That last one’s the tough one. As I’ve discovered, it’s not so easy to come up with content that piques customers’ discerning interests day after day. You can theorize all you want–when you’re on the hook to get it done, it’s hard. Anyone who says otherwise is flat out lying to your face.

But, there is somewhat of a method to this “madness”, as it were. At least when it comes to brainstorming and identifying those topics and issues that your customers care about.

So, today I wanted to share a list of approaches I’ve taken to brainstorming and generating social content with my clients and partners. Take a look at the list below and let me know what you think.

* Scan hash tags and search terms within your industry regularly on Twitter. See what issues are bubbling to the top and write about those.

* Scan Twitter lists within your industry. Find out what these key influencers and folks are talking about and consider weighing in with your two cents on those topics–and don’t forget to feature their tweets prominently in your post.

* Develop a list of 10-20 key blogs in your industry, put them in a blog reader and sift through them once a week. Find out what these people are discussing and take a contrarian viewpoint. Again, make sure you link back to the original post for which you’re taking a contrarian viewpoint.

* Scan LinkedIn Answers for common questions that are popping up on the platform. Better yet, take one of those questions that’s generating a decent amount of responses and build a blog post around it using the question and answers in your post (with links back to anyone who might have a blog)

* Search Quora for key questions that are emerging in your industry. Take a look at the answers to see if you agree. If not, build a post around what your answer might be.

* Aggregate and curate. Go back and review the blogs you follow. Find 5-10 posts around one key topic and create your own post with links back to those original articles.

* Review session topics at upcoming industry events and conferences. Or, monitor Twitter and other social networks for people who are talking about these sessions after the event. That will give you a pretty good indication which topics are hotter than others.

* Read articles in industry publications and news sites. See if there’s any bigger picture issues you could comment on in a blog post or video post. You’re just looking for a topic you feel strongly about–something you can opine about.

Others to add?

Check out Communications Conversations for more articles by Arik Hanson

Are you content with your ability to measure social media effectiveness? Let us know.

ShareThis, which reaches 400 million people a month through social media share buttons across content all over the web, has released some new metrics for measuring social media effectiveness.

One of the metrics is its Audience Index, which lets publishers understand and compare their social audiences against 850,000 other sites (and soon against categories), find out what types of influencers your site attracts, and find out how well you connect with influencers, listeners, and engaged customers.

The other metric might be even more useful. That would be "Social Reach".

"We recently surveyed publishers (ours and others) and found that over 60% wanted (and were missing) social referral analytics," ShareThis explains on the company blog. "Social Reach measures the true value of shared media across the web by looking at outbound sharing and inbound social traffic and, in the process, gives proper credit to the listener/responder of a share as much as the original influencer/sharer. Publishers can now get a more accurate measurement of how a piece of content circulates around the Web after it’s been shared across any service, rather than just the simple number of shares counted by a single service like Facebook."

"Social Reach is built in to all of ShareThis’ new share buttons that we introduced a couple of weeks ago, and the Social Reach score of each piece of content can be displayed on any page where our buttons are installed," the company says.

ShareThis shared some interesting stats regarding Social Reach with TechCrunch. For example, according to the company, Facebook accounts for 45 percent of all shared content across its network, followed by email with 34 percent, and Twitter with 12 percent.

While Facebook may get more shares from ShareThis, email appears to be more effective, as people are more likely to click on an emailed link (31 percent out of the 34 percent, compared with 36 percent out of FB’s 44 percent).

Either way, the metrics could prove to be very useful for publishers looking at optimizing their social media marketing strategies.

What tools do you use to measure social media effectiveness? Share with other WebProNews readers.

A report from the Wall Street Journal says that even large corporations like Kraft foods, Greyhound Lines, and Capital One Financial are among the victims of such scams.

The sites use code, which makes it look to marketers like their ads have been appearing, but they do not appear to users. The report, based on research from Ben Edelman, cites MyToursInfo.com and MyProfilePimp.com as a couple of offending sites.

"The Web sites can get away with it, he says, because online advertisers don’t always audit their campaigns for proof their ads are appearing," writes WSJ’s Emily Steel. "It isn’t clear how common these ads are or how much they cost marketers."

So how is an advertiser to know who to trust? One solution mentioned in the report is to buy ads based on attaining a certain number of clicks as well as impressions. In such a scenario, a site would have no benefit to pull off such a scam. Another possible solution is to be more directly involved with who you are advertising with.

"Advertisers often buy display ads based on the number of times they are loaded onto a page, rather than the number of clicks they get," says Steel. "Over the past, year, an increasing number of scams have sought to take advantage of that pricing system as advertisers have started buying more of their online ads via middlemen called ad networks, instead of directly from the Web sites themselves. These networks sell ad space at cheap rates across thousands of sites, and they don’t always weed out illegitimate players."

Online advertising is having a big year. A number of recent reports show an optimistic viewpoint for the industry. There is no reason why that shouldn’t continue as long as advertisers take responsibility for monitoring and stay involved with their campaigns.

BuzzMarketing Daily discovered that there is a blurb in the Fan Interaction Dashboard, which you can get to by clicking "learn more" from the Facebook Insights page, which talks about a couple of new metrics that are on the way (via Inside Facebook).

