As an analyst at a digital agency with clients across a range of verticals, the question I get asked most often is, “How do I measure the ROI of my digital and social media efforts?” Unfortunately, there is no single formula to do this, and the explosion of digital touch points over the past five years has made the goal of a single formula even less attainable.

In the case of a direct response campaign driving to an online purchase, getting to a hard ROI is practical (and is the basis for performance marketing). Typically, though, those calculations still undercount the impact of the investment by not taking into account the “brand” value and impact of the campaign, and those calculations will also overcount the results of the investment because they take full credit for revenue that was triggered or influenced by activity in other marketing channels (for instance, the revenue we garnered from our retargeting campaign was influenced by the volume of traffic to the website in the first place, which was influenced by paid search investments, which was influenced by consumer interest generated through TV and print). [...]

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More and more consumers are using curation services to condense and digest the flood of information online. With 140 million Twitter posts per day, countless Facebook updates and RSS feeds, consumers barely have time to absorb any of the information they see. Tools such as Summify, Paper.li, Flipboard, and more are changing the way consumers [...]

We’re seeing an evolution in social media. Large digital social networks are being filtered into smaller groups based on interests, activity and location. And while an influx of new apps is helping us categorize existing friends, they’re also enabling us to expand our physical social circles and create disposable digital groups. The digital and physical [...]

Not long ago, the general vision of Interactive TV included an on-screen display with engaging apps and ways to connect with friends. Now, the view of interactive television involves watching the big screen and engaging with additional content on smartphones and tablets. According to a Nielsen and Yahoo report, about 86 percent of people access [...]

With many of us using technology for business and pleasure, there’s a good chance we’re replacing physical relationships with primarily digital ones. But a bevy of new apps are promoting tangible connections by using digital social networking to drive real-life interactions. The Situationist app encourages nearby strangers to meet. Hurricane Party helps create and share [...]

Brands are starting to use social photo sharing to reach new audiences. With the rapid growth of Instagram—two million users in less than five months, plus 130,000 registering each week—and the arrival of competitors such as PicPlz, it’s clear that the popularity of photo sharing is increasing at an astounding rate. What’s even more interesting [...]

Brands are underutilizing one of the Facebook “Like” button’s most powerful capabilities. When users click their Open Graph “Like” button—on and off Facebook—they’re creating a link to content on their wall and subscribing to future news feed updates. So by liking a certain page, consumers allow brands to publish stories to them in the same [...]

When it comes to social recommendations, we know consumers listen to people they know. In fact, according to IBM’s “Capitalizing on the Smarter Consumer” report, 45 percent turn to friends and relatives when they want to know more about something. But are consumers buying the recommendations some sites sell based solely on their friends’ behavior? [...]