Portals and KM

New Study: Top Charities Master Visual and Social Media

Nora Ganim Barnes and The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth recently conducted an in-depth study on the usage of social media by the top charities and nonprofit organizations in the United States. The study was conducted using the 2013 Philanthropy 400 list.

They found that 98% of the charities studied are using at least one form of social media. Most use several.  Eighty-one percent link their social media to their homepages, providing immediate access to all their outlets. For these successful nonprofits, YouTube, web video and video blogs are the tools of choice for communicating with their constituencies with 97% using some type of video to help inspire their audience.  Facebook enjoys popularity with 92% using it and Twitter is used by 86% of the charities studied.  While these three platforms have strong usage across many sectors, it is interesting that nearly 3 in 4 of these nonprofits have boards on Pinterest and half are posting on Instagram.  

In contrast, studies on social media in the business sector (Inc. 500 and Fortune 500) show much lower levels of usage of these particular tools even though their usage is increasing dramatically each year.

A common measure of effectiveness on Facebook is the number of Facebook Fans an organization has.  National Public Radio enjoys over 3.6 million fans on Facebook, over a million more than the second place US Olympic Committee.  The Humane Society, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, the Wounded Warrior Project the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the others listed below, all enjoy over a million fans on Facebook.

A new metric was added to Facebook in October, 2012.  “People Talking About This” is the number of unique users who have created a “story” about a page in a seven-day period. On Facebook, stories are items that display in News Feeds.  People Talking About This is an important metric because it emphasizes interactions beyond an initial Facebook Like. Pages that create posts that fans enjoy will benefit. When people interact with pages in ways that generate stories, pages reach an audience beyond their existing fan base. Again, National Public Radio leads the way with over 500,000 engaging with the organization on Facebook.

I recently saw that three of the six most wealthiest men made most of their money through Facebook, Larry Page of Google tops that list. I hope these four men are putting some of their fortunes into these charities.

Twitter followers provide an important metric both internally and externally.  Of the organizations studied, the Metropolitan Opera Association and the Wounded Warrior Project have the most followers, both with over 96,000.  Charities and nonprofits were asked about all the different ways they provide content to their constituencies.  Eighty-nine percent of those studied write their own original content for their platforms.  Nearly half report gathering it from other sites.  Sixteen percent purchase content for their platforms.

Thanks to Nora Ganim Barnes and The Center for Marketing Research for providing more useful insights on the use of social media. 

2013 Inc. 500 and Social Media Report from Nora Ganim Barnes

Here is another very useful report from Nora Ganim Barnes and Ava M. Lescault of The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. I have written about Nora’s studies on many occasions (see for example this report on Social Media and Fortune 500). The longitudinal aspect of them makes them very useful. This new study revisits the Center’s work on the Inc. 500 social media usage for the seventh consecutive year, making it a valuable and rare longitudinal study of corporate use of new communication tools.

This research presented here was conducted using two approaches.  First, every company named to the 2013 Inc. 500 list was examined in order to determine which social media tools they were using.  Each homepage was reviewed in addition to the entire site (since some did not link to their accounts from the homepage).  Search engines were also utilized to find an online presence if none was obvious after reviewing the website.

Their second level of research involved interviewing a random sample of executives from the Inc. 500 list to ask questions with a specific focus on issues like social commerce, mobile, online crisis management and social media policies. One hundred and eighteen interviews were conducted (24% of the Inc. 500).  While some issues are new to the 2013 study, several were researched in 2012 as well, in order to provide trend data.

The use of LinkedIn by Inc. 500 companies grew to 88% this year, maintaining the number one spot.  Facebook saw a resurgence to 84% after dropping 7% in 2012. The following also saw increases: Twitter (7%), blogging (8%), Pinterest (15%) and YouTube (20%).  This is the first year the study has included Google+ and Instagram.  Increases in YouTube and Pinterest along with the use of Instagram, show that the visual media platforms are becoming increasingly more attractive to the Inc. 500.

In 2007, the Center’s first study of this group and their use of social media was released and revealed that the Inc. 500 was outpacing the revenue based Fortune 500 in their use of social media.  For example, at that time, research showed that 8% of the Fortune 500 companies were blogging compared to 19% of the Inc. 500.  This trend has held steady for the past 7 years with the Inc. 500 continuously out blogging the Fortune 500.  The most recent data collected on both groups suggests that the pattern holds with 52% of the Inc. 500 blogging and 34% of the Fortune 500.  Both groups however, continue to increase their use of this mature but valuable tool.

They are now seeing the incorporation of new platforms and tools as well as an increased use of others.  The only tool with a decrease in usage is FourSquare.  Ninety-five percent of the Inc. 500 are using at least one of the tools studied (a 3% increase since 2012). 

One of the new issues they examined this year in their interviews was the company’s involvement in social commerce. Executives were asked which social media platforms they felt has the most potential for sales growth for their business.  Sixty-one percent feel Twitter holds the most potential for sales growth.  Fifty-five percent see Facebook as the platform for growth and 31% believe Pinterest will benefit them.

There is much more in the report and I encourage you to check it out. I really appreciate their continued efforts. 

2013 Fortune 500 Expand and Branch Out in Social Media: Google+, Instagram, Foursquare and Pinterest

Nora Ganim Barnes and her colleagues at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth have released another of their very useful studies: 2013 Fortune 500 Are Bullish on Social Media:
Big Companies Get Excited About Google+, Instagram,
 Foursquare and Pinterest. For this work they looked at social media use by all 500 of the 2013 Fortune 500 companies. The types included blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, Google+, Foursquare and Instagram were added for the first time this year.

I always find their work especially valuable as they have been doing this research for some time and have a longitudinal set of data for comparisons. Here are some recent ones: Social Media Continues to Increase in the 2012 Fortune 500 and Blogging and Twitter by the Fortune 500: A Longitudinal Study (2011). In the 2011 Fortune 500 they found a leveling off of blogging with only 23% hosting a public facing corporate blog.  However, things changed in 2012 as 28% hosted public facing blogs. This surge continues with their latest iteration showing 34% of these large enterprises creating and sharing content through blogs.  Consistent with this is the fact that in 2013, 79% of the Fortune 500 blogs are kept current, take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions.

This was the largest increase since 2008. They concluded that, “signals the return of the online in depth conversation, thought leadership and original content development that was popular a decade ago with early corporate adopters of blogging like IBM and Ford Motors.” I first hand that this is a goal for IBM and supports their strong move into social business (see; My IBM Connect 2013 Session Notes: Complete Listing).

These large firms are twice as active on Twitter as 77% of the Fortune 500 have corporate Twitter accounts with a tweet in the past thirty days. This represents a 4% increase since last year. These 387 corporations with corporate Twitter accounts come from 72 of the 75 industries represented in the Fortune 500. They also found that those companies ranked higher in the 2013 Fortune 500 are more likely to adopt Twitter than their lower ranked counterparts, following the same pattern as blogging.

Facebook presence is also prominent with 70% of the Fortune 500 on Facebook., a 4% increase since last year. Other social media tools are also being used extensively. There are now corporate YouTube accounts were found in 69% of the 2013 F500. This is a 7% increase from last year. Pinterest accounts are found in 9%. Google+ accounts are operating for 35%. Instagram and Foursquare accounts are operated by 9% of the 2013 Fortune 500.

The researches conclude that these results show “an interest in experimenting with new tools.  Only Google+ shows evidence of a significant number of open, but inactive, accounts.  In every other case, there is current activity and vibrant engagement of their audiences.  The use of blogging, after years of low and stagnant adoption has continued its steady move forward with over 1/3 now providing original content and using their blogs to promote causes, establish thought leadership and to better understand their target markets.”

I am very pleased to see an increase in blogging were more in-depth and interactive conversations can occur beyond what the other, more broadcast media allow. Thanks to Nora Barnes and her team for another piece of useful data. 

Forbes Reports Top 20 Female Social Media Influencers

PeekAnalytics, a social audience measurement solution, has partnered with Forbes to compile a list of the “Top 20 Female Social Media Power Influencers.”  Here are the top ten. You can find the rest in the Forbes article, The Top 20 Women Social Media Influencers. I interviewed number six, Renee Blodgett, in 2005. Here is a summary of the interview: Blog Cases from 2005: Renee Blodgett on Communications and Marketing.

#1. Ann Tran. Ann blogs about travel and leisure, and provides cutting edge advice to social media users in all market. Like a lot of power influencers she is also a power user – 100,000 tweets so far.@AnnTran_

#2. Jessica Northey. It’s a trend this year, leading influences whose base is in a specific vertical For Jessica it is music. She also says she’s moving away from blogging towards Google +. @jessicanorthey.

 #3. Mari Smith. Mari is a leading Facebook marketing expert and one of the top 10, overall from last year. She’s also the author of The New Relationship Marketing. @marismith.

#4. Liz Strauss. Liz runs successful-blog.com. She’s currently taking on the challenge of cancer. Best wishes. @lizstrauss.

#5.  Pam Moore. Covering Facebook, Google + and the business of social. @pammktgnut

#6. Renee Blodgett. Deep seated social media marketing expertise with a long chain of references and endorsements from mainstream media. @magicsaucemedia

#7. Eve Mayer. Officially a LinkedIn expert writes about a diverse range of social media issues and tools – Pinterest, Instagram, Google +.@linkedinqueen.

#8. Kim Garst. Advice on a mixture of social media tools: Google Hangouts, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram etc. @kimgarst

#9. Lori Ruff. LinkedIn specialist who recently launched a new advisory service to guide companies on the use of the LinkedIn platform. @loriruff

#10. Ann Handley. Ann manages the content factory that is marketingprofs, a site that is producing better and better social media content, as well as being a content marketing expert in her own right. @marketingprofs

 

How Can a Restaurant Use Social Media?

Paul Beaulieu asks the question, Why is social media still underutilized by restaurants?, on the Smart Blog on Social Media.  He sites some useful stats such as: consumers are 71% more likely to make a purchase based on social media referrals, 1% of U.S. survey respondents say friends’ social media posts have directly influenced a purchase decision, and 15.1 million consumers go to social media channels before making a purchase decision.

Paul does not provide data on the use of social media for restaurants. I do know some that are using Twitter, for example. It is very popular with food trucks as a way to reach a mobile audience. He does offer some ways for restaurants to use video and mobile. 

Here is a successful example for 2005 when the main form of social media was blogs. At the time Ben Williams ran a restaurant, Horsefeathers in North Conway, New Hampshire with his partner Brian Glynn. Ben writes a blog, “Horsefeathers Restaurant: It all about the food folks” to support his place.  The blog is no longer up so I cannot give you a link but it worked well then.

Ben started the blog to provide a more immediate presence than a static web site. He wanted to promote a loyal following and get regular return customers to the restaurant.  A restaurant needs steady customers to sustain itself.  Ben saw the blog as a way to create closer on-going ties to the local people and frequent visitors to the tourist area where they are located.  He was also not a technical person so the ease of use of the blog was appealing.

The effort has been reasonably successful when I spoke with Ben in 2005. The number of unique daily visitors was over a 100 and growing. He also noticed that the number of blog visitors fluctuates with the different highs and lows of the multiple tourist seasons in the mountain area.  It also peaks on Thursday when people are generally planning their weekend. These patterns suggested that visitors appear to be mostly potential restaurant customers and not simply web surfers. 

The success was also measured directly from the great feedback that Ben got from his customers. Ben wanted to use his blog to start conversations that will be continued at his place. Customers responded and talked about content in the blog when they came in to eat or listen to the music. Ben went beyond the traditional restaurant site content of menus and schedules and added regional information to give customers something to talk about and to promote more regional visitors. He wanted people to go to his site to find out what is going on in the area. The region has several seasons, summer hiking, winter skiing, and late fall seasonal shopping at the outlet stores. He focused content consistent with these seasons and wanted to be the trusted resource for area news.

Ben was also interested in getting more women to read his blog so he asked them for suggestions. He also tried to appeal to the many second home owners who want to stay in touch with the area so they will then think of his place when they return. When we spoke Ben was looking for new features and the blog currently includes current views of nearby Mount Washington, current weather in the area, news of the area, their live music schedule with pictures of the performers, cook books “from their prep tables,” and menus.  The posts include pictures and cover a variety of topics that would interest people who like food and like the area.  Their mission statement is to be “the greatest neighborhood eatery in the known universe.”

Now you can go beyond blogs and use other tools, as my favorite neighborhood, Chiba, does with Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, and Google+ recommendations.

 

JackBe Enables Business Intelligence to be More Accessible and Robust with Recent Moves

I have covered JackBe for a number of years and like their evolution from a mashup engine to making use of this capability for bringing business intelligence to the average business user (see for example, JackBe Expands Real-Time Operational Intelligence with its New Offering and JackBe Presto Provides Self-Service Business Intelligence on a Mobile Basis). I spoke with John Crupi, their CTO, and Sandra Hamorsky, Director, Product Marketing about their latest moves.

Presto 3.5, their latest release, provides business users with direct access to real-time KPIs and analytics through ease of use features, allowing them to move quickly without the need for IT support. This enables users to assess the business impact of changing conditions as they happen. Sandra gave a great example, a dashboard for hardware stores to best serve their customers during a storm situation. In this case it was Hurricane Sandy. Sandra had recently joined JackBe and saw the need to help hardware stores as she was having trouble getting the right tools in preparation for the storm.

This is a good example of a highly important support tool that is urgently needed quickly but will only be used for a short period. It is not a good candidate for a long wait for IT to produce something. So Sandra developed a dashboard in 45 minutes to help stores track the storm using the new DIY features of Presto 3.5. You can see the results below.

There are inventory checklists, along with the probable impact on supplies for each store, weather forecasts, a Twitter feed on the storm and other relevant data sources. This was all very useful as Sandy brought rain to the East and snow to the Midwest. I know these transitions from personal experience as I drove through the entire length of Sandy moving my belongings from Cambridge MA to New Orleans (see Driving Through Hurricane Sandy To New Orleans).

With Presto 3.5, business users can easily create real-time operational and key performance indicator (KPI)-driven apps and dashboards such as the one above that combine data from many live enterprise and social media information sources. John said that they had learned from customers that their IT departments were often not able to keep up with the demands of business users. Once the IT security, governance and protocols are in place - users can take advantage of Presto's self-service capabilities without having to go back to IT every time  they want to create new real-time apps and dashboards.

Presto 3.5 extends its user-friendly interface to include new options to create dashboards through drag-and-drop, to add custom visualizations as easily as plugging in the view, and to customize Presto with a customer’s own logo and colors. There are also pre-built KPIs.

Once created, all Presto dashboards are portable with HTML5 apps that run anywhere, including SharePoint, portals, websites, tablets and mobile phones with the same look-and-feel of the native device. Presto 3.5 also has enhanced security for mobile devices and a more secure single-sign-on experience for social media sites. This includes support for OAuth, used by many social media sites, including Twitter and Facebook. It allows you to combine social media with your enterprise data securely. The interface adapts to multiple devices. You can see the tablet and smart phone interfaces below.

