This Week in Social Media [ROUND-UP]

Overview
This week I read a great blog by Justin Kistner who looked at Radian6 and how it is going to start integrating Webtrends and salesforce data into its offering. For those who are unfamiliar with Radian6, it’s an industry standard social media monitoring tool, but is going to be greatly enhanced with the ability to create, browse and hopefully close sales, as well as providing a whole load of analytics and web traffic data. All in all, it sounds like a pretty impressive CRMproposition.1000Heads have made sounds about attempting to answer the million dollar question – how do you measure WOM? Whilst, little was given away in the post, I applaud anyone who seeks to improve social media and WOM measurement. It will also be a great piece of Intellectual Property for whoever manages to develop an industry standard measurement formula. E-marketer ran an interview with Ed Linde II which highlighted the millions of dollars IBM makes from social media, whilst Facebook scored incredibly low on a customer satisfaction survey, despite surpassing its 500 millionth member this week. I’ve also included an interesting post by Matt Cheuvront on the Y Generation.

Radian6 integrates Webtrends and Salesforce data
As I type this, I am getting ready to attend Radian6’s Rock Stars of Social CRM event. I’m excited for this event because they are announcing an integration with Webtrends and Salesforce. This is a big moment because it is the first vendor driven integration of social media monitoring, analytics, and a CRM, which are the core apps that drive the value chain of modern Enterprises. Yes I know this first paragraph is loaded with buzz words, so let’s take a closer look at what has me giddy like a school boy.

Getting to the heart of WOM ROI
This week I’ve been reading a timely article from McKinsey about WOM measurement which includes some interesting statistics. The article introduces the concept of ‘WOM equity’ which is described as ‘an index of a brand’s power to generate messages that influence the consumer’s decision to purchase’, and which is represented as the number of WOM messages multiplied by the average sales impact.

Case Study: How IBM Uncovers “Millions of Dollars” Worth of Sales Leads with Social Media
How successful can a B2B business be using social media? Fairly successful, at least in the case of IBM. We recently chatted with Ed Linde II, whose team is responsible for building Web assets to support the IBM.com sales channel and organic Web visitors, about IBM’s social media efforts and successes. He spoke about their Listening for Leads program, which he says has “uncovered millions of dollars worth of sales leads” so far, and is expected grow even more. Here’s a clip from the full interview available on eMarketer Total Access.

Facebook Among Web’s Worst in Customer Satisfaction [SURVEY]
The 2010 American Customer Survey Index conducted by ForeSee Results gave Facebook 64 out of 100 points in a customer satisfaction survey; that’s lower than any other business in its category. However, it’s not at the bottom of the social media heap; MySpace received one point less.