Business and Marketing
Companies have all but fully embraced social media in their business plans already, but the integration in 2012 will become all-encompassing, with social media dwarfing other marketing activities. The increase will become so pervasive that it will become a given and a business necessity to have brand monitoring software to track engagement and measure ROI.

Companies will also move away from having a marketing department that also handles social media. The new necessity to survive the competition will be a director of social media, and possibly a staff that does nothing but. This is because social sites will become the new customer service centers of corporations, tailoring their practices to fit into the customers’ paradigm. 

Marketing will finally find the ultimate sweet spot in social media, where well-planned campaigns become almost effortless and extremely more effective due to fitting in the target market’s activities rather than becoming an extra activity. Businesses that can see the future and prepare properly will thrive. Those who do not will sink, and we are likely to see a shake-up and shake-out of businesses in the coming year as this heats up.

Mobile Social Activities
With the smartphone and tablet markets already in full gear, this will be the year that they rise toward the saturation point. These markets have been sitting in the 20-35% adoption range for a couple of years, but the latter half of 2011 saw then inching higher each month. In 2012 this market will break 50% and beyond, and in doing so social media activities will follow and become much more mobile than they are tethered to a laptop or desktop. Social gaming will continue to grow at astronomical rates, incorporating more and more advertising as well as real-world activities that tie in.

News Will Be Primarily from Social Sites
Twitter really began the cycle of distributing news through social media a few years ago, but it has really grown into a powerful force today, with many people getting the majority of their daily news through social sites. This trend will only continue, and as major media outlets embrace it more and more it will become better structured and the primary source for most people to get their news, in one way or another. We have already seen in newscasts and in this election cycle the engagement and inclusion of Twitter and Facebook as legitimate sources of engagement and feedback from viewers, and this year’s Presidential election will likely see a huge impact from the social side of things.

Facebook will break 1 billion users, but Google+ will release their API and Rule the World
Facebook will get the push over the 1 billion mark by adding users from countries with lower rates of adoption, and they will remain a dominant player in every aspect of the social scene, which will mean the web itself. However, Google has already taken bold moves in recent days and months to set themselves up for the biggest putsch in internet history. They have steadily been integrating and tweaking their vast products and resources to eventually form one hub to rule them all, just as the Google search site was for years. With Google+ taking off in the last 4 months and being integrated with everything from search to pictures to documents to email to everything else, Google will complete this consolidation and finally release their API for third-party development, and in a matter o months they will out pace Facebook and once again become the dominant force on the internet. Once this happens it will be a coups that will be hard to undo.

According to Website Magazine, the rankings are based on the following methodology:

Website Magazine’s Top 50 rankings are a measure of a website’s popularity. Ranks are calculated using a proprietary method that focuses on average daily unique visitors and page views over a specified period of time, as reported by multiple data sources. The website with the highest combination of factors is ranked in the first position.
 

Below is the complete list of companies:

1. Adobe.com
2. infusionsoft.com
3. zoho.com
4. rackspace.com
5. vertex42.com
6. carbonite.com
7. silverpop.com
8. 37signals.com
9. freshbooks.com
10. successfactors.com
11. woopra.com
12. marketo.com
13. wordstream.com
14. brightedge.com
15. Mozy.com
16. rightnow.com
17. egnyte.com
18. ibusinesspromoter.com
19. taleo.com
20. whoson.com
21. onestat.com
22. sugarcrm.com
23. outright.com
24. Crashplan.com
25. salesforce.com
26. hubspot.com
27. netsuite.com
28. atinternet.com
29. webtrends.com
30. coremetrics.com
31. dynamics.com
32. getclicky.com
33. webceo.com
34. ektron.com
35. eloqua.com
36. crazyegg.com
37. clicktale.com
38. piwik.org
39. clickdensity.com
40. 10gen.com
41. xero.com
42. engineyard.com
43. commence.com
44. blinksale.com
45. zuora.com
46. adaptiveplanning.com
47. aprimo.com
48. sendible.com
49. salesboom.com
50. liveperson.com

1. Know Your Base
Finding the people you should be interacting with has to be the first step in the process. You want to create as many promoters of your cause as possible to create buzz, energy, and action for it. Search social sites by keywords that relate to your mission and your brand, then follow or like them and engage them on the site to try to get them involved. A group of people with a common vision will feed off of each other and generate buzz.

2. Ask For Participants
Once you’ve identified and engaged your promoters, they can help you to spread the word of your mission and bring more into the fold. The exponential power of tapping into ever-reaching networks of people on social sites can be one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal for getting the word out.

3. Tie It All Together
Utilize ever available resource and make them a seamless net. Picture a website with its pages. Navigating through the pages should be easy and uncomplicated. You should think of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and any other site you use as pages on your website, wih each one linked to the other in as flowing a way as possible. Include links, badges, button, and cross-site promotion on every page. Also make sure that all your information is filled in, like pictures, bios, activities, contact information, etc. Incomplete profiles look bad. Use every site you can get on, and there are a lot. Limiting yourself to the big three (or less in some cases) is a mistake. Using sites like SoundCloud or Pinterest can allow you to reach people that may not react as well to your message on other sites.

