New white paper on Social Media

We've just released a new white paper on social media, called Tracking the Influence. Influential web strategist, Jeremiah Owyang and Dow Jones' Matt Toll co-authored the report, which was based on the discussions from a blogger round-table held late last year.

For communications practitioners who are new to the whole social media phenomenon, the white paper basically tries to answer the question "why should I care about it".

It sets the scene with a discussion about the nature of Net-based conversations, the breakdown of barriers between buyer and seller, and the troubling stats that very few people trust CEOs. Troubling if you're in the PR team supporting that CEO and substantially more worrying if you are in fact a CEO.

It then looks at the discussion from the blogger roundtable, which pulled together influential bloggers and communications professionals. The participants sought to define what was important in social media, why we should attempt to measure it, and what those measurements should entail. The concepts of engagement, community, influencers, reach and sentiment generated much debate.

The paper concludes with some ideas around what capabilities an organisation needs to understand and drive sucecss in the world of social media, and lists a stack of helpful resources.

It's worth a read, particularly if you've been getting regular requests from your mates to join facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, Plaxo etc.