A few months ago, big brands and publishers were scrambling to create a Google+ presence. Six months in, has all that trouble yet begun to pay off in greater traffic and daily interaction with fans? A new study, looking at the UK’s daily newspapers market, has some insights.

The results of the study, conducted by social and search analytics experts at Searchmetrics, reveals a few contradictory points, not surprising for such a young social network (perhaps). Why contradictory? Well, Searchmetrics found that the size of the network doesn’t necessarily translate to more referrals, and thus, more traffic. Remember: in the new world of social search, referrals are kingmakers for SEO fanatics. Here’s what Marcus Tober, Searchmetrics’ CTO and founder, had to say about it:

Not only is having content shared or recommended on social networks such as Google+ a valuable way of generating traffic, but it is likely to be having an impact on how your web site pages rank and are positioned in search results. Google has already started showing personalised results – which incorporate online content that people’s Google+ followers have recommended – within search results.  And it’s likely that it will be looking at using the insights it gets from Google+ data to determine and shape search results in other ways.

Here’s what Searchmetrics found: that while the Financial Times had far and away the largest network of Google+ followers it was averaging fewer +1′d articles than The Sun, which has absolutely no Google+ network to speak of. How could this be? Searchmetrics surmises that the FT is losing out because of its paywall. That would seem to make some sense, but it still wouldn’t explain why its articles scored so low, relatively speaking.

I think the answer comes to us further down the league table, courtesy of the Daily Mail, far-and-away the publication in the UK with the most +1′d articles on a weekly basis despite being middle of the pack in terms of people who publicly follow the newspaper on Google+. The Daily Mail‘s brand of hot-button journalism has really thrived in the social media era. It doesn’t surprise us one bit that people are referring its stories to their network, but declining to pledge their loyalty to the publication by signing up to its Google+ network. Here’s a case where buzzy content will get the clicks, but not the loyalty that the newpaper is hoping to achieve with its Google+ network. Now, it’s still unclear whether the accumulation of +1′s are helping The Daily Mail with better SEO visibility. It certainly cannot hurt. But while it scores high in visibility terms, it’s showing once again that higher visibility doesn’t necessarily equate to higher consumer loyalty. So, in answer to the question above, there are advantages to being well-followed (more visibility on Google), but it won’t earn you any more respect.

By the way, here is Searchmetrics league table:

UK National Newspapers sites and Google+ visibility (19 March 2012)

Site                             No of Google+ followers                 Average +1s per week

FT.com                                                372,159                                     674

Guardian.co.uk 75,255                                                  3,367

Independent.co.uk 60,195                                                  2,812

Dailymail.co.uk 35,490                                                  10,493

Telegraph.co.uk 1,087                                                    5,822

Mirror.co.uk 149                                                       211

Scotsman.com                         110                                                       69

DailyRecord.co.uk 99                                                         22

HeraldScotland.com    1 (recently constructed )               28

TheTimes.co.uk No Google+ page found                       35

TheSun.co.uk No Google+ page found                       827

Express.co.uk No Google+ page found                       10

DailyStar.co.uk No Google+ page found                       5

And here are the most +1′d stories:

Frequently +1’d articles from national newspapers

DailyMail.co.uk, 12 Jan 2012, 837 +1s

‘Most runway models meet the BMI criteria for anorexia’, claims plus-size magazine in powerful comment on body image in the fashion industry’

Telegraph.co.uk, 18 Nov 2011, 1110 +1s

EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration

Guardian.co.uk, 25 Nov 2011, 1,142 +1s

The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy

Influence map or black hole?

By Chris Reed

Understanding and measuring influence has vexed social media communicators for years.

Two good places to start would be the release yesterday of Brian Solis/Altimeter’s “how to” guide, The Rise of Digital Influence, and attending today’s panel debate (22 March 2012) at the Guardian’s Changing Media Summit, featuring Leo Ryan (group head of social at Ogilvy), Andrew Grill (UK CEO of Kred), Bonin Bough (global head of digital at Kraft), Philip Sheldrake (Author – The Business of Influence), and Joanna Geary (digital development editor at Guardian News and Media). If you’re not there you can follow the Twitter stream at #cms2012.

