Radium

Developing unique and interesting content is hard work. Let me repeat – Developing unique and interesting content is hard work. Don’t believe me? Try and knock out a couple of blog posts. Better yet, do it in your spare time. In between all of the other work demands you have, try and craft an entertaining piece of content targeted to your audience.

I’m not trying to turn off anyone from launching a blog or spending time crafting great content. Quite the contrary – I believe the value you generate from developing great work is tremendous. But not everyone has time to develop their own content or publish a blog on a regular basis. How can these people get their message out?

Now, before you curse me out and tell me that social media isn’t free – relax, I’m in agreement with you. Investing in social media has a very real cost and it’s definitely not free. But most of the tools to conduct social media are free to use (facebook, twitter, blogs, etc.).

Because these tools are free, many companies treat them as such and make no real investment in them. They don’t bother putting together a strategy, mapping out goals or defining metrics and when things get too busy, they simply walk away from them altogether.

So what if more social media sites had a cost assigned to them? What if companies had to pay to create a facebook page or a twitter account? Would this ensure they stuck with it? Would it make the content more relevant to users? Would anything change?

Being a good listener is fundamental for social media success, but listening alone isn’t enough – you need to engage people. If you work for a big company or operate within a large industry, this can mean thousands of conversations a day. So what happens if you miss just one of them?

To answer that question I’ll tell you a short story.

Recently, I noticed my twitterfeed account wasn’t sending blog posts to twitter. I tried to troubleshoot the issue but ended up creating a support ticket on the company’s forum. An employee was quick to resolve the issue (2 days) and I thought I was all set, but now it seemed I had a different problem.

Twitterfeed was working too good. It was double posting every blog post. I went back to the support forum and tried a couple of the common fixes but nothing seemed to work. I was really frustrated but, at the time, I was too busy to look into the issue. So, I simply posted a tweet exclaiming my frustration. (Please disregard the typo.)

Listen up all you social media guru’s and experts. A new year is upon us and 2010 is sure to bring about some changes in the social media landscape. The biggest change? Companies will start demanding that their social media investments drive revenues and not just simple web metrics. Page views, site traffic and increased followers aren’t going to be enough to justify a continued investment in social media – you need to link your efforts to sales and conversions.

A recent survey of global CMO’s conducted by Bazzarvoice highlighted that “81% of respondents expect to link their annual revenues to their social media investment in 2010, up from just 44% of CMOs in 2009.”

The study also went on to show that “53% of respondents are unsure about their return on Twitter; 50% are unsure about the direct value of LinkedIn; and 50% are not sure how to measure the impact of industry blogs on business metrics.”

If you’re like most bloggers your probably rely on a Retweet button to help push your content out to others. But if you simply installed the default code, you may not be getting the credit you deserve. To make sure that you’re not missing out on potential followers take a minute to ensure your buttons are configured correctly.

This post will cover four of the more popular Retweet buttons; tweetmeme, Retweet, Topsy and the tweetcount widget by backtype.