Portals and KM

Hyper-Social Summit – Creating Successful Online Communities – Part Three

This is the third part of my notes from the Hyper-Social Summit sponsored by the Human 1.0 Network.  It is based on research conducted by Francois Gossieaux of the Human 1.0 Network and Ed Moran, Director of Innovation at Deloitte. I will highlight some of the key findings that were presented. Their book, The Hyper-Social Organization, covers this research in more detail.

There was a wide range of companies involved in the study: 22% had revenues over 1 billion and 32% had revenues under a million. The smallest group was  the 500 million to 1 billion revenue group which accounted for only 2% of the sample.  Within the sample 56% were considered B2B, 23% B2C, 9% were nonprofits and 2% were government.

There was also a range of experience with 14% having communities up for more than three years and 24% less than 6 months and fairly even representation in between. The size ranged from 26% less than 100 members to 11% with over 50,000 members.

Francois pointed out that the dynamics of pilot will be different than a large scale implementation so be careful with pilot results –  53% did pilot and 47% did not. A community can be successful either way. Many piloted their external communities internally so the results might not be relevant on many levels.

There was a wide range of objectives for the communities: 50% served marketing research, 46% were PR related, 45% had branding objectives, 43% provided thought leadership, 39% supported reputation management, 32% provided customer support, 28% provided lead generation, and the same number supported knowledge management.

Marketing was by far the most function engaged in the development of a community with participation in 79% of the communities. Next, was IT at 37% and sales at 36%, followed by knowledge management at 22% and legal at 17%. Similar results occurred for community management with 53% marketing, PR and community development at 11%.

These results suggest a strong external focus and that was the case with %*% externally focused, 10% internally, and 28% hybrid.  Within the external and hybrid communities 81% were customers focused, 49% were prospect focused, and 37% were partner focused. 

There was often a mismatch between goals and implementation. There can be too much marketing focus when non-marketing goals have been generated. Related to this finding, there have been too many programs around products rather than audience.

The objectives considered most successful were: generate more word-of-mouth 40%, increase brand awareness 27%, increase customer loyalty 25%, bring outside ideas into the organization 24%, and improve customer support quality 23%.  The least successful was to increase sales at 22% of the respondents. At the same this was the leading measured used for success at 38% followed by increase leads at 33% and generate awareness at 28%.

Success factors included: ability to connect with like minded people 50% and ability to help others 45%. The findings stressed the importance of social factors for success and secondary importance of other incentives.

The biggest obstacles were getting people to engage 66%, getting people to come back 42%, and attracting people 42%. The number of active people varies as to whether you can rely on user-generated content. Only 25% deployed external people to develop content and 65% did have internal people develop content.  A big factor is the level of passion. However, a community should still have some professional generated content to seed it and direct it.

The investment were mostly modest with 68% spending less than $50,000 a year on the community and 16% between 50 and 200k. Most community were managed by employees 84% and only 8% out sourced. The investment in management was also modest as 51% have less than one FTE and 16% deploy 1 FTE.  Looking ahead, 50% plan to increase investment and 45% stated than the level of investment will stay the same.  Looking at what types of investments will increase they found that 85% will increase time, and 68% will increase funding.  In addition, 68% will invest in content development and 58% will increase their marketing efforts for the community.

These trends indicate that companies do perceive they are getting value from the communities as only 5% plan to decrease investment. However, communities are still primarily driven by marketing goals and some are really marketing programs with little social components or focus. There is often a disconnect between objectives and success factors. The companies are missing the value that can be derived from strong leadership as only 45% indentified leaders within the community.

While there is some success, there is a lot of room for improvement by injecting a greater social focus into the communities.  This is very consistent with then theme of the event. It is the human much more than the technical that will make a community work.  Communities will be a major component of company’s success going forward. The winners will realize that these are human networks and act in this framework. 

 

Hyper-Social Summit – Creating Successful Online Communities – Part Two

This is the second part of my notes from the Hyper-Social Summit sponsored by the Human 1.0 Network.  It is based on research conducted by Francois Gossieaux of the Human 1.0 Network and Ed Moran, Director of Innovation at Deloitte. Their book, The Hyper-Social Organization, covers this research in more detail.

Francois led the event. He went over several factors that characterize successful companies on the social side. First, they are aware of the needs of the communities within their market, Francois referred to these communities as the tribes. He noted that there are many small business communities on the Web and this is an opportunity for marketing effects if done right. The focus needs to be on the people and not on the product.

Successful companies also do not use social media as a channel.  People often buy without looking at company material. They listen to others (because of reciprocity issue) so it is better to use the Web as a listening channel. 

Successful companies don’t just talk about themselves. They want to engage in conversations especially where buying decisions are made. They treat the people in these communities like press and give them special access to information.

Successful companies also create content that travels well so that people want to share it. This often involves tips on how to use the product for an activity that uses the product.

Successful companies have stopped thinking about company or product centricity. It is about your customers. They need to be in the center. Francois gave the great example of a Europe scissors company. It created a community around scrapbook people (not about their product) but about application of their product. It attracted a huge following of dedicated people.  

Successful companies embrace the messiness of social aspects. They do not exercise too much control. One example is Best Buy. They wanted to enter the high-end music business. They found out who has passion for music in their company and asked them to help with online communities around these instruments. It did matter what area within Best Buy they came from.

Successful companies turn a business process into social process. This is not just putting social tools in place but looking at the human characteristics of reciprocity and fairness, You need to get people to help each other even if it is not their job. You need to allow people to engage in their passion. It will increase the passion and engagement for your product.

A customer acquired through word of mouth is twice as loyal as one acquired through traditional marketing.  When Francois and Ed looked within organizations, they found social aspects in almost every process except legal and finance.

Here are a number of things to think about to implement social aspects to your business. First, bring down the walls. Let the wall around company dissolve. Let internal and external communities and people work together. Then do not build new walls.  Fix the divide between customer touch points in your organization. Make sure they are all on the same page. Your relationship with your s customers is only as good as they last contact they had with your company.

Be sure to not simply do the same thing again. For example, there is a new way of buying so traditional CRM is not relevant. Now buying process is more social so you need more social CRM.

Also, make sure the CIO and CMO are good friends. Think culture before tools. Become the customer advocate and not the product advocate. Establish trust as new business currency.

I liked these words of wisdom and it helped me better think though how I might reach the market for a software firm I am connected with. Now that the focus is more on the people and the community than on the company and the product, smaller companies have a more even playing field. It is not so much the size of the company as they size of the community. Smaller firms can go after the communities and the Web is another big equalizer.

In the third and last part of this series, I will cover a number of the research statistics that Ed and Francois collected in their research. 

 

Hyper-Social Summit – Creating Successful Online Communities – Part One

I had the pleasure of attending an extremely useful meeting recently on a very snowy day in Cambridge, Mass. But then most days are snowy this winter. Here are my notes from the Hyper-Social Summit sponsored by the Human 1.0 Network.  It is based on research conducted by Francois Gossieaux cofounder of the Human 1.0 Network and Ed Moran, Director of Product Innovation at Deloitte’s Global technology, Media, and Telecommunications Group. Their book, The Hyper-Social Organization, covers this research in more detail.  Ed got snowed out in NYC and could not co-led so Francois led the event.

Francois began with some highlights from their research. I liked his comments that bad practices in online communities are enjoying rapid adoption.  For example, the SAP social network provided financial rewards for individual participation. This resulted in bad behavior, as people got competitive over the money.  When they switched to an aggregated reward that was donated to charity, the bad behavior went away. However, participation remained.

We need to look at the human issues in online communities rather than just the tools and this need has suggested the name Human 1.0 for the network that Francois and others are developing.  Reciprocity is a key issue and a basic human reflex. If you act without reciprocity it can hurt the community so humans have developed a sense of fairness. There has been a lot of research to support. Fairness is even more important than transparency. 

People can use a social framework or market framework to evaluate a situation. Key is getting people to use a social framework because it leads them to develop better connections and act more fairly. Sometimes money gets in the way of this fairness as in the SAP example.  

We tell people what we think they want to hear. This causes people to give market research false answers. For example, Jet Blue asked their passengers if they wanted healthy snacks. People said yes, as they thought was the correct response. However, very few people actually selected the healthy snacks. Now I know from personal experience that the majority of JetBlue snacks are not healthy. I am currently on my way to Lotusphere via JetBlue as I edit these notes and just finished a bag of potato chips, cashews, and a diet coke. They were some of the healthier choices.

We also love status. This works well with communities but we need to be creative on this and allow for a refresh of the status ranking. People get disinterested if they feel they have no chance for status.

