Carving up the social media budget - Pie Analogy

One of the challenges faced by everyone involved in marketing, branding and PR is measurement. Usually, companies have a number of activities ongoing at the same time - a comprehensive advertising schedule, marketing campaign, PR and social media campaigns. Each department is often fighting for a bigger slice of the budget so how do they prove their worth?

Often, qualitative research before and after a campaign is the only way to know if your particular communication tool of choice is pulling its weight. That's why we're all slaves to website traffic, click throughs and referrals these days.

I set up my blog and twitter around the same time (with my addiction to Quora following soon after) and it's really been a revalation how these things feed into each other. The stats and analysis you get on even the most basic of social media tools is fantastic - where are your visitors clicking through from, which are your most popular posts and what topics get the most traction with visitors.

I'm a little bit too new at this to go showing my hand but I'm very happy to see people DO click through on my twitter links and that I was right - Quora is driving traffic to my blog. One amateur blogger does not a complete research report make but I'll be watching my stats counter with an eagle eye from now on.

Imitation: Flattery or Fakery?

Does the old adage about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery apply in the social media sphere?

On one hand, we measure the success of social media campaigns in retweets and others posting links to our content. On the other side of the argument, look back to the fierce row that errupted on twiter when a group comedians accused TV presenter Keith Chegwin of stealing jokes and passing them off as his own to see that plagiarism and ownership are still issues in social media.

Wheteher or not  imitation can be called a 'sincere' form of flattery, you know you're something of a big deal when someone has gone to the bother of parodying your creation. Quora parody Cwera was one of the hot topic doing the rounds on twitter last week. Tom Scott got there first, poking fun at the impending tsunami of spam that Quora is likely to become as it grows while most of us were still scratching our heads trying to work out how exactly to make the most of our brand new Quora profiles.

So yes, imitation is flattering when it comes to social media. As long as you remember to credit your sources with a hashtag reference.

Much ado about Quora

With the New Year comes a whole new wave of exciting possibilities for social media in 2011. We've had the first marriage proposal on deal-of-the-day website Groupon, Facebook is overtaking Google as the most visited web page and with newcomers such as Instagr.am, FourSquare and WhatsApp there's a steady stream of engaging ways to interact with our online network.

One of the most interesting topics trending on Twitter right now is Quora, the new questions and answers service on the block. The site is estimated to have half a million registered users and is getting a huge amount of media buzz thanks to $11 million in Series A funding, great SEO capabilities, some heavy-hitting early adopters and glowing recommendations from some major players in the social media industry.

What appeals to me about Quora is that users have to give their full name so there's no hiding behind an online moniker. The site is easy to navigate and has a 'follow' option similar to Facebook making it easy to customize and highly personal. Quality is key to the Quora experience and with a straighforward ranking system the most popular answers to most viewed questions are clear.

With half a million registered users already signed up, the challenge for Quora is maintaining this quality as it expands. Right now there are none of the spam type responses you see with Yahoo Answers which, coincidentally, is still the most popular Q&A website around by a long shot. Now, just for kicks, I'm off ask Quora just what it has to say about that.