Many companies are moving their marketing budgets away from direct marketing and into social media. A survey by Brand Republic of over 1000 marketers around the world found that 66% of respondents were to invest in social media and 40% said that the funding would come by cutting the direct marketing budget.

Another important area of investment is likely to be in measuring the return on investment of social media. An area that has not been as important for many of the early social media innovators, it's now essential to be able to measure ROI. As early adopters and established practitioners and influencers in this sector, Reach Further have been aware of this from the start which is why we have developed a model for social media strategy in which ROI informs every step. Canny companies are not prepared to make investments without a clear procedure to monitor and evaluate the success of their social media activities.

As David Eldrige is quoted as saying in the report:“The rise in the number of marketers turning to social media monitoring tools is reflective of a maturing of the market and a growing understanding of the role social networking can plan in marketing campaigns.”

Whether or not you like either of the two songs that have been battling out for the Christmas number 1 spot this week - and whether or not you watch the programme X-Factor, you probably haven't been able to miss the media coverage of the story. It seems to have been social media - in this case FaceBook - that facilitated the campaign for Rage Against the Machine to be the Christmas number 1. You could say that Jon and Tracy Morter, who started the campaign, have been incredibly successful and proved that a grassroots movement, with the help of social media, can topple the "establishment". Which is a good thing - probably...

I do wonder though if it's not just the good old British grump at work. This campaign wasn't about supporting a great song (it isn't, particularly), it was about halting the success of Joe McElderry (X-Factor winner) and sending a message to Simon Cowell. In other words it was acting out of a negative impulse - to stop something. Of course, I can appreciate the idea of challenging the automatic X-factor-equals-Christmas-number-one that has been the case for the last few years, and approve the idea of a genuine battle for number 1. But it would have been easier to put one's support behind a more worthy contender: the band are even signed to the same record company as Joe McElderry.

Happily the band have donated much of their unexpected earnings to charity, and the FaceBook group itself is now raising money for Shelter, undoubtedly an appropriate Christmas charity. The band have also promised a free UK concert. As Jon Morter himself has said in interview, it's not really about spoiling Joe's success. He will have many other weeks to top the chart, and the battle with Rage Against the Machine's hit "Killing in the Name Of" was a one-week wonder, designed to put the fun back into the Christmas chart race. And it is rumoured that Simon Cowell even offered the Morters marketing jobs after the success of their campaign...

So a success for social media but also for the British "bah humbug"?

One of your first tasks when setting up a new business or embarking on a freelance career is to get  a website.  Every company must re-evaluate its web presence on a regular basis, so there's always a need for a new website. A static website does not suffice any more – if it ever did.

A website may serve a variety of functions, from providing simple contact information to e-learning, but for a start-up or refocusing business, it's about raising awareness, giving information, and establishing a reputation. The ideal website is one which has easily updated content that is changed regularly – for the content velocity that provides good search engine optimisation – and has links to other places on the web where you can engage with your customers and potential customers. In other words, it's a social-media-savvy website that can be the hub of your online community.

At a minimum, to be found on the web, a freelance professional should have a  optimised professional profile on LinkedIn and any other appropriate professional networks. Many of the professional societies provide a personal webpage which can be used to give information, and a Google profile can also provide you with the means to be Googled.

Moving on to develop a website of your own, there are many simple ways of creating a website using tools that provide you with a choice of design and functionality, such as JotterCMS from WebAnywhere, an easy to use simple way to set up a few pages., with a choice of professional template designs and various features ranging from SEO to publicising job vacancies.

When you're ready to provide continuously updated content, another free service is available from WordPress.com, the blog site. As a blogging system, WordPress provides an easy way to get that content velocity and to fill your web presence with content that demonstrates and illustrates your expertise and areas of interest. You can create simple pages that give background and contact information, and choose from various template theme designs many of which can be further customised by colour and uploading your own logo. And by enabling comments, RSS feeds and links to social networks, you immediately have a way to engage with your community, whether of fellow professionals or customers.

WordPress also comes in a self-installed and hosted flavour that allows you to set up your own site in your own space, and there are a variety of other CMS (content management systems) that make it easy to create more complex websites.

Maybe an artist could find use for a Flash website such as those available at Wix but for most of us, our graphics skills aren't up to it. For an individual professional, freelancer, or small business, a WordPress website is an easy and sensible choice. It could be a long time before you need any features that WordPress can't provide. Then when you need it, you can go to a specialist web developer and you'll have the experience to ask for exactly what you want.

I'll be demonstrating how to create a WordPress website in one day with my Build your Website in a Day Workshop on Tuesday 15th December.  At £295+VAT  for the course, and minimal or no cost for the website itself, how much more cost effective can it be?

You can see tags working in any social network site or social bookmarking site of your choice. They are basically keywords or key phrases, sometimes abbreviated for ease of use.

For example, conferences often have tags so that you can follow the discussion online.  Sometimes the conversation in blogs and on Twitter can be more interesting than the speakers themselves!  A key place or topic will have a tag – Obama’s inauguration for example.

By tagging posts, files, pictures or tweets with a tag, people can more easily find resources that others are using or talking about.

• Tag “googlewave” = hashtag “#googlewave”: Twitter posts about Google Wave http://twitter.com/#search?q=googlewave
•  Tag “yellow”: Flickr photos which feature a lot of yellow http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/yellow
•  Tag “timemanagement”:  Delicious links (bookmarks) about time management  http://delicious.com/tag/timemanagement
•  Tag “flu”: Blogs mentioning the flu   http://technorati.com/tag/flu

You can see from these that it’s often useful to run words together because many sites can only handle tags that are a single word.

Tags a re more focused than a simple search, because tags are chosen carefully as key words and concepts – it’s like searching the index of a book rather than every single word in it (which is what Google does).  and the index is more likely to point you at relevant pages.

Tags can be used as categories as well. For example, when I am creating a new course, researching info for a new customer, or writing a new article, I create  a tag for it and any resource I find that is relevant to that project I add the tag to, wherever I save it.

So if you are adding links to Delicious, photos to Flickr, or tweets to Twitter you might like to think about what keywords or tags you add. On Twitter use the hash before the word (which is why on Twitter they’re called hashtags).