We have a herding instinct. We go where the crowds are located. We follow them. I experienced an example when I was briefly acting as a sidewalk artist in Copenhagen in the 60s. If I was working on my chalk drawing people would stop as they liked activity. If a few stopped then others would also stop so there was a multiplier effect. If I just sat there few would stop, they went were the crowds were forming.   We also tend to have loyalty built in so if a product is okay we tend to stay with it.

In the second part of my notes I will cover some of the traits and activities of companies who are successful with online communities. 

 

The Inc. 500 Continues to Embrace Social Media in Increasing Numbers

Here is the latest in the very useful series of longitudinal studies on social media use by The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth led by Nora Barnes.  This one covered Social Media Usage in the Inc. 500. In contrast here is their most recent one on Blogging and Twitter by the Fortune 500.  In this case, there was a nationwide telephone survey of those companies named by Inc. Magazine to the Inc. 500 list. All interviews took place in October and November of 2010 and obtained 34% participation. 

Of course, this sample represents a moving target as the companies included continue to shift and this may effect the data.  In 2010 there were more government services and financial services firms than the years before. Since companies in these two areas under use social media compared to others, this shift has the effect on reducing growth numbers.

We can see this effect of shifting market niches in the numbers reported in the study. In 2010 83% of the Inc. 500 reporting using at least one of the social media tools studied (see below).  However, government services companies make up 12% of the 2010 Inc. 500, but 27% of those not using social media tools. Energy companies comprise 3% of the 2010 Inc. 500 but 17% of the non-users.  Financial services companies make up 5% of the Inc. 500, but they comprise 10% of the companies who have not yet adopted social media.

The study appears to be focused on market facing uses of social media but then this is the Center for Marketing Research.  It looked at blogs, online video, message boards, podcasting, and the specific social networking tools:  Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Linkedin, and Foursquare.  Two of the biggest gainers in 2010 are Twitter and Facebook. Twitter is used by 59% of the Inc. 500 use it for business purposes, up from 52%.  Twitter is perceived as a useful tool as 81% of users consider it a success. Facebook growth was higher with 71% using it for business up from 61% in 2009 and it had a 85% success rating.

Next in percent of usage were blogs. Looking back over the past three years there was a steady increase in company blogs with a rise from 38% in 2008 to 45% in 2009 to 50% in 2010.  In addition to the growth in usage the report noted that firms are using them more effectively, “There is a strong propensity to engage consumers through accepting and replying to comments and providing a vehicle for subscriptions.”  Company blogging was also considered successful by 86% of adopters. In addition, 34% percent have developed policies to govern blogging by their employees. In the Fortune 500 only 20% report such policies.  Both numbers are too low.  The Fortune 500 also are less likely to use blogs with only 23% reporting have a company blog in 2010, a one percent increase over 2009.

Within the Inc. 500 the majority (56%) feel social media is important for their success online.  They also look at what others are saying about them through social media. Seventy percent report they actively monitor, up slightly from 68% last year, 60% in 2008 and 50% in 2007.  In addition to using social media to communicate to their markets, there is a rise in use for communication with partners, vendors, and suppliers. Blog use in this category rose form 18% in 2009 to 22% in 2010.  Facebook is used by 31% of respondents and Twitter is used by 27%.

I have only addressed some of the highlights. The complete executive summary is available at the Center for Marketing Research site. 

 

Lotusphere 2011 Notes: Interviews – Kevin Cavanaugh - Mobile and Social

This is another a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2011. I am very pleased to be back after ten years. I first came to co-present a Lotus Notes based KM project with my client. Now I return as a blogger. IBM was kind to set up some individual interviews. The first was with Kevin Cavanaugh, VP Business and Technical Strategy. This is a recent move. For the past nine years he was the VP of the Notes and Domino business.

The topic was the mobile aspects of social business. Kevin said that you can’t do social business without mobile but that all mobile is not social. For example, there might be a mobile inventory app that is not social. Someone asked about Windows Mobile. Kevin said that IBM does support it but they have not seen a lot of adoption Another person asked if there is a context for mobile awareness. Kevin said yes and this is one reason they are using native apps. An activity stream should provide location information. I would agree but you should also be able to turn off and I assume this is a capability.

Kevin said they are making a big investment in being native as much as possible. I think this is a smart move so you can bring in the core functionality of an app.  It also allows for offline capability as you have with Notes replication. He said they are trying to use existing native apps when available such as with Apple but then building their own when necessary. The Connections 3.0 support for mobile is strong.

He said that SameTime clients will be available mid year or later in some cases. I did learn later that the IBM Business Partner, Meetrix, offers SameTme clients now. Meetrix has created an open standards-based Sametime platform that integrates seamlessly with third party vendors up in the cloud, including integrations with Broadsoft for VoIP/IP Telephony and Polycom.

Kevin said that with mobile, employees often buy the devices themselves so there is less control. It would seem to me that companies that supply computers should also provide mobile devices for standardization purposes. Kevin added that with Lotus Connections there will be a VPN solution.  He said the IDC recently noted that IBM’s Traveler is the fastest growing mobile gateway in the market. They also have a lot of apps working on the IPad and iPhone now.

I think the big news here is the drive for native apps and this strengthens their offering.

 

 

Do Your Employees Endorse Your Products?

In the world of the social Web, product recommendations by individuals seems to be gaining more credibility that those by the product producers.  But do employees tend to recommend the products that their company produces? This is a question that Matt Brown asks in the Forrester report, Do Your Employees Advocate For Your Company? It would seem that this should be in their best interest.

However, Matt found that 49% of information workers are detractors, and only 27% were promoters, however in North America, workers are three times as likely to advocate as European workers.  We could speculate about the reasons for this geographic variation. Canada had the best scores in our survey, France the worst. I wonder what the French Canadians do?

There was another interesting finding that relates more to the focus of this blog. Forrester found that, “advocacy correlates with work technology attitudes and behaviors in North America. This means employees who are optimistic about technology and well-equipped with information and communications technology (ICT) are more likely to be net advocates than those who are not.”

So what can companies do to improve their employees’ advocacy? Josh Bernoff addresses this in his post, How many of your employees love your products? (And why it matters). He suggests that you could empower people. In fact workers who use social media are among the most positive. 48% would strongly recommend a company's products and services and only 22% were detractors, for a net score of 26% -- among the highest of the groups they surveyed.

So get employees engaged in social media both on the Web and within the enterprise. This encouragement to be engaged in product discussions should have a positive impact on what employees will say.  It shows that the company trusts them. Part of this is providing the technology that enables these discussions and the policy that permits the use of this technology in an open way. Restrictions will only promote resentment.  I was pleased to receive a review copy of this report and there is much more within it to help formulate policies to promote employee advocacy. 

 

Traackr Provides Useful Web Influence Monitoring Tool for Marketing and PR Professionals

For those who want to support a brand or simply better understand the thought leaders in a field, Traackr provides a comprehensive, yet very easy to use, tool set. I recently spoke with Derek Skaletsky and Courtney Vaught about their offering. Traackr enables you to discover the top 25 influencers in a topic of your choice. It is designed to primarily support PR efforts. It offers additional features to better enable interaction with these influencers once they are discovered, as well as the ability to monitor what they say about your areas or interest, including your brand.

Once you define the characteristics of your list, Traackr scans the social web to identify the most influential and most relevant people online and dynamically generates your Authority List. Each Authority List includes detailed profiles for each influencer with contact information, influence score, recent posts, an online identity card, and complete performance data. They look at channels such as blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook (when data publicly available).

Traackr provide three scores to hone in on a person’s influence:

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

Traackr has set up a sample A-List on PR 2.0 so you see how the list works. There is comprehensive detail on the social media behavior of each person listed. The results change on a weekly basis and I noticed that people do move up and down, and in and out. I found myself on it a few times and was number 22 this last time I looked. I used their list when I was working on setting up some lists for my firm.  You can also star people so they stay on the list even if their ranking metrics drops. Here is the list with the first five shown.

The Influencer Profiles have been split into separate tabs for easier navigation.  All the recent, relevant posts from that Influencer are in the first tab and their full online footprint is in a second tab.  Here is the footprint of the top person on the list above.

What I especially liked was the way you set the lists up. Traackr demonstrated this but also let me set up my own list so I could see how it worked.  You can use up to 50 key words and the Traackr staff provides guidance on this activity. I had initially selected about seven key words and they gave me good feedback on how to expand it.

You first test a key word and then generate examples of it on the Web.  This allowed me to see which ones remained on topic. I was looking for enterprise social media experts. I found that the term “social enterprise” was too general as it found socially conscious enterprises, as well as those using social media.  They also have a feature that rates your key words from broad to niche. Ones that are too broad are not useful. I was able to work through options and came up with an initial 21 key word phrases that passed the tests. You rank order the key words to determine their relative weight. It was a useful process as I was forced to think through what I was really looking for. Here is the key word list I generated for a list on enterprise social media.