John also covered their latest news, the collaboration with Terracotta to provide better support for the use of Big Data using the Terracotta BigMemory, capability. Big Data is an in-memory solution that delivers performance at any scale. The JackBe-Terracotta collaboration provides compatible tools and a platform for real-time Big Data analytics with:

• Real-time Big Data visual exploration, using in-memory analytics
• Analytic snapshots for instant visual trending and KPI insights
• Apps that visualize live and historical enterprise data mashed with Big Data
• Dashboards that business users can easily assemble quickly and share, with no programming

John said that Presto 3.5 with Terracotta BigMemory can make use of input from Hadoop, as well as other data sources including, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, and Windows Azure. Users are able to construct and make use of data directly from multiple sources without having to set up and feed a data warehouse. This is a huge time and cost saver.

John feels that analytics are the killer app for both social media and Big Data and I would agree. Putting the creation and use of business intelligence apps under the control of those who understand and need them is the key for adoption. JackBe is making great moves in this direction. 

The Need for Smarts as Well as Data

Rich Beatty published a nice article, Data Guides, But the Gut Decides, on how CMOs need to balance art and science in their decision making. The rise of social media is making conversations in the marketplace much more transparent. The corresponding rise of big data has got a lot of senior executives excited about getting access to what their customers are saying. But this data alone is not enough.

Rich found after in-depth interviews with more than 50 CMOs, “that CMOs who have successfully evolved their role in the organization have done so not through data and analytics alone, but by blending the art and science of marketing.” Rich concludes that “data is a commodity that can be had for a price, but art cannot be replicated. Science and art are important alone, but combined, they are the foundation and the accelerant for growth.” I certainly agree.

As a research scientist I was always taught to keep the results section of a research report separate from the conclusions section. This way readers could come to their own conclusions about the data. Also, it required the scientists to think about the implications of the findings. The same holds for the use of data in business. Thought is still required.

In North America in particular, there is an obsession with numbers. Numbers are good but they have their place. In an analogous way some people blindly rely on Robert Parker’s numbering system to tell them if a wine is good. However, as Adam Gopnik in the September 6, 2004 issue of the New Yorker, “(Parker) was uncannily successful because (he was an) apostle of a radical American empiricism – an insistence that facts and numbers could show you what was really going on, against everything tradition told you…The debate is not about whether the numbers are right but whether it is right to have numbers.”

In a similar perspective, Nick Carr quotes Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, in his Atlantic article,Is Google Making Us Stupid?, that it is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Carr adds that what Fred Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. I would add: and what Robert Parker did for wine.  Nick goes on to write, “in Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.”

Personally, I think a little ambiguity and complexity is good. This is where creativity creeps in. Science does have its place and I was a scientist myself in a past life. Now I am a painter, as well as a writer. Both give you a perspective. I am glad to see Rich Beatty’s research supporting the need for a balance in facts and thought.

 

Social Media Settles into the Inc 500 in 2012

Nora Ganim Barnes at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has released another very useful report, 2012 Inc 500 Social Media Settles In. This time it was co-authored by Ava M. Lescault who is also at the center as Senior Research Associate and Associate Director.  Here are some recent other reports (Social Media Continues to Increase in the 2012 Fortune 500 and The Enduring Nature of Blogs and Blogging.

The latest study looks at the Center’s work on the Inc. 500 social media usage for the sixth consecutive year. This longitudinal data makes it a valuable study of corporate use of these new technologies. The new study compares social media adoption among the 2012 Inc. 500 with previous years.  For example, the Center’s first study of this group in 2007 showed that the Inc. 500 was outpacing the based Fortune 500 in their use of social media. In those early years of social media, 8% of the Fortune 500 companies were blogging compared to 19% of the Inc. 500. This difference continued in all subsequent years and the 2012 data suggests that pattern holds with 44% of the 2012 Inc. 500 blogging and just 23% of the Fortune 500. 

In addition, the study found the incorporation of new platforms and tools including FourSquare and Pinterest, an increased use of LinkedIn and blogging, along with a drop in the use of YouTube and Facebook. Now 92% of the Inc. 500 are using at least one of the tools studied.  The research questions continue to evolve with the market. For example, they dropped wikis as they are used more as a collaboration tool than a communications/ engagement tool and divided the social networking category into specific tools and platforms. 

Some of the key 2012 findings include the rise of the Marketing department as the group responsible for social media and a continued increase in blogging by the Inc. 500. The rate moved from 37% to 44%. I like to see this trend as blogging remains very relevant for anyone wanting to get a substantive message out and start conversations. My own work with AppFusions and the AppGap brings this home to me.

There are other tools with an even stronger usage base. The platform most utilized by the Inc. 500  in 2012 is LinkedIn. With 81% usage it replaced Facebook as the tool of choice for these fast growing companies. The use of Facebook has dropped 7% in the past year while both LinkedIn and Twitter have gained users. In 2011, Facebook was being used by 74% of the Inc. 500 and Twitter by 64%. In 2012, 67% of the Inc. 500 used each of them. Looking at some new tools, 28% are now using Foursquare and 18% use Pinterest. 

Spending on social media seems to be leveling off. 2012 found 44% now looking to spend more on social media vs. 71% in 2011. At the same time 41% (vs. 25% in 20122) say their level of investment will remain the same as last year. It was interesting to see that the Inc. 500 appears to be growing less attentive to their social monitoring activity with 63% engaged in it compared to 68% in 2011 and 70% in 2010. I find this puzzling as part of the real value of social media is making conversations in the market more accessible to companies.

Looking at ROI remains less of a priority with only 33% reporting the ability to financially determine the return on their social media investment. Of those, 19% believe they have cut recruiting costs due to their social media investments. This may be tied to the increased use of LinkedIn.  There is much more in the free report and I highly recommend looking at it. 

Meltwater Enables Effective Media Listening, Outreach, and Management

Meltwater is dedicated to helping you find relevant media contacts, manage outreach campaigns, monitor and analyze what is being said in the traditional press, and help engage and drive campaigns in social media. It was founded in Norway and is now a global company headquartered in San Francisco.  I am currently using one of their products, Meltwater Press. I recently spoke with Pauliina Rauhamaa about their two public relations solutions, Meltwater Press and Meltwater News.

Meltwater Press offers a media contact database, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) search engine to locate relevant press contacts, and a press release distribution and management system. I have used it to easily create a number of media contact lists on relevant topics to my work. Meltewater Press is organized around finding relevant reporters, both in traditional media and key bloggers, rather than around general topics or beats that can be incorrect or out of date.

You build your media lists by first picking key terms. The NLP search engine returns relevant journalists and bloggers who have written articles discussing those topics, ranked by their relevance. You can then see either all of their work or the work relevant to your topic and select the time period to cover. You can click through to see the actual articles. Here is sample set of returns below.

Once you find a relevant reporter, it is easy to add them to an existing list or create a new one. The reporters are described and contact information is usually available. You can then contact them through Meltwater individually or as a group. There are useful tools within Meltwater to manage this process. You can also export the lists to other applications such as Excel. Below is a sample media list.

You can embed images in your outreach. The media distribution tools include the ability to see who does and doesn’t read your email or press release. You can use graphic analysis to get an overview of journalist memes, users; and identify and understand trends.

We next looked at Meltwater News, a real-time media intelligence platform designed to enable you to monitor your brands presence across online media, as well as follow relevant topics. While Meltwater Press is organized around reporters, Meltwater News is organized around topics. They monitor over 200,000 online news sources worldwide, including several blogs that I write for.

You can set up searches based on keywords and use Boolean logic to refine these searches. You can also select what types of news sources you want to include such as top tier journalists, news from relevant countries, or even drill down to track a specific list of outlets you are particularly interested in. The searches can be on your brand. For example, I was able to see spikes in mentions of my topics and then drill down to see what sources and content caused these spikes.  

The reports can also be on relevant topics. For example, Pauliina showed me how to set up daily reports on topics of current interest. If the results are too broad, you can add filters to narrow them down. There is an intelligence dashboard that gives you a multidimensional overview of the latest trends. Automated sentiment analysis gives you an overview of media tone.

In addition to traditional media, Meltwater News looks at social media conversations on more than 200 million blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other sources.  The volume of content on the Web is ever increasing with more content generated every few years than in the entire prior history. Tools with the capabilities of Meltwater are essential for keeping up with what is relevant and taking advantage of it for both business intelligence and media outreach.

They also offer Meltwater Buzz specifically targeted to social media and social media marketing. My experience with Melwater Press suggests that this entire suite of products is both easy to use and comprehensive. 

 

 

 

Stand Out Social Marketing: A Review

I was pleased to receive a review copy of Stand Out Social Marketing by Mike Lewis. The full title is: Stand Out Social Marketing: How to Rise Above the Noise, Differentiate Your Brand, and Build an Outstanding Online Presence. It provides “tactics for standing out and drawing positive attention in the already overcrowded social web.” The book provides case studies and interviews of social media leaders on ways that the most powerful brands have succeeded in this area.

Mike is the Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Awareness, a company I have covered a number of times (see for example, Awareness Provides Social Marketing Automation and Awareness Report on Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital). The book covers several aspects of standing out in the social media world: paying attention, stimulating and engaging in interactions, creating content, developing a distinctive presence, managing the process, creating an audit, and measuring ROI.

As anyone who looks at the Web knows the social media space has gained legitimacy and investments in social media marketing continue to rise every year. That is the good news. The difficulty that this book addresses is how to stand out in a crowded field. We are generating more content every year or two that ever before and much of this is through social media.

While you can buy Twitter followers, and Facebook likes, as well as use other tricks and short cuts for some measures of impact, the meaningful measures cannot be faked but are based on creating good content and promoting it well. You need both sides of that equation and this book is a good primer to be successful at both.

You need to be seen as unique. Then if you are successful, expect to be copied so you need to unique again. You need to be in a constant state of innovation. Mike offers the Levis Friends Facebook Store as an example. Once you enter this online store you get a personalized shopping experience based on the likes and recommendations of friends. They placed a Like button next to the SKU for each item in the store to encourage participation. It is a good idea and I can see how this would work for Facebook addicts. I can imagine that many of the people who flock to Facebook would want to know what jeans their friends like.  Personally, I tend to look for bargains but then I also do not spend much time in Facebook. But then 350 million suffer from "Facebook addiction." 

Time Magazine named “you” as the person of the year in 2007 put a mirror on the cover. These types of tactics will appeal to those interested in the social mirror. I have to admit that while clothes may not be where I focus, I am intrigued by what people do think in areas of interest to me such as social media or even art.

Each chapter has specific guidelines. For example, there is a detailed set of steps and processes for paying attention to the right things that impact your brand. First, you need to identify where the relevant conversations are happening. Then you need to refine these conversations to see might ones have impact through what Mike calls an “attention matrix.” Third, you need to measure your efforts. Each chapter ends with useful actions and takeaways.

I recommend the book for anyone interested in social media marketing. I would recommend using social media marketing for anyone serious about gaining visibility for their brand, so that casts a wide net for this book.  

State of Social Media Marketing 2012

Social Media continues to grow. The recent McKinsey report, “The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity through Social Technologies,” reports that there are 1.5 billion members of social communities globally and 80% interact regularly with social networks. The found that one in five hours spent online is now spent on social networks, increasingly on mobile devices. McKinsey also projects huge opportunities for wealth creation through social media, many of them are marketing oriented.  However, they also note that companies are just beginning to tap its potential.

Awareness recently released a report, The State Of Social Marketing Report: 7 Major Findings & In-Depth Analysis. To complete this effort they surveyed 469 marketers from wide varieties of industries, company sizes and levels of social marketing expertise. These respondents included a cross-section of executives, managers and those who support the social marketing functions within their organizations.

The seven major findings are as follows:

• Misalignment between business objectives, measurement methodologies and social marketing investment
• Tighter integration between social and rest of marketing and business overall
• Social marketers are starting to measure what matters
• Marketers are yet to tap into the true potential of social
• Social marketing budgets and resources insufficient to drive value
• The big 3 social platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, still dominate
• Limited outsourcing

You might say this represents the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media marketing. The ugly is certainly the first one. As I mentioned in another Awareness report, How to Kick-Start Your Content Marketing - A Seven-Step Approach to Delivering Success, - You need to start with defining your business objectives and build your program and metrics around those goals. If you are not measuring against business goals, the whole effort is meaningless.”

Coming in the bad category are insufficient budgets and the inability to tap into social’s true potential – which I would add is the product of the tow prior findings. The good results include the tighter integration between social media marketing and the rest of the business and the measurement of what matters. Although I am not sure how they know what matters if companies do not create between business objectives, measurement methodologies and social marketing investment.

The top business objectives for social media include: Better customer engagement tops the business objective charts (78%), revenue generation i(51%), better customer experience follows (47%), and increased thought leadership (41%). Unfortunately, only 47% measure success today but 38% more plan to measure by the end of the year. At the same time ROI is listed as the top challenge with 57% indicating this is an issue.

On the plus side, an increased presence across all social media platforms was reported by 66%. Increased frequency of content publishing was reported by 56% and better social marketing integration with other marketing initiatives was reported by 50%. This is all heading in the right direction.

The report goes into good detail on each of the findings with many more quantified results. They conclude that companies are continuing to piece together paid and free tools to measure their impact. This results in a lack of integration that likely affects their ability to measure ROI. They expect an increase in social CRM adoption to tie social metrics with traditional ones to drive business value. I am not sure that social CRM is the only answer but I do see a need to better align social metrics with traditional business ones. I recommend looking at the free report to see more quantified results in a fast growing field where, for some, it is ready fire, aim. 

Good Advice on Content Marketing

I was pleased to be involved in the creation of a useful guide, How to Kick-Start Your Content Marketing - A Seven-Step Approach to Delivering Success, developed by Skyword. They engaged a number of experts in the effort including my Merced Group Partner, Catherine Shinners.

As the report notes, “content marketing is a more subtle approach than other, more traditional, marketing efforts. While the ultimate goal is to drive increased revenue for companies, content marketing is more focused on delivering information and advice that enrich people’s lives.” However getting people information that is useful to them can be complex.

This report outlines seven steps to make content marketing successful: define objectives, develop content strategy, establish process and technology, prepare site, cross promote POE, and measure, learn, optimize.  I was honored that they began the first step with some words from me. “You need to start with defining your business objectives and build your program and metrics around those goals. If you are not measuring against business goals, the whole effort is meaningless.”

This requirement applies to many initiatives, but it is also the one most often overlooked when we start to use a new technology or approach. We get focused on the new tools and forget why we want to use them. They define a common set of objectives for content marketing to get you thinking including: generating leads, increasing site ranking, increasing conversions, branding and engagement, and providing information.

