Through the years, as my boys have gotten older, Santa has gotten a bit more clumsy when he visits our house. Spilling ashes from the Chimney. Dropping a worn piece of reindeer harness, complete with bell, in our driveway. Leaving footprints on my rug (not too happy with Santa that year).  Santa even lost his drivers license in our home. Had to send that puppy back to the North Pole and quick! All these mishaps had their desired effect and belief in the Jolly Old Elf ran high. Alas, children age, get curious, pay more attention to where the Christmas list goes and actually look behind the water heater and in the guest room closet. That’s where the internet can help. Check out these sites and see if Christmas Cheer isn’t restored a bit in your house. Oh. And you don’t need to be a kid to have fun with them:

This year’s favorite: The PNP, short for Portable North Pole.

Santa Chat's It Up

Of course you can always track Santa on his epic journey: Norad does a great job!

And then you can Twitter with Santa, and Mrs. Claus.

Merry Christmas and Peace on Earth to Men of Good Will!

I get that blogging is part of an integrated social media & web marketing strategy and that it takes time and patience to see results. and that it’s difficult to compare to how PR or paid advertising is valuated. However, I’m curious to know if there is any measurement that represents the value of blog posting for a company’s product/service on relevant industry blogs? Like it on not, we live in an ROI-driven business world and some business folks simply need a measurement. Perhaps they’re not a good fit for social media?

ROI is always a hot topic when you’re pitching social media to businesses, especially if the business in question is used to dealing in traditional media marketing with traditional, measurable results. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that social media isn’t a good avenue for that business to take. Any business can benefit from social media interaction, if it’s done correctly. The hardest part is often selling the idea to the people at the top of the company heirarchy.

So, how can your ROI be measured when you’re dealing with social media? The first and most important step is to outline what your goals are. This gives you a benchmark against which you can measure your success.

If you want quantitative results, the best way to measure the impact of a social media campaign is through analytics. Some things you can look at:

• How many unique visitors does your blog have? How many comments? How about subscribers?
• How many times have your posts been submitted to Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and other social news sites?
• How big is your Twitter following?
• How many fans are there on your Facebook page?

You get the idea.

By analyzing these numbers, and by tracking the number of folks who click through to your site by way of your social networks, you can start to get some hard data to deliver to the bosses to prove that your social media efforts are paying off.

Along with your quantitative results, you’ll also want to be able to demonstrate the quality of your social media activities. Some things to consider:

• Is it easier to connect with existing and potential customers or business associates?
• Are you participating in conversations you couldn’t take part in before?
• Are the conversations surrounding your business and your products positive?
• Have these conversations been valuable to you in evaluating the way you do business?
• Are you better able to manage your online reputation?
• Is your social media presence helping you with branding?

Answers to these questions, along with the hard data from your quantitative measurements, should help you get a clearer idea of how your social media campaign is impacting the success of your business or organization.

You know you’re doing well when Jon Stewart starts making fun of you.

The un-conference portion of the event was held during the day at Kansas City’s Record Bar. I have to say, I was skeptical at first about it as a venue for a conference like this. But I’d never been to a barcamp-style meetup before, so I also wasn’t really sure what to expect. After having experienced it though, I can now say that I really like the format and will be looking for similar events like it in the future.

The morning began with coffee, bagels, and schmoozing. After about half an hour of chit-chat, the presentations began. One of the kickoff presentations was by Jon Crawford of StoreEnvy, which is an application that allows you to build a social-oriented, customizable online store for free. (And their business cards are freaking ADORABLE. They look like little clothing hangtags, with a barcode and everything. Genius!)

Next, Jenn and I saw Shashank Date of Nurture, which is a lead-nurturing platform that allows customers to set up automated e-mail campaigns, rank contacts, and track who’s opening which e-mails, following links, and exploring these sites.

Michael Bailey’s presentation on MobaTalk was the one we went to next. MobaTalk is an awesome new way to connect via Twitter with videos. Upload your video to MobaTalk, then enter your text and a tag, and the video link is sent directly through your Twitter account to your followers. They can also subscribe to your stream, or watch it directly in iTunes or Google Reader.

