Fast Company Jul/Aug 2011 issue - Milo within eBay / Social Media ROI

Two pretty solid stories from the latest issue of Fast Company.

From writer Danielle Sacks was "How Jack Abraham Is Reinventing EBay" about the 25 year old who sold his online shopping site Milo to eBay for a reported $75m. Abraham comes across as a very smart guy with the idea of showing online the inventory of brick and mortar stores... known as cross-channel shopping. Whether Milo (now a division run by Abraham within eBay) takes off or not, it's a concept that makes sense.

The second story from this issue that stood out to me was "Does Social Media Have A Return On Investment?" by Farhad Manjoo. Idea put forth is around the extreme difficulty in quantifying the effectiveness of Social Media spend as part of a company's Marketing budget. I'm sure there's companies out there purporting to be able to measure that (either within their own firm or on behalf of clients), but Manjoo writes of how difficult it is to say the return on a dollar spent in Social Media. Result of this is many companies are simply taking a land grab approach and trying to accumulate Twitter followers and likes on Facebook.

I wrote about Social Media over a year ago now, but the one thing that's known is it's important. The second thing known about Social Media beyond this is... well, that's what people are trying to figure out.

Pierre Omidyar and Social Entrepreneurship

I wrote in August of last year a blog post about Jeff Skoll... the former eBay founder who has since founded Particpate Media and the Skoll Foundation. So, it seemed only right to do a post about the other eBay founder (really the guy who was there before Skoll, Pierre Omidyar.

Both Skoll and Omidyar have been pioneers in and advocates of the field of Social Entrepreneurship, the sometime for-profit, sometimes non-profit category of business that benefits disadvantaged people. Skoll's efforts are written about in the linked blog post and Omidyar's can be found through the organization he started... the Omidyar Network.

Additonally, lots of interesting mentions of Omidyar can be found through the below search results...

- Omidyar search results on the BusinessWeek site.

- Omidyar search results on the Fast Company site.