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This week, the New York Federal Reserve Bank announced its plans to begin a social media monitoring project to gauge online sentiment about the Fed’s actions and general economic policy. Some people (i.e. civil libertarians and activists against big government) are irate and are likening the Fed’s actions to those of Big Brother. But can you really fault the Fed for wanted to know what people are saying about them online? The private sector has been doing it for years.

As an ORM company, we were interested in finding out just what monitoring tactics the Fed was interested in using. Going beyond basic article gathering to gage public sentiment, the Fed wants to know what individuals are saying, and was intelligent enough to target Facebook and Twitter as the perfect realm for learning the truth. Of course they’ll also track their repute as judged by news sources like the Wall Street Journal, CNN and the Associated press (all named in the request for proposal), but it shows that the corporation cares about more than economists or financial bloggers. And most interestingly, they also requested that vendors offer a monitoring system that allows people monitoring the project for the Fed can login to and track results (hey, that sounds kind of familiar…).

We commend the decision of the New York Federal Reserve Bank to be active in the monitoring of their online reputation. While they’ll likely find that many people aren’t happy with the economy and the actions of large financial corporations, hopefully the Fed will find ways to interact with individuals online to alter their tactics and hopefully eliminate some of the angrier sentiments floating around online. Fast Company has a great look at the Fed’s program as well.

Earlier this month, The Dachis Group launched the Social Business Index, a compilation of data that illustrates how social or influential brands are online. By assessing different indicators on a real-time schedule, businesses are ranked by their level of social influence, much like Klout does currently for individuals. Some of the businesses included in the service’s beta launch are Coca-Cola, Google, Time Warner, and Nike.

Since the service is still in beta testing, I was only able to look around the website and test a limited number of features. Even though my exploration of the service was restricted, I think The Dachis Group does an excellent job of describing Social Business Index to those whose companies are not yet members. Each company is displayed through a snapshot, which provides its current ranking, change over the previous week’s ranking and its raw score. Company employees, when logged in, have access to a more detailed list of actions and statistics. Companies can also earn accolades like “Top Performer” in their respective categories depending on the industry’s ecosystem and the company’s dynamic signals. Continue Reading…

A recent report from Hitwise has come out with a Facebook Like valuation. For retailers, each new fan is worth 20 visits to your website over the course of a year. Hitwise also estimates that 1 in every 6 page views from UK Internet users goes to a Facebook page and 20 million hours are spent on Facebook daily in the UK alone. The numbers alone support the underlying market value of not only Facebook, but overall financial impact of the social web on the whole.

How long will Facebook hold this type of market share on the social web? It’s the question Google is asking and answering – with the release of their own social network called Google+ that is just now undergoing what the company calls a ‘field trial.’ Currently, Google+ is by invitation only and not yet available to the public but already has been receiving a fair amount of buzz – and we don’t mean the ill-fated social network released in late 2009.

Google+ has several interesting features including: Circles, Hangouts, Instant Upload, Sparks, and Huddle all of which will allow users to share information with smaller groups and benefit from access to Google’s search capabilities too. Only time will tell whether the social network can or will catch Facebook’s 700 million user level.

It’s been the ultimate question facing an entire industry since social networking exploded a few short years ago: how, exactly, can we put a dollar figure on this?

Nearly every major American company with a meaningful consumer base and a coherent online strategy is somehow active on Facebook, Twitter, and the like. Some do a much better job than others, but there’s certainly a sentiment out there that goes something like, “Gee, we ought to be doing this… so we’ll do it.”

There are a lot of brands out there driving real consumer engagement, and coming up with creative ways to take advantage of the social network ecosystem. But what’s it worth? The biggest problem we encounter when attempting to answer this question is a simple one: how to frame the question itself. A pair of recent studies determined to discover the value of a Facebook fan prove how difficult it still is to quantify social network behavior. From the FairWinds Blog:

Virtue, a social media management company, put out a study recently that revealed that Facebook fans have a value of $3.60 apiece for big brands.  The company based their valuation on how many impressions a wall post receives given the number of fans a page has.

Meanwhile, at GigaOm:

An average fan is apparently worth about $136.38, although for some very successful social marketers the value can be dramatically higher, while for some less successful companies it can be virtually zero.

Now those are a couple of very different valuations. The first number is, as the excerpt mentions, based on impressions; in other words, the value of reaching eyeballs.  That second number is essentially derived from conversions; the dollar values were drawn a survey of purchasing behavior by fans of the top 20 brands on Facebook. There’s interesting symmetry here that resembles a Google AdWords campaign – are we after impressions, or conversions?

Clearly, the answer will depend on context, and the specific goals of a company or brand. The specific numbers here – $3.60 vs $136.38 – are far less informative than the divergent framework of these two studies. They’re both perfectly legitimate ways of looking at the problem, but probably don’t stand up as well on their own as they would if we could merge the results in a customized way that makes sense for an individual company.

So what is a Facebook fan worth? Something, that’s for sure.

Lest we forget that the Internet is not powered entirely by tweets and friending, Small Business Trends has a nice explanation out today regarding the value of the more “traditional” blog. The conclusion:

Though it can be attractive as a SMB owner to let social sites like Facebook or Twitter become your dominant Web presence, it comes with a high cost. The less time you spend building content and authority for your site, the more you make yourself dependent on tools that may one day fall away. And if Facebook or Twitter went away tomorrow – would you have enough seeds planted to attract your audience?

The article makes some great points against putting all your eggs in a basket owned by someone else, and some equally salient points in favor of building your own authoritative web presence that does not rely on the whims of the rapidly evolving social media space.

At RepEquity, we tend to take this a step further. It’s crucial to develop a multifaceted approach to online reputation management – one that includes full immersion in the social media world, but also stakes out more permanent territory. As Small Business Trends points out, you want to be able to exercise full control over some of your online properties; the advantages include strategic link-structures, credibility as a thought leader, and the ability to create great content that supports your brand.

However, simply launching a single blog shouldn’t be the final step. We advise our clients to build out a handful of additional “microsites” designed to augment a primary corporate or product site. Our team can generate unique and meaningful content for each of these secondary destinations, which then become a valuable part of the overall ORM program. One blog can help build credibility and improve your visibility… but two or three additional microsites can cement that credibility and dominate the search engine landscape.

It’s all about diversifying.