The Social Media Breakfast Club - Via The Comit Developers Blog

The Social Media Breakfast Club (Shanna Perkins via The Comit Developers Blog)

Shanna Perkins, SEO & Internet Marketing Specialist at Comit Developers, wrote a great post on the different strengths and weaknesses of the most popular social media platforms last week.

Given that I'm old enough to remember watching The Breakfast Club in the movie theaters, I was particularly fond of her use of the characters from the movie to describe the traits of each social media platform.  It's a great way to offer a perspective that everyone can relate to - even if you didn't watch the movie ;)

LinkedIn transforms Contacts section into super-powered personal assistant that integrates with EVERYTHING

Image Courtesy of  TechChrunch

Today, LinkedIn released a few important new features for members that really turbo-charges their Connections section of the site.  In addition, they released a new mobile app called Contacts for Apple devices (with other platforms slated for future release dates).

If you're like me, you have probably already imported some of your Contacts into LinkedIn from your gMail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc accounts.  Which was great...except of course, that it was a one-time affair.  If you have added any contacts since your original import, those won't appear on your LinkedIn Connections because the import is a one-way process.

Well, go back and do it again, because now LinkedIn creates a permanent connection to your mail system's contacts and will keep your contacts synchronized between those systems (should you choose to permit it) and your LinkedIn profile.  Unbelievably, LinkedIn also now supports synching your mobile device's contact lists with your LinkedIn profile if you also install the mobile application.

Free Webinar & White Paper: IBM Social Analytics: The Science behind Social Media Marketing & Putting the Science into Social Business

As I have been working on Inbound Marketing & Content Marketing Strategies with clients I have noticed that as we begin to master measuring and managing the metrics that have been traditionally associated with Social Media Marketing (likes, reach, shares, etc...) they quickly discover that these metrics are disconnected from the way we manage the rest of our Marketing, particularly around tracking Sales Conversions and assigning cash values to metrics.

The truth is that even though Social Media offers marketers a wealth of data that almost no other marketing channel provides about our customers, the tools we have to analyze, report, and act on that data have not kept up with the pace of development of the various social media platforms.

IBM has recently released a fantastic set of resources that help to illuminate how you can use a scientific & quantifiable approach to tracking these Social Media Metrics.  They are based on IBM's new approach to Social Business & Analytics and outline steps you can begin working on today to develop and execute a Social Media Strategy that is based on HARD DATA instead of the guesswork we're so used to in this space.