The second step begins with sound useful words from Dave Kerpen, Co-founder and CEO at Likeable Media. “Think about the content that will be useful, valuable and/or entertaining to your customers and prospects. It’s not about you, it’s about them.” Know your audience is the first item on the strategy checklist. Then you determine the type of content, define and own your keywords, and more. There is useful detail around each item with best practices for each step.

There is an interesting graph comparing the number of views for news versus “evergreen” or non-time based content. They showed how the number of hits for news was significant the month it appeared and then dropped off sharply as to be expected. The amount of average hits for evergreen content builds over time. It passes the news in the third month and keeps growing. I have often found this to be the case. In most years on my blog, the majority of the top ten most visited posts are not from the current year, but prior years.

Content marketing is not for those do need a quick return. It requires patience and time. The report concludes that, “Companies that have launched the most successful content marketing programs understand the need for a systematic, long-term approach in order to provide relevant content consistently and efficiently.” I highly recommend this guide for those who want to undertake a content marketing effort. It is available as a free download. 

Awareness Provides Social Marketing Automation

I covered Awareness a good bit (see Awareness Provides Social Media Command Center). Beginning as a community platform, they have transformed their offering to become a social media command center that allows you to properly manage all of you social media activity through a single source. In their latest initiative, they are now providing the Awareness’ Social Marketing Automation suite. It equips brands to identify, track and rank their existing social customers and new likely prospects from all the major social networks (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) based on segmentation and prioritization criteria they define.

One of the major aspects is Social Prospecting. This helps brands identify new pipelines of prospects from the social web using their own defined set of social activity criteria (e.g. identifying users who are engaging with competitors’ brands, or those actively discussing specific topics). It is offered as an additional feature via the Awareness Social Marketing Hub.

Another is Social Scoring. This allows brands to analyze their social profiles (prospects and customers) and apply their own segmentation logic to address their specific business goals.  By applying weights to the social users’ activities, actions, and demographic information, marketers can generate prioritized, dynamically updated lists of social targets. These lists can be used for engagement in social channels or to augment nurturing activities by synching profiles and scores with CRM systems such as Salesforce.com, and Marketing Automation or Email Marketing platforms such as Marketo, Eloqua, and Silverpop. 

A third is Awareness’ Social CRM. It is an automated social profile database that provides a complete picture of social prospects and brand followers and fans. Customers following brands on social channels and new likely prospects harvested from the social web are placed within the Awareness’ Social CRM, with complete social profiles based on available demographic information, interests, and preferences.  This social profile data is augmented over time with users’ likes, posts, comments, and shares to create multi-dimensional user profiles.  Profile data and interactions across multiple social networks are merged into a single social profile record to offer a consolidated view of each user.

These are very useful capabilities as we awash in an ocean of unstructured data from social media. As they note, with over 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook each month, YouTube receiving more than 2 billion viewers per day, and Twitter handling 1.6 billion search queries per month, more than Bing and Yahoo combined, the potential for social marketing automation to accelerate user engagement and sales is profound. 

People often talk about Big Data but I also think there is Big Content which is another way to describe the unstructured data or content that we need to make sense of regardless of how much there is. See my post - “Big Data” vs. “Big Content” Complementary Sides of Information Overload). While big data is a challenge for many large organizations, big content is a challenge that all Web users face every day. How do you deal with the fire hose of content coming at you from the Web, especially from the all the user-generated content sites like Twitter or blogs? The Big Data tools do not really address this so l tools like the new Awareness capability are welcome. 

 

The Postdigital Enterprise Needs to Shift Attention from the Cost Side to the Value Side

These are not my words of wisdom but ones I have long agreed with. It is a quote from an excellent article and comprehensive article in Forbes by John Hagel, Suketu Gandhi and Giovanni Rodriguez, The Empowered Employee is Coming; Is The World Ready? John Hagel is co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge. Suketu Gandhi is a principal with Deloitte Consulting. Giovanni Rodriguez is a senior member of the Deloitte social-technology team, and a blogger for Forbes.

As they write, if you focus on the cost side there is only so much you can squeeze out.  If you focus on the value side there are no limits. You can also focus on both if you do the value side right. In my career with both small and large consulting firms, I was pleased to be able to always focus on value by enabling employees to become more effective through learning, knowledge management, collaboration or social business. It was adding value rather than figuring out how to lay off more people or outsource. When done right it did also result in cost savings or increased revenue or both. I am not trying to claim credit for anything here. It just gave me more satisfaction with my job and I also thought it was the right thing for the client in the long run. That is what this article articulates quite well.

The authors note that, “while the ranks of the unemployed continue to swell globally, the number of unfilled jobs for skilled labor are also on the rise.” This is exactly why we need more education, organizational learning, and enterprise collaboration (aka knowledge management.)  They discuss the need for the empowered employee that was one of the original goals of knowledge management and a theme that runs through all the social business efforts that are worthwhile.

They note that marketers were one of the first groups to dominate the conversation about social media in its infancy.  They note that this is because customers are where the pressure is typically coming from. As customers harness the tools of the Web to gain more information about products and vendors, they are putting increasing pressure on these vendors to deliver more value at lower cost.

They are also requiring the vendors to have knowledgeable and empowered employees to talk to these empowered customers. This is not a new issue. It has just gotten magnified. I remember in 90s when call center reps would tell me that they often learned about the company’s new offers from customers calling in who had just seen them on TV or the paper.

They next offer a profound statement I will quote in its completely as I could not say it better. “Rather than treating employees as cost items that need to be managed wherever possible, why not view them as assets capable of delivering ever increasing value to the marketplace? This is a profound shift in focus. For one thing, it moves us from a game of diminishing returns to an opportunity for increasing returns. There is little, if any, limit to the additional value that people can deliver if given the appropriate tools and skill development.”

They then note that this requires a people centered enterprise than needs to adjust to meet the needs to employees rather than the reverse. This is flipping the old industrial revolution on its head and marks what is needed for the 21^st century. There is much more and I recommend reading the whole piece. 

 

Awareness Report on Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital

Awareness has released an interesting free report, 3 Keys to Influence: Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital. It began with some useful statistics:

• 90 percent of all purchases are subject to social influence.
• 90 percent of consumers trust recommendations from people they know.
• 67 percent of shoppers spend more money online after seeing recommendations from friends.
• 75 percent of Facebook users have “Liked” a brand, and 53 percent of Twitter users have recommended companies or products.
• Fans of brands are 51 percent more likely to buy.
• Sharing features can increase the spread of awareness by 246 percent with “Likes” and 98 percent with “Send to a friend.”

We are in a social world. When LinkedIn added social features, their use and market value went up. Even the Weather channel is adding social features. It is happening inside and outside the enterprise.  The Awareness report provides three keys to gaining great influence in this new online social world. They define influence as “a brand’s ability to affect or prompt action among its key constituents.”

The first key is growing social capital by leveraging external and internal influence. I like this use of both internal and external. This is why I like the term social business rather than enterprise 2.0. The internal and external social media strategies and practices need to be aligned, and where appropriate, the technology needs to be integrated. I remember the old call center days in 90s when call center reps said they would learn about their company’s latest offers from people calling in. This cannot happen today and should not have happened then.

In the section on leveraging external influence they look at a number of tools, including one of my favorites, Traackr. I have written about them many times (see Appopedia). Here is their enterprise social media list of key influencers. They also mentioned, PeekYou, Kred by PeopleBrowsr, mBlast and PeerIndex. The Awareness report provides an eight step approach to maximizing this influence.  You can also find my posts on Awareness in the Appopedia. 

In the leveraging internal influence section they offer a four step approach that begins with benchmarking your firm’s social capital and concludes with fostering brand advocacy over time.   This is a very useful report for marketers and others who want to expand their organizations’ influence through social media. Here is the way to download it.

 

 

Social Media Marketing May Need to Adjust Measurement

Adobe has released second Adobe® Digital Index report, which provides marketing, e-commerce and retail executives with digital marketing data. The research looked at how marketers measure the impact of website traffic from major social media sites. The most common measure of impact is the last-click attribution. However, this may cause marketers to undervalue social media’s website impact by up to 94 percent. The report argues that first-click attribution models more accurately capture the benefits of social media in engaging customers earlier in the buying process. It concludes that the significant differences in the results of first-click vs. last-click attribution data for various social media sites may cause marketers to change how they allocate the budgets across social and other digital channels.

They go to explain their rationale for using first click attribution. “Last-click attribution assumes that the marketing channel most responsible for a consumer’s behavior is the channel the consumer last touched before a visit or purchase. First-click places responsibility on the channel the consumer first touched. Social media creates an environment in which brands can build awareness and engage with prospective and existing customers early in the purchase process. By ignoring the value of these earlier interactions, last-click attribution gives disproportionate credit to the marketing channels customers use late in the purchase process, potentially undervaluing the role of other channels in building awareness, engagement, and ongoing relationships between customers and brands. In contrast, first-click attribution gives social media more credit for these earlier interactions. The difference between last-click and first-click is significant and has the potential to change the way companies allocate social media budgets.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. The report looked at sites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, Blogger, YouTube, and Yelp. These are often used as pointers to other sites. For example, I often use Twitter to drive traffic to my blog or to a company Web site. So you need to measure this pointer impact to really determine success. This is one thing we examine at Darwin. It is why tools such as HubSpot, Google Analytics, and Typepad give you referring sites

 

Adobe Offers a New Collection of Digital Marketing Capabilities

At the recent Adobe Digital Marketing Summit, Adobe made a number of announcements about new capabilities for digital marketers. These included the following.

Adobe Social is a new product within the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite. It combines social publishing and engagement with monitoring, social ad buying and analytics that can attribute social activity to business results. It gives social marketers a single platform to manage, measure and optimize social media strategies in the context of all other digital marketing efforts. Adobe Social builds on the social media management technology Adobe acquired earlier this year as part of the Context Optional/Efficient Frontier acquisition, as well as the social media monitoring and analytics of Adobe Social Analytics.

The Adobe Digital Marketing Suite features new predictive marketing capabilities, helping digital marketers improve personalized engagement, multi-channel campaign execution, and media monetization. These advancements will help marketers better understand the opportunities within big data. They can more quickly sort through an increasing amount of data to identify impactful insights and leverage historical data to predict future results. Adobe captures more than 6 trillion transactions per year for its 5,000+ digital marketing customers.  Collectively, these transactions represent more than 27 petabytes of data.

Technology acquired from Efficient Frontier is now available as part of the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite to new and existing Adobe customers.  It unifies social, search and display campaigns and creates true multi-channel optimization from disparate campaigns. This is a departure from multi-channel campaigns that are often operated with separate budgets, distinct data sets and unique workflows

The Adobe Web Experience Management (WEM) solution and CQ 5.5 are integrated with the Digital Marketing Suite, helping organizations build their brands, increase engagement and drive demand by delivering more consistent, contextually relevant experiences on the web, mobile devices and social media. The new Adobe CQ 5.5 includes several new features and capabilities, as well as integration with other products in the Digital Marketing Suite.

Adobe is partnering with hybris, a provider of multichannel commerce and communication software, to provide digital marketers commerce capabilities as part of Adobe’s solution for powering online customer experiences. This partnership lets marketers manage and optimize the online buying process across multiple channels for both the front-end shopping experience and back-office merchandising and marketing publishing processes. The integrated eCommerce capability as part of Adobe WEM is available now in beta and is targeted for general availability in the second calendar quarter of 2012.

 

 

NetBase Partners with SAP Expanding Social Media Analysis Across the Enterprise

Here is a useful idea for taking advantage of the transparency within social media. Why not move social media analysis beyond the marketing department to provide its benefits to other groups within the enterprise? This is exactly what NetBase is doing through its reseller relationship and collaboration with SAP.  NetBase reads and analyzes vast amounts of social media data in real time to help organizations understand what people are saying on the Web: what they love (and hate) about brands, categories, issues and trends. I have written about them before see NetBase Provides an Expanding Set of Social Media Monitoring Measures and NetBase Provides Next Generation Semantic Technology for Brand Monitoring and Understanding for more details about their offering.

Recently I spoke again with NetBase CMO, Lisa Joy Rosner, to catch up on the company’s latest moves. Lisa Joy mentioned that they now have a global partnership with SAP.  In this relationship SAP is repackaging NetBase in an SAP skin as SAP Social Media Analytics by NetBase. At the same time NetBase continues to directly market their analytic tools through its existing channels.  SAP has a traditional BI tool, Business Objects, which allows you to do analytics that uses transactional data ie looking at past business results. NetBase complements this as social media can help you see emerging trends and make predictions about the future. Here is an example of social and BI data NetBase metrics and Business Objects viewed on an iPad.

Lisa Joy said it has been an interesting expereince educating the vast SAP sales force on what NetBase adds to their set of offerings. Because of SAP’s broad reach throughout the organization this partnership has allowed NetBase to enter SAP workflows and opens up the new opportunity I started this post with. Now the predictive value of social media analysis can be applied to help with decisions through the enterprise and not simply be a marketing analysis tool.

Lisa Joy provided an excellent use case example of the benefits of this broader reach. A company produces a line of Greek yogurt, which is a very popular item today for its health benefits. Their BI tool tells them that Vanilla is the highest selling brand so if you followed that advice you would make more Vanilla and make sure it was widely distributed. However, the social media buzz picked up by NetBase said that everyone is talking about the Pineapple flavor as the most loved. At the moment Pineapple is produced in much lower volume and is offered through fewer stores. So when people hear about how great Pineapple is through social media and go their local store they often find it is not there and buy Vanilla instead, perhaps adding some Pineapple of their own, or worst case buy nothing or go for a competitor. Here is a word cloud showing pineapple as a top buzzed flavor.

This social media insight about Pineapple yogurt changes the game across the organization. Obviously the company wants to get more Pineapple in more stores to meet this demand. Now they have to look at supply chain issues. They have to deal with more distributors. The creative people need to develop some advertisements to expand on this viral popularity.  Even the call center people need to be advised on how to respond to people asking where they can get Pineapple and perhaps offer future coupons if it is not yet in a store near them. With this example you can see the power of looking beyond past results to anticipate customer demand going forward and how social media analysis addresses this need. Here also is a source pie chart to analyze where pineapple buzz is most prevalent.

 

The first benefit from social media was increased collaboration and connectivity throughout the organization as well documented by McKinsey. The transparency generated by social media opens up the next wave, analytics. NetBase is offering some creative ways to make the most of this second opportunity. 

 

Summary Listing of All My SXSW Notes Music and Interactive

I was pleased to attend SXSW for the first time. Except for the long lines, it exceeded expectations fo both the tech part and the music part. I am grateful for Adobe Acrobat for enabling me to attend. I did go to some of the Adobe sponsored sessions. Here are are my notes on the SXSW Music.

 Here are all my session notes from SXSW Interactive. 