But neither one will nail it. Because trying to find a single algorithm to measure influence is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. Fun trying. Maybe a degree of success, but you’re going to basically end up in a bit of a mess.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. It just means that you shouldn’t rely on a single algorithm. Your mix of qual and quant tools and analytics has to have the right balance. Algorithms should be the starting point, not the end point. Which is where I hope/expect this afternoon’s panel will net out.

And above all, it means you need to ask the right question to start with. You need to know exactly what you’re trying to measure, why you’re trying to measure it. And what all the proxies are along the way. Quite separate to that you need to ensure your tools aren’t being gamed – which they all are to a greater or lesser extent.

Yes, it’s possible to use tools like Peer Index, or Klout (or younger and better upstart Kred) to put a measure on ‘influence’, but influence always depends on the context of the question. By way of analogy, which of those tools would tell us: Who is the most influential journalist when it comes to reporting yesterday’s budget? Or even, which is the most influential newspaper, or broadcast channel? It all depends on who’s asking, and why they’re asking. Ask five different people, you’ll get five different answers, depending on their different perspectives. There’s no way an algorithm can answer the question and get it ‘right’.

Back in the day some people used to think that content is king. Then it became conversation. Now it’s context. While empirical data is always useful, it is shortsighted to run any ‘influencer’ campaign based on that data alone. And naive to base it on any one number which is spat out by an influence-identification tool without understanding individuals’ pre-disposition and motivation alongside it, as well as desired outcomes.

Brian Solis is right when he writes: Before you start to even try and measure influence, you need to understand what you want to achieve at the end of the process.

Which – hang on – is exactly what good PR people have been doing for years. Using a mix of qual and quant data, and a decent brief.

I’ve lost track of the number of stakeholder maps I’ve helped draw up using a combination of readership figures, demographics, gut feel and (the missing link with most of these tools apart from Kred) that stakeholder’s willingness to listen/participate – “to be influenced” if you like.

So I was disappointed to see that Klout featured so heavily in the Altimeter case studies. It’s an incredibly blunt tool, and extremely easily gamed. And it takes no account of people’s ‘receptiveness’ to what is essentially a PR approach. People who know their own Klout score know what’s expected of them when they’re invited to something. There is still no such thing as a free lunch. Or a free status update.

I therefore hope that the case studies were actually much more sophisticated than they’ve been presented. From my experience, all the UK mobile phone networks are already significantly more advanced in their social CRM and influencer engagement than the Windows Phone case study. And Nokia have been running a textbook influencer-engagement programme with 1000 Heads for years.

Having said that, though, Altimeter’s Influence Action Plan is spot on – maybe because it reads to me as a decent guide to running an effective PR campaign. The only thing that’s different compared to 5 years ago is the scale and the channels/tools to reach people. And while there are now tools to help measure influence which can cope with this recent change in scale and channels, I worry that the more the process is automated (i.e. based exclusively on Klout scores) the blunter and ultimately less effective it becomes.

I’m willing the tools to get better, I really am. Altimeter’s reviews and feature trackers are really useful in picking out some of the highlights. But those tools are never going to be as effective as people within organisations having a relationship with the people they are trying to influence – the ‘permeability’ that, as a social business consultant, I’m helping clients develop on a daily basis.

Yes, use the tools can help identify potential influencers. But those tools are better used, in my opinion, as a starting point for further research, not as a definitive list. Simply using an algorithmic tool to start a ‘transactional’ relationship will (as Dinah Boyd acknowledges) kickstart the Heisenburg uncertainty principle – just as professional ‘compers’ have mastered the “RT to win” phrase on Twitter.

Influence totally depends on content, context and nuance. That’s the problem with trying to measure it. Tools can help. But – although it’s time-consuming – eyeballs and gut feel should always play a bigger part in doing so.

Chris Reed founded social business consultancy Restless Communications. He also heads up Seventy Seven PR‘s social media team

Telecomms giant Sony Ericsson has teamed up with marketing agency Iris to offer Australian Facebookers the chance to bag themselves an Xperia arc smartphone. To do so, they must try to ‘unlock’ the arc featured on the brand’s new Facebook application, ‘Unlock Xperia’ – very much like sitting in the pub with a friend’s phone, trying to guess its password (teaser vid here).

