Marshall Sponder’s Social Media Analytics: A Life@42 Review by Robert Lavigne, The Digital Grapevine @TDGv.net

Chapter One – The Conundrum of Social Media

"2011 moving into 2012 may well be the time frame when social business begins to replace social media" ~@smanalyticsbook <good biz model 😉

— TheDigitalGrapevine (@TDGV) December 4, 2011

@smanalyticsbook Chapter 1 is complete. Loved the analogy of "Ultraviolet" to represent existing yet untracked data through CRM to POS & ROI

— TheDigitalGrapevine (@TDGV) December 4, 2011

@smanalyticsbook Also very key points regarding poor metric/sentiment tracking from Flash-based sites. Another key reason why HTML5 won IMHO

— TheDigitalGrapevine (@TDGV) December 4, 2011

@smanalyticsbook The part though that really impressed me was learning about code-pipes to feed social and enterprise data to virtual worlds

— TheDigitalGrapevine (@TDGV) December 4, 2011

In Chapter 1, Marshall Sponder asks the question “Where’s the ROI?”

I found that opening salvo ironic, given that I first heard about Marshall Sponder through Olivier Blanchard, who wrote “Social Media ROI”.

To make it even more ironic, I am putting down Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics 2.0 in order to read this book. Avinash wrote the foreword to Social Media Analytics.

After reading the first chapter, I can already see how all three books will work so well together to answer that very question that is asked by so many.

As a side note. I was reminded once again how important and influential Trey Pennington was to the Social Media community. His name came up twice within the first few pages of Marshall’s Social Media Analytics. This is also something that is noticeable in Olivier’s Social Media ROI.

Chapter One hints at how important being a Social Business will be to successful social media campaigns and the measurement of sentiment and engagement within the social media community.

It brings forward the notion that many organizations and tools are currently unable to fully measure the complete Digital Footprint of a purchase driven by Social Media and Social Networking.

We are exposed to another example of how brilliant the integration of Virtual Worlds within the Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM spectrum can be if we fully integrated the data stream between the Virtual World, the Physical World and the Social World.

Click to Read my Review of

Chapter Two – Targeting Your Customers

Take Care,

Robert Lavigne, Your Social Business Mentor