Hope that headline grabbed your attention! Especially if you are planning your entire social media strategy around the marketing tactics of Digg, StumbleUpon or MySpace, you just might want to read on.

When it comes to having Business Value, according to a survey performed by MarketingProfs, utilizing Digg, StumbleUpon and MySpace as social media tactics are pretty much worthless to those marketers who where surveyed. Even marketing tactics around YouTube were found to have little value by the survey. Where did they find extreme value? Twitter and Blogging.

(posted w/ permission from Marketing Profs)

According to the MarketingProfs survey of over 200 Twitter users, Twitter ranks behind only blogs as the social media tool that delivers the most value. On a five-point scale where those Twitter users they surveyed ranked value of the marketing tactics they were using in social media strategies, 41 percent of respondents said Twitter delivers “great value” to their company.

I’m not going to give away the whole report or survey since the report is available for only $49 from Marketing Profs. Honestly, this is a great bargain since it not only gives you the survey information but 10 different Twitter Success Stories.

What I have presented here though should get your mind wondering about your strategies in social media, or those strategies being recommended to you to implement.  What are you going to find the most valuable?  Is your whole strategy that has been presented to you based around these marketing tactics a lot of other marketers are starting to find no value in?

Of course there also needs to be research done into where your audience is.  If you are a company that provides a certain kind of content, you strategy might find extreme business value in implementing a strategy around Stumbleupon.  If you are a rock band who needs to get the word out, MySpace may just be the place for you.  If you are a “green company” and putting out a lot of content around that, Digg could just be a natural place to seed your content.

However most companies implementing strategies around these types of tactics just might not find a great business value in doing so.  It’s all about establishing what will be your “Return”, your “Value” on the investment you put into your social media strategy.

Yesterday we launched the first tweet chat aimed at discussion and conversation about social media metrics, both measuring and monitoring.  The focus of the conversation was around “Are Free Monitoring Tools Enough to Measure Your Social Media Efforts”.

There’s a lot of confusion out there about what to mesaure and how to measure it.  People are finding that a mix of free tools, paid tools, home grown tools and spreadsheets can all work together to accomplish their tasks.

We’ve taken the transcript of the #SMMetrics Tweetchat from yesterday and made it into a PDF that you can download and print, or just view.

• #SMMetrics Tweet Chat Transcript 09/09/09

Next week @nathan_linnell (Nathan Linnell) will be heading up the TweetChat and topic will be “What Metrics Are You Using to Track/Monitor Your Social Media Efforts“. To follow or join in the conversations around social media metrics just follow the hashtag #smmetric and include it in your tweets so we’ll see your questions and contributions.

#SMMetrics Tweet Chat is Every Wednesday at 1 p.m. EST.

Nate Linnell (@nathan_linnell) and I (@storyspinner) noticed that there wasn’t a lot of discussion going on about metrics, monitoring and measuring in social media, so we decided to lead up that charge! Starting on Wednesday September 9th at 1 PM Easter time, we’ll engage the Twitter community in a talk about Social Media Metrics. You can follow the hashtag #smmetrics to join in the conversation. Our first week’s topic for #smmetrics chat will be focused on: “Are Free Monitoring Tools Enough to Measure Social Media“. So come on in and join the conversation!

If you’d like to get just a taste of what Charlene Li spoke about at SES San Jose in August of this year, SES has just released a video full of snippets of her keynote, an interview with Charlene and interviews with people who attended the keynote. Also in this video piece, Pattie Simone of WomenEntrepreneur.com has some really great points of why Charlene Li’s keynote resonated so well, “anyone can be a publisher now and it’s important to get those people on board with you.”

Charlene also goes into a bit of detail around the engagement pyramid she spoke about in the keynote,  so take a little time and have a listen.

Serengeti Communications Interview at Search Engines Strategies

While in San Jose, CA for Search Engine Strategies in August, I was interviewed by the Search Engine Strategies team about building relationships in social media communities.  It is a bit longer of an interview, but I discuss a few points that we really didn’t get into on the panel that discussed managing social conversations.  John asked some great questions which the audience didn’t and in social media, really needs to be addressed.

We discuss tying social media to your bottom line, and what that bottom line really means.  Unfortunately some companies are deeming that social media doesn’t work because it isn’t selling more of their products.  Click to purchase rarely happens in social media, instead companies must look at other measurement methods to understand exactly how successful or unsuccessful their efforts are.