20x2 at SXSW 2012

SXSW Notes: The Complexity Curve: How to Design for Simplicity

SXSW Notes: Design for Social Innovation and Public Good

SXSW Notes: The Curators and the Curated

SXSW Notes: Copy Matters: Content Strategy for the Interface

SXSW Notes: Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface

SXSW Notes: Boost your Mobile Workflow with Adobe’s Newest Product

SXSW Notes: Content As a Means for Social Change

SXSW Notes: No Brochures: Digital Storytelling for Nonprofits

SXSW Notes: Positively Inspired Change Campaigns

SXSW Notes: Coding the Next Chapter of American History

SXSW Notes: The Future of Music Consumption

Here are all my notes from SXSW Music.

SXSW Notes: BAMM.tv Offers a New Way to Serve and Showcase Artists

SXSW Notes: BAMM.tv River Cruise Part One

SXSW Notes: BAMM.tv River Cruise Part Two

SXSW Notes: The Music Scene Part One: March 13

SXSW Notes: The Music Scene Part Two: March 14

 

 

SXSW Notes: BAMM.tv River Cruise Part Two

Here are my notes and photos of the second of two lake cruises with BAMM.tv during SXSW 2012. In this case the bands are Lee Kock and Hollis Brown. BAMM.tv is a service that connects emerging artists with audiences through video. I wrote about BAMM.tv in an earlier post.

Lee Kock is an excellent solo singer songwriter. Both his voice and lyrics convey an experience beyond his apparent age. He is from the San Diego area and was a recent contestant on the TV show: the Voice. He was one his way to Nashville when he got this gig and now plans to try New Orleans and a few other places. I gave him some suggestions on where his sound might appeal in NOLA on Frenchman Street.  He did all his own songs, including “Same as Blood” about supporting a close friend. The one exception was an excellent cover of Van Morrison’s “Crazy Love.” He dedicated this to his wife who was on board and is a photographer who also mangers his web Site.

           

Hollis Brown was up next. They started with the singer and added a guitar player and finally the whole band joined in as they could on the boat format so there were no drums. They played great rock and as some one said, it is “music made for the road.”  They are a popular band with over 8 gigs at SXSW 2012. The singer commented on how you can hear the lyrics more with the reduced band. However, I got a CD and also enjoyed the full sound.  They are from Queens. They did a lot of their own work with a few things like the Velvet Underground thrown in. Their next CD, Nothing & the Famous No One has a release date of April 3, 2012. I think we will hear a lot more from them. In the last group photo Lee Kock joined them for a final number. 

               

 

SXSW Notes: BAMM.tv River Cruise Part One

Here are my notes and photos of the first of two lake cruises with BAMM.tv during SXSW 2012. In this case the bands are Soft Swells and Leah Siegal who fronts for Firehorse. BAMM.tv is a service that connects emerging artists with audiences through video. I wrote about them in my last post.

Soft Swells plays rock that sounds like its name. I say this in a positive way, as there are intelligent lyrics with a focus on quality music over volume. Soft Swells is billed as a duo out of Brooklyn and Los Angeles out of Brooklyn and Los Angeles but they had a third player on this set. The cruise format led to a more acoustic sound that you find on their videos. Their self-titled ‘Soft Swells’ LP goes beyond what you could do on a boat with full range of sounds, including stuttering and snapping drums, handclaps, a ringing xylophone, and subtle electronics. I especially liked “Every Little Thing.”  They got some buzz fromTime Entertainment for their SXSW work.

          

The second artist was Leah Siegal who fronts Firehorse. She sang solo on the cruise. Leah is the singer/songwriter/instrumentalist behind the Brooklyn group. As the band site mentions, she was a classical violinist from ages six to twelve then taught herself to play guitar and sing, resulting in her first songs at fifteen. Now she has a full band that has been with her for some time. With just her you could focus on the lyrics but I hope to hear the full band at some point, as their videos are great. They have been getting a lot of good press from places like NPR, the Wall Street Journal and the Paste magazine for their work at CMJ in New York. 

      

    

Leah also sings in the Citizens Band ("a ragtag cabaret collective that features musicians from the group Beirut"). I went to their performance later that night and you see pictures of it from my upcoming post on March 14 music. 

 

 

SXSW Notes: BAMM.tv Offers a New Way to Serve and Showcase Artists

I was fortunately to participate in two lake cruises with BAMM.tv during SXSW 2012. Each one featured two different bands and I will be covering these cruises in my following two posts.  In this post I want to cover BAMM.tv itself as I think it is offering a great service to emerging bands. I spoke with Chris Hansen, their co-founder and CEO on the cruise. He is the middle below. They are trying to help bands get paid for their work as it appears online which is currently difficult for emerging bands.

     

BAMM.tv connects these emerging artists with global audiences in several ways. Through a global content distribution network, the company offers music video content from new artists to the web, mobile devices and television. BAMM.tv gives device makers and service providers a differentiated music offering without going through traditional music licensing, while giving artists free HD music video content creation, an instant global audience, and 50 percent of the net profits from the music video distribution agreements. This seems like a good deal for all sides.

Samsung, Chungwa Telecom, Taiwan’s largest telco provider, and Fuugo-TV, an integrated TV and mobile platform based in Finland are among the companies partnered with BAMM.tv at their launch in 2011. Samsung features BAMM.tv’s mobile and tablet application for discovering and sharing new music videos on its Android-based devices including the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Galaxy S2 smartphones. It already reaches 150 countries, and BAMM.tv will be on other mobile devices later this year. Other services already featuring BAMM.tv content include Select-TV, an IPTV provider servicing luxury hotels throughout Asia, and India’s MunduTV, a live TV app for PCs and mobile phones that has reached over four million downloads. BAMM.tv was also showing their new iOS app on the cruise. BAMM.tv will soon be in the Mozilla Marketplace where Mozilla is deploying HTML5 web apps.

It works like this. BAMM.tv curates top emerging artists across many genres including the four bands on the cruise, and produces high-quality HD performance videos in their San Francisco sound studios and at music festivals around the world, as well as interviews and behind-the-scenes video content. In return for the cost-free production and digital video editing, BAMM.tv receives a global license to distribute and monetize the content. The artist retains all of the copyrights, publishing and composition royalties associated with the underlying work. The video content is then fed into BAMM.tv’s growing content catalog which powers a suite of owned and partner applications (for mobile and tablet devices), TV services (pay-per-view content localized in many countries), ad-supported web streaming and more options.

This seems like a win-win and, if these four bands are representative, they have a great talent scout picking the artists. These bands are emerging candidates for the BAMM.tv: Soft Swells, Leah Siegal of Firehorse, Lee Kock, and Hollis Brown. Examples of current bands are Geographer, Wallpaper and The Soft White Sixties. My next two posts will cover the bands on the cruise.

 

 

Awareness Offers Its Social Media Command Center

I have covered Awareness, Inc. a number of times but it has been a while since we talked. The most recent was in 2008 - Awareness Summer 08 Release Brings Sharepoint Integration and New Features. In those days they provided a comprehensive community platform. Since then they have transformed their offering to become a social media command center that allows you to properly manage all of you social media activity through a single source.

With the increasing complexity of social media, this is a welcome capability. As Jeremiah Owyang recently pointed out in - A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation - global corporations are trying to manage an average of 178 business-related social media accounts. He adds, “The genie is out of the social media bottle and he's creating new technologies and tools at dizzying speeds.” What we need are tools to manage this complexity and that is what Awareness is offering.

I recently spoke with Mike Lewis of Awareness about their capabilities. The Awareness Social Marketing Hub is built to address the challenges marketers face managing multiple social channels. It also allows for CRM integration so firms can record and track what is being said about them. For example, the US Major League Baseball (MLB) organization uses Awareness to track the social media activities of all its teams. This enhances their ability to sell tickets and merchandise through social media.

MLB can also monitor what is being said about all teams while each team sees only what is being said about their team. This allows each team to adopt their own social media strategy and policies. They can monitor and approve any messages before they go out. Each message has its own url for tracking purposes. You can segment your audience and add pictures and video. Workflow can be added for the approval process. You can track activity over time as shown below.

You can also immediately get data on those who are writing about you. See sample below.

Awareness can be used to support Facebook campaigns. You can control custom tabs in Facebook and add functionality. For example, you can allow a white paper to be downloaded from Facebook. You can get profile data from participants and have it automatically entered into your CRM system.  See a sample Facebook download screen below.

There is sentiment analysis on people, content, and channels. You can see some results below. You can also put a widget on your Web site that displays comments from social media channels and you can filter these comments. I think this offering is great service and a much needed one.

Now Awareness helped with the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl host city of Indianapolis has introduced a new way to service fans during the world's biggest annual sporting event via its first-ever social media command center. Here is a sample tracking social media screen for the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl XLVI Host Committee Social Media Command Center had 50 staff and volunteers working over the course of two weeks, in two shifts. There is a 2,800 sq ft. facility that seats up to 35 people. Within it is 9-screen monitor wall (over 100 sq feet) and 27² iMac Touch Down stations. See a portion if it below.

I see this happening for many major events going forward. 

 

Introduction to Google Analytics – Online Workshop

Google Analytics is a popular free tool from Google that provides a wealth of information about the visitors to your website. It can take a bit of time to uncover its full use. I want to alert you to a useful online workshop offered by my friends at Pioneer Training. As a disclosure I have no business connection with this firm except that I have been a close personal of the owner, Don Lesser, for years and have written about his food writing on this blog before. I normally do not offer such promotions but I see this as a real service for an important product. Readers of this blog please do not send me similar requests to promote your products.

This two-hour online workshop will introduce you to the benefits of Google Analytics. This online class uses GoToMeeting software.  You will be prompted to download a free guest copy prior to the class, if necessary. (Installation is quick and painless.)

Use Google Analytics to find out:

• Number of visitors
• Average time visitors spend on your site
• Types of traffic (direct, referral, search engine)
• Keywords used to find your site
• Most and least popular pages
• Geographic location of visitors
• Number of “socially engaged” visitors (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In)

Set Goals and Track Visitor Progress

• Measures conversions from visitors to customers (or donors, volunteers, etc.)
• Track visitor progress through your “funnel path” to a goal.
• Use data to improve site content and design.

Real-Time Data and Custom Reports

• Find out how many visitors are on your website now!
• Reveal the key words they used to get there.
• Show the pages currently being viewed and locations of current visitors.
• Customize reports for focused data analysis.

Regitser Online, by Phone or E-Mail

• Cost: $99.
• Go to their website: http://www.ptraining.com.com.  Click Register Now! on the home page.
• Call their office: (413) 387-1040
• Send them an email:  [email protected]
• PPrivate classes using your website or blog data also available.

Private SEO website analysis also available

• Learn how to optimize your website for search engines.
• Improve your SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) rankings.
• Avoid SEO mistakes and make maximum use of web page copy, titles and ALT tags.
• Design Google Analytics goal funnels to track visitor progress through your site.
• Create custom GA reports to retrieve the exact information you need

 

SXSW Notes: Positively Inspired Change Campaigns

Here is another in my series on SXSW events. I am pleased to be attending SXSW for the first time. I am grateful for Adobe Acrobat for enabling me to attend. I will be attending some Adobe sponsored sessions. As I do with other events I will be posting my notes from most of the sessions I attend. This is the session on Positively Inspired Change Campaigns led by Stacey Monk, Founder & CEO, Epic Change and Tom Dawkins, Co-Founder, StartSomeGood.com. Here is the session description.

“Social change agents often use guilt, fear, pity, or outrage to rally an audience around a cause. But does tapping into negative emotions with the hope of creating positive change make sense? Could focusing our common attention and intention on positive emotions more effectively transform our world? This panel will explore the experiences of recent positivity-based campaigns by Epic Change and HopeLab and other examples.

Contribute to the discussion and learn how you can infuse these principles in your next campaign. Questions will include: How do positive (versus negative) emotions influence audiences? How can you build happiness, joy, inspiration and love into your next campaign? How do we inspire these best parts of ourselves in the pursuit of social change and meaningful engagement? Is positivity-based messaging more sustainable than its opposite? How do we balance some of the difficult realities of the world and the work we are doing with a positive message?”

This session is a core conversation style session so there will be much more discussion. I really like the topic and the room was small but filled even as Alf Gore spoke nearby. Stacy shares the stories of change makers in their communities. They have become known as positively based change campaigns (rather that guilt or angry driven). They first did Epic Thanks – give what you are thankful for and they raised enough to build a classroom. Next was To Mama with Love to a person who has a classroom in Africa. The challenge was to give in honor of mothers you love. This raised enough top build a signiifcant addition to the school. This is much better that campaigns based on pity. It makes the recipients feel better about themselves.

Vanessa represents StartSomeGood.com as Tom could not make it. They made a decision to not go negative and focus on good ideas. They help originations develop positive stories. It was asked if audience members feel that people are motivated more by negative messaging to move to one side and positive the other. There was split but more were on the positive side and that was where Ai was.

The example of negative message that was given was the Wounded Warrior campaign that shows soldier in wheel chair and raised $60 million. But some people feel that this erases guilt and does not promote long term giving. I would rather show a positive image of what the money can do and I have seen ads for this very worthy cause that do this.

The next question was which spreads more effectively positive or negative messages? There were more neutrals in the audience and it seemed split about equally. I was asked what if the facts are negative?  But I feel that these can be put in a positive spin without sugar coating injustice like the video I saw yesterday about the community in the Rio Grande Valley that over came injustices to raise funds to send their kids to schools.

Mother Theresa said she would not participate in an anti-war rally but would join any pro-peace rally.  Someone asked how can you put a positive spin on anti-smoking. People said talk what positive things you would miss by smoking and dying early like playing with your grandchildren. I have seen both positive and negative approaches to antismoking ads.  

Do negative inspire action but ultimately led to inaction? There is more energy from the positive side. The Obama campaign of 2008 was a positive one and it won. I hope that continues in 2012 despite all the negative ads that will be going against him. But now I am getting all these emails from the Democrats using anger at what the other side is doing to get donations.  They got more of my money with the positive approach.

I was asked what is difference between sympathy and empathy? Empathy is putting yourself in someone else’s place and sympathy is feeling sorry for someone. The person who answered said sympathy will draw more donations. Another person said the opposite.

Question: What are the bad side effects of negative non-profit campaigns? It can male the recipient feel bad about themselves or their situation. Instead, someone said to focus on trying to find a cure rather the hopeless of some diseases. The families who deal with this issue want to feel there is hope.

Someone mentioned the TV commercials with the sad dogs in sad locations and sad music. The ads allow many people to see these places as bad places where they do not want to go.  You can instead have images of happy dogs finding a new home.

You need to have follow up to show the results for any campaign, especially a positive one.  One study showed that positive messages spread faster on Twitter than negative one. This was consistent with Biz Stone’s talk on one of the goals of Twitter. I really appreciated the leaders for picking this topic. It is an important one today. 