4. Let the Funds Flow
Don’t spend all of your social networking time asking for money. It is much more effective to be real and engaging to generate interest and let the money come naturally. This is not to say that you should never ask, just don’t get pushy. Remember, $1 from 1000  people is the same as a $1000 donation from one person, except there is a much better chance of the word spreading to others through the 1000 people.

5. Monitor Your Sites
Using a social media dashboard will help you keep track of the activity surrounding your brand or mission. Even if you have a full-time person for social media management, which you should, it is close to impossible to keep a good eye on your engagement by simple browsing through. Good software will do much of the work for you so you can spend your time actually being social. It will also provide analytics that can help you to figure out what is working and what isn’t.

1. Go to your Sendible Message Box, Click Photo or File and upload an image to Sendible.

2. Once uploaded, you’ll see your image with 3 little icons at the top right. Click the middle icon (a link).

3. You’ll be able to enter a URL and convert the image to a link preview.

1. The ability to edit sentiment and relevancy for a given mention
Sendible’s sentiment analyzer is great, but there are times when it gets it wrong. You now have the ability to edit the sentiment score for a given mention. We understand that some mentions may be irrelevant and we’ve introduced the ability to mark posts as irrelevant so that they do not appear in your reports and mention results.

2. The ability to integrate your Google Alerts feed
Creating Google Alerts for your business or keywords is a great way to keep updated whenever Google’s crawlers come across a mention of your brand. You now have the ability to add your Google Alerts feed into Sendible so that Sendible is also notified whenever Google comes across a mention of your business. 

3. Tracking of new services including Google+, GetSatisfaction, Blekko and IceRocket
We have been extending our mention crawler to include mentions of your business from new sites such as Google+ and GetSatisfaction. If you have any suggestions for other sites you’d like to see crawled, please leave them in the comments below or send us an email.

4. Searchable results
We have added a search box so that you can now search your mentions streams.

1. Find a mention or post that you would like to assign to a team member so that they can respond.
2. Select the little drop down menu on the far right and click Assign.

3. You will then be able to enter a message and select which team member the post should be assigned to.

4. The team member will receive an email notification, informing them that a task has been assigned to them.

5. They can then respond to the task from within Message Box > Tasks. They can also collaborate on the task and post comments/questions.

6. Once they’ve responded to the task, they click Mark Done and the user that originally assigned the task will be notified that the task has been completed.

To configure a workflow for a user, follow the steps below:
1. If you haven’t already done so, sign up for a Sendible account that allows you to manage multiple users/clients. For more information on how to manage multiple clients with Sendible, see this short video)
2. Go to My Users and either create a new user or edit an existing one.
3.  You will now see an Approval Worfklow section. Click edit to define who this user needs approval from before they can publish content.

4. Follow the steps to Save or Create the user.
5. Now, when this user creates their content from the Message Box, they will see a Submit For Approval button.
6. The user has the ability to add a message/comment that will be sent to the user from whom they require approval. This user will receive a notification, informing them that they need to either approve or reject the content.

So how do they work out this score? The Klout algorithm is quite clever, it takes into account three statistics , True Reach, amplification and network score before working its magic and coming up with a number based off of these figures.

True Reach is basically the size of a person’s actively engaged audience. That is the number of followers that regularly interact with the users social profile in the form of reading, clicking links and responding to content.

Amplification is used to gauge how valuable or viral the content you offer is. This is judged based on how probable the person’s content is likely to be acted upon i.e. retweeted, commented, liked etc.

Network score is based on how influential the users engaged audience are. For instance if a celebrity with a high Klout is a member of a person’s engaged audience than that persons score is likely to benefit a fair amount from it.

In order to achieve a reasonably high score you need to keep track on and improve all three of these metrics. It doesn’t matter if you produce a lot of content and have a large audience if what you spread is worthless your amplification score will suffer. The best way of reaching a high level is to produce content people find valuable, your audience will then spread it on for you and your number of followers will grow. In the mean time keeping an eye out for other influential users and engaging with them will only likely increase your score further.

But why is this number important and why is it worth tracking? While its accuracy has sometimes been questioned by some it is generally considered the best method of determining whether you’re social media campaigns are going well and provides a clear and quantifiable number that is easy to follow.

Outside of tracking your own performance it is also a useful metric that can be used to evaluate others or for them to evaluate you. This can come in handy when you want to spread your message as far as possible. For instance if you were in the process of advertising your product, you could approach users with higher Klout scores and ask them for a review.

Their message due to their large active following will spread far wider than if the message had been passed on by the average user. Klout provides a simple way of identifying who these “influencers” are. This method of advertising has been practised by a few companies and is growing in popularity. One example of a company doing just that was when Audi asked designers with high Klout scores to come and test drive their new A8 model at an exclusive San Francisco event, and I’m sure most of them obliged.

So if you are not doing so already, make sure you keep an eye on this statistic or you will be passing up on a very useful measure for your success.