Next, we saw Nathan T. Wright and Hillary Brown of Lava Row talk about social media businesses in the midwest. Owning a similar business ourselves, we already knew a lot about what they were saying, but it was interesting to hear another perspective on the subject, and heartening to see a company in our region with bright people building a successful business and fostering an active tech, creative, and social media community in Des Moines.

At this point, we broke for lunch. Being a vegan, I have to be careful when I eat out, so I was a little worried about the lunch aspect, but I have to hand it to the Record Bar; they did a great job of providing delicious foods for everyone, and the woman working there knew exactly which foods were and weren’t okay for me to have. I thoroughly enjoyed my meal of hummus and pita, salad with a really tasty vinaigrette, and vegetable minestrone.

After lunch, Jenn and I separated and went to different presentations. I sat in on Scott Kahler and Doug Sparling’s presentation, about utilizing Ruby on Rails to run their comic syndication site, GoComics. It seems they’re also developing a new iPhone app that will allow users to read comics right on their phone or iTouch. Being a huge comic nerd and an iPhone user, this excited me to no end. (One of the comics, Halo and Sprocket, is a favorite indy comic of mine, so I did a little seated chair dance when I saw that they’re offering it for mobile use. Squee!)

Jenn, meanwhile, sat in on Adam Coomes‘ presentation on Social Radar, an amazing new product that lets you monitor social media and the web for specific terms in real time, and easily generate reports and graphics based on the data they return. It seems like it will be a truly invaluable tool for companies and social media consultants who are engaged in brand monitoring.

After that was my turn to present. My talk was over non-profit organizations and how they can harness the power of social media to spread their messages and gain membership and donations. I really feel like I got a good response, so thanks to everyone who came to see me speak!

Next up, Jenn and I checked out Derek Maune, who did a presentation on a new platform called Quillpill, which is a microfiction tool that lets users write poems, short stories, journals, notes, and even full-length books in increments of 140 characters, similar to the character limitation on Twitter. It looks really interesting, and I’m eager to try it out. Maybe this year I can finally find the time to participate in NaNoWriMo. Might be easier in chunks of 140 characters at a time!

Last but not least, I watched Mike Templeton’s presentation on microblogging and his site, Microblink, which is a microblogging platform/application review site and news aggregator. Definitely a great tool for avid Twitter fans like me who want to keep up on the latest trends within the microsphere.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to hear all the presentations throughout the day, so be sure to check out the Who? page on the Highlight Midwest site for a list of all the other great presenters and their contact info.

After the presentations, we heard a fantastic set by The Threes, one of Kansas City’s own local rock bands, and then an equally awesome set by The Nadas, who are based in Des Moines.

The evening presentation, hosted by the Kauffman Foundation at their conference center, brought everyone together again for some schmoozing and boozing, and then we heard presenters from Kansas City, Omaha, and Des Moines talk about what is going on in each of their hometowns in regard to the social media movement. The evening ended with a panel discussion and Q&A from some of the region’s best and brightest.

All in all, the whole day was a fantastic experience. I can’t tell you how happy I am to have been a part of this event, and to have met all these wonderful people and heard their stories. It was a truly inspiring day, if not completely exhausting, and I’m already looking forward to our next big regional get together.

Thanks again to everyone who helped plan, organize, and facilitate Highlight Midwest. You made it a huge success!

(Sidenote: I know this post is boring with just text, and I PROMISE I will upload photos tomorrow afternoon, and hopefully I’ll also have video of my presentation at that time, as well!)

Was this my fault? Did I have the wrong time? The wrong day? Could I have erred? Going back to the cable menu I am assured this is where the game is being nationally televised. I’ve got the right station and the right time. Yet I am not watching Dustin Pedroia slap a grounder to left. I am not reveling in the slippery mastery of Josh Beckett on the mound. Instead I am watching a show I never bothered to watch in prime time.

I scramble through the trash for the sports section. Print media concurs. Rays vs. RedSox on TBS at 7pm cst. ESPN.com agrees.

Since the laptop is open and awaiting my next command, I move to the ever immediate, ever responsive realm of Twitter. Surprisingly, after 3 minutes, no one has answered my query. Where is ALCS game 6?

