Although in early stages with regard to B2B customer adoption, social media presents new opportunities to connect with customers and prospects, build trust and brand loyalty, and create more tailored messages/campaigns to increase your marketing return on investment and stakeholder relevancy.

1. We covered many of the trends, adoption rates and overall effectiveness of social media marketing in our recent webinar on July 9: MROI - Finding the Business Value in Social Marketing.

According to Aberdeen - the following performance gains were realized over 12 months by best-in-class organizations leveraging social media to engage with customers:

• 96% improved customer advocacy
• 82% improved their ability to generate customer insights for products/service development
• 53% reduced market research cost

While tools are effective and results are good, the "rub" with social marketing lies in the difficulty in measuring the impact that social media has on buyers.

For example, you can't provide conclusive evidence of blog value.  While we might know the total readership for a blog, the viral nature of the Web exponentially increases this activity. And organizations don't know how to measure the value that viral video and social network marketing provides.

Based on our webinar and collective brains at IGLOO Software, here are some recommendations on how to optimize and measure the effectiveness your social media marketing initiatives:

1. For quantitative measurements, there are tools like Google Analytics (which we make extensive use of), Yahoo results (for tracking and conversion rates), and programs like Web Trends, Omniture, Visual Sciences to measure activities. You can also use social monitoring tools like Radiance, Nielsen Online Buzz Metrics and social rating tools like Delicious.
2. Since metrics are still evolving you need to measure effectiveness holistically. Improved analysis of community activity, for example, can be a powerful source on responses, intentions and actions - buyer behaviour.
3. Segmentation skills are still essential to connecting with a specific audience and making your message relevant. Study specifically how business buyers in certain markets use social networking sites. Also use surveys, focus groups and more. Remember to centralize this invaluable information and make it readily accessible.
4. Process is very important. For example, organizations should be focusing more specifically on how social media can support the sales cycle. At IGLOO we create processes that profile our customers over time, nurturing prospects and using social activity in the VIP Room, for example, to establish lead qualification scores.
5. And last but certainly not least, join in the conversation. Respond to your customer's comments on blogs. Find out what makes them happy, and what turns them off. Plug your engineers into your customer conversations. Comment on their blogs and participate in their forums-this way, you'll become a trusted resource minus the expected marketing spin.

Look for a recording of the webinar session on our website. I encourage you to attend next week's webinar session: Achieving breakthrough performance with Performance Management 3.0.