the app store wasn’t connecting in the UK so no books had been uploaded yet, and I’m still keen to see how well the books read on screen without inducing screen fatigue after long periods. But I’m optimistic.

But in all testable respects it seemed a smashing piece of kit. Web browsing was just as fluid as the iPhone but obviously with much greater visibility, although there remains the issue with a lack of Flash compatilbilty. Even the keyboard had good usability. Though I have read recommendations for the external keyboard when using it for prolonged blogging, I feel this just turns it into a regular Notebook, but with a rather unwieldy piece of extra kit attached. I’d be hoping to blog away using just the iPad interface – that’s the cool factor.

And look who else has jumped onto the iPad bandwagon? Our friend in the white coat at BlendTec. Posted just over a week ago on 5th April, the YouTube video has already received over 5,ooo,ooo views. Wowzers.

But will it blend?