I’m in the process of writing a case study for Cisco IT on social media tools LinkedIn Answers and Twitter.  The challenges have been how to effectively utilize these tools in order to show ROI.

When first joining twitter, we got a lot of negative feedback about the structure of our posts from the community, which were very similar to that of an rss feed.  Working in a large corporation, there is still quite a bit of ambiguity in what can and cannot be said on the internet in many of my colleagues minds.  I guess that is to be expected in a large company such as Cisco, but I am very happy to see an increase in converasation around the topic.

Our twitter account has slowly evolved from a Cisco IT news feed to a real person with thoughts and opinions in the IT industry as well as some Cisco recommended resources.

LinkedIn answers has been a great tool as well that has been an enabler of conversations and relationship building.  I was quite surprised with the amount of positive feedback that I have been getting in response to some of my posts relating to Cisco IT.

In the end we are measuring amount of relationships, engagements, and traffic back to Cisco IT and we are still learning what strategies and tools can work best for a group that is a Cisco resource for best practices and case studies.

Chris Brogan just wrote a blog post on twitter marketing agency Cherp.  The company advertises that they can can a twitter account and turn it into a sweet melody by creating a twitter marketing strategy.

With Twitter’s open api, it is only a matter of time until we see different forms of this micro-blogging platform used in all kinds of unimaginable forms.

On the site they say twitter “..not only provides brands the ability to deliver relevant, SEO friendly messaging, but to connect and listen to consumer.”  There is also the option for platform integration.  My skeptisim comes in with the quesiton of whether or not a service such Cherp can not only broadcast and listen but have meaningful, transparent conversations.  It will be very interesting to see how twiter continues to play a role in business models.

I found a great web app called Tweetburner for keeping track of how many clicks your twurls are generating.  We all know that one way conversations are frowned upon in the social media community, but for purposes such as press releases or website updates it helps to see how effective or interesting your twitter titles are to your audience.

After recently taking the dive into twitter for a social media marketing tool in my group at Cisco, there was some discussion on how we can measure our success as well as our deliverables.  Twittercounter.com helps us do exactly this.  It’s all about follower count and growth.  It gives both a nice bar graph along with predictions for the following month.  Those of you who need something to measure your twitter account by, this is the perfect solution.