However, fans only get one shot to win one of the 10 Xperia handsets, which are released every four days. After entering their code, the ‘hand of destiny’ will input the fan’s guess and reveal if they’re a winner or not. It’s pretty straightforward, and only one handset now remains, suggesting that the campaign has been well-received; indeed, a press release from Iris indicates that 15,000 guesses were made in the first week of the campaign alone.

Of course, to take part, the application asks that users ‘like’ the brand first, and then shares their activity with their peers. This adds a fun dimension to the guessing game, as the app reveals the (wrong) guesses of others. However, brand awareness seems to be the focus of this campaign. An email from Iris reveals that “People are seriously getting involved, and more importantly engaging with the app for long periods of time, which from a brand perspective is right on the money.”

Indeed, 10 handsets is a small price to pay for fan growth like this:

Coca-Cola has ranked at or near the top in just about every measure of social engagement for some time now. It is the Lady Gaga of brands. How does it manage to keep its 34 million-plus fans sated on a daily basis? An interesting new piece of research offers some insights.

We should warn you the findings may actually aggravate you, particularly if you are struggling to find and post Like-worthy content to your fanpage on a regular basis. With Coca-Cola, it seems to come too damn easy. Case in point from the Coca-Cola Facebook wall:

Right, not exactly Shakespeare or Socrates. In fact, it’s pretty banal. If your chipper colleague came into work and pronounced something like this to you and your cubemates you might want to go over and punch him square in the nose. And yet 14,562 people have clicked “Thumbs Up.” What gives?

Surely, engagement goes beyond simply pointing out the banal. Coke knows this. What Coca-Cola actually does geniusly well is to mix in on its Wall little observations like the one above with a little entertainment (a video out-take, for example, of a Coke Zero TV commercial audition) and the random fan-participation initiative (i.e., a logo-design contest for the UT Grand Prix 2012).

Now to the whitepaper, which was published yesterday by SEO and SEM specialists Covario. Covario ranked the top 100 brands (by advertising spend) and ranked them on a series of factors to determine which are the most Like-worthy on Facebook. Not surprisingly, Coca-Cola ranks Number 1. It not only has the most fans among its peers, it scores very high in engagement (the number of comments and likes per post), its brand, relatively speaking, isn’t sullied by parody or critical Coca-Cola groups and its technical presence is stellar (i.e., it’s clear from first peek, this is the official Coca-Cola fan page.) You can download the full report here (PDF).

We’ll leave you here with some of their insights into what makes for engaging social content (you can click to enlarge):

One point that we ought to add here is know your audience. Over time, you’ll see what your steadily growing fan base responds to. Reality check: it’s not a steady stream of promotional posts. Sometimes it is a simple observation or salutation. Stick with it. You’ll figure out the right content mix and the right voice to get people to start engaging with you.

Before you can start conversing with social media, you need to know what people are saying and how your organization or brand fits into that conversation. Here’s a quick guide to get you started on the very first step: listening.

Turns out the Japanese are blog-addicted, with the average blog visitor there spending more than one hour a month perusing others’ posts. It got us thinking about other interesting national social media consumption habits that just might tell us a bit more about these cultures.

Blogs. Starting off on our bet-you-didn’t-know tour, we head to the Far East where comScore reports on the blog consumption habits of Asian countries, noting that Japan tops the world league tables in blog readership.

Twitter. Which country Tweets the most? The Americans? The Brits? Nope, and nope. Earlier this year we learned it was the Dutch. Some 22.3% of the population of the Netherlands uses Twitter. No. 2? That would be Brazil at 21.8%.

Facebook. Yes, America is the top market here. But what’s surprising is the big gainers  who fall in line just behind the Yanks. Yes, it’s Indonesia at No. 2, India at No. 3 and Turkey at No. 4, Socialbakers calculates. This is probably why Miramax chose to launch its new Facebook movie-viewing service in three maiden markets: the U.S., UK and Turkey.

YouTube. In Europe, the Germans are the biggest consumers of online video, out-watching the Turks and Brits, says comScore. The Germans watch just over 19 hours of online video each month. By contrast, Americans watch about 16.8 hours per month. But it appears the Canadians and Israelis are the world leaders with a greater percentage of their population tuning in to online video each month.