 

Shifts in 2011 Inc. 500 Social Media Usage

I have been writing about the work of Nora Ganim Barnes and her colleagues at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for some time. See my last post on them: Is Social Media Reaching a Plateau in America's Largest Companies? They recently released a new study on the usage of social media in fast-growing corporations. This new study continues the Center’s work on Inc. 500 social media usage for the fifth consecutive year, providing a useful longitudinal study of corporate social media use.

In the first study of 2007, the smaller INC 500 companies outpaced the Fortune 500 in blog use (19% vs. 8%) and this trend continued as both group increased their blogging over the years. Now for the first blogging has declined in the Inc. 500 as other social media tools have emerged. In 2010 50% of the Inc. 500 had a corporate blog, up from 45% in 2009 and 39% in 2008.  Now in 2011, the use of blogging dropped to 37%. In contrast, they found, in a related study that blogs continued at the same 23% level in Fortune 500 companies.

There are other shifts as the use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, texting, downloadable mobile apps and Foursquare are increasing while there are reductions in the use of blogs, message boards, video blogs, podcasts and MySpace. Specifically, in 2011 74% of the Inc. 500 used Facebook and 73% used LinkedIn.  Twenty-five and 24% respectively find that Facebook or LinkedIn is the single most effective social networking platform. In addition, texting, downloadable mobile applications, and Foursquare are used by 13%-15% of the 2011 Inc. 500.

Social media is seen as an effective tool in a variety of ways with 90% of responding executives indicate that social media tools are important for brand awareness and company reputation.  In addition, 88% find social media as important for generating web traffic, 81% find it important for lead generation, and 73% find social media tools important for customer support programs.  At the same time I was surprised to see a drop in monitoring social media as the 2011 study found that 68% of companies do monitor, down from 70% in 2010, which was the highest percent of the past 5 years. Although is a small drop and we will have to see if this trend continues.

Investment in social media will continue to increase for most as 71% plan to increase their investment, 25% said they would keep their social media budget the same, and only 1 company (4%) plans to decrease its investment. Only 24% of the Inc. 500 now have a written social media policy for their employees who use these tools on behalf of the company. This number clearly needs to increase.  Measurement will also likely increase as current metrics include: numbers of fans, followers and supporters (26%), web traffic (25%), lead generation (16%), reduced cost of customer support (10%), the value of sales generated through social media programs (7%). 

Most firms are filling resource requirements internally as 66% report retraining or repositioning existing employees to handle their social media efforts, 10% use external consultants or agencies, and 7% have made new hires specifically for their social media needs.  In summary, 91% of the Inc. 500 are now using social media to market their brands with a shift from blogs as the main tool to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. This matches my intuitive and informal observation but it is really useful to have this useful research to validate these trends.

 

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Summary Listing

Here is a listing of my notes on Lotusphere 2012 that have been posted so far. I was very pleased to be back again after last year with support from IBM. I think that IBM has made great progress in furthering social business in ths past year. I have a few session notes to do and will add them to this list rather than do a new post. Here is a complete listing of my notes from last year’s Lotusphere 2011.

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Opening Session

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Monday Morning Press Q&A

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Mobile, Bring Your Own Device

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: IBM as a Social Business

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Customer Conversation – Russell’s

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Opening Session Tuesday

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Innovation Lab Tour

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Opening Session Wednesday

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Social Business for SMBs

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Music Industry Social Evolution

Why Apple Needs to be More Like IBM

IBM Connections Conversations 1: Review of 3.0

IBM Connections Conversations - 2: Overview of Next Release

IBM Connections Conversations - 3: Analytics + Social

 

 

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Opening Session

This is the first in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2012. I am very pleased to be back again after last year thanks to IBM’s support. The opening general session included: Keynote Speaker: Alistair Rennie, IBM General Manager, Social Business; and other speakers, including Kurt De Ruwe, CIO, Bayer; and Premier Healthcare. These notes are real time so please forgive any typos. 

The session began with a very loud and good rock band, Okay Go. Alistair Rennie then started things off. The celebrity guest was Michael J. Fox. He talked about Back to the Future. He talked about don’t play the result and just be in the moment and act and react. The movie was about possibilities and the unexpected.

  
He also mentioned he loved Bobby Orr growing up as a Canadian hockey fan. Good choice. He played on a celebrity team against Bobby Orr in a celebrity vs. old timers game at the Boston Garden. In the game he scored against Bobby Orr without realizing that Bobby had told him that he would let him do it before the game. He was so awed metting Bobby Orr he had not heard what he said before the game. Michael said that had he remembered it was a set up he felt he would have messed it up.

He talked about learning he had Parkinson’s disease.  At first he tried to play against this and then decided he should just live his life and let people know about it. He realized that he could further the conversation about Parkinson’s. He started a foundation to support those affected by it. My father had a rare form of it that was untreatable so I have been through the process of this disease as a family member and appreciate his work. Michael said the 75% of people with Parkinson’s are on a social network now. He did a Chuck Berry move as he existed the stage.

Alistar came back and started about social business. He said that there is some hype about social media. He defines social business as an application of social tools to business processes. What is new is not social but the platforms to support it and establish a sense of trust and transparency, have the content persist so they can be reused and shared.  Discovery, sharing of new ideas and improve forecasting effectiveness. McKinsey said there a positive correlation between use of social tools and business margins.  I see social business, to quote Tom Lehr, as doing well by doing good.

He said that with transformations, the winners do not only come out ahead but change the game. He also said that the technology does matter (I agree and have written about this recently – see Maybe Enterprise 2.0 Is About the Technology) but there is more and I agree with that also - Looking Deeper into Getting Social Business Right.

He said the email needs a make over.  He also said the content management tools are currently designed to store content at rest. But content needs to be put to work. Social we need social content management that fits in with work processes.

Going beyond technology there are people issues, leadership, and change management. Social business is not an IT project or a management edict. A new role is a community manager. Here is a shameless plug for my new business partnership centering, in part, on this role (see Joining the Merced Group to Offer Social Business Consulting Services). I promise no more of these.

He asked Ron Noval @lotusrockstar to come up as a representative of the Lotus Champions group. Jejf Shick then came up to introduce a demo of IBM Connections Next. Suzanne Livingston showed us the activity stream within it.  There are embeded apps to integrate multiple apps into a single place. Suzanne showed multiple examples of integrated with third party apps like SAP and Trilog. This is exactly what needs to be done to make social business work. We need to integrate the old school systems of record with the new school systems of engagement.  Many kudos to IBM for this approach. You can also see the most active members of your community and the most popular content. There is also real time group video. She showed a nine-part window of her team members. It is a very robust activity stream with extensive integration capabilities. This is how social business will get traction.

They have also integrated Connections with Outlook, as well as Notes.  There is IBM Docs that allows for collaborative editing in the cloud or on premise. Content needs to be active to have value. Agreed.

Now Ron came out to show mobile capabilities. There is Notes Traveler. He showed it on an iPad and featured a lot of new SameTime capabilities. It has gone as long way from 2000.

Larry Bowden talked about the Web experience. A demo was offered on how Web site can be modified and resized the fit screen real estate. You can make significant changes from a mobile device and interact with your team on these changes. These was a wonderful integration between the market facing Web site and the internal comunities. This is why I prefer the term social business over enterprise 2.0, as it covers both work within the enterprrise and on the Web. 

Sandy Carter came up and talked about the exceptional benefits IBM clients are getting such as Royal Bank of Canada and the city of Warsaw, Poland. Social is the new business model. IBM offers workshops for this transformation. She introduce Denise from Premier Healthcare Alliance. She talked about innovation within the healtcare industry and what they are doing. The biggest source of mistakes in healthcare is the handoff of data. There is a lot of room for improvement here that can both save lives and reduce costs.

Now a demo was shown on how social applies in Lotus and Domino through Notes Next. The activity stream from Connections is on the new Notes page. You do work on social tools without having to leave the email client. I think that this approach of bringing new social capabilities to email, where people still do most of their work, will greatly speed to adoption of social business. I know that I still sometimes use email with attachments as a collaboration platform but if the social tools are inside email then there will little need to resort to the old school attachments. There was a lot of applause to the integration of new capabilities with Notes. Later this year there will a new Social Notes edition more tighly integrating Connections and Notes. These are all the right moves. 

Trilog Group won the award for open social innovation. They won an award last year. Mike Rhodin came out to talk more about social business and the cloud. I did an extensive interview with him this past summer. Here is part one - IBM's Mike Rhodin on the Convergence of Social Business, Analytics and Commerce: Part One. It covers some of the issues he talked about here. He also announced Smart Cloud for Social Business that offers even more integration of capabilities. After discussing social business at GAD, the German bank, the award for delivering better social results in the cloud was given to Applicable Ltd. 

I think IBM has made significant progress in social business since their strong start last year. I look forward to getting more detail this wek and hsaring what I learn here. Here is a complete listing of my notes from last year’s Lotusphere 2011. 

 

Joining the Merced Group to Offer Social Business Consulting Services

Social business has great potential and I have shared much of my excitement over its opportunities, as well as ideas for its success on this blog.  I am now pleased to announce that I have joined with Catherine Shinners and the Merced Group as a partner. The Merced Group provides business strategy, program design, and implementation services to companies and organizations on social business efforts. The services we offer include: online communities, enterprise collaboration, social media marketing, as well as product marketing and management.

I have been doing some consulting over the past few years on an informal basis, along with my other activities, and this move provides an organization and channel for my consulting going forward. I also plan to get more involved in consulting now, putting into practice all that I have learned in the social business space, both inside the enterprise on the Web.

I chose to partner with Catherine because we have complementary skills and she has an established practice in the social business space. Catherine brings both collaboration expertise and a technology background to bear in her practice. She has helped clients successfully position and market new products, build authentic customer relationships through online communities and create compelling online user experiences for productive collaboration. She writes the Cathexis blog.

Catherine has been based in Palo Alto for the past 23 years and has held senior director level positions in product management, product marketing, business development and marketing at such firms as: WebEx, Tandem, and Compaq.   She developed new lines of business in enterprise software for internet infrastructure solutions for the financial services and telecommunications market, led go-to-market efforts for Web-based business solutions, identified and structured business and technology partnerships and successfully launched Web 2.0 and SaaS online services for collaboration software. 

One of her recent Merced Group projects was the creation of a community strategy and management of the ongoing program of a strategic, global corporate social responsibility initiative that engaged a select executive management clientele in the education sector.  It currently has close to 2500 member sin over 100 countries. The online community program (www.getideas.org) provided education leaders a collaboration environment to advance 21st century innovation and transformation in education and received a 2011 Computerworld Honors Laureate award in the collaboration category.

I will remain connected with Darwin Ecosystems and a part of the team. I am also continuing to provide software reviews on the AppGap blog.  I am excited about this new direction and look forward to writing more about it as it evolves. 

 

Enterprise Social Software Will be Pervasive by 2016 - Perhaps

The Forrester report, Social Enterprise Apps Redefine Collaboration, predicts that enterprise social software twill become a $6.4 Billion market in 2016. Juan Carlos Perez provides a nice summary of the Forrester report.  He notes that according to Forrester, will grow strongly in the coming years, surpassing the demand for more traditional communications and collaboration products,

The latter point is an interesting one.  To quote Forrester directly, “By creating a social layer between information workers and the applications and communications infrastructure, social enterprise apps will overcome the adoption malaise that has affected UC&C. We forecast that standalone UC&C sales will begin declining in 2014 while the market for social enterprise apps and related services will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 61% to become a $6.4 billion market in 2016.”

There are several key issues and assumptions here. I will get to the demise of the traditional communication tool sets at the end of this post. First, there is a major assumption in the Forrester statement. To repeat, “by creating a social layer between information workers and the applications and communications infrastructure.”  This is exactly what needs to be done. If social software is outside the workflow and not integrated with traditional apps then it is facilitating coffee room conversations. I have written about this before (Putting Social Media to Work).

It also means that there is an important technology component to enterprise 2.0 or social business, however you call it. It is not plug and play, despite what a few of the vendors might say. You have to integrate the new social tools with the traditional apps. You have to link the new school systems of engagement with the old school systems of record (see - Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions and Maybe Enterprise 2.0 Is About the Technology).

Of course, while there remains an important technology component it is much more than technology. The integration also has to occur within the work processes and the culture that supports this new way of doing work. For this reason and others, I am starting to like the term social business rather than enterprise 2.0. The other reason I like social business is that, as my friend, Catherine Shinners has suggested, it can be applied both within the enterprise and in market facing activities.

IBM made a big push on this term at last year’s Lotusphere that I was pleased to attend (see Complete Listing of My Lotusphere 2011 Notes). I will be back there and reporting on Lotusphere 2012 next week. There are other enlightened vendors who take this approach but IBM has probably made the biggest play in this area in terms of positioning a unified set of products and services around the social business theme.

Let’s go back to the title of this post. I added the word “perhaps” since success is not a given and it depends the integration of the new school tools into both work processes and the traditional apps connected to these processes.  Finally, the demise of the traditional communication tools will occur because they are cannot be fully integrated into these processes in the same way as the new social tools. I think 2012 will be very telling to see how much this required integration occurs on both technical and work issues. 

 

Forrester on Web Content Management for Online Customer Experience

I received a review copy of the Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management For Online Customer Experience, Q3 2011 by Stephen Powers and am just getting around to looking at it. It is a very useful document that covers a web content management market in transition. I remember back in my days with a large consulting firm that this was an emerging field and it was included within the knowledge management group I led. Now it was passed KM, at least the old school version, with the rise in Web, but also I doubt it would even be included in a KM group because of the external focus.

Forrester writes that, “functionality to enable publishing to the Web — whether internally or externally — has become commoditized. Yet now, the WCM market is growing based on customer experience management (CXM) needs, including multichannel delivery, content targeting, analytics, and integration with other CXM technologies.” The group the vendors into four classifications: traditional ECM vendors (e.g., IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and OpenText); CXM stack players (e.g., IBM, Adobe, and Autonomy); Independents (e.g., Percussion and Clickability); and Open source (e.g., Alfresco, Drupal).

The major capabilities within the emerging CXM offerings include the following:

Process-based solutions enable business users to create experiences. These solutions include tools that business users (as opposed to IT users) use to create and manage structured and unstructured content for customer experiences. Ease of use is a feature here.

Delivery solutions bring interactive experiences to customers. Vendors often tightly couple both WCM and eCommerce solutions with native delivery tiers, enabling businesses to offer CXM through a single package. Other options include experience delivery with rules-based content targeting through search, personalization, and recommendations engines.

Customer intelligence solutions also enable businesses to gauge the success of experiences. Testing can enable marketers to test variations of experiences on demographic subsets before rolling them out to a broader audience. Web analytics tools can give insight into how consumers use content. Social analytics can provide insight into how consumers engage with companies.

