Welcome to the Friday Five’s series. Each week, I ask selected Tweeps a question to answer in five parts. This week’s question: What are the five social media tools you can’t do without?

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Friday Fives: Blog Post Must-Do’s

Seven in 10 marketing professionals either have very little to no understanding (31%) about relevant social media conversations around their brand or clients’ brands, or use a few ad-hoc tools (39%), according to [pdf] a new survey from Alterian. The remainder report regularly to management. Alterian analysis indicates the majority do look to improve their level of understanding about these conversations and redirect their social media monitoring strategy to improve awareness and engagement.

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Marketers Have Limited Social Media Understanding

You could look at the world of social media as a game of snakes and ladders. One bad decision can send you sliding down a slippery slope, but to climb to the top takes dedication. Today sees the release of the world’s first Social Media Reputation Index.

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Social Media and your brand – it’s all about how you play the game

Yesterday I was privileged to attend the Toronto launch of the Canadian results of Edelman’s 2011 Trust Barometer survey with my employer, Richard Edelman. This year, even more than in recent years, I find the results of the survey fascinating from both traditional and digital communications standpoints

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Edelman Trust Barometer Reveals Need For Mature Social Media

This handy infographic breaks down the top social networking sites by gender, age, income, and education demographics. We also discuss the affinity score of certain keywords for a few social networking sites. The sites included in this graphic are Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon and YouTube.

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Infographic: Social Media By Demographic

Humans are

I spent the better part of January looking at every social media listening, monitoring, analytics, intelligence and insights firm I could get my hands on. I looked at dozens of dashboards, and reams of reports. In reality there must be hundreds of firms out there doing social media analysis in some form or another but I tried to hit the most popular ones with the single-minded goal of finding a firm that could deliver the most strategic value from the 2+ years of social media data that’s out there.

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Monitoring vs Analytics [Infographic]

Is it really possible to measure the impact and quantify the

...with all these numbers, it seems sometimes like we know less and less. The problem is that we do not tie the numbers we analyze to the actions we want to take with the business. As a result, too much time is spent analyzing data that will be nice-to-know, rather than developing insight that can improve customer relationships and drive the business forward.

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Do Your Metrics Really Matter?

Whatever tool you use, the first number it gives you—followers, post count, overall sentiment—is candy for the boss. The useful insights are deeper in the numbers, in the filters and cross-tabs that you use to slice and dice the data. Look at topics within sentiment within demographics on a subtopic deep dive. Compare with competitors and ask the why questions suggested by sudden changes. Then you might find something you can act on.

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Top-Level Metrics Are Just Candy for the Boss

Of adults surveyed who had visited a social media website within the past 30 days, millennials were 33% more likely to feel that if they had not accessed said website, they would feel a sense of disconnection from others.

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Adult Millennials Most Active Social Media Participants

The first annual GlobalWebIndex report - “2011: Welcome to the Age of Social Entertainment” - publishes results from the first year of a long term research project to track consumer adoption and attitudes towards all internet platforms. The GlobalWebIndex has interviewed more than 51,000 Internet users in 18 countries across 3 waves of data in its first year, moving to 90,000 interviews in 26 countries in 2011, revealing a fast shifting internet ecosystem.

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Real-Time Social Increased 20% in 2010 - Blogs and Forums Declined

Most of the panelists agreed that the internet was, in fact, helping make the world a better place and that the social network sphere was allowing users from all over the world to interact and share ideas with greater ease than ever before. However, Andrew Keen vehemently disagreed and noted that our nation’s “rampant individualism’ was to blame for the country not resembling a democracy the likes of which were described by de Tocqueville.

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The 7th Annual State of the Net Conference – A Look at Social Media