Below is a great post by one of my company’s (Social Media Solutions) interns, Casey.  Enjoy!

Facebook emerged as a social media platform that connects people. Quickly, we began to see how powerful social media can be and businesses rapidly developed social media marketing plans. Now, Facebook serves more than just people. It serves businesses by providing them with an interactive platform where they can engage the audience in communication and information. With that being said, here are five Facebook applications that will help your business communicate and interact with your audience more effectively.

1. RSS Feed: Social RSS

Social RSS is a useful application for Facebook pages because it will automatically pull content from RSS feeds and post it directly on your fan page. According to Facebook, it is the most popular RSS reader application offered by Facebook.  This is great if your company has a blog or something similar so that users can have access to the blog while on the Facebook page. It also eliminates the hassle of having to manually republish content to the Facebook page after it is posted to your company’s website or blog.

2. Poll: Poll Application

Social media is all about interacting with your audience. Facebook’s poll app not only gets youraudience engaged, it also provides you with direct feedback from consumers. If managed effectively, polls can provide unique insight into your readers allowing you to learn more about them and their needs. Facebook’s Poll App easily lets you post a question, set answer options, and then publish to wall or news feed if desired.

3. Video Content: YouTube for Pages

YouTube for Pages is an application that allows users to link their YouTube channel with their fan page. Any time new videos are posted, they are automatically pulled to the fan page for users to view. Not only is this more convenient for your audience, it also increases the likelihood that they will watch the videos.  It also features archived thumbnails of older videos and also allows users to denote their favorite videos. YouTube for Pages is a developer based app using involver. All you need is to create a free account and set it all up!

4. Promotional Marketing: Promotions Application

Everyone loves free stuff or great prizes. The Promotions application easily allows companies to create a promotional Facebook campaign for giveaways and contests. Promotions are a wonderful way to engage the audience and create interaction between the brand and the consumer. The application is set up for special deals, coupons, giveaways, and contests. It is also a developer app produced by Wildfire.

5. Advanced Customization: Static FBML

For those especially tech savvy businesses, the Static FBML app will allow you to personalize your page by creating a box or tab that is blank. You then fill it with whatever content you want using HTML or FBML (Facebook Markup Language). Static FBML gives users the ability to completely design their own box instead of using the generic look Facebook has. In a world of uniformity, Static FBML gives you a chance to break out of the mold and set yourself apart from other fan pages.

Lauren Fernandez is the Agency Community Manager at Radian6, the social media monitoring and engagement platform. She is @cubanalaf on Twitter, and blogs at LAF and MarketingProfs Daily Fix.

From an agency perspective, many utilize social media monitoring at the request of a client who either doesn’t know much about it, or depends on their agency to educate them. With no client direction, it can be a bit difficult to decipher the first steps of what to monitor, who the players are, and the information that will prove valuable to your client.

Volume, Influence and Sentiment are metrics that will come in handy once these five benefits are realized.

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1. Crisis Management

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Crisis communications strategies are ingrained into most PR professionals’ skulls from the beginning of their education and internships. However, many don’t ever have to execute a crisis communications plan. In the traditional space, it was few and far between, but social media gives customers instant access to a real-time complaint channel.

Creating a presence on social media networks won’t stop this type of conversation from happening, but will enable brands to make the conversation a two-way street. So, what type of metrics can you measure in a crisis? You can look at conversation at the start, middle and end for benchmark comparison, and evaluate response on a cause-and-effect spectrum.

In June 2009, the Holocaust Museum shooter was incorrectly identified as a current American Mensa member. Amongst all of the horror, the Mensa fact was reported quite extensively. We knew about it before the first reporter called because we monitor the mention of the client’s name on social channels. We were able to discuss a quick response, activate our crisis communications plan and be prepared. We not only considered image, but the sensitive matter and how our members would react. If we didn’t know about it beforehand, our response would have been much slower and not as precise.

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2. Influencer Identification

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Influencer identification is a processes that is unique to each brand. If the client’s presence is heavy in forums or blogs, it helps to look at post mentions, commenter count and post volume.

Work with your client to determine whom they think is the most influential. A few questions to ask them:

• What platforms are you currently using?
• Are there others in the works?
• What type of demographic does your typical customer belong to?
• Where do you see conversation happening?
• Where would you like conversation to be happening?

These questions will start to form a picture of who the heavy influencers are and how to target them.

Influencers can also change dependent on the situation and type of audience they attract. Create an A, B and C list. This reflects a high, mid or low priority. A low priority might move to a high priority if a blog post written attracts a lot of commentary. The key to tapping influencers is being flexible and knowing they can change constantly.

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3. Building Relationships with Media and Customers Alike

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We are in the field of communications. Journalists are utilizing social media to stay on top of the news, get leads and build relationships not only with PR professionals, but also with the community. It also enables brands to see if the discussion, content and approach is resonating with their target audience.