The new metrics are Click Through Rate and Engagement Rate for content that appears in the Facebook news feed. As described in the blurb, if a user clicks on one of your posts, it will be counted as "Stream CTR" and if a user likes or comments on a post, it will be counted under Stream ETR.

One knock against social media marketing has historically been its lack of measurable success. Metrics like this should be able to go a long way toward curing that.

With Facebook’s Insights, you can already look at interactions (numbers of comments, wall posts, and likes), Interactions Per Post (average number of comments, wall posts and likes for each piece of content), Post Quality (score measuring engagement), Discussion Posts (number of discussion topics created on your page), and Reviews (number of times fans use the Reviews app to rate you page).

Suffice it to say, there are a number of things you can look at to gauge the success you are having with your Facebook page, and depending on what areas you are lacking in, you can take the necessary steps to try and improve – just like with any other analytics program.

comScore shares some rather interesting data showing that the number of paid clicks has grown 3 times slower than the total number of queries in the US since January 2007. Look at these graphs:

The percentage of SERPS (search engine results pages) that actually feature paid ads appears to be on the decline according to comScore.

"An analysis of comScore data shows that search queries are actually getting longer and that as searchers become more experienced they are using more words per search query," explains comScore’s Gian Fulgoni. "And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization."

The data makes me wonder if we might start to see a trend in longer query keywords being bid upon. This could make the game much more tricky, because obviously the longer the query, the more combinations of keywords. It would really require a lot analysis of search trends and thinking from inside the customer’s shoes.

The study shows that only 20% of visitors to sites from social media and PR are the result of a direct click. The remaining 80% are from "view-through," which measures traffic from Internet users who come to a site after viewing a piece of social media or online PR content that either didn’t contain a direct link to the site, or didn’t acquire the user as a result of a direct click from the content.

"This study shows why marketers who are serious about measuring the ROI of social media need to use view-through measurement in addition to existing click-though measurement," says Erik Bratt, CEO of Engage Social Media, a social media and PR agency focused on monitoring and measurement.

Tealium breaks social media and online PR traffic down into 3 scenarios:

- The social media outlet provides a direct link to a site and the visitor clicks the link – this is what is currently measured by existing analytics tools

- The social media outlet provides a direct link to a site, which is not clicked on, but the outlet still generates the interest for a future visit

- The social media outlet does not provide a direct link to the site and all traffic generated will be indirect and occurs as a view-through.

This brings to mind things like the DiggBar, Facebook’s similar bar, and things of this nature that provide users with third-party content while framed within the social network’s own format.

Tealium uses the study to push it’s own product that measures view-through, but if the data is accurate, this is certainly something that should be taken into consideration when measuring social media ROI. The Interactive Advertising Bureau actually released a document of social media advertising metric definitions that could help as well.

Among the organizations participating in the project to come up with the guidelines were Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Advertising.com, AOL, Business.com, Click Forensics, CBS Ineractive, Compete, Disney Interaactive Media, Looksmart, Omniture, PricewaterhouseCoopers, SEMPO, WebTrends, and many more. The guidelines are designed to:

- Provide a detailed definition of a “click” and outline standard methodologies by which clicks should be measured and counted, including the identification of invalid and/or fraudulent clicks.

- Define standard terms to aid in the streamlining of buying and selling of click-based media.

- Increase transparency and consistency in click measurements for media companies, ad-serving organizations, advertisers, and third-party click auditors.

"Helping the interactive industry define a click and the standard for measuring one has been an extraordinary effort on the part of the IAB and its members," said Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety for Google. "It is an important step that continues to reinforce interactive media’s role as the most accountable and measurable form of advertising."

The document (pdf) is lengthy, but one that advertisers should take the time to read. They are offering a chance for ad agencies, advertisers, publishers, and vendors to provide feedback on the guidelines, so you might be able to get your two cents included too if something of value has not been referenced.

There are a variety of ways that you can use Google to boost your holiday sales beyond simply optimizing your site for the search engine (which is a given). In fact, Google has been so kind as to offer some holiday tips regarding several of their services: Product Search, AdWords, Checkout, and Analytics.

Google Product Search Tips

When it comes to Google Product Search, Google points out that if you’ve never submitted to it, you can start submitting your products by using existing feeds that you’ve prepared for other shopping engines to save time and effort.

Google also says, "Use key attributes like MPN, UPC, ISBN, condition, or brand to accurately describe the products in your feed. These values are crucial for increasing your products’ visibility to relevant queries." There are services you can use to create you feeds if your company doesn’t have "the internal resources to build and submit feeds." You can also of course post a single item.

 Google AdWords Tips

As you’re probably aware, Adwords is a wildly popular advertising platform, but are you going about putting your ads together in a way that lets them reach their effectiveness potential? Google says to Write clear, specific, and compelling ads to convince people to click on them. "For instance, if you are running a special holiday promotion, you could mention it in your ad text to drive additional interest."