Here is my list on enterprise social media based on the above keywords. I was somewhat surprised to find myself ranked highly but I really did not game the system for this. I am not sure that you can game it. I found many people that I already know and respected and others that were new to me.  Some were Twitter friends whose blogs I was less familiar with. I will continue to monitor the list as it changes weekly.

Since the Traackr tool is designed to help marketing and PR professionals in both agencies and within an enterprise there are other features to augment the A-List. When you login to your account, you will land on your Account Dashboard.  The Dashboard offers a summary of the activity in your account as well as a quick look at any New Influencers appearing on any of your lists.

You can export any of your Traackr A-List as a JSON data feed which will allow you to plug your influencer data into any other application of your choosing.  You also have the ability to "subscribe" to any of your Influencer Monitors via an RSS feed that you can plug into any standard RSS reader.  This will allow you to feed all of the posts from your Monitor into your reader.

You can also monitor the presence of terms such as your brand or a topic of interested in the writings of the top influencers. You also have other task support features such as notes and to-dos associated with individuals on the list.  As someone involved in the marketing of a software product I can certainly see the usefulness of this tool set. 

 

Twitter Provides Its Own Business Guide

There seems to be another consulting industry on the rise, consulting on business uses of twitter. Well, has provided its own business guide. As reported in thenextweb, the new version of business.twitter.com provides twitter success stores, ideas, tips, tools and resources.  It starts by defining what Twitter is and what it can do fro business. “As a business, you can use Twitter to quickly share information, gather market intelligence and insights, and build relationships with people who care about your company.” I would agree.

There are some interesting stats: 370,000 new sign-ups daily, 95,000,000 Tweets per day, 175,000,000 registered users.

One of the tutorials offers Twitter Best Practices.  It includes rules for both individual and large companies; share, listen, ask, respond, reward, demonstrate wider leadership & know-how, champion your stakeholders and establish the right voice.

More specifically give a glimpse of developing projects and events and reference articles and links about the bigger picture as it relates to your business. Be a good citizen and retweet and reply publicly to great tweets posted by your followers and customers. Listen and respond to compliments and feedback in real time. Sounds good. They even have a tweeter feed on the topic – @TwitterBusiness.

The site offers case studies: Best Buy, Etsy, JetBliue, and  Moxsie. The latter is a fashion company and it allows followers to get a peak at new trends and can gauge their reactions to these new ideas.  Best Buy uses tweeter to support its customer service. It empowered the its Geek Squad tech support service and corporate employees to staff their @twelpforce account on Twitter. Any Best Buy employee, working on company time, can provide answers using an @reply to the customer. In both cases it is about engagement and empowerment. With Moxsie it is engaging customers and with Best Buy, it is employees who, in turn, better engage customers.  

There is much more including information for developers on its API and advertisers on the analytics if offers them. I like Twitter’s business guide because it is accessible and clear. They are not the first software company to do this but they serve as a model for others. 

 

Traackr Provides Web Authority Lists for Market Areas

I came across Traackr through a tweet that mentioned my presence on one of the their Authority Lists.  So I followed up and found out a bit about them from their site. Traackr “identifies, qualifies and facilitates the engagement of top online influencers.” They sort through the massive amount of data within social media to “identify the most influential individuals in their community around specific issues, markets, brands. Traackr calculates influencers’ score based on proprietary algorithms to help marketers and PR professionals decide who they need to contact and how to reach these influencers.”

CNN recently reported that social media provides 43% of content sharing, running far ahead of email at 30%. The content sharing was primarily done by a subset of the total users. They noted that both news organizations and brands should study these influencers who share content.

Here is more from their site: Traackr's Online Authority List is a list of individuals steering online conversations about a specific market or topic. Traackr scans the social web to identify the most influential and most relevant people online and dynamically generates your Authority List. Each Authority List includes detailed profiles for each influencer with contact information, influence score, recent posts, an online identity card, and complete performance data.

They provide three scores:

Reach - Ability to generate views.

Resonance
- Ability to spark conversations.

Relevance
- Ability to cover specific topic/market.

I was pleased to make their A-List for Top PR2.0 Influencers, coming in at 19 in the list of 25. They listed three of my blogs including this one. This was a pleasant surprise, as I know some of the others on the list. My highest score was in resonance. This was even better and I would prefer this result. 

 

Is Your Social Media Usage Tactical or Strategic?

There was a revealing poll put out recently by the Smart Blog on Social Media. It asked: Does your company have a formal, written social-media strategy? Here are the main results:

No, but we’re getting around to it 32.73%

No, and we probably won’t write one anytime soon 27.64%

Yes, and it’s really useful 20.00%

Yes, but it’s not that relevant to our daily operations 12.36%

 We’re not using social media 5.82%

  We paid a consultant to come up with one for us, but we’re not sure what it really means 1.45%

I like the honesty of the last one. However, why would a consultant create a social media strategy for a company rather than with them. In the latter case, it would be understandable and perhaps more useful.

More than 60% of the 320 SmartBrief on Social Media readers who took this poll say their company is using social media without a strategy.  I read that social media is seen as a fad by many people and firms. In this case, why would you have a strategy? On the other hand why would you want to invest time and money in something without making sure it aligns with your business goals and supports them. I would side with the latter view.

I have helped a number of firms over the past few years with their blog strategy and, more recently their Twitter efforts.  Some come to it with a strategic outlook. Others start out tactical and become more strategic as the they reflect on what they are trying to accomplish and the resources required. A few stubbornly remain tactical.

I think this poll reflects the nagging immaturity of the social media field. However, like many other efforts, those with a strategy will win out. I heard a politician on NPR talking about political passion.  He compared it to fire. If it is guided and focused, fire can heat your house and cook your food. It not guided, it can burn your house down. The same holds true for social media as we have a seen many times. 

Forrester’s Guidance to CIOs on Establishing Social Media Policy

I recently received a review copy of the Forrester report, The CIO’s Guide to Establishing a Social Media Policy. There were a number of things I like about this report. First, they offered guidelines rather than best practices. They covered the issues to address and the questions to ask. They offered examples instead of definitive answers, recognizing that the final answers are context dependent.  This aligns with the post I recently did, Are There Best Practices for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption?, building on Luis Suarez and Oscar Berg,  Luis, Oscar, and I said no. 

While Forrester’s Nigel Fenwick does explicitly take a position on this, his report does not use the words “best practices” or any similar term. In the Nigel’s words. “it includes explanations of the topics that you should consider for inclusion in a social media policy, allowing you to tailor your own policy to the specific needs of your organization and industry.”

Secondly, the policy leads with a positive approach toward social media while acknowledge risk. Nigel writes that, “A well-communicated social media policy should provide a set of guidelines to help your organization leverage the power of social media both internally and externally while protecting the organization’s IP and managing risk associated with employees engaging in online social communities.” It notes that, “even in organizations with a social media policy, IT and the CIO are often seen as roadblocks to social media usage.” In stead it urges CIOs to be evangelists in both using social media effectively and creating effective guidelines to support this effort. It also stresses that this needs to be a cross-functional effort.

One of the drivers of the need to create guidelines is that claim that, “ lack of policy, or a highly restrictive policy, can result in reduced employee advocacy in social media communities and can impair the organization’s ability to compete effectively against organizations with a more open policy and empowered workforce.”  You need to effectively employ social media to stay competitive in today’s market. At the same time, the report does not gloss over such risk as legal vulnerability and brand erosion through inappropriate actions.

The report begins with some interesting research that supports the need for an effective policy. As part of the effort, Forrester conducted a survey of social media users. It found that 43% of respondents reported that their organization did not have a social media policy. Another 11% were not sure if a policy existed. Meanwhile, only 26% reported their organizations did not sanction social media access while at work.  The numbers indicate that for many companies employees are accessing social media without a policy to guide their efforts. At the same time Forrester found that if a policy is in place, employees will read it.

The report goes on to provide some useful guidelines and examples. It is available through the Forrrester site. 

Should You Get an MBA in Social Media?

 The New York Times wrote that Business Schools Respond to Demand for Use of Social Media.  The story began with some major mistakes that large firms have made in social media marketing.  Now an increasing number of firms are asking for social media expertise in their candidates. These firms tend to feel that personal experience with social media is not enough, that business related experience is necessary. I would certainly agree here.

The NYT goes on to write, “To meet this demand for education in social media strategy, several top business schools are incorporating courses on social networks into their M.B.A. curriculums. These include Harvard Business School; London Business School; Insead, the international business school based in Fontainebleau, France; and the École des Hautes Études Commerciales, known as H.E.C., in Paris.”  These courses have proven to be very popular.

