Industry professionals will tell you that its hard to put numbers on social media. Managers looking for precise ROI in order to sell social media to executives continue to analyze the worth of a single brand fan, and could be one step closer.

Digital consulting firm Syncapse and research company Hotspex have come up with an empirical formula that puts an average value of $136.38 on the Facebook fans of the site’s 20 biggest corporate brands.

The value of a brand fan was split into four different categories with the highest value coming from how much fans will spend on a brand and their loyalty to the brand. Other value comes from recommendations and earned media value. The total is then offset for the cost to acquire a fan. (more…)

Acquisition and Retention via Online Communities EMarketer recently published research into interactive ROI, and concluded that the primary objectives of online marketers are to acquire and retain new customers. Now it’s the fall and little has changed. There are a number of projects, technologies and tactics that can be deployed to drive customer acquisition and retention, and I will be focusing on how publishers and brands can apply their online community platform for this purpose. While the explicit definition of the terms ‘customer’, ‘acquired’ and ‘retained’ vary across organizations, I consider a new registered website user to be acquired, and a returning registered website participant to be retained. (more…)

There’s been a lot of buzz lately surrounding the credibility of claims in calling oneself an expert on social networking and user-generated content (UGC), especially with the inherent unpredictability of social media. (more…)