eBooks are an essential part of internet marketing from a standpoint of providing solid information on a given subject matter. eBooks are normally sold throughout the internet marketing world along with free versions that are meant as an additional value to the visitor or potential customer. At this point I also offer 3 ‘free ebooks’ on Social Media to those that subscribe via email to Social Media Core.

It is no secret that most of these free ebooks are written by an author who typically gives the ebook on a non-commercial license in order to share the information and at the same time possible draw traffic back to their website or upsell to another ebook or product.

Most people will search on Google or through time gather a collection of free ebooks. I like to use the social media strategy in having the free ebooks come to me. That is why I use a website called Scribd.com to check on new free ebooks on a given subject matter. In this case Social Media. Lately many have been uploaded to be shared. Of these, I have compiled a list of the current Top 25 free ebooks on Social Media. The order is random as quite honestly I have not read all of them. The 26th free ebook to the reader who reads all of them and gives me their opinion on the actual top order. Note: I have compiled a list of ‘true ebooks’ that are in PDF and Word Doc format.

1. Belonging Networks Corporate Social Networking
2. Social Web Basics
3. The 2009-2014 World Outlook for Advertising for Social Media Web Sites
4. Social Media and Customer Service
5. Center For Social Media – Youth As E-Citizens
6. How Blogs and Social Media are Changing Public Relations
7. Social media and the banking industry
8. Social Media: 40 Places to Find Web 2.0 for Your Web Site
9. Social Media Marketing Strategies Guide
10. Nielsen – Pharma & Social Media
11. The Need for Speed – Using Social Media to Speed Innovation
12. What is Social Media?
13. ComplexDiscovery – User Generated Content, Social Media, and Advertising
14. Social Media Guide Release
15. Social Media & Marketing – Online Networking & Advertising February 2008
16. ebook: The Art and Science of Social Media and Community Relations
17. What is Social Media? – Book 2
18. Social Media Maps
19. Social Media Manifesto by Brian Solis
20. New Media Case Studies 2008
21. The Impact of Social Media on Innovation – Josh Bernoff
22. The Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organisations
23. Customer Service: The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media
24. The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008
25. The Essential Guide to Social Media

There are alot of questions when it comes to social media marketing and what are the best approaches. Some like to dive right in by choosing a technology platform that has some type of measurement capability while others take a more conservative approach.

When it comes to strategy in social media marketing I would like to highlight 5 key building blocks to consider.

1. What is your identity?
2. Who do you associate with?
3. User conversation.
4. Platform conversation.
5. Face to Face conversation.

1. What is your identity?

First things is first, when you place yourself or your brand online you need to define your identity online. If you are fortunate to not have an online presence you are in a territory to begin the shaping of your identity as you want to communicate it. You can begin by signing up to a few “profile” type websites that allow for personal and business branding. Good examples of this is:

• LinkedIn – http://blog.linkedin.com/2008/03/20/company-profile
• Facebook Business Pages – http://www.facebook.com/business/?pages
• ClaimID – http://www.claimid.com

Once you setup your brand profile in these website begin to populate the profile with brand specific content and messaging. A key aspect is to make sure your branding is consistent as possible among all profile sites a key to any marketing initiative.

2. Who do you associate with?

Once you have created your online identity the next steps naturally progress to the aspect of association. Who do you befriend? Who chooses to be friends with you? Are you targeting a specific niche within your interests or industry? Are you going outside of this to reach a different demographic?

From experience I tend to befriend people that I find from within site specific searches that are relative to my industry. For example on Twitter, I choose to search for a specific keyword within Twitter that is relative to my industry and begin to seek out those that I have associations with or would like to have. Then I begin to associate myself with this circle. This will begin to shape itself over time to a specific audience. Some great examples to use are micro-blogging tools such as:

• Twitter – http://www.twitter.com
• Plurk – http://www.plurk.com
• Utterli – http://www.utterli.com

3. User conversation

Next next step is to search out to see the current climate on your brand. What are others talking about your brand. I simple google.com search will typically extract some conversations. Other buzz metrics you can find about from a search on technorati.com from a blogging standpoint.

Ultimately you need to listen to others and enter the conversations to support or argue the positions. This begins to give your brand a voice online and for others to respond to it.

The best places to do this listening is by going to blogs, message boards, forums, and group sites. Some examples of these kinds of sites are:

• BlogCatalog - http://www.blogcatalog.com
• Board Tracker - http://www.boardtracker.com
• Yahoo Groups – http://groups.yahoo.com

4. Platform conversation

Another channel to listen to others as they speak about you or your brand is to go directly to the place where user clamor such as large social networking sites that have specific groups within the networks. One aspect to consider is the demographic the social network has when you are listening to it. As some social networks have not only various age groups but also different regions. For example, Facebook is extremely popular in Canada (more so than in the USA). While MySpace is the king in USA, it isnt as influential in South America where sites like Orkut is popular in South America. Bebo and Hi5 are more dominant in Europe and Asia.

Either way, you must tap into the conversation from within these platforms. I have mentioned a few already here is a few more contemporary (as of today) platforms to consider.

• Consumating – http://www.consumating.com
• Mashable – http://www.mashable.com
• Multiply - http://www.multiply.com

5. Face to Face conversation

Social Media Marketing consists of alot of online engagement however at its core as humans we interact on a face to face basis much more effectively than in a virtual enviornment. That is why a major final building block is the actual face to face and networking opportunities that you can position yourself and your brand. Thankfully there are many resources within the social media world that allow you to monitor and choose to host or participate in an event. Some examples are:

• Meetup - http://www.meetup.com
• Upcoming – http://www.upcoming.org
• Eventful – http://www.eventful.com

Each of these three examples is an excellent place to tap into the opportunity to meet face to face and continue your online brand to the real world. This is a key aspect of social media marketing. The online brand and persona that you choose to create must be transparent enough to leverage in real life situations. This will solidify your brand and persona and allow you to merge social media marketing to its fullest potential.