You can geo-target your AdWords ads right down to specific neighborhoods (or as wide as an entire country or the whole world). This lets you adjust the relevancy of your ads to the audience they reach. Google also suggests, "Use the Keyword Tool to help you build your holiday keyword list so your ads can appear when holiday shoppers search on Google for gift ideas related to your products and services."

I’ll go a step further and suggest incorporating some display ads into your holiday AdWords campaigns. This is a new feature that Google is offering, and display advertising is a trend that is making its way back around now that targeting and personalization technologies are better equipped for success than they were years ago. Not only will display ads potentially attract more eyeballs, they are (in my opinion) better for branding and leaving a lasting imprint in the minds of those who view them.

Google Checkout Tips

If you use AdWords, display Google Checkout badges in your ads. According to Google, ads that do this have a 10% higher clickthrough rate than those that don’t, and why not? This is a classic advertising strategy. It makes the ads look "clicky". It’s basically a call-to-action. It tells the customers, "click me to buy this."

Google also offers a couple of cost-saving tips when it comes to Google Checkout, which are sure to be appreciated as the economy puts a strain on businesses. You can reduce transaction processing costs if you use AdWords with Google Checkout, because when you do this, you are eligible for free processing on some or all of your Google Checkout sales. They also offer reduced shipping costs via discounted FedEx rates.

Google Analytics Tips

Analyzing data is an important part of moving forward with campaigns and making adjustments to your site, and in that spirit, Google also has a couple tips for using their Analytics service. These include getting the most out of you AdWords campaign by evaluating geographical performance data, and learning where shoppers are exiting your site so you can make improvements to it to keep them there until they buy.

For a more detailed look at Bounce rates, I suggest reading Jason Miller’s article and watching our accompanying WebProNews video interview from SES San Jose with Google Group Manager Brett Crosby and Web Analytics: An Hour a Day author Avinash Kaushik. Search Engine Roundtable also points to some additional holiday tips from Google in video form.

Google or No Google, the Holidays Are Coming

One could argue that these tips are just a ploy to get people to use Google’s services. That would probably be correct, but the fact is that many are already using these services, and may not be utilizing them to their full potential. Is Google the "be-all, end-all" of getting conversions from your site? Of course not. You’ve got other options to make money online during the holiday season.

Other possibilities include: Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, Amazon, other shopping search/comparison sites, social networks, etc. But people commonly use Google, and that is a cold hard fact.

Here are a few additional bonus tips for converting sales:

- Guiding Your Customers to the Checkout

- Making Efforts To Earn Customer Trust

- Marketing To Your Local Audience

- Making Usability a Focus

Given the data released recently from different parties, it’s hard to tell just what kind of a holiday season businesses are in for. The economy would obviously indicate reduced spending plans for many consumers. However, while Hitwise says that holiday traffic is on the way down, the E-Tailing Group says that 49% of consumers they surveyed still intend to do their gift buying online. Make of that what you will.

I would still expect to make some sales online, but the number is likely to be up to how much effort you put into making them. The point is, economic conditions may create a less-than-stellar outlook for your holiday sales, but there are still tools at your disposal that can help you overcome those conditions and have a successful holiday season.

These pages have just one motto in mind… Give us money, else go away! Personally, I find it more convenient to move away from that page because I always feel that I can find that information on other pages as well.

But if you are willing to go for a subscription model, then Google has got something for you! They call it “First Click Free.”

“In order to help users find and access content that may require registration or a subscription, Google offers an option to web and news publishers called "First Click Free." First Click Free has two main goals:

1. To include highly relevant content in Google’s search index. This provides a better experience for Google users who may not have known that content existed.
2. To provide a promotion and discovery opportunity for publishers with restricted content.” – Google

Guidelines

“Webmasters wishing to implement First Click Free should follow these guidelines:

• All users who click a Google search result to arrive at your site should be allowed to see the full text of the content they’re trying to access.
• The page displayed to all users who visit from Google must be identical to the content that is shown to Googlebot.
• If a user clicks to a multi-page article, the user must be able to view the entire article. To allow this, you could display all of the content on a single page—you would need to do this for both Googlebot and for users. Alternately, you could use cookies to make sure that a user can visit each page of a multi-page article before being asked for registration or payment.”

Comments

Who to believe, we wonder, ahead of Google’s Q1 2008 earnings announcement on Thursday. The forbidding news of less paid search clicking? The investors who have pushed shares of Google up ahead of today’s opening bell? The idea that fewer clicks will be more profitable clicks, thanks to Google’s rejection of low-quality ads?

On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, Silicon Alley Insider said its sneak peek at comScore’s report on paid clicks showed a “violent deceleration” for the first quarter. Growth in March of only 2.7 percent, Q1 growth of 2 percent year over year, they aren’t happy numbers.

Citing Mark Mahaney of Citi, the post pointed to a couple of possible reasons for this relatively flat performance: Google’s forceful efforts to make advertisers comply with AdWords quality guidelines, and a general decrease of commercial searches that would lead to ad clicks.

“Uh oh,” Silicon Alley Insider said to that last one, while suggesting a combination of the two seemed likely.

VentureBeat picked up on more of the comScore report, gleaning a copy of it from UBS. “Once again we