This is an area where customer service will come into play as well. What type of conversation is your customer base having? Does the sentiment skew heavily toward positive, negative or neutral? What areas are they focusing on? This will enable brands to act quickly and efficiently for their current and future customer base.

Ask a reporter out for coffee. Chances are, if you build a relationship, they will call you if they have a story that fits. You’re able to pitch them off-topic ideas to see if it can run. Other reporters can see the interactions you’ve built and will find you more approachable.

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4. Creative Feedback and Ad Targeting

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If you work in an agency that also handles the advertising for a specific client, the creative feedback and ad targeting principle is something to incorporate in your monthly metrics report.

Advertising campaigns reflect brand positioning, which should also be reflected by social media efforts. Incorporating the mindset and campaigns into your social media presence isn’t being promotional. It’s not about using the campaigns directly, but the idea the campaign presents.

For Facebook (), you might see an ad for shoes once you update your status dealing with that particular subject. Monitoring if someone actually clicks ad that will be beneficial.

Other questions to answer: Is the message hitting the right demographic? Is it resonating with the audience, or is it having the opposite effect? Did the platforms we chose work?

Benchmarking your efforts can help with this. Set attainable objectives and the type of demographic desired. Set up a pyramid effort to check in increments of three months, starting at six months out. That will give you enough time to measure the “before,” “during” and “after” of a campaign.

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5. Competitive Monitoring

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Your clients want to know if they are measuring up to the competition — literally. Monitoring industry conversation is the first step in identifying who the competition is in the social space.

With this, it can be two-fold: Who the client perceives as their competitor might not be the same across different social networks. It’s up to the agency to identify and further define what is successful and what’s failing. The latter is important when one needs to prove why a certain idea isn’t the best route.

Knowing competitor efforts can affect not only what a brand does in the future, but current efforts. You can see where the consumer is, and what efforts they react positively and negatively to. Brands like to see competitor efforts for consumer validation, trends and market research.

From these five areas, you can then start focusing on specific metrics to report on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Monitoring specific topics will always come down to what the brand wants to achieve and if it meshes with objectives.

What would you add? Share your opinions and strategies in the comments below.

From Ben Parr @ Mashable…

Jim Tobin is president of Ignite Social Media, where he works work with clients including Microsoft, Intel, Nature Made, The Body Shop, Disney and more implementing social media marketing strategies. He is also author of the book Social Media is a Cocktail Party: Why You Already Know the Rules of Social Media Marketing.

Over the last three years, social media marketers have gotten a lot more sophisticated about the programs they deploy and how they’re measured. Platforms like Sysomos and Radian6 () have become vital tools in understanding not only the social universe in which you operate, but how that universe responds to your brand.

But for all of our success, we’re still largely entering strings of Boolean variables into a tool and waiting for matching results to roll in. Most tools have added sentiment processing, but that clearly has a long way to go. Beyond sentiment, however, how are these tools going to evolve to provide more insights? The answer is with math.

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Cluster Analysis Shows Promise

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Cluster analysis is one of the features that many tools are adding. Basically, it involves complex mathematical computations that analyze how certain words are gathering — or “clustering” — relative to your search topic. It finds the words that are mostly likely to be associated with your search word. This may provide unexpected insight into what’s being said about you. In fact, some articles suggest it’s a way to predict record sales two weeks before they happen.

The downside to cluster analysis is that it’s complex. Nilesh Bansal, the CTO of Sysomos, likes cluster analysis, but worries it’s not that easy: “We very often find ourselves explaining to clients what these features mean and how to use them best. For a full blown unguided cluster analysis, a team of technical analysts will be required and it cannot be point and click.”

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Semantic Analysis Will Also Be Key

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When it’s not just where words appear but what those words mean that you’re trying to decipher, semantic analysis will become key. Semantic analysis strives to understand what words mean in context to provide deeper insights.

Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6, likes to think of various “analytic lenses” to apply to the vast data they collect. LeBrun says he doesn’t see cluster analysis as a direction to move in, but as one of the tools in the analyst’s toolbox.

He explains that cluster analysis works on the basis of math, but it can’t differentiate apple (the fruit) from Apple (the company). Semantic technology, he says, can add additional insight because of its ability to identify entities and nuances in language.

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Depth vs. Simplicity

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For a while, the relative strength of social media monitoring tools was dependent on how much data they indexed, and how far back they had stored it. Today, major competitors have largely mastered indexing the stream (private Facebook () updates being the obvious exception).

So the new race is on to display and interpret that data better than the next guy. Every monitoring tool is rushing to improve their dashboards, and competitors like RowFeeder are trying different approaches.

All of these companies are working with very smart people who can make data dance. Sysomos’ Bansal published a paper on cluster analysis applied to social data three years ago, indicating that they are ahead of the curve. The real challenge is to apply these complex lenses to the data in a way that lets us non-PhD holding marketers understand it at a glance — and to do it flexibly enough for different monitoring objectives.

Through cluster analysis, semantic analysis and enhanced dashboards, we’re likely to see an aggressive monitoring “arms race” over the next year. For the companies involved, nothing short of market share gains are at stake.