So now we are more than a week past the final election week results and Barack Obama is our President Elect and George Bush regrets saying alot of things while in office. What a wild post election week.

I am a non-traditional when it comes to politics, internet, and blogging. I am a conservative Republican.

However, one thing I have admired almost a year ago is how Democrats, Barack Obama exclusively has used the power of the internet, more specifically social media to rally his supporters and influencers. Never before has a campaign leveraged the power of online social communities like Barak Obama. As of today here are some general statistics for some major social sites the Barack Obama campaign has tapped into:

• Facebook Group - Over 3.1 million subscribers
• Myspace Profile – Over 900,000 friends
• Youtube Profile – Over 1,800 videos and 135,000+ subscribers
• Twitter Profile – 128,000 + followers

Why I am bringing up these statistics is the fact that Barack Obama (and the Democrats per se) have a huge crowdsourcing gem on their hands for not only during Barack Obama’s Presidency but for his re-election aspirations in 2012.

Barack Obama is the first president to have the power to leverage Social Media in such a way as never seen before by our Presidency or Government as a whole. Immediately after he won the presidency, he launched the website, CHANGE.GOV – A website dedicated to educating and communicating with the social user.

On the flip side, the Republicans seem to be taking note. I won’t get into how massive the difference in statistics were for John McCain for the website mentioned above, but what I want to mention is that it seems the Republicans are taking note as well by launching their own Social site called REPUBLICANFORAREASON.com

I applaud the Republicans for jumping on the band wagon and understanding the power of Social Media, but I have to admit the massive difference in Social Media Strategy is still massive. Consider the domains themselves used from a marketing standpoint. Change.gov vs. RepublicanForAReason.com – The Republicans just may have added hyphens inbetween words, it would have made the domain easier to remember.

I am excited to see that both parties now are understanding the power of Social Media. Time will tell who will win this campaign of utilizing Social Media to its maximum potential.

You can look at several elements when measuring the success of your social media efforts. What you measure is going to depend on your overall marketing goals. Do you want to push sales, drive engagement, or increase awareness? Whatever your success metrics are, here are some others to consider as well:

1. Content Consumption – If you have a blog, an effective way to measure engagement is to monitor who is reading your blog, where they are coming from and what content they are reading. You can run web analytic reports that will show you the most popular content on your site or blog. This data will also show how much time the reader spent on a particular page, where the reader came from, and also the bounce rate (percent of visitors who left your site after visiting a particular page).
2. Content Contribution – If you have a blog or wiki that allows comments, a quick and easy metric is monitoring the number of visitors who are interacting with your content.
3. Social Bookmarking – Who is adding your site, article or blog posts to sites like Delicious, Reddit, and Stumbleupon? There are a couple of methods you can use to look at this metric. You can use your web analytics tool and run a click map report and see how many web visitors are clicking on the social bookmarking icons. Or, you can simply create profiles in each of the bookmarking sites and search for your URLs.
4. Subscribing to an RSS feed – This allows you to measure how many of your readers are subscribing to your RSS feeds.
5. Emailing posts – If you allow your blog postings to be emailed to others, you can use a blog platform tool (such as WordPress) to see how many emails are sent through your form.
6. Who is talking about you – There are a few ways you can measure this, but, it’s not an exact science. Again, with WordPress, you can see which sites are linking to your site. This function is clearly located on the dashboard so you can see this as soon as you log in. You can also use a blog search engine, such as Technorati, and search your domain. Lastly, you can always use the old SEO trick by searching for your domain in Google, Yahoo and MSN with the following: link:http://www.yourwebsite.com. These numbers will never exactly match, but they are indicators of who is talking about you, or minimally, who is linking to your site.
7. Profile Engagement – Perhaps you don’t have a blog, but you have a profile on Myspace, Facebook, or Mybloglog. You can apply the same metrics mentioned above, as well as monitor the number of friends that you have, total profile visits, etc. Each social networking site offers some type of vitality metric to see what’s going on in your communities.

Before you engage with social media, you may want to assign monetary values to your metrics, especially if your end goal does not include revenue conversions. This is where the task becomes a bit challenging, but it’s key if you want to assign an ROI to your social media marketing efforts.

Insipration: Content from Michael Brita Senior Marketing Manager Yahoo!

Who is the Evangelist?

Social Media exists because people who have strong opinions about a product, service, or issue are extremely “vocal” online. They post on forums, blogs and wikis. They chat with friends. They reach out to the online world in every imaginable way possible to drive home a point.

“Evangelist” describes this prolific online personality. This person or group of people are the heartbeat, the pulse of the social media strategy for your company or initiative. According to Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research “An evangelist’s role is to go beyond understanding and get others to believe in your product or service. This is beyond just communication and advertising and gets to the fundamental root of human communications, building trust. “

The Social Media Evangelist’s activity can be categorized into 3 major tasks:

1. Writing – The Evangelist must directly communicate with the client or customer. Typically, a skilled writer makes the best Evangelist. The writing must reveal an online personality that the audience can relate to.  The writer can be clever, funny, or even controversial as the brand permits. For maximum impact, you want the audience to strongly relate to the Evangelist.
2. Networking– The Evangelist must be open to online networking. Your ideal candidate is plugged into the Social Media stream of top technologies and is on top of technical trends. The Evangelist must have the technical savvy and the personality to influence online networks. The Social Media Evangelist must also be willing to join other communities and groups in the ‘real world’ in order to further relationships and influence their networks.
3. PR Magnet – The Evangelist knows how to generate buzz. He or she leverages Social Media to communicate the message you want to get out.