Newstex President Larry Schwartz has been re-elected to the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) Content Division Board of Directors after a two-year hiatus.

Having spent six years on the SIIA Content Division Board of Directors previously, Larry had reached the maximum of three consecutive terms. Now, he’s back on the Board for the 2012-2013 term where he’ll help the SIIA develop and prioritize the Division’s initiatives and determine the projects, activities and events to be undertaken in the near future.

The newly elected (and re-elected) board members include:

• Nancy Aldrich-Ruenzel – Vice President and Publisher – Pearson Education
• Simon Beale – SVP, Global Sales & Training – ProQuest
• Chris Broekhoff – COO, VP Business Development – MEI
• Dan Duncan – Sr. Director, Government Affairs – The McGraw-Hill Companies
• Barry Graubart – Vice President, Marketing – ReisReports.com
• Kevin Novak – Vice President, Integrated Web Strategy and Technology – The American Institute of Architects
• Larry Schwartz – President – Newstex, LLC

These board members will join the following mid-term board members:

• Robert Barber – CEO – Environmental Data Resources
• John Blossom – President – Shore Communications Inc.
• Anthony Capon – Vice President, Content, Corporate Markets – Dow Jones & Company
• Edward Colleran – Senior Director, International Relations – Copyright Clearance Center
• Adam Gross – CMO – The Jordan, Edmiston Group, Inc.
• Edward Keating – Chief Content Officer – BLR
• Daniel Kortick – Partner – The Wicks Group of Companies, L.L.C.
• Scott Livingston – Vice President – LexisNexis Group
• Peter Marney – Senior Vice President, Global Head of Content Marketplace – Thomson Reuters
• Guillaume Mazieres – Executive VP, North America – TEMIS
• Ann Michael – President & Principal Consultant – Delta Think, LLC
• Jeffrey Massa – President & CEO – YellowBrix, Inc.
• Robin Neidorf – Director of Research – Free Pint Limited
• Claudio Pinto – Director Business Development – Thomas Industrial Network
• Frank Rubino – Director – MarkLogic
• Daniel Schaible – SVP Content – BurrellesLuce
• Mary Jo Zandy – Managing Director – Berkery, Noyes & Co

The goal of the SIIA Content Division Board is to advance business priorities for the content industry by bringing industry perspectives and acting as the voice of SIIA member companies. Please join us in congratulating Larry on his appointment!

This week, Social Media Examiner launched its fourth annual Social Media Marketing Industry Report, and there are some interesting discoveries found in the report. The study surveyed 3,800 marketers to learn how they’re using social media for business promotion. Some of the results will surprise you.

First, let’s take a look at the top 10 things about social media marketing that marketers who responded to the survey have questions about and want to understand.

1. How to measure the effect of social media marketing on their businesses
2. How to find their target audiences with social media
3. How to engage their audiences
4. How to sell with social media
5. How to best use their time to maximize social media results
6. How to create a social media strategy
7. Which social media tactics are most effective
8. What are the best social media management tools
9. How to use the different social media platforms
10. How to select the right social platforms for my business

Some of these truly worry me. Who is handling social media for these businesses if they’re asking these questions? While measurement continues to be a challenge for social media marketers in general, a professional marketer with social media experience shouldn’t be asking the rest of these questions. I suppose this could be attributed directly to the #3 finding from the study discussed below.

83% of respondents to this survey believe that social media is important to their businesses, but they’re still using a silo marketing approach in implementing social media in their marketing plans and missing the full opportunity that social media offers. Following are five key areas of the study with particularly interesting findings:

1. Time

The vast majority of marketers who responded to the survey are spending less than 10 hours per week on social media marketing activities (67.4%) with 41.7% spending less than 5 hours per week on social media marketing activities.

2. Sites

Marketers are focusing the vast majority of their efforts on just a handful of sites for social media marketing: Facebook (92%), Twitter (82%), LinkedIn (73%), blogs (61%), and YouTube or other videos (57%).

3. Manpower

It’s clear from these results that time, experience, and expertise is an issue for marketers, yet only 30% are outsourcing at least a portion of their social media activities to third parties.

4. Metrics

Marketers don’t know how to track their social media efforts and truly determine if they’re driving real results. 40% of survey respondents say they want to know how to measure the return on investment of social media and how to find customers and prospects.

5. Benefits

Marketers who responded to this study believe that the biggest benefits of social media marketing are: Generating more business and exposure (85%), increasing traffic (69%), and providing marketplace insight (65%). This leads us back to the inability to measure results. Without measurement, building brand awareness and increasing blog traffic are the only things marketers are comfortable saying they’re impacting through social media marketing.

Social media marketing represents a significant opportunity for businesses to build their brands and ultimately, boost sales. As the results of this study show, there is still a lot to be learned and plenty of room for aggressive and innovative businesses to thrive on the social web. The marketers who responded to this survey indicated that their future plans will focus on online video and YouTube (76%). Beyond that, the top areas marketers plan to increase investments in during 2012 are Facebook (72%), Twitter (69%), blogs (68%), Google+ (67%), and LinkedIn (66%).