The Tines writes that, “because of the relative newness of social media and their rapid evolution, there is no assigned textbook for the course. Students are expected to follow industry-specific blogs like Mashable and Groundswell to keep up with developments.’ I wonder how many assign this blog? :)

The professors create content by studying what is happening and bringing in guest speakers.  This might create some awareness but I am not sure how many real skills are conveyed. When I worked for the City of New York in helping local community groups get more federal funding we would occasionally have to hire new people. If they had a Masters in Community Organization we generally subtracted two years experience from their credits. This was done as we felt they would need two years to unlearn what they were taught in school by experiencing the real world.

Some of the social media courses require actual work with real clients on their social media marketing. This is a good move and may avoid the need to do what we did in New York.  Professors do admit that business is driving innovation here and that schools are trying to catch up. I applaud the humility.  There is hope.  But I would still take someone with two years real experience in business social media before someone with the school work for now. 

Shopping Surge with Mobile Phone Users

I recently wrote about the Smartphone Surge in 2010 for business users. The main driver in the Forrester study that fueled this post was collaboration. Well there is another surge - shopping.  This will become an additional benefit for business users as they more efficiently handle regular tasks in their off work life and even do some simple business related shopping.

A study by Retrevo found that 59% of people said they found the shopping information they were looking for, when using a mobile phone while only 8% of people said they did not intend to shop from their mobile phone. There is a big generation factor to no surprise as 50% of shoppers under the age of 35 indicated they have done used their mobile phone for shopping and the number drop off in older groups.

People are also moving from research like store locations to actual purchasing The study found that 15% of the under 35 year old shoppers have made a purchase using their phones and the vast majority said it was a positive experience. However, there is still a strong resistance to ads on mobile phones. Of course, television is moving in the mobile phone direction and it will likely bring its ads.            

Have you bought anything on your mobile phone? I have not tried it yet but see no reason to avoid this.  

Social Media in the Inc. 500: 2007 - 2009

The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth conducted a study on social media by Nora Barnes and Eric Mattson on the usage of social media in fast-growing corporations. All interviews took place in October and November of 2009. The 2009 study looks again at the Inc. Magazine 500 social media usage for the third consecutive year, allowing for a longitudinal study of corporate use of social media.

In 2007, the study found that the Inc. 500 was outpacing the more traditional and larger Fortune 500 companies in their use of social media. For example, with blogs, the 2007 some research showed that 8% of the Fortune 500 companies were blogging compared to 19% of the Inc. 500. This difference continued in 2008 with 16% of the Fortune 500 blogging vs. 39% of the Inc. 500. And it appears the Inc. 500’s lead in blogging will continue in 2009 with the Inc. 500 now blogging at a rate of 45%.

This research shows that social media continues to penetrate parts of the business world at a fast rate. In all three studies, questions looked at with six prominent social media (blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking, message boards and wikis).  In 2009, several new tools were added including Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and MySpace.

Social networking continues to be the most familiar social media tool to the Inc. 500 with 75% of respondents in 2009 claiming to be “very familiar with it” (compared to 57% in 2008). Twitter’s has captured “share of mind” in the first year of being studied with sixty-two percent of executives reported being familiar with it.

Looking across the three years, social networking and blogging have have continued to grow in adoption, the use of message boards, online video, wikis and podcasting has leveled off or declined. The addition of Twitter (considered by respondents to be both a microblogging site and a social networking site) in the latest study shows that 52% of the Inc. 500 companies are already using this tool for their business.

Forty-three percent of the 2009 Inc. 500 reported social media was “very important” to their business/marketing strategy and 91% of the Inc. 500 is using at least one social media tool in 2009 (up from 77% in 2008). In addition, as they ramp up their usage, the Inc. 500 companies are also seeking to protect themselves legally, with 36% having implemented a formal policy concerning blogging by their employees.

This is consistent with other studies I have seen in the past two years. It is nice to see the continued increase in social media use by business. It also makes sense. 

Social Media Marketing Continues to Move Forward

Alterian has conducted its seventh annual survey on online marketing. This year’s sample covered 1068 marketing professionals worldwide. It found that 66 percent of respondents will be investing in social media marketing in the next 12 months. Where is the money coming from in an ear of tight budgets? The survey found that 40 percent of those investing in social media marketing said they would be shifting more than a fifth of their traditional direct marketing budget towards funding their social media marketing activities. This supports other statistics from the Alterian survey that found that the majority of respondents (67 percent) feel social media is either ‘increasingly important’ or ‘critical to success.’ I have seen similar results in other studies and through my own experience. 

The survey also found that 36 percent of respondents are investing in social media monitoring and analysis tools. It is a growing field and I have discussed a number of them on this blog. This is a significant percentage, considering the maturity of the channel. It appears to reflect a growing understanding that a social media marketing strategy needs to be based on listening to customers and prospects and its ROI needs to be measured. However, the 64 percent who are not planning this investment may be left behind, as you need to see what impact your efforts achieve, as well as what customers are saying about you.

The research also explored the importance of customer engagement, a critical component to success in the opinion of many, a view I share. It found that over half of respondents (51 percent) are placing a ‘fair’ or ‘significant’ amount of effort on moving from a campaign-centric direct marketing model towards multi-channel customer engagement – in fact only 7 percent are making no effort at all.  This is good news.

The Web and social media continues to change marketing, whether it is for products or politicians. The same holds for traditional news media as many long time news providers have found out too late. It appears that some marketing professionals have awakened to this change and are making steps to take advantage of it. 2010 will be an interesting year for business applications of social media, both inside and outside the enterprise.

More on Webtrends Openness Moves

I recently came back from New Orleans where I attended the Webtrends Engage event and watched the city anticipate the Super Bowl. See this weekend for my reports on eating and live music in New Orleans. While there I spoke again with Jascha Kaykas-Wolff.  We continued the topic I started with Alex Yoder, their CEO (see yesterday's post). Jascha gave me some concrete examples of how this openness is being put into practice.

Spirit Airlines is a new Webtrends customer. They use the target capabilities in the Optimize suite to provide individualized offers to customers. The Webtrends Visitor Data Mart allows this to occur as it can take data from several sources to provide a complete picture of customer activities. Webtrends can give a company both aggregated customer data and data on specific individuals across all channels.

In the case of Spirit Air, the company can look at a customer’s prior activity and provide special fares and seating to reward their most active customers. This data scanning through the Visitor Data Mart and the special offers through Optimize happens on the fly because of the open architecture implemented by Webtrends. The ability to combine these tools on the fly also provides a useful feedback loop to conduct tests of offers and other Web site components.

Cabelas is another client. It is a large retail sporting goods outfitter that uses Webtrends Analytics 9. They can collect customer data online and bring it into their enterprise data mining tools. Traditionally, Web data was not integrated with offline data but the open architecture within Webtrends allows for this combination. This allows for the combination of online and in-store transactions so they can better reward customers in their frequent purchasing program.

It goes beyond this to allow Cabelas to better infer customer intensions and respond appropriately. For example, a customer might start to buy some camping gear online but back out. Then they might get some of the purchases at the store the next day. Now Cabelas can make a special offer to them to complete the purchase of related items for their upcoming camping trip.

If the population within Facebook was a country it would be the fourth largest in the World. This makes Facebook an emerging frontier for online marketing. It uses its own technology that does not allow for Javascript so this makes data collection more difficult. Webtrends is working to provide more access to Facebook data for its customers.

With their data collection APIs Webtrends has found a way to connect some portions of Facebook data.  A brand can set up a Facebook fan page and provide an application connected to this fan page. Using Webtrends they can access all of the data connected with the Facebook application.

To promote this Facebook related capability, Webtrends has launched a Great Data Giveaway Contest for customer intelligence analysts.  To enter, a person has to register on the Webtrends fan page, give Webtrends some information about themselves and state what they would do with the data. They also have to share this activity with their friends.  There has been a great response so far. Webtrends will now be able to look at the data from the contest entries and decide which ones to involve in sales activities.

Jascha said the use of traditional standalone micro-sites that brands set up for their customers and prospects have been hurt by Facebook. While you lose a lot of control over data collection with Facebook it brings a ready-made audience. Now Webtrends is working to provide further access to Facebook related data to support this trend. This move is part of the larger Webtrends effort to extend the reach of customer data collection beyond traditional online sources to both reach back into more old school offline sources and the many new school social media sources that keep emerging.

