The strategic thought behind this conversation is based on massive volumes of data.

Billions of Likes, Tweets, Visits, Votes, and Shares.

All of this data creates a variety of ‘mental static’ that causes decision makers to freeze up and become disoriented.

The sheer amount of information becomes a new type of obstacle that prevents businesses from moving forward at the right time and location.

Here are three social media infographics
that paint a picture with all that data

The Growth of Social Media – This social media infographic is a great place to start. It shows some of the tools that have reached adoption and global appeal.
Check it out: Social Media Infographics – The Growth of Social

Social TV and the MTV Video Music Awards – this covers what 5.5 million Tweets can show you around a live event (and this visualization doesn’t even cover the tip of the iceberg.)
Check it out: Social Media Infographics – Social TV with MTV

Adoption of the Mobile Workforce – we have to keep in mind that social media also covers a range of hardware such as mobile phones and tablets.
Check it out: Social Media Infographics – Mobile Workforce

Do you have any recommended social media infographics?
Share them in the comments below!

These five questions tie into the topic of corporate social media and using it beyond a simple marketing channel.

Questions of the week

Do you have a method for focusing on actionable data?
The online marketplace creates a tremendous amount of digital noise that needs to be focused down against business metrics into actionable points. Within the employees responsible for each department, they need to understand what information needs to be processed, refined, and passed along to other actionable employees.

Is human resources having difficulty retaining or attracting top talent?
When professionals know they are “A Players”, they often place reputation and personal brand at an escalated value. This often causes problems with corporate entities that have a negative perceived reputation or that do not enable the perception of being a “superstar” within a team.

Do you have a sales plan in place to take advantage of sudden online news?
With current financial fluctuations, many businesses are closing doors or shifting focus. Nimble and knowledgeable companies have an opportunity to claim market share that is suddenly tossed onto the open market during such shifts.

Do you have a method of grading your social media efforts?
Many companies spend thousands upon thousands of dollars without having the ability to chart success or failure. Healthy social media projects should have a quantative business impact and be planned against reasonable and predictable goals. It should be noted that social media results are not necessarily in marketing, but could appear in other business silos that have much deeper business impacts.

Do you understand the value of intellectual syndication?
Many businesses fail to realize that one of the largest business assets is the creative thought and intellectual power of hundreds or thousands of individuals. Internal and external groups have the ability to streamline test cycles, reduce process timelines, or out-think complex problems and achieve success.

Want some more questions to think about?

Check out 5 Enterprise Social Media Questions at 123socialmedia.

The first series of questions often revolves around the questions of sales pipelines and marketing functions in relation to the web, but in all honesty we find that many of the core answers surrounding these questions are rooted deeply in areas of brand, customer service, and even employee knowledge.

To examine some of the “quick and dirty questions” that many executive professionals ask, I wanted to simply offer some of the most common:

1. What sites are my visitors coming from?
2. Where is my audience collected online?
3. Are there influencers in my market?
4. How do my competitors create relevant traffic?
5. What traffic sources tie into my existing workload?
6. How can employees drive more exposure?
7. What type of information does my audience want?
8. What screen resolutions do my visitors use?
9. Is my audience using mobile browsers?
10. What audience segments do I have?
11. Why are visitors leaving my site?
12. How many leads are being generated?
13. What is the quality of sales leads being generated?
14. Where are our top sales leads coming from?
15. Where are marketing dollars being best invested?
16. What is the percentage of opportunities won vs. lost?
17. What are my top opportunities and what are they worth?
18. Who is driving my top budget impact?
19. What is the volume of customer service cases?
20. What is the cycle status of individuals in the system?
21. What is your customer satisfaction rating?
22. What is your employee satisfaction rating?
23. How do you drive external revenue online?
24. How do you drive internal revenue online?
25. Is your business evolving as fast as the market?
26. ?