A few of my favorites:

“Focus on sharing your cause. The money will follow.”

and

“Create a relationship first, and then ask for support.”

This is a great book for traveling, or if you’d like to see bite-size examples of successes in non-profit social media.  Either way, I’m recommending this one, especially if you’re involved with a non-profit.

In this ‘off the record’, or ‘unattributed’, or whatever you want to call it, Tweet, Nick Bilton gets the nitty-gritty on how Zuckerberg feels about user privacy.  Now, to be fair, I’m sure he’s not totally against some user privacy, but it’s the internet people!  Other than your date-of-birth, emails, social security number, and your address/phone number, nothing you put on the internet really needs to be private.

Less private content means better archival options (I can link directly to what you said), transparency among identities, and less trollery.  Remember, anonymous comments are the bane of the internet, and in no way contribute to a discussion.  Making real people, with real identities, a possibility means we can really cut down on asshats and spam, and that’s what all this Identity 2.0 stuff is trying to do.

My two cents… Don’t expect anything on the net to be private. If you want to keep your opinions to yourself, don’t post them to Twitter or Facebook. If you feel the need to only share them with a handful of people, just group text them or email them. Otherwise, I see no problem w/Facebook, or any company, pushing the limits of so-called privacy on the net a bit. Remember, Blippy couldn’t even keep your Credit Cards safe (Techmeme), so you should assume that if your content is out there, it may one day see the light.

Seems simple right? In my experience, dealing with hundreds of clients over the last 12 years, very few can actually quantify what they want.

Some tell me they want marketing help (far too vague), but when I ask about success metrics, they almost invariably cite traffic as their primary success measure. Now, not to discount traffic, but that’s not what pays the bills is it?

ROI shouldn’t be calculated on traffic*, but by counting other other measures. If your aim is engagement, count comments, reviews, buzz. If your aim is sales, count overall revenue increases, direct conversions, increase of average sales…

In an SEM campaign in particular, knowing what you want is vital, because every click costs you. Your campaigns should be highly segmented, helping you know where each dime goes, how each ad performs, how each keyword you’re buying contributes to the goals you’ve set.

Search Engine Guide has an excellent post up today about segmenting your keywords:

There are four distinct keyword segments each representing a different phase of the searcher’s buying cycle. After going through the process above you should be left with one or more groups of keyword that can be optimized into a page or several pages. The next step is to take each group and segment them even further based on those keyword segments.

Once you know what you want, you can do A/B testing to determine where your money’s going and whether or not your plan is working.  Know what you want and you have a heck of a lot better chance at getting it.

*there are a few, rare exceptions to this rule

Supermarket ‘clubs’, like those in place at CVS, Safeway, Publix, and virtually every chain supermarket, save Walmart, already share your data with telemarketers and email marketers.  The swipe saves us a few bucks so we agree… Upromise, by Sallie Mae, has already gotten into big trouble with not disclosing the truckloads of data they collect from their toolbar to their users.  Still college students add that toolbar and hope for the best. WE SHARE TOO MUCH!

A Mashable post on Data Mining in Social Media digs a little deeper, but still not deep enough. They don’t even mention the new iPhone app that’s being called a ’stalker’s dream’ nor the freaky 123People that lets you check the government documents that other people have filed (or had filed against them).

I’m big on social media, I love it, but this trend toward over-sharing, both purposefully and unintentionally, frightens me.