 

Webtrends Moves Toward Greater Openness for Products and Company

Last week I attended the Webtrends Engage 2010 event in New Orleans. See this weekend for my reports on eating and live music in New Orleans. I covered some of the sessions on this blog. While there I had a chance to speak with their CEO, Alex Yoder, on an individual basis.  We went over some of the major directions for the company.  Alex started by saying their core principle was openness.  They are culturally open as a company. They provide direct access to everyone, including himself.

As part of this directive of openness they recently provided access to their knowledge base to the general public. This included how-to-dos for their products, bugs, fixes and other company information that had been behind a firewall and only previously accessible to customers. Now it is available to anyone on the Webtrends site.

They are also sharing the lessons that they have learned inside their company. Alex said that they deal with many of the same issues that their clients face so they can learn from each other. This sharing also helps to build a stronger sense of community with their clients.

On the technology side they partner with a number of providers to round out their capabilities. These include Radian 6 on the front end and Teradata on the back end. Alex said that things are moving too fast for one firm to say that they can do everything. It is often better to partner than to build.

They are also open from a technology perspective. They provide open APIs for both data extraction and data collection, one of the few firms to do both. On the data extraction side they allow for integration of their data into other tools within the enterprise. This helps Web analytics to get out of silos and into executive dashboards for greater visibility. Their data on customer activity can also go into CRM systems to allow for more complete customer records. Their findings can also trigger action-based emails to employees to promote proper responses.

On the data collection side Webtrends can incorporate data where Javascript cannot go. They can look at anything that is digital, such as the records of in-store transactions, to provide a complete record of customer activity.  They can also work with certain mobile devices.

Looking in the future Alex said that Webtrends will continue to further optimize customer interactions. There is a lot of marketing money flowing from traditional media into social media. Webtrends wants to expand its support in this growing space. Mobile devices is another growth area where they are working to enhance their offerings. As marketing people need to work across a broader array of channels, Webtrends wants to provide for better campaign management and coordination across all of these channels.

Alex brought up gaming consoles as another device where there is both marketing and analytic possibilities. He recently received a Playstation3 for Christmas. It has a large hard drive and an Internet browser. He can do email and chat and play games remotely with others. Communities are developing around these games and these communities will be fruitful targets for related marketing activities.

Alex said that his gaming console has also taken away the need for cable TV as he can get what he wants online. I have many friends who have also dropped cable and use their laptop for TV through services such as Hulu.  When people watch TV through an online device there is much greater opportunity to collect data and interact with viewers than the traditional TV set. Alex said that the gaming console will likely become a channel for direct response ads in the near future. It already has some ads and related product information.

The same injection of intelligence is occurring as people switch to Kindles and other online readers such as the new Apple iPad. When you drop a print newspaper on a front door you have no way of tracking what people do with it. With online readers there is a whole range of data collection opportunities.

Alex closed by saying that Webtrends is defined by its relationships. These include customer relationships, relationships with the broader community, and the relationships that its customers establish with their customers. Having grown up in New Orleans I added that people here really appreciate the help that comes through bringing events like Engage to their city. Alex said that this event is also part of their plan to better support communities.  They have moved a number of the Engage activities out of the hotel and into the city. 

Trends in Social Media Sales and Marketing from Webtrends Engage

 I am attending the Webtrends Engage 2010 event in New Orleans. This city is Saints crazy and even the airport checkin screen display Saints signs when not in use for flight status as you can see on the right. Yesterday afternoon I sat in on a session on How to Turn Blogs and Other Social Media into Revenue Builders. Here is an excerpt form the session description: This session will examine the ways that companies are converting social interactions into dollars, the future opportunities for weaving social media and commerce, and the secret ingredient that makes it possible (i.e. analytics).

The speakers were Neil Lynch, Technology Manager for Alliances at ATG and Matthew Ball, Principal Consultant – Digital Marketing Optimization.

The session started with the observation that In 2010 1.4 Billion will be spent on social media marketing but most firms are not looking into ROI are really have a strategy to guide what they are doing. It is important to know why you are doing it, what is the social media spend versus your overall market budget. You also need to answer such questions as: is it for customer acquisition or retention.

Often social media marketing is given to the most junior person in the marketing department since they must know about Facebook. This is not a good idea. You need to have a consistent strategy and analytics across channels. You need to determine your time horizon. Often senior executives have a simplified expectation such as a certain number of followers by a certain date.  

Neil presented a number of models on how to use social media with examples.

The first was site centric – discussion boards. These have been for a long time and are used to build communities to interact with others of interests related to the product. Firms often do not know if these interactions lead to a transaction. It is best to try to document the transactions connections online by direct user input from customers.  Nike Plus is an example.

Next, Neil covered site centric – ratings and reviews.  Office Depot was given as an example. He said that this is one of the best social media approaches. It often works. People trust others more than the company, just be careful not to game it as this will be detected. One study found that just having a rating capability on a Web site increases revenue by 15%. Firms are also adding the adding the ability to broadcast ratings and reviews outside their sites through Facebook and other social networking sites.

The movement from social sites to commerce sites was covered next.  DSW was the example. You can share products on social networking sites like Facebook and then drive people to your commerce site. This is likely the most common way to tie these sites together. It is straight forward to manage and measure. Some one pointed out that you need to be careful if you have bloggers and Twitterers promoting your products as these activities are governed by the FTC ruling on disclosure of compensation. The challenge here is the notion of trust could be compromised if there is a compensation disclosure.

Inline purchasing was covered next. Neil said it is not quite social but related. Travelocity was given as one example. You can purchase something through an ad.  Facebook does not allow this but in other places the ad becomes a transaction point.

There is also inline purchasing where you make a purchase through a Facebook stream from a fan page without leaving fFacebook. This is expanding and The Limited was given as an example.

Sponsored game applications are also being used. The Lady Gag Karoke application was offered as an example. They have a recurring purchase model as they release new songs on a continuing basis and charge for the new songs. You can share your karoke efforts with others and this leads to ongoing use.

There is also mobile commerce. The Tommy Hilfinger iPhone app was shown.  This is trend is exploding. You can complete an entire purchase on your phone through an iPhone app. The Tommy Hilfinger app makes use of all the iPhone features. It is not just a Web app ported to the iPhone.   

I can imagine that this is just the beginning of social media sales and marketing.  Here is a post script. I want to thank Webtrends for putting on  a great event and for their choice of cities. I hear they have another good spot for next year. If you were not able to make it down, come to New orleans soon. The great food and music is flowing. here is a taste. On the left is shrimp and grits at Surrey's Juice Bar on Magazine Street and on the right is Walter Wolfman Washington at d.b.a on frenchman Street.

  
 
 

The Future of Publishing/Media Panel at Webtrends Engage

I attended the Future of Publishing/Media Panel at the Webtrends Engage event. The local newspaper, The Times Picayune, is running front page stories on the upcoming Supper Bowl everyday this week. On Monday the paper had a letter to the city of Miami to help them better prepare for Saints fans. The first point was to order more beer. Today they provided a very useful section on Mardi Gras. I wish I could stay.

 This panel on newspapers and other traditional media covers a topic that I have been writing about a good bit on this blog. Here is an excerpt from the panel description: “The 100 year plus industry has hemorrhaged profitability and good, talented people, and been forced to re-evaluate its entire business model. The Internet as a whole has started to progress beyond the two-way Web and into a real-time Web, and content producers no matter how big or small, must be ready to deploy measurement models to help make relevant content publishing decisions and in turn drive ad revenue.“

The speakers include: Sam Whitmore (moderator), Alan Citron (Buzzmetrics), Lewis Vorkin (Trueslant), and Paul Berry (Huffington Post).

Sam is the founder and editor of Sam Wittmore’s Media Survey.  He pointed out how the Web has made us all potential publishers.  The panel discussed the role of analytics in the publishing world.

Alan said that one of the things you have to master as a startup is analytics, You have to pick carefully with the budget of a startup. They primarily look at macrotrends. They have 40 sites and need to look over all of them. They cluster their sites where commonalities might apply.  They are now experimenting to make their middle pages like mini-home pages to keep people there and to attract ads placed there.  Mobile is important but determining how to monetize mobile is still an issue.

The Huffington Post recently passed the Washington Post, the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal in number of readers. When Pual started three years ago they only had Sitemetter – a free primitive tool I used to use for this blog They were underfunded at the time for their goals so they had to be careful. They built some tools themselves. Now they can see how they are doing on an hourly basis and everyone is addicted to these stats.  He said that tools need to be intuitive so everyone can use them and not just a few experts. 

Paul said they look at the stories and what people care about to support optimization.  They also constantly test features to see what headlines work better by putting up different combinations and making adjustments.  These efforts are improving their bounce rate.  This constant attention and adjustments of place and titles by editors stands in stark contrast to the print newspaper editors who decide once and day and throw stuff on your step with few ways to see what you do with the paper.

