It’s becoming boring. And that’s not a good sign either, because according to other studies, people use it for entertainment more than self expression or communication.

And of course, those studies also show that they use it less for finding information than anything else.

I’ll be mentioning your article over on Northcutt.com in a week or so. Thanks for the info.

The lower frequency, less emotional and shorter time there is to a purchase cycle the less valuable social engagement is. IE everyone needs cars, they are emotionally engaged in the process and purchase has a moderate and repetitive frequency over a relatively long period… that makes for a great social engagement environment where a company can benefit from all the things that social offers. The final step of that long, emotional process is the local search at Google that leads to the trackable sale and the measurable ROI.

Clients need a criminal lawyer very infrequently, have little or no emotional connection and usually the “purchase cycle” is very short. The client goes from need to Google Local search in no time flat.

My point is that not every business is necessarily a good fit for social.

But even in businesses that are a good fit for social it is notoriously difficult for SMBs to track the value of the pre purchase cycle. Often like in the car scenario above the business entity doing all the social work isn’t even the one that gets the sale.

I am not saying that SMBs shouldn’t engage in social. I just think that they need to think through the presale role very carefully to be sure that the investment is worth it

Post sale is another issue altogether… but even there the social networks have not done a good job of creating a great environment for SMBs to interact with their clients.

No proof out of me though. Maybe in a future blog post or something. I’ll be sure to link it over.

Efficient accurate tracking allows the proper ROI calculations, that’s a huge gray area too in my limited experience – seems the majority of SMBs I deal with struggle to answer the question of how they acquire new customers and especially how much they’re paying to do so.

I liked this link on social ROI: http://www.business2community.com/social-media/cheap-qualified-leads-from-social-a-lesson-in-the-value-of-social-media-0354530

ROI is list building, reviews, recommendations, tags in photos…all builds awareness…part of the buying cycle – in addition to the direct word of mouth.

Accurate measurement is more than weeding through the chaff, it’s having the correct benchmarks – and that remains a huge challenge in defining social ROI.

I have yet to see a significant return on time or money invested in social networks but do anticipate social signals and cross integration to trend up in 2013 as it relates to search.

Even those who swear (usually social media peeps) that they have an ROI cannot give me any figures from social networking.

Anyone have any?

Good points about the uses of networks and influences because of it.

I usually lurk in the background but had to chime in on this one!

Reviews were there for awhile but disappeared, at least with a little warning.

Reviews indexable on Bing, done deal.