Maybe you don’t want to hear every single detail of the conference one of your Twitter pals is going to. Or you’re tired of hearing about the new iPhone? TwitterSnooze to the rescue. Tune out those annoying Tweets without having to un-follow or block the user. TwitterSnooze allows you to filter out a Twitterer or topics or subjects with a few keystrokes, all without tipping off your friend that you’re tired of hearing about their trip to Tahoe.
Ahhh the bliss.

If you’re new to social media marketing the first logical question is “How will we measure the return on our investment?” right?

It depends on what the goal of the campaign is.
Are you looking to:

• Expand your brand’s visibility?
• Connect with your user base on a more personal level?
• Collect business leads or user profiling?
• Drive traffic and see larger sales?
• Create a relationship with users who will evangelize for you?
• Maintain, repair or enhance your public image?

All of these can be done with social media if you know how to use it. The difficulty of measuring the value of relationships is the key issue with measuring the ROI of social media. How do put a number on consumer interaction or relationships? How do you sell it to the board when you can’t put a $value on it?

Actually it’s done all the time in advertising. Let’s take the millions of dollars spent on a Super Bowl ad as an example.

Skip the beer commercials, because we know there are obvious relationships there.
But why would GoDaddy, Audi or Kraft spend over 2 million for an ad spot?
It’s not about sports. They want to be associated with the success and power that the Super Bowl represents. They want the attention of several million people focused on the event.

Over simplification? Maybe, maybe not. But by comparison the same amount of money spent on social media marketing could actually reap bigger rewards in the long run. While an ad on the Super Bowl might get talked about for a few months afterwards, it’s quickly eclipsed by the next year’s ads.

Creating a loyal following online can lead to a network of traffic coming from sources you never dreamed of, and can continue to build on itself for years. As social media networks and lifestream sites become more popular, word of mouth campaigns will take off with a simple 140 character statement. (Oh, and believe me, if you’re not in the thick of things the anti-sentiment could take off just as fast without you ever knowing it.)

OK, but where’s the ROI measurement tool?
There isn’t one.
Sure you can watch your traffic, and see a spike when a discussion about you or your products begins, but the ripple effect of a post on Twitter about how great your customer service is can’t be measured. How do you measure the long term brand awareness and the good will from a group on FriendFeed or Facebook that supports your company values and encourages conversation?

You can watch your click rates on your ads but remember that now people may click on your ad and then go onto their various lifestream sites and tell everybody their impression of what they found. They may not look at those links they got from their friends for days or months. Google may pick up a Twitter post and put it into the search engine results.

Check your logs. Are you seeing traffic spikes your can’t relate to tv, radio, live events or print campaigns? Are you getting a load of traffic from Twitter? Plurk? FriendFeed?

Time to get busy.
But what tools to use? It depends on what your goals, available time and tools already integrated into your business are. We’ll go over some of those tools in future posts. In the meantime, get out there and see what’s going on in social media. Don’t know where to starts? Friend me on FriendFeed and you can see posts from me and from my friends who work in the social media space. It will give you lots of food for thought.

So many of us have been frustrated with Twitter’s server issues that we’ve been casting around for alternatives. The thing is, there’s nothing quite like it. Sure Friendfeed has more features for integration, Pownce is prettier and has more features, and Plurk is… well, it’s just quirky enough to be sorta interesting.

But how do you choose from of all these options?
Let’s talk about “Lifestream Aggregators”. These are sites that pull together some of your feeds or personalities and let them mingle together, offering you a much easier way to keep on top of the various services. Lots of Twitterers have migrated to FriendFeed. Scoble could be considered the leader of the migration but I hate to compare myself to a lemming so let’s just say it was a logical choice.

FriendFeed allows you to pull in your friends’ Twitter feeds as well as over 35 other sources, so you can be knee deep in their lives and businesses pretty quick. It also let’s you build “rooms” as a place where your friends can hold threaded discussions.

But FriendFeed doesn’t satisfy that micro-blogging urge. so what else? Well there’s Jaiku, (now owned by Google) which offers micro-blogging in 140 character increments just like Twitter, but it also lets you comment on your own messages as well, so if you need to be verbose you can (please, just don’t). Jaiku also lets you add icons to your discussion and import your own web feeds.

Then there’s tumblr Tumbler is really great for sharing the little snippets of goodness you find as you wander the web looking for really useful stuff. You can add graphics, video or audio files, and customize your template to give it your own style, and they’ve done a great job at creating ways to interface with tumblr. You can post via IM, with a "tumblet" dashboard widget, from your phone wiith Vimeo or SMS. Importing your feeds from other life-streams is a snap.

Tumbler allows you to create groups too, so it’s a good environment to set up for group projects or user groups. tumblr is clearly where the designers hang out, among others.

Then there’s Pownce. Pownce isn’t Twitter either and they will be happy to hear it said. Although there is a pretty cool micro-blogging feature, you can use it to send files to your friends, and if you pay for your account you can send files up to 250 MB.

And last to the party, but picking up steam fast is Plurk. Plurk has a unique visual time-line that’s quirky but in a cute way. You can add images, icons or video to your posts, but rather than mingling with all the other Plurkers, you have the option of viewing your friends plurks or your own. It’s really intended to be more of an online journal than a microblog. Just like good ol’ IRC chat, you can get blocked for flooding, a control that Twitter could certainly use.Plurk also uses Karma to instigate frequent use (Like Reddit). The more you use it the better your Karma. The more Karma you have the more features you get.

To be honest I got on Plurk last week and found the interface and the chore of adding my friends to yet another micro-blog too much to face. The fact that it doesn’t work on my Mac with Firefox is an added headache. I could use Safari but I’m pretty attached to all my plug-ins, so fergeddaboudit. Who knows. Plurk may take off.(It’s just been acquired by pheltup) A lot of the Twitterati are Twittering they’e Plurking and vice-versa.

Thing is none of these sites can replace Twitter. It has it’s following for a reason and none of the other sites quite fit. It has it’s own simple style. Craigslist remains popular because they stayed true to the original simplicity and goals of ads and community. Hopefully the same will be true with Twitter. I think I’m going to wait it out a while and see. Frankly I’m up to my eyeballs in apps at the moment. I’ll let you know which ones I settle on for good, but in the meantime, if Twitter’s up I’ll probably be posting.

My links- friend me!

Twitter http://twitter.com/jfouts
FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com/jfouts
Tumblr http://jfouts.tumblr.com/
Pownce http://pownce.com/jfouts/
Plurk http://www.plurk.com/user/jfouts