I have been thinking more and more about the various strands to Social Business Intelligence, which is a major area of focus for us here at Dachis Group in 2011. At our London summit earlier this year, I spoke about the way open data inside and outside organisations can uncover new sources of value and help drive performance improvement. Yesterday, at the lovely Social Media Influence Conference, I spoke about how the field of Social Media Monitoring will become more real-time, operational and valuable as it moves towards Social Business Intelligence.

In summary, I think social media monitoring will evolve towards real-time data-driven business improvement based on socialising customer insight within the firm as a whole, not just within marketing and outbound communications.

Here are the slides, and a longer summary follows below for those of you who were not there:

From Social Media Monitoring to Social Business Intelligence

Listening grows up; becomes more business-focused

We have all been to events where people (sometimes me!) reference the Cluetrain manifesto and say that markets are conversations, and therefore we need to get better at listening before we engage. But in reality, the fact that ‘listening’ is still seen as a new and novel activity just goes to show how alien this has been to the culture of large companies and brands for so long.

But, looking at Altimeter’s survey of social strategists, it seems that listening, customer dialogue and word of mouth are now high on most organisation’s spending priorities for 2011. This is a good sign. Listening tools and techniques have evolved rapidly in the past year or so, and the purchase of the market-leading Radian 6 by Salesforce suggests that listening platforms are now regarded as a key piece of the wider social business infrastructure.

However, current practice is still largely dominated by the ideas of brand monitoring and buzz – in other words, it is still more about the company or brand than the individual and their needs or interests. Brand monitoring is a slightly narcissistic way of engaging – ‘they love me … they love me not’ – and often tend to look at aggregate measures of sentiment (which is, by the way, extremely unreliable) and reach, rather than specific issues. But there are plenty of other ways to use listening platforms to get a better idea of customer needs, opportunities, etc. We are working on some quite specific listening campaigns to help refine clients’ service offerings, and this requires far more linguistic gymnastics than asking “does my brand look big in this?”

Brand perception is obviously important, but I think utility matters more to customers most of the time. This is why I love the way companies like Southwest Airlines and others use Twitter in a very down-to-earth way, responding honestly and openly to complaints, questions and issues.

A fun little story that I think exemplifies the way utility trumps “official” brand communications, and also illustrates the need to listen and engage rather than jump feet first into social media, is the tale of woe surrounding Tom Armitage’s Tower Bridge twitterbot.

I am sure our favourite bridge needs no introduction. We love it and watch it every day (as some of you will know, often from the window of our favourite local eaterie). It’s only downside is that when the bridge raises, we sometimes get stuck in traffic for 10 minutes or so on the way to meetings in the city. Luckily, whilst he worked here, the lovely Tom Armitage created a twitterbot for the bridge that would diligently tweet bridge openings and closings, and even tell you the name of the boat sailing through, all based on public data. Beyond its practical utility, the twitterbot gave the bridge a personality in the social web, and inspired other inanimate objects to do the same (incidentally, the SF writer Bruce Sterling coined the term spimes in 2004 for this very purpose).

At some point, the marketing people at the corporation of London, who run the Tower Bridge Exhibition, decided they had the right to the “official” twitter handle @towerbridge and applied to Twitter to have it handed over to them. After trying and failing to contact Tom, Twitter sadly complied with this request and what began as a public utility (that also did a great job of promoting the bridge) turned into a dull, series of weak marketing messages for the exhibition. Perhaps the Corporation of London thought it had ‘followed a process’ and so everything was ok.

To cut a long story short, a minor twitter storm ensued with over 1,250 tweets mentioning @towerbridge in just a few days (approx. 50% of the 3 year total), almost all of which were very critical of the Corporation of London’s disregard for both Tom, the Twittersphere and the users of the bridge. I would hate to be the one trawling through the sentiment analysis for their newly minted Twitter account. Finally, realising their mistake, and to their credit, the people involved contacted Tom and the bridge now tweets at the rather unmemorable @twrbrdg_itself, presumably to “protect” the brand equity of the exhibition.

