Now, there are over 10 million daily users on Google Plus, and those users are sharing over 1 billion items daily. Google Plus is looking to be a very promising new social networking site, and a lo of people are claiming that it has, “all of the features facebook and others need”. So there is only one question left to ask, are you on Google Plus?

This may mean the direct impact of social media is minimal, and that the true value of social media cannot be quantified just by studying the traffic that comes directly from a social media URL.

While only 1% of site visitors come from a social media URL, 18% of site visitors report being influenced by social media to visit a website. These numbers represent benchmark averages; individual companies show a wide range of direct and indirect influence.

Larry Freed, President and CEO of ForeSee Results, was quoted as saying in a press release at the firm’s website: “What this tells us is that traditional clickstream metrics don’t give us a full picture of what value social media efforts are bringing to our business. Companies have long been able to count how many Facebook fans, how many Tweets, and how many people click through ads on social sites, but they haven’t had a way to calculate a tangible return on investment for social media efforts, not to mention other marketing initiatives. Now they can.”

By correlating the visitors who were influenced by social media, and how much they spent, companies can determine the impact of social media marketing efforts on revenue. This offers a more robust approach than traditional social media yardsticks, such as referring URLs or raw counts of tweets and Facebook fans.

“The benchmark gives our clients a way to see whether their visitors are more or less influenced by social media than the average, which can provide a fresh perspective on directing social media investments,” Freed was quoted as saying.

The Social Media Value Benchmark ? which includes nearly 300,000 completed consumer surveys on more than 180 websites across a dozen private and public sector industries, and includes websites for the Department of Defense, Drugstore.com, and General Mills, among others ? revealed that people influenced by social media have a higher average order size, higher customer satisfaction, and higher loyalty than people who aren’t influenced by social media.

ForeSee Results is an international online customer satisfaction firm founded in 2001. Using the methodology of the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), ForeSee Results scientifically quantifies the elements driving online customer satisfaction and predicts future behaviors such as purchase, return site visits and referrals.

To learn more visit joindiaspora.com

Diaspora – history and plans
The group Diaspora was inspired to create Diaspora by a February 5, 2010 speech by Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen to the Internet Society’s New York Chapter, “Freedom in the Cloud”, in which Moglen described centralized social networks as “spying for free.”The project Diaspora was announced on April 24, 2010 on Kickstarter and reached its initial $10,000 fundraising goal in 12 days. In the weeks that followed, it raised $200,641.84 from 6479 backers, making it the most successful Kickstarter project to date. One of the contributors was Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive officer of Facebook, who called it a “cool idea.” It is currently under development by Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, and has a first release planned for September 15, 2010. After its foundation is completed, Diaspora’s developers intend to concentrate on creating a “battery of add-on modules” in order to “facilitate any type of communication”, and plan to offer a paid hosting service for Diaspora seeds.
source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(software)

Source: blog.twitter.com

Beta version of the project is available at blippy.com.