What is a Twitter party? If you’re wondering about that – and why it should matter to you – keep reading!

A Twitter party is an online gathering of individuals at a specific time, but from no specific place. Party attendees can join a Twitter party from the bedroom, living room, restaurant, bar or even airplane … anywhere with an Internet connection.

Twitter parties are hosted on the Twitter platform. The only thing you need to attend Twitter parties is a Twitter account. Don’t have an account? Sign up here.

Why do I need to have a Twitter party?

Twitter parties are used to support real-life events. Specifically, Twitter parties are used to support tent pole events within an organization. Tent pole events are those events on a calendar that you know are coming like Election Day, Valentine’s Day, movie premieres, book releases and product releases.

For example, a tent pole event for a record store might be the release of a new Justin Bieber album. The record store could have a party the evening of the release and give away a signed photo to one attendee.

Twitter parties are great, inexpensive ways to connect the excitement of a larger event to your business.

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If you’re confused about all of the social media choices, don’t panic! There are plenty of social media management tools to make your life easier.

Be sure to bookmark and share this post, as it contains a link to a huge list of social networking sites, along with links to hundreds more social media management tools.

Before we get into all of the details, though, I want to tell you about a fascinating, funny man that I recently met: the popcorn guy. It may help you feel better if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the social landscape of today.

The popcorn guy’s family has owned a popcorn business since 1947. That was the year that his father decided that, to make some extra money for the tight family budget, he would pop some corn in their Cleveland, Ohio basement and sell it at school festivals.

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Social media ROI and metrics: how should your company measure social media and its effect on the company’s bottom line?

Earlier, we blogged about how to measure social media, as:

• an online reputation management tool
• a method to position your company as an online thought leader

Now, the focus will be on how to measure social media as a source of:

• website traffic
• online sales leads
• conversions
• sales

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Social media ROI and metrics: how do you measure if your campaign is working? And, what is meant by “working” in this context?

It isn’t unusual for a business to jump on the social media bandwagon without really knowing what to expect. After all, it’s often said that “everyone” needs to be on (fill in the blank with Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, YouTube and so forth) and you aren’t to be blamed if you’ve taken the leap without knowing how you’re going to measure social media impact.

According to the 2009 Mzinga & Babson Executive Education report, a report referenced by Brian Solis, 84% of professionals who participate in social media do not measure for return on investment. Here’s the flaw with that. It’s hard to tweak and improve what you don’t quantify – which means that, if you take on the challenge to effectively measure social media efforts, you’ll move ahead of a significant portion of businesses – most likely including some of your competitors.

Once you make the commitment to measure, though, your question probably is – now what?

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What is Google Plus and how does it affect your business?

You’ve probably heard people talking about Google Plus and you may have wondered whether or not this development is important to your business. The reality is that, when you hear that term, people could be chatting about any one of three different (although closely related) things, including the:

1. Google Plus button located by each result in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and/or next to PPC ads
2. Google Plus button appearing on a website
3. Google Plus social media site, which is currently in Beta (invitation only)

Although no one knows all of the ramifications just yet, Google representatives have stated that they expect Google Plus signals to influence ranking, which makes this an important development for virtually all business websites.

According to Google’s David Byttow, “We’ll also start to look at +1’s as one of the many signals we use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, including social signals from other services. For +1′s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality over time.”

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