I was asked yesterday if I knew of a benchmark for a unique visitor acquisition for social media programs. My response was as follows:

I don't think you'll find a meaningful number for this unless you are looking for a somewhat narrowly defined component of social media. Social media programs as we define them rely on a wide range of variables. A PR firm trying to reach out to top influential bloggers for example, may only be a single component to a program with several other tactics.

Although a cool new blogger and public relations study may tell me something like 42% of A-list bloggers who are pitched on something from a PR professional will actually write about it - I'm left guessing about fair traffic expectations (let alone conversions) generated from those blog sites.

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I met with the principals of an impressive interactive firm this morning to talk about how we might partner to help them with SEO and social media initiatives for their clients.

I was reflecting on the term "social media," and how it was much more prevelant on the the Room 214 website last year. We made a choice to remove it because it didn't appear to be generating a great deal of interest from a search and conversational perspective.

Yesterday, I spent time adding it back in. As the fellas I met with this morning suggested, there was a gap between the use of the term social media vs. the desire of the marketing practice. Now I'm finding more companies are not only using the term - but asking (demanding might be more accurate) what they should be doing to execute. 

I was updating content on Room 214's website, and thought I would share a collage of logos (a very small sample, mind you) to remind people that social media is about interacting with many touch points (tools, web properties, content respositories, etc.)

 

This was the statement I heard from a pastor on Easter Sunday. Most people where I live would roll their eyes at such a statement, some even with a genuine sense of disdain as their cruise control associations to Christianity, and perhaps religion in general, effortlessly kicks in.

It's amazing how that statement instantly raises walls. People think of wars, persecution, hypocrisy, forced dogma, abuse, George Bush, YouTube clips of Jeremiah Wright, the list goes on. It isn't difficult to understand why. I know Christians who feel like they need to apologize on behalf of all Christians before revealing any of their personal beliefs... an oppression in and of itself if you think about it.  

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I've been reading Joy at Work, by Dennis Bakke. When you tell somebody you're reading a book by that title, the assumption is you have no joy at work. Not true for me.

I'm finding it more of a philosophical study from the point of a CEO who really believed he could run a multi-billion company employing a set of real human values that were at such the fore-front of everything the company did, that the SEC actually percieved the emphasis on the values as a potential threat to shareholders.

My new favorite concept from this book applies to the search marketing and social media business efforts in my own company, Room 214: "We try out it in practice, then see if it works in theory."