Listening and analytics cannot, of course, undo stupidity like this, but there are many other situations in which earlier action in response to product or service problems or user issues could be possible thanks to real-time data.

Some pointers for data-driven business

There are several areas in which I think listening and analytics will grow up to become more business relevant, and if they do, then I think they can play a major role in helping businesses evolve in a more customer-centric way:

• Instead of studying a microcosm of online social activity, we should try to immerse ourselves in the ecosystem and be closer to the context of what is being said and shared.

• In addition to listening to opinion, it also makes sense to gather and connect behavioural data so that future social marketing efforts can build up a rounded picture of customers and their needs.

• Don’t just listen to external conversations – also point analytics at internal conversations and see if there are common themes or correlations between them (e.g. someone in product teams suggesting feature X might be buggy should ideally be picked up before customers begin complaining).

• Share streams of listening data internally as widely as possible to bring everybody closer to customers, and involve the whole company (not just marcomms) in making sense of the data and what actions it suggests.

• Think carefully about who should ideally action customer insight, and bring them into the listening loop. For example, efforts by Gatorade, Dell and others around social media command centres have shown great promise in immersing C-suite execs in the flow of customer insight, and that helps them understand what social media teams are trying to do and why.

• Move beyond reports and dashboards and find new ways to share real-time data ‘in the flow’ of peoples’ work. Reports have never been a particularly effective way of changing behaviour, but in this case their limited distribution and the time lag effect both limit their usefulness.

The “who owns social” question

In order to action some of the points above, the perennial question of how to organise for social cannot be ignored. Who “owns” social (if anybody)? How do different business functions come together to make it work? These are not easy questions to answer after decades of increasing specialisation and silo-building, but without at least an interim answer to this question (even if it is as simple as a co-ordination committee), there may be problems ahead.

Ideally, we would recommend the kind of podular structure that my colleague Dave Gray has written about recently. It is interesting to note how Amazon – a very data-driven business – uses small teams or pods to drive tiny features on each Amazon web page, and how they use he vast amount of behavioural data generated by the site to tweak, improve or remove these features in an approach dubbed ‘Data Darwinism.’

Actions speak louder than algorithms

Why do we listen? We listen to learn and inform action. But how do we act? This is the key question that can help us close the loop between insight and results. All the data in the world will not help if we do nothing with it. Right now, one of the problems we see with listening campaigns is that the insights go no further than the marketing department, but they are not able to pull the right levers within the company to act on them. This was one of the take-aways from Jaimie Punishill’s entertaining talk at the 2010 Social Business Summit in Austin, and from what I understand, it came up in his 2011 SXSW panel on the challenges of doing customer engagement using social media as well.

So how can we both improve the way we make sense of customer insight whilst also encouraging people to take ownership of the issues identified?

We are working on the application of social analytics to this problem for clients that want to take the next step beyond passive listening. The basic idea is this: start by surfacing a stream of potentially actionable events or insights within a social environment inside a client’s organisation, and give people the opportunity to easily flag items as actionable / non-actionable or to claim them as actions. Claiming actions in the open, we believe, encourages a culture of ownership but also helps others learn what sort of actions and resolutions work best. The logical next step is to reward those who are best at filtering, sharing, escalating or claiming actions, perhaps through simple game mechanics or visible rewards.

We believe that open data can encourage greater self-management from staff by giving them the real-time feedback on how their efforts are playing out in terms of results. This can play a vital role in creating the conditions for evolutionary improvement in companies interested in harnessing customer insight to drive performance.

Lee Bryant was a keynote speaker at Social Media Influence 2011. He Tweets at @leebryant.

Last week we looked at the novel way in which PayPal UK has recruited over 100,000 160,000 Facebook fans and another 11,000 Twitter followers in a matter of a few weeks simply by dangling the chance to win a free iPad 2 to anyone who clicks the “Like” button. We calculated the cost-per-acquisition for PayPal UK is pennies on the pound, a huge bargain when you consider what it costs to lure in new Twitter followers by paying for a targeted “Promoted Account” buy.