Paul said they are looking for brave brands for ads. They have applied sentiment analysis of their comments to give themselves and brands a better picture of what is happening and how engagement is working. To keep people on the site they have business in the front and party stuff in the back. The back pages get a lot of traffic. I know this myself as I have been tempted to go back for the party stuff after going to the front page for a more serious news story.

Paul said that people love thumbnails and good headlines. They try to use these to get people exploring their site. He also said that they believe in the scroll. You do not need to be above the fold on a Web page but rather in the story. Paul said they support mobile devices and the analytics with mobile is similar. They are spending a lot of time looking at how their stories look on mobile. This places a strain on the organization to be constantly checking this.

Lewis has over 300 member journalists on True Slant. He went from traditional media to AOL several years ago. At AOL data was important but they did not have the right data. Then he moved on to found Trueslant to support traditional journalists to move into digital publishing. These journalists did not know about the data possibilities in digital. You need to take advantage of the data that is now available They cannot build these analytics tools themselves although they did some of this at first. Lewis said that page views are not useful. The real metrics are more like time spent, comments, repeat commentors, Coming up with right metrics and seeing then constantly is the key,

Forbes Media is one of the investors in his firm and they can bring in CMOs for discussion sessions. At a recent event all the CMOs wanted to talk about was social media. Measuring social media is an important next step. Research into a viewer’s path is key but hard to do.  Mobile is the future of news but they have not gone there yet. Lewis agreed with Alan that there remain monetization issues with digital.

This was useful session. The Huffington Post example certainly shows the power of making good use of the data available with digital media. 

Web Analytics Best Practices from Webtrends Engage 2010 New Orleans

 I am attending the Webtrends Engage 2010 event in New Orleans. It is a city celebrating two main events at the same time; Mardi Gras (or Carnival as it more often called here) and the Saints trip to the Super Bowl. Mardi Gras itself is Feb 16 but the Carnival celebration starts several weeks earlier and the Super Bowl on Feb 7 falls right in the middle. The City has set aside Feb 9 to have a parade for the Saints, win or lose. It was one of the few nights without Mardi Gras parades. This is great time to be placed into this celebrating city via the Webtrends Engage event. This event also has a lot to offer and is sold out.

Here is an interesting session: Hidden Gems & Top 10 Reports of Webtrends Analytics, It covers better ways to use Webtrends but many of the issues are not simply tool specific. Here is an excerpt from the description: “Modern web analytics inundate us with a flood of information. But how do you know where to start? And how do you separate the actionable insights from the “nice to know”? This session will focus on ways to use Webtrends to uncover some of the most actionable insights for your online marketing efforts.”

The speakers include: Derek Fine, Product Manager at Webtrends, Chris Grant, web analytics team at Enlighten, and Tami Dalley, Director of User Experience Optimization at Acronym Media. Derek opened the session and said it offer what are features in Webtrends Analytics that do not often get discussed but are very useful.  Chris first discussed some new features in Webtrends Analytics.  They have a new geolocation provider: NetAcuity Edge. Webtrends rolled out this new relationship at the start of 2010 and made sure labels are consistent.  Analytics Insight Localization was deployed on Jan 22 with French, Italian and Spanish, as well as UK and American English. The Webtrends iPhone app was released on Jan 14.  It was approved by Apple on 2/2 so should be in iPhone store today. Analytics added notes and alerts in fall of 09. You can syndicate them and subscribe to them. Also, you can add notes and alerts into Outlook.

Tami Dailey took over and talked about what to look at in Webtrends if you only have an hour or so (Lunch date with Webtrends).  Her firm does a lot of keyword marketing.  Web analytics is not just the tool. It is about the “so what?’ or what are the actions that need to be done based on the data. Now people use analytics to shape marketing campaigns, but just measure them.

You want to identify trends early. You want to be the first to notice things so do not simply look at high volume items.  Also use the compare calendar feature to see percentage changes but put in some thresholds so you are not cluttering things with moves from 2 to 4 sold for example. Next, analyze on-site search.  Look at the onsite search terms report to see what people are looking for.  Look at both high volume items and the biggest percent movers.  Look at average revenue by connected orders to these searches. What is the value related to these searches? Based on the report, you can better understand customers, promote popular products, and improve navigation to reduce the need to search.

Next analyze conversion funnels. Why are people dropping out of the sales process? When does this abandonment occur?  Attraction, engagement, conversion are the three steps in online conversion. How can you get people to move through these stages?  For example, in a hotel site, a lot of people dropped out at the guest room selection process. So give them more reason on this page to stay. Also, if people are dropping out at shipping options in a retail site, provide more and better options.  To get this data export the entry pages report and the single page visits to get bounce rates. Use the v-lookup in Excel to do this. Once you find pages that are causing problems, test them through A/B testing first to weed out stuff and then do multivariate testing for refinement.  Test different headlines, images, calls to action, text, etc. to see their impact of changes.

Measure your PPC (pay per click) messaging. Test different offers to see the return on ad spending to see actual revenue impacts.  You can put in reference to ad copy in the url around the link. Then create and export a custom report on these urls. Get the ad performance report form Google. Look at costs to see ROI on different ad copy.  

Do GEO targeting. If are not doing this you are wasting money.  To go beyond what seems like the obvious (e.g, selling skis in Montana might be better than in Florida) you can get a products by state report to see conversion rates.  Target areas with high conversions rates. After all, people in Florida might need skis for their upcoming trip while those in Montana might already have them.

Chris Grant took over.  She works for Enlighten and writes the blog, Webtrendsoutsider to talk about Webtrends features.  Chris does a lot of Webtrends training. She often finds that people are not using some good stuff.  For example, there is a Related Reports button to see other reports that have the same dimension as the one you are looking at.  If you hover over an item you can also use a button to go to the same item in other related reports.  Bookmarks allow you to easily return to things you like and share with others.  There are also preferences to change parameters and see longer and shorter lists in your reports.

The calendar compare feature allows you to compare different time periods. You can quickly see the changes in different factors such as page views or revenue. There is a tear out sheets feature that allows you to save sections of reports. It is almost like a screen shot and it is saved on your desktop.  You can add your own help card to custom reports for your memory and for your end users.  You can sort reports by where the customer is on the site.  You can also visualize your geotrends and that makes trends and results easier to see than lists. You can do this by moving data into Mapviewer software, a third party product.  You can look at the map based reports in terms of raw numbers or in terms of proportion of population.

Path analysis can be useful but you need to have a business reason mind to get value.  Webtrends has five different path analysis types. For example, for one bank site 25% of people went back and forth between mortgages and loans so there must be confusion in labeling.  

All of the features sound useful and the actions make sense. People often only use a fraction of the capability they are paying for. I know I am guilty of this. Much of this is not tool specific and/or describes features that should be on all tools.

 

Webtrends Engage 2010 – New Orleans - February 1 - 4

 I am looking forward to attending Webtrend’s 2010 Engage conference in my home town, New Orleans, February 1 – 4.  Hopefully it will warm up by then.  The conference is subtitled the conference for customer intelligence and covers Webstrends latest moves and what can be done with the tool set; but it also goes beyond Webtrends to cover general topics in the customer intelligence space.  I recently covered Webtrends on the AppGap blog (see: Webtrends Provides Comprehensive Customer Intelligence Data Collection, Integration, Analysis, Optimization and Visualization).  They invited me to attend the Engage 2010 event and, as a disclosure, are covering my travel expenses. I will be blogging about my experiences there but will do this without any editorial guidance or prior review by Webtrends.

Growing up in New Orleans, I am always glad to go back and have covered events and restaurants there on several occasions (see: New Orleans Update 2007 Part One: the Paradox of Two Cities Remains, and New Orleans 2007 Update Part Two: Restaurants, New Orleans 2007 Update Part Three: Live Music, as well as the New Orleans category in my right side bar). I plan to update my coverage of the city while there as I am going a few days early. I applaud Webtrends for bringing in more outside money to a city that still needs it. I encourage you to attend this interesting event and, if not, plan to come to New Orleans soon. It remains a great place to visit. 

The Engage event begins with an Ignite session on the evening of Feb 1. The Ignite community is sponsored by O'Reilly. A presenter gets five minutes on stage with only 20 slides that auto advance after 15 seconds. This will be first New Orleans Ignite session. I have heard good things about this approach from people who attended the recent Boston session.

With Engage 2010, Webtrends is experimenting with several formats to encourage dialogue. There will be some Ignite-style presentations – or sprints – that replace the traditional hour-long keynotes. There will also be small breakdowns and a series of panels. Here are two examples that I plan to attend.