Because most companies already have significant investments in WCM tools, it makes more sense to integrate the missing pieces that rip and replace everything. The top candidates to add to existing WCM tools are analytics and CRM capabilities. This makes sense given the rise of CXM as a value proposition for the tools. The top new capabilities for the next 12 months include mobile capabilities, targeting content based on used behavior, analytics, and distribution of content to social sites.

This is vibrant market that will only grow in capabilities. The report assesses a number of vendors on how they meet market needs looking at their current offering, strategy, and market presence. 

 

Can Sentiment Analysis Be Effectively Automated?

Listening to the voice of the customer is a major initiative for many companies. Sentiment analysis is a growing component of the tools to assist in this effort. Sentiment analysis is defined by the Wikipedia as “the application of natural language processing, computational linguistics, and text analytics to identify and extract subjective information in source materials.” It is getting a lot of hype and there are conferences and events springing up to cover this buzz. Brand awareness is one of the major use cases.

However, sentiment analysis is also attracting its doubters. Peter Knoblock writes in the Smart Data Collective, Sentiment – A Potential Mirage on the Data Horizon. He writes that social media is relatively new and, as often happens with new technologies, people tend to implement old methodologies when trying to interpret this new type of information. He continues, “a common mistake is people try to turn social media data into quantitative information. The most common trend is focusing primarily on what is positive and what is negative.”

Automated Sentiment Analysis is Only a Piece of the Brand Awareness Puzzle

Peter notes that while positive and negative sentiment can provide a form of brand awareness, it is only a small piece of the puzzle. And this assumes that the sentiment was properly understood by the machine. We will come back to ask this question again.  But assuming the machine got it right, Peter asks some useful questions including: what is driving positive comments and what is driving negative comments? What are the themes surrounding the conversation? What types of terms keep showing up in conversation? What types of events or statements drove an increase in activity? He adds that looking at the themes and terms within your data can give you a richer brand awareness experience.

Can a Machine Really Understand Sentiment and Its Relevance to Brand Awareness?

Machines can be taught to understand words but what about context? There ha sbeen some progress in this space but more likley needs to be done. Someone could be happy your brand is tanking. They could be sad your competitor is having trouble. They could be angry that people are angry with your brand or they could be pleased with this turn of events. Then there is sarcasm or is that was I was just doing?  

I have heard that sentiment analysis tools take a stand only on a minority of content they scan. Often return some form of “not sure” as the result. To be fair, it is still in a primitive stage. Most vendors will acknowledge that there is a ways to go. Machines are good at going through masses of content to uncover things for people to look at. People are still best at determining meaning.

I have to admit that I have not used a sentiment analysis tool so I could be missing something. What has been your experience with sentiment analysis? 

 

The State of the Blogosphere 2011

Brian Solis recently posted on the results from Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2011 survey. This survey is something I have followed for a while. Here are some thoughts on the State of the Blogosphere, October, 2006. Brian begins with a thought I completely agree with as he puts blogs at the top of the social media list. Bloggers were the pioneers in this space and blogs still offer the best to offer a complete thought. Here is a 2009 post I did on Why You Should keep Blogging in the Age of Twitter. As Brian writes, “Over the years, blogs have formed the foundation of social media, democratizing the ability to publish thoughtful commentary, build a noteworthy community and equalize influence along the way.”

Twitter offers the sound bytes and blogs can go into depth. Many of the most useful tweets contain links to blogs and other content that goes into more depth. If you are tweeting but not blogging then you are mostly pointing readers to other people’s idea. Most bloggers also tweet but many tweeters do not blog.

The 2011 reports finds that the vast majority of bloggers have been doing it for over two years and close to half for over four years. Many bloggers have more than one. I have a number of blog sand this one is the oldest, starting in May 2004. In terms of frequency, the report states that bloggers across the board will publish two-to-three posts per week. However, a notable percentage of professional, corporate, and entrepreneurial bloggers post once or twice per day. I advise company that they should publish two to three posts a week. In my case I have doing a post a day since 2005. Most respondents to the survey note that blogging has proven to be valuable for promoting their business or professional standing.

It was interesting to me to find that as many as 40% of today’s professional and 35% of corporate bloggers once worked as a writer, reporter, producer, etc. in traditional media. I was a frequent writer for publication as an academic and then as a businessman in industry publications. I wonder if that qualifies?

Bloggers also continue to prove useful for brand marketing, advertising, and engagement. The research found that between 40-50% of all bloggers, whether personal or professional blog about brands. I would fall into this group for several reasons. The advantage of blogs for brands comes down to resonance and permanence. Blog posts live longer than Tweets and are more accessible that other forms of social media.

It is nice to see the blogosphere remain healthy. Blog on. 

 

Is Physical and Virtual Regressive Software Marketing on the Rise?

I recently commented on some less intelligence social media marketing techniques by brands, picking up on a great post by Sameer Patel, Marketing your Marketing. Basically he was arguing against the rising practice of enticing your visitors to ‘Like’ your Facebook business page by throwing them a discount coupon and commented, “what were they thinking?”

Now Jeremiah Owyang comments on The Peculiar Marketing Trends Among The Social Software Industry. I can summarize my reaction by quoting Sameer, “what were they thinking?” as I see a similar logic in operation.  Three are very old school and one is new school. First, some firms are putting up airport billboards. Yet he notes that some brands might question it that is the best way to invest in marketing.

Then others are hiring attractive women to staff their conference booths to supposedly lure in prospects. Jeremiah notes that while they might get some eager males for the wrong reason, many serious buyers might not want to get anywhere close to the booth to avoid having their picture in the conference tweet stream. The iPad prizes mentioned by Sameer are more subtle. Others, especially female prospects might simply be offended. A combination of iPad prizes and models appears to doubledown on your mistake. Other software firms are adopting virtual mascots for Web promotion and physical ones for event promotion.

Then there is the rise of might be argued as virtual versions of these gimmicky efforts. Jeremiah notes that in order to appeal to our shrinking attention spans, infographics are the new white paper.  I would suggest that these are generally designed with a focus on SEO and link bait, as much as with serious content.  Jeremiah notes the link bait aspects.  

In marketing there has always been an attempt to lure people in ways that do not add any value to the serious nature of the conversation about the product. There is nothing inherently wrong with this as long as it is done with good taste. Now we have SEO as a byproduct of search engine algorithms.  We are appealing to these tools with material that is alluring in the same way that mascots and models attempt to attract people. It can be argued that the physical versions of link bait do not necessarily get the right people to engage. I wonder if that will be the same result for the virtual marketing techniques? 

I know there is not a clear yes/no answer to this question. However, I do think it is question that needs to be asked. What has been your experience? 

 

2012 Social Marketing and New Media Predictions eBook Now Available

The 2012 Social Marketing and New Media Predictions eBook is now available. It can be down loaded for free with the link in the prior sentence. Thanks to Lora Kratchounova and her colleagues at Scratch Marketing + Media for putting it together. The book is brought to us by Awareness Software. I have covered them several times on the TheAppGap (for example see: Awareness Summer 08 Release Brings Sharepoint Integration and New Features)

Here is the Web site description of the eBook. It “contains predictions, insights and advice from 34 marketing strategists, brand marketers, and leading marketing consultants. It aims to prepare business leaders and marketers alike for the changes about to impact brands of all sizes in the coming year. As we move away from customer relationship management to customer managed relationships, we need new approaches to marketing, new ways of organizing our resources, and flexible, scalable technology to get our customers’ attention and ensure their engagement.” I could not agree more.

The book consists of a series of quotes organized around the six themes listed below. I was pleased to be one of the 34 marketing strategists consulted and the book quotes me several times. I feel honored given the experience of the others such as David Meerman Scott, Brian Solis, Erik Qualman, Paul Gillin, CC Chapman, and Steve Rubel.  There are six parts:

The 2012 Social Marketing and New Media Predictions is organized in Six Parts:

One: Predictions for the biggest (social) marketing developments in 2012

Two: The role of “big data” in (social) marketing next year

Three: Expectations around key new technology

Four: The role of mobile in (social)

Five: The top challenge for marketers engaged in social next year

Six: The top marketing news resources

Here are some excerpts from sample quotes I especially liked:

“Businesses will have to embrace all of the disruptive elements, such as mobile and social technology, in a new, cohesive organization that is focused outward and inward.” Brian Solis.

“The continued growth of mobile -- smart phones as the primary device to access the web and use social -- will totally change the game for social marketing,” Debi Kleiman

“The biggest progression in 2012 will be around taking social data to the next level. Instead of focusing on measures such as reach and participation, brands will begin to focus and act on the insights from those metrics.” Mike Lewis

“Social movements and programs will become more integrated within existing business processes and become the driving agent behind purpose-driven product innovation, lead generation, sales, R&D, customer service, market research, communications, brand development, company culture, and, yes, marketing.” Robert Collins

“Real-time social will push marketers to form better internal collaborations and deeper partnerships with their agencies. Collaboration will lead to better marketing, increased advocacy and better customer value.”  Lora Kratchounova

There is much more. Of course, I liked all my quotes but you will have to download the book to see them. 

 

Public Relations Attempts to Redefine Itself: PR 2.0?

I am not just speaking about some conceptual transformation. The New York Times reported that the, “Public Relations Society of America, is embarking on an effort to develop a better definition of “public relations,” one more appropriate for the 21st century.”  The Times goes on tot report at “the effort, of course, has a catchy name, Public Relations Defined, and a logo, too, that proclaims its goal: “A modern definition for the new era of public relations.”

Perhaps this traditional approach to the effort start indicates that they really do need to redefine themselves. The current definition is: “Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.” I find this a bit bizarre. Does it mean there is a problem in the relationship that needs to be overcome or does it mean that PR helps firms and their public co-exist despite the problems?

Now I have no disrespect for the field of Public Relations. I deal with PR people all the time in my capacity of writing for this blog and doing the product reviews for the AppGap blog. They tend to be more friendly and engaging that the average person. The professional that I work with are also very respectful of my space. They act as great facilitators to make useful connections between myself and the people I write about on this blog.

I remember way back when I was in college and majored in sociology because it had the fewest requirements. My very politically conservative aunt who lived in a very conservative state said to me to tell her friends I was studying public relations because the people in the sociology department at her local university were all considered left wing radicals.

There seems to be two types of PR firms now. The old school ones that are relationship oriented and the new wave ones that have a data driven component. Adam Lavelle, a member of the board of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association who is the chief strategic officer at iCrossing, is quoted in the Times piece, “Before the rise of social media, public relations was about trying to manage the message an entity was sharing with its different audiences. Now, P.R. has to be more about facilitating the ongoing conversation in an always-on world.”

This sense of facilitating conversation, encouraging engagement, and monitoring what is happening on the Web needs to part of the new definition of PR.

I will add that Traackr maintains a useful list of people who are influencers in the new world of PR 2.0. They also have a great tool for finding influencers that is ideal for those in the new school of PR. I was on it briefly once and I discovered them when someone tweeted my presence on the list. 

 

Please Stop “Robo” Marketing from Coming to Social Media.

Sameer Patel recently wrote a useful post, Marketing your Marketing, on the shallow nature of enticing people to like you on social media with coupons or other giveaways. I could not agree more with his thoughts and suggest that you read his original. Basically he was arguing against the rising practice of enticing your visitors to ‘Like’ your Facebook business page by throwing them a discount coupon.

Sameer makes the excellent point: “This looks like a knock off of trade show marketing where we are duped into believing that 1000 interested prospects came to our booth where in reality 700 just wanted to drop their business card in the till for a chance to win an iPad2.”

Then the marketing department wastes their time following up with the 700, including me. It is especially annoying when you get a follow up phone call. There needs to be a do not call option on these giveaways.

I hesitate to download white papers for the same reason, even when they look like they might be useful. I do a lot of interviews of software firms. Occasionally they send me to their web site to get a paper expanding on our conversation. Then I get a call from a marketing person who had no idea about why I got the paper or that I had been speaking to his boss for an interview. I suspect in some cases these calls are from outsourced services. While they are not technically robo calls they have the same nuisance factor and the speaker often sounds like a recorded message as they read their scripts. In fact, they are worse because you actually have to respond to them long enough to say no thanks.

While I am on it, auto-generated messages thanking you for following someone on Twitter is enough to make you want to immediately unfollow them. To paraphrase Sameer, what were they thinking?  Social media is about engagement and we need to keep this robo behavior out. 

 

Traackr Provides a Comprehensive Set of Analytics

I have written about Traackr before on this blog (see Traackr Introduces αlpha‑Lists). As I wrote then, I have been using Traackr for several months. For those who want to better understand the influencers in a field, Traackr provides a comprehensive, yet very easy to use, tool set that gives you a list of the top 25 in your topic of interest. As a disclosure I have no connection with Traackr but they have given me limited free use of their tool so I can better understand it.

I recently spoke again with Courtney Vaught from Traackr to see their excellent new analytic tools. They provide some useful visualizations with this new capability, so there will be more than the usual number of screen shots in this post. For many of the analytics examples we used the Traackr campaign I set up for Darwin Ecosystem on influencers related to keywords relevant to our Awareness Engine™.  We began by looking at the location visualization (see below). This shows the states within the US where your top 25 influencers are located. You can drill down within each state to see their location within the state. 

Next we looked at the distribution of key words used by all of the influencers to see what is prevalent in their conversations (see below). Creating the original list helps you discover who these influencers are. This keyword analytics feature and some of the other following tools helps you listen more closely to what they are writing. The original top 25 lists, along with the analytics pieces are updated weekly. These keywords not only give you a good sense on the topics of interest, but can also help you adjust the keywords you use to derive the top 25 list. We can see which ones are being used and which ones are not used. The results on our list made sense to me and were useful.

Next we look at the scores table. Traackr uses three measures to determine its top 25. Reach is the ability to generate views based on audience size. Resonance is the ability to spark conversations based on such measures as retweets, comments, and links. These first two are actually independent of your keywords. Then relevance is the ability to cover specific topics based on relevance to your selected keywords. As you can see below you find reach and resonance on one axis and relevance on the other. This grouping makes sense and I find the results helpful. In our case the scores are stronger for reach and resonance and less for relevance.  This seems appropriate as we are trying to create a new market with our Awareness Engine.

Lastly we looked at sentiment. Here we moved away from Darwin examples as it takes some elapsed time to set up and run a sentiment analysis because of the factors involved and we had not started one. The actual user time is short, it just takes time for the process to run. Sentiment analysis can be marked in the monitor tool and further broken down and reviewed in the analytics suite.

Sentiment is determined by users as they manually rate each piece of content by the influencers as: positive, negative or neutral. I actually agree with this manual approach for two reasons. The data set is small and the automated sentiment tools are still quiet primitive and often return “unknown” as a result. Below is a screen shot of sentiment within analytics where you see the percentage of positive (red), negative (black), and neutral (grey) sentiment.