Notice a pattern here? Again, marketers are focusing primarily on the top social destinations rather than surrounding consumers with branded content so they can self-select how they want to experience and interact with the brand. The biggest destinations are the easy path. Think beyond “easy” in 2012.

 Image: Social Media Examiner

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to LinkedIn by Susan Gunelius (Newstex marketing consultant) is now available as both a paperback and an ebook through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all online and offline booksellers.

This book goes beyond the basics of setting up a profile. It also teaches readers how to get the most out of the site based on their individual goals. In other words, rather than simply focusing on the “tactics” of using LinkedIn, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to LinkedIn also covers the “strategies” of using LinkedIn.

Whether you want promote your business, find a job, recruit new employees, or simply network with like-minded professionals, this book shows you how to do it. Some of the topics covered in the book include:

• Customizing your LinkedIn profile to meet your specific goals
• Strategic analysis of the various LinkedIn account options and features
• The do’s and don’ts of LinkedIn
• Finding the right people and making sure they can find you, too
• Finding and communicating with LinkedIn Groups to reach your objectives
• Specific suggestions for using LinkedIn to find a job, promote a business or brand, raise capital, and increase sales

Books in the popular “Complete Idiot’s Guide” series are typically intended for a beginner audience. While The Complete Idiot’s Guide to LinkedIn covers all the basics, it goes into far more strategic detail related to setting and achieving professional goals using LinkedIn than similar beginner books. Most LinkedIn users don’t realize the full potential that the site has to help them build their careers, brands, and businesses. With that in mind, there is likely to be something that any LinkedIn user — novice to guru — can learn in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to LinkedIn.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide has a great price in paperback from both Amazon and Barnes & Noble right now of $13.43 (a 33% discount).

The 2012 In-House Counsel New Media Engagement Survey from Greentarget, InsideCounsel Magazine, and Zeughauser Group sheds light on the social media trends within the legal field. When the study was first conducted in 2010, blogging and social media usage among lawyers wasn’t mainstream. While younger counsel were diving into the world of social media, older counsel still primarily ignored it. That generational divide has narrowed significantly in the 2012 study.

According to the 2012 In-House Counsel New Media Engagement Survey, which surveyed corporate counsel from across the United States, some trends have emerged that are having a big impact on hiring, marketing, research, and more. Following are some of the highlights from the study results:

Quality Blogs Influence Outside Counsel Hiring Decisions

3 out of 4 of survey respondents believe that a lawyer’s blog is an important factor when they’re deciding which firms to retain.

Client-Side Counsel Prefer to Read Blogs by Firms

84% of in-house counsel believe that blogs are credible, and most prefer to read firm-branded blogs rather than blogs written by journalists.

LinkedIn is Viewed as the Serious Social Network for Attorneys

88% of in-house counsel surveyed believe LinkedIn is credible and use it for professional and personal reasons.

New Media Usage is Mainstream

Blogs are read more often by this audience than any of the most popular social networking platforms (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn). Older counsel are consuming far more content, particularly blog content, then they did a year ago.

In-House Counsel Are More Likely to Consume Content than Create Content

In-house counsel are often “invisible users” of social media who consume a lot of content but rarely create content or participate in online conversations.

Social Media is Becoming a More Popular Tool for Client Services

The legal industry is using social media more frequently for client services and communications with an 8% increase year-over-year.

As the research report says, “The primary utility of social media — at least for this survey’s audience — is an intelligent filter of useful information.” However, the trends cited above show that the current primary utility of social media for in-house lawyers is evolving. Content consumption and content creation are both growing in 2012.

Clearly, there is demand for high quality legal blogs like those content publishers that syndicate their legal blogs through Newstex Authoritative Content such as Lawyers, Guns, and Money. That demand will only increase in the future.

In a great review of Newstex vice president of technology Chris Moyer’s book, Building Applications in the Cloud: Concepts, Patterns, and Projects, Jack Vaughan of SearchSOA discusses the misconception that you can throw a bunch of servers on the cloud and then sit back and see what happens. The result is likely to be multiple problems like decreased speeds or a crash.

That’s just one of the “gotcha” moments that Vaughan highlights from Moyer’s Building Applications in the Cloud: Concepts, Patterns, and Projects. Vaughan writes:

“Cloud providers lead you to believe you can take your existing applications and put them on the cloud with no fuss or muss. It is true, the applications can run; but you may find the performance is not what you expected. The fact is that application integration is one of the more complicated aspects of cloud computing.”

In his book, Chris Moyer discusses the principles of successful cloud solutions. He explains that your best strategy is always to design around your possible points of failure wherein failure is viewed as a feature that you plan for just as you plan for and design around any other feature. For example, it’s essential to scale out rather than scale up and make sure things run in parallel rather than just using bigger and better servers to band-aid problems related to scaling as they arise. Chris writes, “You must figure out how you can abstract critical computations and transactions so they can run in parallel.”

Check out the complete article on SearchSOA for all the details, and to learn more about building cloud applications (while avoiding potential problems), follow the link to read about Building Applications in the Cloud: Concepts, Patterns, and Projects on the Newstex blog.

Image: Will Merydith