Companies have long had problems putting numbers on social media marketing results. Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group have now released a study looking at how engagement with consumers through social media correlates with financial performance.
The "ENGAGEMENTdb study" shows that companies who measured as having "the greatest breadth and depth of social media engagement" grew revenues by 18% over the last year, while the companies that were the least engaged dropped 6% on average.

"This is the first study of this depth on the top global brands and we think the results provide a good guide for corporations and brand marketers in every industry," says Charlene Li, Founder, Altimeter Group. "The success stories we have uncovered provide a blueprint for companies making decisions about how to best apply their marketing and consumer relations resources."

Channels taken into consideration for the study were:

- Blogs
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Wikis
- Discussion Forums

Brands looked at were the 100 most valuable ones as identified by the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands ranking. In case you were wondering what the top ten brands are according to the ENGAGEMENTdb study, they are as follows:

1. Starbucks
2. Dell
3. eBay
4. Google
5. Microsoft
6. Thomson Reuters
7. Nike
8. Amazon
9. SAP
10. Yahoo!/Intel (Tie)

So what are these brands doing right?

According to Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group, the companies that scored well have dedicated teams (of varying sizes) who are active in the social media channels they utilize. Basically, it shows that it pays (literally) to have a team working full time on engaging with customers via social media. Even if that team consists of one person, it means they will not be distracted by other tasks and can give the social channel the attention required for it to make a significant impact.

As the social web continues to grow (meaning more people joining social networks, more people blogging, and more sites becoming social), there is a growing number of channels that require said attention.

"The ENGAGEMENTdb study goes a long way towards validating the importance of social media for business," says Ben Elowitz, CEO of Wetpaint. "The closer any company is to its customers, the better, and it's hard to argue with the ability for social media to create such proximity. In this day and age, companies should feel much more comfortable investing in social media -- the correlation to results is so clear."

It is in fact that clarity that many companies have had a hard time seeing in the past. Social media is still in its early stages though really. In the grand scheme of things, it's still a relatively new concept. Keep in mind, that many businesses still do not even have websites, let alone a social media presence.

It is going to take studies like this and concrete data showing the financial benefits for more small businesses to truly get on board and engage. Having dedicated teams is a strategy that will likely become more commonplace as companies realize that half-assing it is just a waste of time.

A couple of other highlights from the study:

- The study found that the most successful teams evangelize social media across the entire organization to pull in a broad range of stakeholders.

- These companies view social media as an indispensable tool to help them achieve results, and their approach is conversational.

Along with the study, the ENGAGEMENTdb site was launched as a tool where companies can measure themselves against the top 100 in terms of the strength of their social media efforts. It's probably not a bad idea to take a look if you're serious about those efforts.

GoDaddy is sometimes hard to take seriously; its marketing department seems to be run by the same bunch of teenage boys in charge of Axe commercials. But GoDaddy is still the world's largest domain registrar, and it's poised to help Twitter with a new step in its registration process.

GoDaddy seems to have made the assumption that anyone wanting to create a website will also want to establish a presence on Twitter. Adam Ostrow reports that it's actually "integrated Twitter registration into its domain manager, allowing you to see if the Twitter username that matches your URL is available, and if so, register it."

This says a great deal about how important Twitter has become to the people at GoDaddy (and indeed, you can find GoDaddyDeals, GoDaddyJobs, and GoDaddyGuy Twitter accounts, with that last one being rather popular and putting out about ten tweets per day).

It says something about what GoDaddy thinks its customers want, too.

And since every single GoDaddy customer probably hasn't been switching back and forth between the domain registrar and Twitter while trying to name a company, this development may introduce Twitter to a lot of new people.

It's no secret that real-time search is one of Google's weak points. Since Bing launched, fewer people have been willing to acknowledge Google as the best search engine overall, too. But the search giant seems to be fighting back, as new reports have it addressing issues on both fronts.

Let's start with real-time search. Twitter's search engine can show users things that were published just a minute or two ago. Google Blog Search and Google News operate more in increments of quarter- or half-hours. This seemed to allow for the possibility that Google might turn to Twitter for its expertise, or even that Twitter would dominate this one niche more or less unchallenged.

Over the weekend, though, Alex Chitu discovered a statement hidden away on a Google site that read, "This is the MicroBlogsearch Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format." So Google appears to have an offering of its own in the works.

As for the Bing matter, James Doran reported, "Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft's rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service . . . . Brin, according to sources inside the tech behemoth, is himself leading the team . . ."

And although it's well known that Brin isn't the type of exec who sits in an office tending to paperwork all day, this sounds a bit unusual. It looks like recent events are moving Google away from any semblance of complacency.