Returning to the TV, I click back on TBS. The same banal sitcom continues to harsh my squee. Now I’m peeved. I grab the laptop and go to TBS. com as well as their sports specific web page. Nothing. According to the TBS websites, I should be enjoying their stellar coverage of the game.

I return to ESPN.com, knowing they will at least have updates of the game. Not only is ESPN giving me a much desired play-by-play, they have moved my side screen to their “chat” section. I never “chat” during a ball game and I wonder why ESPN isn’t remembering that. They’ve put up a screen that I never participate in. But then I begin to read the chat. It is all about TBS’s broken feed. Someone from TBS is texting, explaining their frenzy and frustration, begging for our patience, letting me know they are aware and working on it.

So here are my questions to TBS:

• Why didn’t you tell me this in a TV crawl at the bottom of your insipid Sitcom?
• Why didn’t you tell me this on your website?
• Why didn’t you tell me this on your other, sports specific, website?
• Why wasn’t somebody monitoring Twitter to give me an explanation?
• Why did I have to learn about your problem on ESPN.com?

For all of your promise, TBS, that you are a sportscasting powerhouse, I had to get my sports information, and my information about your problems, from somewhere else. Thanks ESPN.com.

For those who may not know, Twitter is a micro-blogging application that allows its users to “Tweet” or write text-based broadcasts of up to 140 characters in length. Besides broadcasting messages, you can also direct message anyone who is “following” you. How this makes Twitter a darker security risk than email, forums or travel drives, I don’t know. Unless you are using a secret code, the broadcasting nature of Twitter seems an unlikely place to pass along proprietary information. Using a simple Twitter Search would land whoever is sending inappropriate material/information in the soup due to the transparent nature of the network.

In my opinion, it is Twitter’s transparent nature that makes it an ideal social media platform for businesses. Twitter is a way to monitor customer attitude and opinion, a way to create and support brand evangelism, and a way to broadcast your own corporate messages. Why should companies hesitate to jump in? True, corporate competitors can easily find your following fan base and directly target them to “change sides.” But, if you are courting your followers properly, they are more likely to be offended by such a tactic than tempted.

Let’s look at those followers from the other side of the ice. If your competition can find them through you, the friends of your follower’s can find you through them. That’s what we call a “win” folks. Recent studies have shown consumers are 83% more likely to take purchasing advice from people they know rather than from traditional advertising campaigns. And 93% of consumers are asking, no, begging companies to meet them in the social arena. Twitter can satisfy that need for connection without requiring a large investment of corporate time.

So what about a company’s own employees? Should they be allowed to Twitter? Might they let slip with proprietary information or paint an ugly picture of their workplace on the blogosphere? Rest assured, if employees wanted to do those things, they would be already, whether Twitter was in their lives or not. Some psychologists even think that Twitter may be a much-needed safety valve, helping employees relieve stress. A few minutes taken out of the workday to check in with our emotional support systems, i.e., friends and family, could be just what we need to keep us from “going postal.” I think when companies weigh the real benefits of a social networking platform like Twitter against any perceived threats to data security they will determine that Twitter poses no real risk at all.

Like a lot of other social media sites, these sites are primarily used to communicate socially with other people, allowing you to add “friends” or “followers” whose updates are fed to your account, allowing you to keep up with what they’re doing. However, there are several reasons to utilize microblogging in your social media marketing endeavors.

For starters, it’s a great way to build your professional network. Through my Twitter contacts, I’ve been able to meet people who have helped me with my design work and coding, gotten me in touch with local media to promote The Social Lites, and recommended our company to others, leading to business opportunities that I would have missed out on otherwise. You’ll meet like-minded folks who will provide stimulating conversations, and build great relationships with other bloggers and social media lovers.

It’s also a good way to promote your brand and your blog, and it aids in SEO. By adding a link to relevant blog entries when you post to your microblogging platforms, you expose more people to your content, and you can increase your search engine rankings. And if others “re-tweet” or link to that same post, your exposure and rankings go up yet again.

And, in case you’re thinking that 140 characters isn’t enough to say what you need to say, consider Ernest Hemingway’s famous six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” He’s said to have called it his best work. Also, check out Copyblogger’s Twitter Writing Contest. Big creativity in small packages!