Sentiment can also be found in the Traackr monitoring tool. Here you can see the absolute number of positive, negative, and neutral content instances. See the example below for the same data as the analytics visualization above.

Monitoring gives you much more functionality than this sentiment reporting. For example, you can put in up to five keywords and monitor their use by your top influencers. These new keywords do not have to be, nor should they be the ones chosen from your original list used to determine your influencers. For example, if your list is for hybrid cars you can monitor specific cars as shown in the example below. You can also select a subset of your influencers as also shown below.

I really like the analytics features and look forward to using them. I will also make greater use of the monitor feature. Traackr provides a nice balance of ease of use and useful features. It is great tool if you are trying to discover and understand the key influencers on your topics of interest. 

 

Is Social Media Reaching a Plateau in America's Largest Companies?

Nora Ganim Barnes and Justina Andonian at the Center for Marketing Research, Charlton College of Business, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth recently released a report on The 2011 Fortune 500 and Social Media Adoption: Have America's Largest Companies Reached a Social Media Plateau? This is another in the great series of studies on social media use in business and elsewhere (see for example, Social Media Use Continues to Expand in US Higher Education).

This study continues their annual research started in 2008 they released one of the first studies of the Fortune 500 (F500) adoption. The study has been expanded to include the usage of the fastest growing social media tools – Facebook and Twitter.  They look at public facing instances of social media. They found that 114 (23%) of the primary corporations listed on the 2011 F500 have a public-facing corporate blog with a post in the past 12 months. This is the same as 2010 and only one more than 2009.

These results include two of the top five corporations (Wal-Mart and Exxon). Three companies in the top 5 in 2011 without a public-facing blog are: Chevron, Conoco Philips, and Fannie Mae. However, I know that Conoco Philips has a very active enterprise social media presence. In 2011, 91% of the F500 blogs take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions and this is an increase of 1% since 2009 and 2010.

Twitter usage is much greater with 308 (62%) of the 2011 F500 maintianing corporate Twitter accounts with a tweet in the past thirty days. This represents a 2% increase since last year. Of these companies, the top 10 corporations (Wal-Mart, Exxon, Chevron, Conoco Philips, Fannie Mae, General Electric, Berkshire Hathaway, General Motors, Bank of America Corp. and Ford Motors) consistently post on their Twitter accounts.  Note that this includes companies without blogs.

This is the first year the number of followers was included in this study. Google has the highest number of followers on Twitter among the 2011 F500 followed by Whole Foods Market, Starbucks, and Southwest Airlines. The Washington Post has quickly grown to almost 600,000 in just over a year.

Facebook presence is almost as high as Twitter and far greater than blogs with 289 (58%) of the 2011 F500 now on Facebook. Only 156 companies (31%) have neither a Twitter account nor a Facebook presence. A different set of companies lead in Facebook followers than Twitter followers. Coca-Cola dominates with 32,303,342 fans and this is the highest recorded number of the 2011 F500's 289 companies with a Facebook account. Starbucks pulls into 2^nd place with 24,102,790 fans. Target and Nike both have more than 4.5 million fans.  This makes sense as these are more mass-market companies who would tend to use Facebook for marketing purposes,

The researchers conclude that social media use by large companies may have leveled off and this could be the case. It does seem that the more marketing focused tools, Twitter and Facebook, are leading the use of blogs that tend to work better for thought leadership and more complex messages. I really appreciate the work of Nora Barnes and her colleagues. They are proving a great service. Check out their full report for more details. 

 

My KM World Session Notes: Jeremiah Owyang on Architecting a Connected Enterprise

I am primarily posting my notes from the 2011 KM World on the Darwin blog. I will share a few key sessions here and then a list of all of them with links. I attended the opening keynote, Architecting a Connected Enterprise, by Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analyst - Altimeter Group. Here is the session description.

“Owyang, a leading web strategist and industry analyst, discusses collaborative enterprises of the future. He provides tips for building networked enterprises that share and apply knowledge for decision-making, innovation, customer satisfaction, business success, and a stronger bottom line. Owyang illustrates with real-world examples and is sure to spark insights for you to build a high performing networked enterprise that connects employees, customers, prospects and partners.”

Jeremiah began by saying he wanted to expand our understanding of knowledge management. The proper end result is knowledge action. I like this as I never liked the management part of KM and action is a better objective. He said that while you want to have action you do not want to forget the knowledge part. He said that some companies have done this with bad results. It has resulted in bad PR. He gave the famous United Airlines breaks guitars example when the airline did not respond.  Jeremy said they did some research related to this concept to see what when wrong in their social media crisis.

He found that these social media crisis are on the rise as companies have jumped into social on the Web but failed to properly prepare for it. Most of these crises could have been avoided if the company had prepared. This affected consumer good companies the most, especially those in the press. The crises have emerged on also every social media channel.

The number one issue was exposing poor customer experience. The companies that suffered lack policies for social media, training, focused staff, and inability to specify how to respond. He aid that the internal use of social media needs to coordinate with the external use

 

He went through five models on social media inside and outside. The first was decentralized with no sharing. The second is centralized where one group exercises top down control, often it is corporate communication. The third is hub and spoke. There is a cross-functional team with experts deploying on behave of business units. Number four is multiple hub and spoke. Different business units deploy but there is a central social media center of excellence. The last one is very rare and is called holistic. In this case the majority of the employee base is using the tools inside, as well as outside the enterprise.

He next presented a social media maturity model with the holistic approach at the top. The model is similar to Maslow’s hierarchy. You have to go through the stages starting at the bottom. The bottom line is called foundation requires clear objectives that are aligned with business goals. He gave IBM as an example of clear goals for using social media inside and outside the company. Intel has made their social media guidelines that they made public. Cisco also has clear FAQs on social media use to educate their employees.  However, he found that most companies have not implemented clear guidelines for social media use within the enterprise, as well as outside.

Dell has a social media program SMaC – social media for communities. There is a social media team with 18 people that have trained over 1500 employees in person in a few weeks. They host events to train employees around the global. They train employees on social media before letting them use these tools.

Only 18% of companies had a social media certification program. Dell was one of them. The DoD has a social media hub. Companies that are successful do not block employees whose job is to connect with customers from using social media.

The second level in the maturity model is safety. This requires a dedicated team with workflow and crisis response methods. It includes a strategist, a manger for coordination across functions. people to work with customers, analysts, educators, and a liaison to work with business units to gather requirements. They should have a triage in place on how to respond to potential social media problems inside or outside the enterprise. He went over an example triage for the US Air Force that was sent to all officers to be able to respond in real time. Staples has a team of managers to respond to social media issues. Some companies have dedicated listening centers. Gatorade has one of these to listen to what people are saying about their products online

The third level is formation. Companies at this level have asset inventory, best practices, and a center of excellence. The Four Season hotel chain has an inventory with a Twitter account for each hotel. Panasonic also has a range of accounts. Cisco also has a its inventory on its web site, as does Panasonic. Advanced companies are using this – term – Social Media Center of Excellence that has central responsibilities for tools and how they are being used. eBay has this, as does Adobe.

The fourth level is enablement. Now you can scale with empowerment, cross-learning, and measurement. Business units are now enabled to work on their own. The IBM focus is not to constrain but to empower. Cisco empowers employees on how to use social media internally with guidance and tools.  NVIDA measures how all the tools are being used. Salesforce.com measures and rewards employees who are answering questions on social media. They are rewarded financially for their efforts. The SAP Community Network covers suppliers and partners and asks people to rank the efforts of members. He offered six categories of measurement: innovation, customer experience, operational efficiency, revenue generation, marketing optimization, and brand health.

The top level is holistic or enlightenment where everyone works together on social media after the foundations of the first four levels have been put in place. The goal is action in real time.  They also integrate customer data with social media activity. They use this data to improve their products. A few in his model are Zappos, Dell, and Best Buy. In these companies the CEO is personally involved in customer support. Only 1.4% of companies in their survey were at the holistic level. Starbucks is involving customers to gather ideas on how to get better, Dell is doing this internally. Levis’ has integrated the Facebook Like button in its Web site. It can recommend products based on what your friends like. Proctor and Gamble is looking outside for new ideas. They are making this open and social.

Great session and here is a link to his sldies.

 

Traackr Introduces αlpha‑Lists

I have written about Traackr before on this blog (see Traackr Enhances Its Web Influencer Monitoring Tool). As I wrote then I have been using Traackr for several months. For those who want to better understand the influencers in a field, Traackr provides a comprehensive, yet very easy to use, tool set. As a disclosure I have no connection with Traackr but they have given me limited free use of their tool so I can better understand it.

Traackr has now launched a series of curated alpha-lists on different topics. As they write, “There's a human element to measuring influence that technology will never substitute. It has to do with someone's unique way of defining a topic.” With this series they are letting industry writers define their topic and create a public alpha-list.

The way Traackr works is to have you first define a topic through a set of key words. They let you test these words, and offer advice of effective key word choices. Traackr scans the social web to identify the 25 most influential and most relevant people online and dynamically generates your list. There are three distinct categories with separate scores:

Reach - Ability to generate views based on audience size

Resonance
- Ability to spark conversations based on such measures as retweets comments, and links

Relevance
- Ability to cover specific topic/market based on relevance to your selected keywords

The placement on the list is determined by the combined set of scores. The curator does not directly control the choices or the ordering. Once people do appear you can star them so they always show up even if they fall out of the top 25. In this case they are listed at the bottom of the list and unranked.

When Traackr let me try out their tool as part of a review, I choose Enterprise 2.0 as my topic. They asked me to include in this topic list in their first set of alpha-lists. Despite appearances, I did not try to influence the list beyond the key word choice but perhaps there is some indirect influence as I picked key words that are a personal interest to me.

Here is their first set of alpha-lists. As you can see the topics are quite diverse.

Non-Profit Marketing

The Future of PR

Enterprise 2.0

Makeup and Beauty

Luxury Brands

 

From Social Insights to Social Business Innovation: MIT Enterprise Forum

Last night I went to an interesting event sponsored by the MIT Enterprise Forum. It was part of their Innovation Series: From Social Insights to Social Business Innovation.  I have the pleasure of attending an earlier event for startups where my Darwin Ecosystem partner Thierry Hubert presented our story. It was a very useful and innovative format where both a panel of experts and the audience provided feedback on our presentation. Once we presented we could not talk but only listen. This event was quite different and played to a much larger audience but no less useful. Here is the event description:

“The rapid growth and usage of social media by consumers and businesses has created a seismic shift that affects every aspect of our lives today.  We predict that this social movement will have the same impact on society and business as Guttenberg had over 600 years ago.  Social is making the Global Village possible, it is truly flattening the world, and thus is impacting not only business disciplines such as marketing, sales and customer service but the very core of business itself. New and powerful business models are emerging – models based on social innovation.”

Lora Kratchounova, Scratch Marketing + Media, led the event. Francois Gossieaux, Human 1.0, moderated the panel discussion. He asked the panel for their context that led them to be on the panel.

Betsy Aoki, Bing, said she was recruited to Bing from XBox where she had introduced some social aspects. I interviewed her in 2004 for a business blog book I was doing at the time. She was the funniest interviewee then and she is keeping up with this skill.

Ekaterina Walters, Intel, does social media work and social networks within Intel. They have been doing social media and blogs for about 5 years. Their Facebook community has 3.5 million members

Nathaniel Perez, SapientNitro, is the head of social at Nitro, a PR firm, but they do not use the term, social media, but social experience instead. He is most passionate about generating experiences that lead to innovation, as well as real time insights.

Marcus Nelson, SalesForce.com, is Director of Social Media at Salesforce.com.  He was the first one in the group and now they have about 15 globally. They are measuring a lot now that they have acquired Radiant6.

Francois asked the panel about the human aspects of social media, as opposed to the technology. He said that humans are hard wired for reciprocity. I would agree but in my experience this is not universal across all people.  There are many who will exploit this reciprocity.

Francois added that we are also hard wired for power and status. If you allowed knowledge to equal power you get knowledge hoarding and this stifles innovation. He also found that people lie to you in interviews and tell you want to hear. For example, Jet Blue asked people what type of snacks they wanted. They said healthy so they provided them and no one ate them.  He asked the panel how social innovation got started in their firm.

Betsy said she was the blog queen at Microsoft and helped blogging get started at Microsoft in 2004. Microsoft was one of the first firms to allow employees to blog on a mass scale. There were so many individual bloggers that created a portal in 2004. They still have it as their Microsoft Community Blogs section on their site with a directory to find weblogs about Microsoft technologies written by Microsoft employees. The site said you can ‘Use these blogs to get insights and opinions about using (and creating!) Microsoft technology and software.” There were 385 blogs listed in 2004 when I first wrote about it.

Ekaterina said that half of the population is under age 30 and grew up with social and real time communication so they are attuned to using social tools for innovation. Nathaniel said that you need to go beyond tools and create connections based on human experience for innovation to happen. Marcus talked about PR campaigns generated informally that had a single focus. These can trump the most well funded ones. He gave an example of a $10,000 video that Levis did about walking across America that has had over 8 millions views.

Ekaternia said they are trying to get all employees to help answer customer questions through social media. Nathaniel countered by saying there is a difference between waves and ripples and the waves need more careful planning.

Francois asked how they measure success. Marcus said share of voice is one: how to get people talking about us more than competitors. However, he noted measurement is hard. What is the ROI on your mom? Nathaniel countered by saying that you can measure everything and you should. I sense a contrarian trend here. He added that brand health and perception are key measures. Ekaternia said that for Dell they saved millions through social media based customer service that took traffic away from call centers. Nathaniel said you can design initiatives for measurability.

The audience asked what is the biggest misconception about social media. Ekaterina said the idea the social media will solve everything and do it for free. Marcus said that more input is not always better. You can just get more confusion.

The audience asked if the goal is to find good ideas in the middle of too many bad ones, how do you find the good ones. Francois said use the crowd to find the bad ideas. They are good at that. Marcus said one issue is deciding who you hand off the good idea or insight to get something done with it.  He also made fun of the audience members who left early as they were leaving. I guess he wanted to keep the crowd thing going.

Marcus said that people want to be helpful but they do not know the answer so they make it up on the spot. This is a weakness with crowd-sourcing. Nathaniel said that the number of followers is a bogus measure. I would certainly agree here since you can simply buy them if you believe all the ads I see. Key influencers are not effective. Ashton Krucher is an example. Betsy said there are other people who are influential because they are smart not because they are popular. Marcus said the true influencers do not worry about their followers. They just act.

Francois asked about stories. Betsy and Ekaternia talked abut the amplification effects of social media through personal stories. Nathaniel said the potential is limitless. He told about a person who bought a house that had video cameras in every room and he looked at his son’s early sounds. He could trace the evolution of the use of the word “water.”  The content is there for many questions but we need the means to analyze it. Marcus talked about how the world can come to you through Twitter before it gets presented in the mainstream media.