Hidden Gems & Top 10 Reports of Webtrends Analytics covers better ways to tuse Webtrends but the issues should not simply be tool specific. Excerpt from description: “Modern web analytics inundate us with a flood of information. But how do you know where to start? And how do you separate the actionable insights from the “nice to know”? This session will focus on ways to use Webtrends to uncover some of the most actionable insights for your online marketing efforts.”

The Future of Publishing/Media Panel covers a topic that I have been writing about a good bit on this blog (for ex. Social Media Does Not Replace Mainstream Media). Excerpt from description: “The 100 year plus industry has hemorrhaged profitability and good, talented people, and been forced to re-evaluate its entire business model. The Internet as a whole has started to progress beyond the two-way Web and into a real-time Web, and content producers no matter how big or small, must be ready to deploy measurement models to help make relevant content publishing decisions and in turn drive ad revenue.“

There is much more and here is a link to the full Engage agenda. I will be writing about a number of the other sessions on this schedule. The twitter feed for the event is @wtenagge and the Twitter hashtag is the same:  #wtengage. 

 

Is Online Video Moving to Look More Like Television? Or the Reverse?

Here is another angle on the convergence of TV and the Web. The digital marketing firm eConsultancy asks the question, Is online video destined to look like television programming? They quote Brian Stelter in The New York Times: "News Web sites are starting to look a lot less like newspapers and a lot more like television." Brian also writes that online ads are booming, if they’re attached to a video.

They report that traditional television has been impacted by commercial fast-forwarding, but with online it does not work quite the same way. And as much as people complain about pre-roll ads, they are increasingly watch them instead of skipping through them.

Digital video earned $477 million in revenue in the first half of 2009, which is an increase of 38% from the same time period last year. By online standards this may seem small as online search is estimated to be a $10 billion market this year. However, this growth is good news for struggling media companies. Especially since online views are not poaching traditional TV viewers. During the daytime, online is popular, but at night viewers are switching to television. I think people will switch to online videos as a diversion while working on their computers but will prefer the bigger TV screen for more devoted recreational viewing.

I have written elsewhere that traditional media cannot not simply reproduce itself on new media (see Here is a Creative Blend of Mainstream Media and Social Media and The Misplaced Fear of the Mainstream Media) and this post agrees. It points out that in the longterm, merely reproducing TV content online at a quicker pace is not likely save the networks. They quote Todd Teresi, chief revenue officer at Quantcast: "We need to get to solutions that are as elegant as search. The power of the search marketplace is that Google does not sit there and tell you what you should buy. Google gave people control. That fundamentally is why that marketplace works so well."

I wonder if traditional TV will ever gives us the same control and the online world? It could be a very powerful move. Will hardware be the driver or content?  (see TV Moving Closer to Mobile Phones and the Web). 

Consumers Increasing Their Use of Social Media To Discuss Brands

Tealeaf provides online customer experience management  (CEM). Their CEM solutions include both a customer behavior analysis suite and customer service optimization suite. I have written about them before (see: Understanding Your Online Customer's Moves with TeaLeaf). They also sponsor an annual Online Consumer Survey. Here is my post on last year's survey (Online Customer Experience - What is Going On?) The 2009 survey has some interesting results.

What struck me most is the way consumers are increasingly likely to share their experiences and opinions about companies, rather than with them. They are using social media to do this. The rise of Twitter is one vehicle but there are many others that have been around for a while such as blogs and forums.  I have even tweeted about a brand myself and was pleased to see them respond (Conmcast).

Here is the data: 26% of online adults who experience problems conducting online transactions posted complaints on a company's Website in 2009, down from 32% in 2008. At the same time 38% of all online adults contacted a company╒s call center after encountering problems using the Website in 2009, down from 47% in 2008. In contrast 12% of online adults who encountered issues said they shared those experiences via blogs or social networks, twice as many as in 2008.

This 12% may seem like a small number but the survey also reveals that these shared experiences are highly influential and should therefore be a real business concern. More than half (54%) of all online adults said social media content has influenced their online transactions, with 82% of respondents said social media has influenced their choice of vendor.

The survey goes on to say that online adults whose transactions have been influenced by social media content actually respond to positive reviews (26%) more so than negative ones (21%). So it pays to create good reviews and opinions about your products online. 

This all has a major business impact since in it is estimated that in 2009, $47.6 billion will potentially be impacted by online transaction problems, on U.S. shopping websites alone. This impact comes in various forms. For example, 51% of consumers would not buy from the same brand if they had a problem online with them. Most of us experience some problem although this is slightly improving. The 2009 survey reported 80% of adults have had a problem shopping or getting services online but this is down from 87% the year before.

The Web may be the new frontier of business but results like these reminds u of both the current impact, the potential, the long way we have to go to reach a more mature market, and the need for companies to participate to survive and prosper. 

Web Passes TV to Achieve Biggest Ad Revenue in UK

The UK has become the first major economy where advertisers spend more on internet advertising than on television advertising, with a record ú1.75bn online spend in the first six months of the year according to the Guardian.  The paper notes that this change marks a watershed for the embattled TV industry, the leading ad medium in the UK for almost half a century (or perhaps a waterloo). It has taken the internet little more than a decade to become the biggest advertising sector in the UK.

It is somewhat ironic to read this in another embattled media that is being challenged by the Web (see for example, Who killed the Rocky Mountain News? John Temple at WebCom 2009). The Guardian reports that the Web now accounts for 23.5% of all advertising money spent in the UK, while TV ad spend accounts for 21.9% of marketing budgets. I wonder what percentage traditional print newspapers account for.  Also, it would be interesting to see what portion of the Web advertising comes from online versions of newspapers and what percentage of newspaper ads revenue is from print versus online.

The survival of traditional media was a topic at the recent Webcom 2009 in Montreal, see Who Killed the Rocky Mountain News?  Our firm, Darwin, provides a way for news organizations to use the Web to their advantage by discovering stories beyond the expected.  My colleague Thierry Hubert presented a number of examples of this in his presentation, Case Study H1N1: Collective wisdom is emerging from Web chaos.  

My KM World and Enterprise Search Summit Notes: The Role of Social Techniques in Search & How It Impacts Your Organization

This is another in a series of notes from the 2009 Enterprise Search Summit and the 2009 KM World. These notes are done real time so please excuse typos.  It is titled: The Role of Social Techniques in Search & How It Impacts Your Organizationby Charlene Li,  Partner, Altimeter Group.  Here is the session description.

“Social technologies are transforming the way that people use the web and, with it, the way that companies engage with their customers and employees. Search is certainly being affected by the increasingly social nature of online activities. Impacting the socialization of search are the factoring in of the social graph and social activities into search results. Also, online people increasingly turn to their social networks when seeking information, recognizing that these people are likely to lead them to results. Li, a former Forrester analyst, provides insights into how social technologies are transforming the way people search for and discover information and how you can prepare your organization for—and create business advantage with—this shift.”

Charlene is now writing a book on how social technologies are impacting organizations and making them more open.  She started her talk with search.  Googlesearch results now provide a lot of personal context. Then she showed Twitter results on Bing. It shows the most popular links about a topic. She said search will change to provide more social content both inside the enterprise and on the Web.

There are three ways search will improve. First, semantic search will better understand the meaning behind your search query.  For example, people will use the words Saints differently. Some people will think of a football team. I would. It will also be more personalized and more social.

Your social content will be integrated everywhere. You will not have to go to a site like Facebook but it will be found in many contexts.  Now there is a greater culture of sharing.  The engagement pyramid starts with watchers, then sharers, then commentors, then producers, and finally at the top are curators.  The curators mange the content produced by the pyramid.  She said most organizations support the top of the pyramid but the focus should be at the bottom so the watchers are well served.  These people are the foundation.

Facebook Connect puts Facebook content on other sites. For example, you can comment on Huffington Post and it will appear on my Facebook and my friends can see it.  So you can bring your friends into Huffington Post and bring Huffington Post into Facebook. This openness is the future.

Then she showed Tech Crunch with Google Sidewiki. You can see the side conversations around this site. Tech Crunch cannot control this conversation but now you can see it easily.

Next, she showed Amazon with GetGlue that allows you to see comments on a book from multiple sites. You can see what people are saying and where they are saying it.  The comments are being separated from the site and pivot around the topic or the person.

With these tools you can target marketing much more. You can use social graphics: who is like you who might have the same interests. Media6 identifies who is closest to you. Then they can target those people with ads based on what you do and like.  You can also map relationships within organizations to target business communication.

Be careful not to get too wrapped up in the technologies. Start with what types of relationships you want with your employees and your customers.  Loyal and constant relationships are more valuable.