Below is a post I wrote for my company’s (Social Media Solutions)  blog…Enjoy!

When creating a social media strategy for my clients, I like to use a strategy developed by online media expert Gaurav Mishra, which focuses on the four underlying themes in social media, or the 4Cs of social media: Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence. Taken together, these four themes constitute the value system of social media.  The tools & buzzwords in social media are constantly changing, but the value system embedded in these 4Cs is here to stay.

Here is a breakdown of the 4 Cs of Social Media, from Mashra

The First C: Content

The first C, Content, refers to the idea that social media tools allow everyone to become a creator, by making the publishing and distribution of multimedia content both free and easy, even for amateurs.

User generated content, and the hope of monetizing it through advertising, is at the core of the business model of almost all social media platforms. User generated content is also at the core of citizen journalism, the notion that amateur users can perform journalist-like functions (accidentally or otherwise) by reporting and commenting on news. Citizen journalists have repeatedly emerged as critical in crisis reporting and several citizen journalist platforms have emerged to harness their potential to report hyper-local news.

However, just because everyone can become a creator doesn’t mean that everyone does. Most users prefer to consume user generated content, by reading blog, watching videos, or browsing through photos. Some user curate user generated content, by tagging it on social bookmarking websites, voting for it on social voting websites, commenting on it, or linking to it. Researcher have found support for the 1:9:90 rule in many different contexts. The 1:9:90 rule says that 90% of all users are consumers, 9% of all users are curators and only 1% of the users are creators.

The Second C: Collaboration

The second C, Collaboration, refers to the idea that social media facilitates the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results.

Collaboration can happen at three levels: conversation, co-creation and collective action.

As consumers and curators engage with compelling content, the content becomes the center of conversations. Conversations create buzz, which is how ideas tip, become viral. Many social media practitioners who are from a marketing or public relations background are focused on creating conversations.

However, some of us recognize that conversations are a mere stepping stone for co-creation. In co-creation, the value lies as much in the curated aggregate as in the individual contributions. Wikis are a perfect example of co-creation. Open group blogs, photo pools, video collages and similar projects are also good examples of co-creation.

Collective action goes one step further and uses online engagement to initiate meaningful action. Collective action can take the form of signing online petitions, fundraising, tele-calling, or organizing an offline protest or event.

Even though conversations, co-creation and collective action are different forms of collaboration, the difficulty in collaborating increases dramatically as we move from conversations to co-creation to collective action. The key is to start with a big task, break it down into individual actions (modularity) that are really small (granularity), and then put them together into a whole without losing value (aggregating mechanism). It is also important to bridge online conversations into mainstream media buzz and online engagement into offline action.

The Third C: Community

The third C, Community, refers to the idea that social media facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and often across space.

The notion of a community is really tricky because every web page is a latent community, waiting to be activated. A vibrant community has size and strength, and is built around a meaningful social object.

Most people understand that a community that has a large number of members (size) who have strong relationships and frequent interactions with each other (strength) is better than a community which doesn’t. However, a community is more than the sum total of its members and their relationships.

People don’t build relationships with each other in a vacuum. A vibrant community is built around a social object that is meaningful for its members. The social object can be a person, a place, a thing or an idea. The Netroots community is built around progressive politics in America. The My Barack Obama community was built around Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The Obama Girl community was built around a series of videos Amber Lee Ettinger made to support Obama’s campaign. Sometimes, choosing the right social object can be crucial for building a vibrant community. HP can choose to build a community around printers, printing, or corporate careers, all of which will have very different characteristics.

The Fourth C: Collective Intelligence

The fourth C, Collective Intelligence, refers to the idea that the social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them.

Collective intelligence can be based on both implicit and explicit actions and often takes the form of reputation and recommendation systems. Google extracts the pagerank, a measure of how important a page is, from our (implicit) linking and clicking behavior. Amazon and Netflix are able to offer us recommendations based on our (implicit) browsing, (implicit) buying and (explicit) rating behavior and comparing it to the behavior of other people like us. eBay and Amazon assign ratings to sellers and reviewers respectively, based on whether other members in the community had a good experience with them. On the day of the 2008 US elections, the Obama campaign was able to assign trimmed down telecalling lists to volunteers by ticking off the names of the people who had already voted.

The great thing about collective intelligence is that it becomes easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of the community grow. If the collective intelligence is then shared back with the community, the members find more value in the community, and the community grows even more, leading to a virtuous cycle.

The4Cs Social Media Framework in Summary

So, the 4Cs form a hierarchy of what is possible with social media. As we move from Content to Collaboration to Community to Collective Intelligence, it becomes increasingly difficult to both observe these layers and activate them. Also each layer is often, but not always, a pre-requisite for the next layer. Compelling content is a pre-requisite for meaningful collaboration, which is a pre-requisite for a vibrant community, which, in turn, is a pre-requisite for collective intelligence.