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“ROI (return on investment) is incredibly important whenever investing, but companies have to start looking at ROR — return on relationship — when planning, strategizing, and, most importantly, evaluating social marketing,”  writes Ted Rubin, chief social marketing officer at OpenSky. Rubin cites Zappos and Amazon as prime examples of companies that understand the power of ROR. What do you think? Should the conversation move from ROI to ROR?—Matthew Royse

We won’t be publishing on Thursday and Friday. See you on Monday.

The Internet is providing the jobs of the future in communications, product development, and branding. In the past, these positions would be listed in newspaper classified ads under public relations, marketing, or communications. Those days are gone. Now we can get paid to surf the Web and scour information channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Bebo. Writing for the website SoFeminine.co.uk , journalist Shila Meyer-Behjat says that Internet jobs represent a new type of occupation — they require…

Ever get the urge to light a match, drop it on your kerosene-soaked Facebook page, and walk away? Dan Yoder sure has. He actually deleted his Facebook account, and he’d like you to do the same. “This is part altruism and part selfish,” he wrote. “The altruism part is that I think Facebook, as a company, is unethical. The selfish part is that I’d like my own social network to migrate away from Facebook so that I’m not missing anything.” Check out his top 10 reasons for ditchi…

The associate creative director is responsible for leading the Ketchum Digital creative teams in the development of visual design, user experience, brand identity, and content development for print, Web, video, and other multimedia solutions. (You’ll need to dig down to find this job posting;  here is the link to do so.)

Relocating for your career usually sucks in a few ways. You show up somewhere, know no one outside the office, and have to rebuild your immediate network again. Rather than doing what we’d do — disappear into a bottle of vodka for months on end — you can take steps to overcome the pain of relocation. PR pro Melissa Gullickson, of Market Wave, just relocated from Las Vegas to Dallas, and she’s got some great ideas that can help you. Among them: “Order some media kits and lear…

You scored a radio or television interview for your client or boss. Nice job. Thing is it’s about 10 minutes, which means you need to make sure your message is effectively communicated. How do you do that? PR pro Christina Khoury, a former book publicist, has five tips to help make that interview a success.

As marketers, we always look at the bottom line or the financial return of social media. However, Forrester analyst Augie Ray contends that you need to recognize the efforts beyond just dollars and cents. He suggests using a social-media-marketing balanced scorecard with metrics from four key perspectives. This will help you better judge your social media hits and misses. — Matthew Royse

Have you noticed the slump? You launch a Twitter feed and Facebook page, maybe you persuade your CEO to blog. It’s exciting. You attract some attention immediately — and then it goes quiet. The followers/fans stop coming; the comments slow; the enthusiasm fades. What happened? “Having now worked with over 400 companies … here’s our theory: Brands hit social stall points because they are using social media primarily to reinforce the existing ways they create value,&#8221…

Know where most journalists go when they visit your website? The online newsroom. Too bad lots of them are lousy. “I am amazed at how many companies merely post press releases with no multi-media content attached,” Priya Ramesh, head the social media practice at CRT/tanaka, wrote. “Seriously, wake up!” She explained four ways to enrich that newsroom .

It seems town halls anger people, or (perhaps more likely) people are already angry when they arrive at town hall meetings and the host does a lousy job of answering their questions. At a town hall meeting for fishermen and women in Alabama to air their concerns about the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico that could  decimate their industry, reps from BP — the company that leased the oil rig that exploded and sprang the leak — angered the attendees even more because they refused to respond …

What are social plug-ins? They’re the Facebook icons that let people share with their friends what they like, have commented on, or shared. The like buttons and recommendations on Facebook are two examples of these social plug-ins. This blog post from Open Forum explains eight of these plug-ins and why they’re good for business.

Thousands of passengers poured off the Carnival ship Splendor on Thursday after three days stranded at sea without power. What was the reaction? “This is a vacation from hell,” a passenger told London’s Daily Mail . How’s the crisis PR been for Carnival? Not bad, actually. For instance, a CNN  story said passengers gave “mixed reviews” of the experience. It quoted one person as saying it was “fun.” Of course, another man told CNN the experience was &#8…

On The Daily Brainstorm blog, social media expert Chris Garrett posed this question: “Why would you use social media in your business?” Perhaps that question is bouncing around your office. Garrett provided a reasonable explanation, including two things you can expect if you effectively engage in social media. — Claire Celsi

Rick Burnes at HubSpot crunched some data about small businesses that do and don’t have blogs. “The data was crystal clear,” he wrote. “Companies that blog have far better marketing results.” The companies that blogged had 55 percent more visitors, 97 percent more inbound links and 434 percent more indexed pages. Burnes explained the importance of these numbers.