How much will it set you? It depends on the industry, ClickZ reports, as promoted accounts are sold on an auction-based system. The more jockeying done by an industry to get this week’s promoted account, the higher the cost. As a result, the automotive industry, far and away the most active buyers of promoted accounts, have bid the costs up higher than, say, retailers. Here’s how ClickZ explains it:

Promoted accounts are currently sold on an auction-based model, with advertisers paying on a cost-per-follower basis to target certain keywords linked with data from users’ accounts, such as who they follow. Automotive advertisers have been paying as much as $70 per follower, though the average price ranges from $10 to $40 for that vertical, [Twitter's Chief Revenue Officer Adam] Bain revealed. The overall average for all advertisers is lower still, however, at under $10.

That’s right. A tenner, thereabouts, per follower. So, if you attract an extra 1,000 followers (pretty mediocre results, actually) per Promoted Account campaign that’s a minimum cost of about $10,000. For car brands, that same number would cost you $70,000. For that price, Mercedes could give away a CLS-Class Coupe to new Facebook/Twitter fans and probably score more cost-effective results.

And we should remember here that this is cost-per-acquisition of follower, not customer. When you consider just a fraction will ultimately buy the product, the relevant “acquisition cost” metrics then climb even higher. It tells us that if Twitter auction prices run much higher it will price a lot of brands out of the market. So you better hurry up if you’re mulling such an investment. Any delay and the price could tick up yet again.

For those in the wait-and-see camp there’s always the good-old fashioned  contests and give-aways to pad your follower numbers. Now not everybody can give away an iPad2 in exchange for Twitter/Facebook love. Can they? Well, digital marketers have shown little resistance to nicking what works. Remember the me-too flash mob craze?

Expect to see more iPad2′s on offer.

That’s how you could pretty much sum up the conversation I had this morning with Jon Bishop, head of social media for PayPal UK. For the second time in a year, the popular online payment service has amassed 6-digit gains in its Facebook following in a matter of days with a pretty cost-effective pitch: friend us and you’ll get a chance to win a new iPad 2.

When we first reported on this campaign we were pretty skeptical, wondering if such a blatant give-away was, you know, pandering to the masses. What happens when the winners are announced, we wondered, and all but 10 grumble in disappointment? Would they stick around, or un-Like PayPal UK and go about their day? And isn’t there a more meaningful way to generate interest than to just give away a must-have gadget?

Before we answer that we should admit that we’ve got a bit of egg on our face. Bishop convincingly pointed out that the weeks-old effort has been a big success in not only attracting fans (more than 100,000 have “liked” PayPal UK in the past 2 weeks) but in boosting the daily interaction in the community (comments and queries are up, and not only to talk about the give-away) and, he believes, it will lead to continued loyalty and even further engagement down the road. Why so? PayPal executed this same campaign a year ago in Germany and the net result was roughly 100,000 new fans and the community there has grown incrementally ever since, in both follower numbers and in terms of daily interaction between members and PayPal Germany staffers.

PayPal UK figured it had a good chance of duplicating the success of what occurred in Germany, Bishop says, because “at least 80% of UK Facebook users have a PayPal account. What a great platform for us then to go out and engage with them.”

Here are a few other things about this campaign that are worth noting:

On customer acquisition costs: Bishop says there was NO out-of-pocket digital ad spend backing this effort. The only cost was the price of the 10 iPads (for sake of argument, let’s call that £5,000) and the cost of building the contest app (price = “very little,” he says). And the results? They’ve gained over 100,000 followers on a cost of little more than £5,000. If you do the math, that’s a cost of 5 pence a follower! And the campaign still has a few weeks to run. Run that ROI metric past your direct-marketing number-crunchers.

The risk of attracting the wrong kind of fans: Marketers know in the back of their mind that any time they organize a give-away it will attract contest junkies who could care less about your company or brand. Bishop says he expects they’ll lose some fans after the contest winners are announced, “but we’ll still have a big audience left with which we can engage.” And building the community is the hard part, he points out. He’s confident the vast majority will stay with PayPal UK because so many of them use the service already. And, with a big community they can begin to talk to them about other issues, including new product launches and even answer customer service queries.

Golden rule of engagement: Which is? Right. “Don’t talk about yourself all the time.” Many brands forget this, pumping out the me-me-me announcements. “The idea is quite simply you should be talking about what they want to hear. After all, it’s their page,” Bishop says.

