Augie Ray, over at his blog, has a great post about the Return on Investment of Social Media Marketing. The most important part to people who follow the online reputation management industry is the part about how social media marketing effects risk management.

Traditionally, few brands have wholly evaluated their marketing in directly measurable financial terms, and my new Forrester report recommends a traditional measurement approach for innovative social media marketing programs.  Using a Social Media Marketing Balanced Scorecard, marketers can evaluate a diverse set of short- and long-term benefits that are both financial and not.  This approach furnishes several benefits, such as aligning measurement to all corporate objectives and not just sales; providing a means for gaining consensus from diverse stakeholders; and avoiding short-term gains at the expense of long-term brand health.

Social media can help to combat brand reputation management problems. But it would be interesting to see a breakdown of how social media marketing can effect long term risks associated with online libel.

http://blogs.forrester.com/augie_ray/10-07-19-roi_social_media_marketing_more_dollars_and_cents

Facebook has become a massive phenomenon that is used by businesses almost as widely and religiously as it is by individuals. Its appeal stems largely from the fact that it has a lot of different elements to offer visitors which keeps them and their friends coming back for more. It is used as a job hunting tool as well as a tool for prospective employers. It is used for social networking and staying in touch with friends and colleagues. It is even used for promoting businesses and managing online reputation.

During an interview with ABC News yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the site has attracted more than 500 million users since it first started six years ago. To put that in context, it’s approximately 1/12 of the world’s population and the UK is right up there with some of the heaviest hitters in terms of registered members. Approximately 1/3 of the UK population are registered with Facebook. Talking about whether the site would make 1 billion users, Zuckerberg said “who knows if we’ll get there”.

There were also positive words regarding “that” ongoing lawsuit with Paul Ceglia. Ceglia is a developer that attended college at the same time as Zuckerberg and claims to have a contract which states he should now own 84% of the Facebook site. However, there’s no need to panic as Zuckerberg has always defended his position on this and continued to do so last night saying “We are quite sure we did not sign a contract that says he has any right of ownership over Facebook.”

If you need to create a blog for Internet reputation management reasons, there is no better system than WordPress. They offer free blog hosting for anyone that can fill out some basic forms and utilize their platform.

WordPress blogs are clean-cut, easy to use, and attractive to look at. Free blog hosting is one of the best ways to stake out a place on the Internet and fight online defamation.

WordPress also offers all kinds of plugins for blogs which can be helpful. These plugins can do all kinds of things like monitor visitor’s IPs, analyze traffic statistics, etc. These are extremely helpful.

WordPress.com is where you go to sign up for a free blog. Most industry experts will suggest it over the competition. This is because they have shown a propensity for improving and innovating their product over time, and keeping everything free of charge.