I came away feeling that while social media has the potential to provide significant insights we have a ways to go to make the most of these insights. There are certainly examples of success here but we are still in the frontier phase. This is not a bad place to be as the opportunity ahead is huge.  

 

The Untapped Sources of Business Intelligence

Endeca recently announced the results of a survey that explores the changing business intelligence analytics requirements. The survey polled 228 marketers at U.S. organizations with an eCommerce presence. The demographics indicated that 56% of the respondents came from B2C retail shops, 27% came from B2B Distributors, and the remaining 17% spanned Manufacturing, Financial Services, Education, and Media organizations. The survey found that while it is more important than ever to tap into social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to understand evolving customer behavior and forge new revenue streams, marketers are overwhelmed with the growing number of data sources that need to be measured and analyzed.

Combined with the rise of information overload from the volumes of unstructured data coming from the leading social media sites, it is not surprising that survey results show that more than 60% of respondents admit they are currently making decisions based on only 50% or less of data available to them. In addition, nearly half of the respondents report that they are still using multiple tools (at least three or more) to support BI decisions. 

Nearly half of respondents say they are not currently incorporating unstructured data into analysis, but it is something they would like to do. These firms are missing much of the good stuff. In addition, 35% of respondents say they spend hours combining data from various data sources and over half say they would like to analyze all information in a single view.

The need for a dynamically changing set of PI tools is also seen as 48% of respondents said their analytics requirements changed at least monthly, with 20% of respondents requirements changing daily or hourly. In addition, more than 40% of respondents cited that it often takes months to have their BI requests fulfilled or they often cannot get their requests fulfilled at all.

There is a great untapped potential for business intelligence as firms are still not taking advantage of the vast amounts of user generated content within Web 2.0.

 

 

Research on the Positive Side of the New Web

Actually the new Web, or Web 2.0, has been around for a while now. Here is an interesting study on its positive impact after the many naysayers have spoken up. Communispace, in partnership with Ogilvy & Mather, recently released findings from a joint research study that examines the impact technology has on the lives of today’s consumer, with a specific focus on the role technology plays on children and  family life in our society. The ‘Tech Fast Forward: Plug in to See the Brighter Side of Life’ study evaluates the optimistic outlook associated with tech-savvy kids and their respective families and draws direct correlations to the resulting implications for marketers and brands.

In two phases of research, they surveyed 1200 US parents with children aged 3–12 in the household and qualitatively explored key topics with 112 tech-savvy community members and their kids. In the first portion they identified 5 segments: tech backward 3%, tech neutral 36%, tech forward 42% , and tech fast forward 19%. Ten they looked more closely the last group. Here is a video of the qualitative portion of the research, including footage from Flip cameras given to participants (children ages 3-12 years old) tasked with recording in-home technology-related behavior.

The vast majority of all segments saw technology as a positive force in their lives (84%) with the tech fast forward slightly ahead (87%) on this measure. In a related question: Will technology make of break us? All segments respond make 72% of the time and 85% of the fast forward said make. When asked if technology better connect or creates more distance, 72% of all segments said better connect and 80% of the tech fast forward sided with this view.   This is an overall quite positive view and one that I share.  The tech fast forward group is also more optimistic about the future.

Some of the key implications identified in the study that enable brands to more effectively connect with and reach the Tech Forward consumer include (mostly in their words with some additional comments):

Mobilize tech optimism: Brands have the opportunity to capitalize on today’s tech optimism by helping consumers create the brighter world they want to see.

Mine the family mindset: As intergenerational attitudes converge, opportunities to market to the family as a unit increase. Purchase decisions are family decisions.

Curate unexpected connections: Brands have the opportunity to bring unimagined access to consumers across the globe and should harness the power of connections in more interesting ways. We like this idea at Darwin.

Put the world to work for you: Technology has unleashed the wisdom of the crowd and brands can build on tech optimism to channel their customers’ creativity.

Respect the mode: Consumers today switch between modes of separation and integration, and seek service and product solutions to help them feel in control.  Brands will benefit by providing a flexible feature set that speaks to the multi-modal life.

Un-connect the dots: Consumers want to interpret your brand—to make your brand’s story their own. So give them the building blocks and let them put the pieces together. I like this one. This is what we do at Darwin, enable people to better connect the dots themselves through content visualizations rather than prescriptive top down search.

Build gated communities: Safety and privacy create major barriers for self-expression online; private communities help consumers feel secure and confident when engaging with your brand online. This is what Communispace does quite well.

Let people mess with your brand: The creative impulse abounds, and today, any and all content is fair game for experimentation, adaptation and reinterpretation. This includes your brand!  Companies need to embrace this trend and enable consumers to reimagine and remix brand assets. I like this one best of all.

There is much more in the report that is available for free. 

 

Review of The Social Marketing Funnel

I recently looked at a useful new book, The Social Marketing Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social Marketing. It is sponsored by Awareness and available as a free download. The book begins with some interesting stats. Inc. reported in a 2009 study that 91% of Inc. 500 companies use social media as part of their marketing mix1. A second study found that 72% of marketers reported closing more business as a result of social media efforts and 52% reported lead generation benefits with social media.

At the same time, they note that, “measuring and tying social media efforts to true benefits and ROI continues to elude many marketers…Most marketers struggle to identify, capture, and leverage the myriad social conversations related to their brands.” The sets up the purpose of the book: to “help CMOs and social media strategists think about organizing and optimizing social marketing in the context of building a Social Funnel” and provide the steps and best practices to get the most value from social media investments. They define a Social Funnel as “a dynamic collection of consumer activity across social media channels, which sits on top of the traditional marketing and sales funnel.” To provide context to this effort, Awareness looked at close of 100 businesses of all sizes from multiple industries (some managed by the brands themselves and some by agencies). They also talked with some industry experts.

To create your Social Funnel you need to first identify and capture consumer conversation across a variety of social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Then you need a CRM tool that handles social media (aka SCRM) to aggregate the data and mine it for insights. This effort needs to be integrates with your traditional marketing and sales efforts and your CRM tool. This makes a lot of sense but the book notes that only 6% of companies report doing this integration.  The report predicts a growth in this integration and I would agree.

They offer five steps to building and managing your social funnel. You first manage and grow your social reach. This is defined as “the total number of social profiles a brand has collected across all social media platforms with brand presence.”  Then you monitor the relevant social conversations and manage your social content as a result of this monitoring.  You also practice good SEO as part of this management and measure and analyze the relevant social activity around your brand.  There are useful tips for each step.

In a related 2010 study Awareness asked over 300 companies about what they did with their social media monitoring. The results: 78% - Identify and respond to customer service issues, 64% - Identify individuals looking for my product or service, 38% - Identify individuals who influence sales of my product/service, and 17% - Identify behaviors associated with people who are likely to buy our product or service. However, this was mostly informal as only 18% had a formal tracking process.  Cleary there is a need for more effort here.

There is much more in the book as I have just skimmed over the headlines and I recommend it to anyone interesting in making their social media marketing more effective.  They conclude: “Remember, your Social Funnel is a strategic business investment – treat it with the same rigor, dedication, and governance you treat your other strategic investments.” This is good advice for any initiative and one that is most often ignored when the effort is around a hot new topic such as social media. 

 

Making Better Use of Customer Intelligence

Forrester’s Tamara Barber asked the question: Are You Prepared For The Intelligent Enterprise?  She looked at the future of market research and saw a trend and need for increased collaboration between the market insight professionals who go out and proactively collect market research data and those who passively collect transactional and behavioral data.  We applaud this.  She worked with a colleague, Dave Frankland, to look at how these functions best collaborate.  These came up with these findings and suggestions.

First, they found that customer knowledge is an elusive commodity. Often the market insight interviewers and the data analysis teams do not collaborate. As a result, decisions can be based on an incomplete view of the customer. I like to have these two methods work interactively. For example, the data can raise questions to ask customers. The customers can bring up issues to validate with data.

Second, the old roles of market research and database marketing actually miss the mark. Tamara and Dave fell that these roles are stuck in their own vicious cycles because they tend to focus on traditional methods and channels, making them less relevant to the business. This is where new approaches can come to play in useful ways.

Third, the greater alignment of these roles can drive business value. While this “alignment” is much easier said than done, when done right a “more adaptive insights function emerges that can drive more efficient marketing and in the end help grow the bottom line.” I think this can best occur through the interactive exchange and validation I mentioned in connection with their first finding. I have seen this first hand in research on internal employee capabilities and interests and I am sure it will work with customers. 

 

An Alternative Approach for Social Media Analytics

Sandeep Raut recently provided some useful guidelines for Implementing and Using Social Media Analytics. As he noted companies have started using the huge unstructured text data with social media for customer service improvements, for understanding what customers are talking about themselves or competitors, and general market awareness.

Sandeep offers what he refers to as “typical steps in implementing social media analytics.”

• “Collect the huge amount of unstructured data – comments, blogs, call center notes, twits from social sites
• Using statistical analysis & Natural Language processing (NLP) on texts & words to break up the information into good or bad
• Use categorization, classification & association methods for text processing
• Further identify the categories on which these good or bad sentiment are applicable from the data

            - Brand awareness, trust, loyalty

            - Customer service

            - Product improvements

            - Competitor analysis

            - Geographic locations

• Produce the results using visualization tools”

Here is an alternative approach. Use the Darwin Awareness Engine™ and skip to the last step. Then use your topic expertise to quickly make sense of the emerging themes in your areas of expertise and interest. The Darwin Awareness Engine is designed to enable people to make sense of content and bypass reliance on complex technologies that are still working to become accurate. 

 

Traackr Enhances Its Web Influencer Monitoring Tool

I have been using Traackr for several months. For those who want to better understand the thought leaders in a field, Traackr provides a comprehensive, yet very easy to use, tool set. I wrote about my initial experiences in a prior post (see Traackr Offers Useful Web Influence Monitoring Tool). Traackr provides three scores to hone in on a person’s influence: Reach or the ability to generate views based on audience size, Resonance
or the ability to spark conversations based on such measures as retweets comments, and links, and Relevance
or the ability to cover a specific topic/market based on relevance to your selected keywords.

I recently spoke with Courtney Vaught about some useful new features.  Traackr generates a list of the top 25 influencers on a topic based on the keywords you enter. This list is updated every week so some people fall off and others are added. Now you can now customize your list to more easily go beyond those generated by Traackr. You can now add or remove influencers manually to supplement the list. You can also star those influencers generated by Traackr so they are not removed from the list if they fall off the top 25. Below you can see the input pop up to add a new influencer. 

Traackr still rank orders the top 25 and the additional ones you selected appear beneath the top 25 with their reach and resonance scores displayed. If they have any relevance to the keywords for that list, that will also be counted in their score – anyone who is added to an A-list by the user will be scored, ranked if plausible and tracked the moment they are added. This allows you to continue to monitor people you have a special interest in and expand the list beyond 25.

You can also edit your keywords used to generate the list and add new ones. Traackr has a useful feature that allows you to test these keywords. They can tell if the keyword is a niche term, average or too broad. They also automatically rank order the keywords in priority form niche at the top to broad at the bottom. This is useful so your niche topics do not get overwhelmed. However, you can override the auto-prioritization by starring a key word and it will be put at the top of the priority list.

Traackr allows you to make your top 25 influencer list public. Here is one that I did on enterprise social media. Now you can see both the keywords that generated the list, along with the list itself. I added some new key words to the enterprise social media and the list re-organized itself in ways that made sense to me based on what I know about those listed. Below you can see the keywords and top three of the the 25 on this list. This list will change on a weekly basis. 

 

The Evolution of Site Search

Site search is becoming more than a means to increase website traffic. Now 40% of content and collaboration professionals see the feature primarily as a tool to improve customer self-service, according to a new Forrester report, Site Search Evolves from Technical Feature to Customer Touchpoint, by Leslie Owens with Stephen Powers and Anjali Yakkundi.  The next objectives were: increased sales conversion 30%, increased search traffic (SEO) 12% and increased page views 10%.

However, the report also finds that most corporate websites provide an inadequate search experience, lacking customer friendly self-service in areas such as speed, adaptability, relevance, content integration and task fit. In fact, 69% of Web sites examined did not even offer searchable self-help for customer service. Asked to rate the overall success of their search initiative, a survey of 188 content and collaboration professionals gave an average score of just 6 out of 10, reflecting a need for better, more measurable value from search. 

The report found that two thirds of search decision-makers are planning to expand their implementation and usage of site search this year. To be successful, according to Owens, IT and marketing teams must collaborate to develop the top three improvement areas in search: better relevance, enhanced usability, and quality content. They need to move the search functionality from a siloed activity to a cross-functional search partnership.  I would add that this business involvement is the success formula for most IT initiatives.

The report suggests that as marketers begin to take a greater role in search vendor selection and administration in the coming years, they may even completely take over tasks like boosting and blocking content, and setting up metrics to gauge growing levels of customer experience.

Forrester sees site search as a key area for investment. My sense of the market and my own experiences with Web sites has be agreeing with them.  Web sites have often replaced people as the face of the enterprise. It makes sense to put your best face forward. I was pleased to receive a review copy of the report. You can see the report at the Forrester site.

 

 

US Charities Outpace Other Sectors in Social Media

Here is more great work by Nora Ganim Barnes at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research. This study is on the usage of social media by US charities. The new study compares organizational adoption of social media in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 by the 200 largest charities in the United States based on a list compiled annually by Forbes Magazine.

To gather this data, the Center for Marketing Research conducted nationwide telephone surveys of the nonprofits on the Forbes list. Their findings are based on detailed interviews with executives of the 78 charities that responded. Those that participated had a wide range in mission, average gifts, and total revenue. They include the Salvation Army, Easter Seals, Habitat for Humanity, Shriners Hospital for Children and the American Heart Association.

In 2007, the first study on the use of social media by large charities showed that these large non-profits were leading large and small businesses as well as universities in their familiarity with, usage of, monitoring of, and attitude towards social media. One year later, in 2008, the second study showed that the lead in knowledge, adoption and positive attitude was still intact.

By 2009 the research found that 97 percent of charitable organizations were using some form of social media. Now the latest iteration of their research finds that all of the top charities in the US are using at least one form of social media, either blogs, podcasts, message boards, social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare), texting or video blogging. Usage of LinkedIn has jumped from 36% to 58% in one year, while the use of MySpace as a platform has declined from 30% to 22%.  Both Foursquare and texting were new in the 2010 study and made respectable showings at 28% and 44% respectively.

At present sixty-four percent of the organizations are blogging, showing no significant change from last year. Facebook (97%), Twitter (96%), and YouTube (92%) are now the most common tools used Ninety percent of those studied in 2010 report social media is very important to increasing awareness of their mission. The researchers concluded that while these organizations are best known for their non-profit status and their fundraising campaigns, they demonstrate an acute awareness of the importance of Web 2.0 strategies in meeting their objectives. 

This is great work by the non-profits. Now business has to catch up.