SocialMedia404

We’ve been asked to do some research on how social technologies are, and will, impact the new U.S. health care reform in a couple of different areas.  One of the areas we are focusing on is Employee Wellness.

Our experience in working with many Human Resource (HR) departments over the years, is that most have a very “traditional”, non-innovative stance.  Most use policies and procedures which come from concepts developed shortly after World War II.

I wonder how many would be brave enough to attempt an approach we found south of the border.

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As promised in a previous post on this topic, here is the next layer of the Social Media Scorecard I talked about in San Diego last week.

The audiences’ biggest surprise, I think, was that in a crowded world of highly sophisticated automated tools, you might still have to actually talk to people.

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I saw this hilarious article over at Chase Jarvis explaining the difference between advertising, marketing PR and branding.  We are always looking for was to tease these kindred cousins apart in projects, from now on I’m using this!  Original is here: Chase Jarvis Blog: Who Says Youre A Great Lover?.

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The World Economics Forum 2010 has just wrapped up in Davos, Switzerland.  I was watching the session on Technology for Society, a panel discussion with some notable participants from the public and private sectors, including Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

They spoke of advances, directions, barriers and issues.  Interesting perspectives which occasionally outlined a future with no path to get there.  There was something missing.

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It may just be me, but I’ve seen another spike in activity lately about measurement, and the value, of Social Media initiatives.  While many are still saying you can’t really measure the ROi, that does nothing to inform and influence organizations looking to invest anything in Social Media.

And the debate is not whether Social Media can be of value, the question remains to be how much value?  A hint of not being able to measure is enough to stop most organizations from pursuing Social Media immediately.

I think the answer is looking to trusted methods to understand new information.

I’ve been invited to speak with members of the San Diego Software Industry Council next month, where I’ll be presenting the latest addition to our OASIS Social Media Best Practices: The Social Media Scorecard.

Here’s a peek.

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New Marketing Labs posted an interesting interview on their blog with Miriam Kutcher, VP of Marketing at research firm IDC Insights about their new community launched last March.  Miriam and a group of IDC analysts worked for most of 2009 establishing the community to address needs in their research verticals.

She generously shares their goals and details the “scorecard” approach she uses to track return on the community.

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“Foundations of Listening” is the new book from The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), and it was recently covered in the influential Advertising Age.  What the ARF found, is that despite the wealth of online opinion or “buzz”, and the growing basket of tools available to monitor such, neither is really that valuable.

So you can set up the fanciest tools available, but it doesn’t replace, or as the ARF found, even reflect what is actually in most peoples’ minds.  Tools won’t give you “the answer”.

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