Are give-aways the only way to boost your fan following? Bishop acknowledges it’s worked very well twice now for PayPal. But he points out that it’s worked because once people are there on the Facebook fan page they can read up on other related matters of interest. It’s true that the give-away is far and away the most-discussed conversations on the PayPal UK Facebook page at the moment, but, in reading the comments, Bishop says he and his team can start to learn better what people are interested in. And guess what? It’s not always what can I win?

The importance of momentum. Here’s why a give-away of this kind makes sense, Bishop explains. At the outset the typical fans community needs some kind of jolt,  something to perk their interest, something that will compel the general public to investigate the community and maybe tell friends about it. In this case it happened to be the lure of an iPad2. Once the seeds are sown, the numbers grow and the community starts to reach its full(er) potential. But you do need that level of meaningful daily interaction otherwise nobody will join the community. And you need the people to make that happen. And you need the incentive to lure them there in the first place. If the offering is a compelling one then the new followers will stay long after they’ve won or lost the contest.

Ok, so “bribery” it’s not. We admit it. Now we’re wondering: will PayPal UK succeed in breaking some kind of customer-acquisition-cost record? We’re also guessing Facebook cannot be too happy that a brand has so deftly used its platform to build a swelling fan base without needing to buy a single ad. Expect to see this kind of effort duplicated again, and not just by PayPal.

One of the most crowded fields of social enterprise software — social media monitoring — just got more cut-throat with Salesforce.com entering the market in the form of a $326 million buyout of Radian6 earlier today. Has the great social media measurement shakeout finally begun?

Here’s what we can say with some certainty. The mega-deal certainly should lend clarity to a cluttered social media analytics market if only because it establishes a clear leader in Salesforce.com/Radian6. Radian6 boasts its software is used by more Fortune 100 firms – including Dell, GE, Kodak, Molson Coors, Pepsico, and UPS – than any other. And Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff already has plans to integrate Radian6′s monitoring capabilities into its products such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Chatter and Force.com to enhance the all-around “social intelligence” of these products.

Sure enough, Salesforce reckons the deal will add $5 million in sales by the quarter ending July, 31 and $45-$50 million through the entirety of the current fiscal year 2012. That would mean the combined entity would result in a $10 million year-on-year incremental revenue jump (on the low end; $15 million y-o-y on the high-end), if the Wall Street Journal‘s figures are correct. That comes out to a  promised 29%-42% year-on-year revenue jump. And, crucial for CRM (its ticker symbol) shareholders, it would add to EPS straight away. Investors are cheering the deal, by the way, sending shares up 2.65%, outperforming the Nasdaq.

Let’s move beyond investors now…

Salesforce.com’s determined entry into this market should trigger further investments and M&As in this area. Firms such as Meltwater Group, Alterian, Market Sentinel all compete directly in this space, offering monitoring dashboards that scan Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube and discussion forums for the latest public chatter that could sink a brand. There are seemingly scores more niche firms, specializing in real-time analytics like Topsy and Seesmic. The latter already has a distribution alliance with Salesforce.com and just landed investment from Salesforce.com too. Hell, even Hubspot offers social media analytics. And who invested in Hubspot earlier this month? Yep, Salesforce.com. It’s a perfect illustration of just how nutty this market has become, and how high-stakes too. You need a good social media monitoring tool just to keep track of all the Salesforce.com investments in social media monitoring.

So, there’s now investment capital in this sector. That’s a good thing. One thing holding back this market though is just how frustrating an experience it still is to use social media measurement software. It’s improving, though still notoriously wonky. We, either here at SMI or at Custom Communication, have tried out several of these dashboard monitoring tools over the years. We’ve groaned about the shortcomings of social media monitoring tools in the past, notably that no sentiment analysis software can distinguish fact from irony and that sometimes you get better results from simply heading to Google or a combo of one of the dozens of freeware out there. Now, none of the freeware can make the lovely charts and graphs that you get from the enterprise versions. And that’s what usually gets presented in meetings. Let’s be honest, that’s the selling point. These dashboards are visually appealing, but are hardly thorough in the results they turn up. Never mind that. CRM investors today are happy. Pleasing enterprises won’t be nearly as simple.