Obama redefined political campaigns.  The relationship with the candidate was more personal and got more engagement with supporters. This type of connection will be very powerful for businesses.

You also need to create learning organizations. There are many tools for seeing what is happening on the Web. Good to get these tools in the hands of everyone so they can see what is happening inside and outside the organization. This is a role that Darwin Ecosystem serves as you can see the relationships between topics on a near real time basis.

There also needs to be a culture of sharing. Internal micro-blogging tools such as Yammer can promote this sharing.  You need to create new information workflows to support this sharing. Everyone is getting the information that used to be department focused and siloed like marketing.  Comcast is using Twitter to respond to customer issues very quickly and the whole organization has become more customer focused. I have conversed with Comcast through Twitter and they are very responsive.

Kohl’s has a very interactive Facebook page and responds quickly to comments put on the wall. Saleforce.com is integrating a Twitter-like comment feature so you can talk about sales issues.

Openness requires accountability. The Red Cross gave guidelines for its employees on how to use social media and avoid risks. Finally you need to be open to fail and but you need to learn from these failures – Google says fail fast and fail smart.  Walmart failed many times at first with soclal media through fake blogs and other stuff. Finally they started a blog for their buyers that worked. 

In summary, Charlene said you cannot ignore social networks as they will be everywhere and integrated into many things. You need to be prepared to give up control to succeed.

 

Altimeter Group Provides Useful Resource on Social Media Service Providers

Charlene Li’s Altimeter Group is hosting a wiki that provides useful information on social media resources. There is a list of social media policies and a listing of social media agencies and consultants. The social media agencies and consultant are divided into five groups: independent consultants and experts, social media boutiques – US, social media boutiques – non-Us, PR agencies, and interactive marketing and search agencies. 

Anyone can apply to be listed. I am listed under independent consultants and experts. Two of my business partners are listed under social media boutiques – US,. Beeline Labs manages the AppGap and FastForward blogs. I am also working with Pistachio Consulting on Twitter client engagements. 

This wiki is a nice service and great resource. There is more than simply resource lists. Check it out. 

Unisfair Offers Release 8 of Their Virtual Engagement Platform

I wrote about Unisfair over a year ago, see: Virtual Environments for Business: Unisfair. They create virtual environments designed explicitly for business clients that provide ease of use. I recently spoke with Joerg Rathenberg, their Senior Director for Marketing. Unisfair has been in the business of virtual environments since 2000 and they are now on Release 8 of their virtual environment platform. Joerg said they now use the terms virtual engagements, rather than events, as the Unisfair platform supports ongoing activity and interaction, rather than simply enabling one-time events, although they do that too.

Joerg said that virtual events are becoming increasingly popular. Marketing Sherpa reported that they have achieved the largest percent increase in usage for marketing compared to all other channels, including search, websites, trade shows, and newsletters. He described it as a perfect storm for virtual engagement. The marketing budgets cuts, the desire to go green, the rise of web 2.0, the increase in distributed markets, the longer sales cycles, and the limitations of traditional webinars all feed into this increase in usage.

Unisfair is prepared for this shift as it is set up to support continuous engagement. This can occur around a specific event but it is not limited to the time sequence of the event. When you first enter a virtual environment, you arrive in the main hall, allowing access to all event locations and activities. You are greeted in the main hall by a virtual host who can take on the appearance and voice of a real person, rather than an avatar. You can register live or in advance and then be notified by email. The image below provides an example of the quality of the graphics.

Other components include the exhibition hall that hosts booths that can be organized in groups. Each booth includes communication capabilities for live interaction, as well as a kiosk for product information. The people in the booth know all the profile information about each attendee when an attendee enters the booth. This is one of advantages of the virtual world over the real world. Another is the virtual briefcase that participants can fill with presentations and collateral, as well as contacts, messages and invitations. The entire content can be exported as a simple zip file. I wish I had this at real conferences.

A networking lounge serves as a central meeting place, where attendees can exchange knowledge and ideas. Each attendee has their own virtual business card and can connect with others using networking and interest matching tools. . Live polls and surveys can be used by organizers and sponsors to enrich participant profile and engagement data. The resource center is the central content repository for attendees to select from all available event materials. Here is a sample networking lounge.

Joerg said that firms can create their own individual environments with point and click customization. You choose from an array of predefined themes and upload real images of your staff to let real people represent your company at your booth. Unisfair also provides an Engagement Index that measures the level of engagement for each participant and lets you rank your leads for appropriate follow-up. This is another potential advantage of the virtual world. There are performance metrics that allow you to assess ROI and lead conversion rates. You can also choose to add your own qualification criteria to generate exactly the types of leads you want.

Joerg said that some companies are using Unisfair for as a collaborative space inside the enterprise. For global reach inside or outside the enterprise, you can set up events so they go through different time zones and change languages and format as they make these changes. Joerg added that will be adding integration with Twitter and Facebook soon so people can leverage their networks in these tools while engaged with Unisfair. I can see why this virtual platform makes increasing sense in today's market and changing technology landscape.

Adweek’s Brian Morrissey on Twitter Success Factors

I recently spoke with Adweek’s Brian Morrissey about Twitter and brands. He began with the thought that Twitter presents a challenge for old school marketing people who are used to crafting messages and coming up with clever ways of presenting them. Whiie Twitter can be used to broadcast your message, this approach will usually fail. Instead of thinking of Twitter followers as a passive audience for your messages, consider them as the ultimate focus group. It allows you to listen to what others are saying about your brand and engage them in conversations to address their concerns and encourage their praise.

For example, the WWE (aka World Wrestling Entertainment) looks at the varying noise level in arenas to judge what people feel about different wrestlers. Now they have taken to Twitter and Facebook big time and listen for the virtual noise about different wrestlers in the same way.  Except Twitter allows greatly granularity and the ability to talk back to individuals, as well as your whole group of followers.

Another adjustment for brand marketers is the time it takes to both build a following and find your Twitter voice. Mad men would probably not have the patience.  For example, Coke Zero has an edgy voice to its tweets to match the edgy image of the drink.

Brian also mentioned that traditional media and social media can help each other. Of course, social media can promote traditional media plays. Recent experience has shown that the reverse can certainly be true. For example, TGIF launched a Facebook fan page. Then they did an ad buy on Facebook to promote it in their target age group. This helped. But when they included reference to the Facebook fan page in TV ads, it really took off.

Like any business effort, you need to think through your marketing strategy and how it aligns with your business strategy before getting started. It is not simply a race to get the most followers. Rather it is what are you going to do with these followers? What is the value to your brand? What calls to action do you want to initiate? Brands are looking for their customer advocates who will share their praise with others. Twitter can be a way to find these people and give them a voice but you need a plan to get there.

Brian also shared some of his thoughts on Facebook. You can find them in this article: Success Factors for Brands on Facebook. 

Social Media Helping TV Stations Attract More Viewers and It Could Change Way TV News Created

Many TV news organizations are now on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, trying to connect and win over the participants in these social media sites as reported in TV stations turn to social media to attract viewers. There is concern as more people turn to social media for their news, moving away from TV news. So now TV stations are going to these social media sites to lure back departed. They have gone beyond what some late night TV shows are doing with social media. Perhaps they are more desperate. I also think there is more opportunity here.

In one example, Seattle TV station, KCPQ/13, recently sponsored a Tweetup at the Waterfront Seafood Grill in Seattle Friday night. It brought together hundreds of people who follow "Q13Fox News" and its personalities on Twitter, and who may be followed by "Q13Fox News" in return. A number of the Q13 Fox News personalities attended, and the gathering was a marketer's mix dream.

KCPQ/13’s social media strategy is working as KCPQ/13 as its 10 p.m. newscast regularly draws more viewers in the 25-54 demographic than the 10 p.m. newscast on other Seattle stations: KONG at 10 and the 11 p.m. newscasts on KING, KIRO and KOMO.

They are also taking a sense of community into their broadcasts. Christine Chen, a marketing consulting firm in Redmond, was quoted in the article: "Q13 has embraced the concept of 'sharing' information with their viewers, acknowledging their power and making Gen Y/Millennials seem more like 'peers' who are participants in the information flow rather than 'viewers' who receive the information."

The TV staff are also tweeting and blogging. For example, weekend anchor Bill Wixey's has been tweeting on his battle against cancer. On his own blog, Wixey last April shared this vision of TV in the future: "Using the social media websites and our own, we can easily gauge what stories people are talking about and engage them. (We can) create content initiatives in which we solicit content from the viewers, so they not only provide the stage but also provide the script for the production. It's their show. We are just providing the theater."

I hope channels other than Fox pick up on this idea. I think it will benefit all news coverage to get great user engagement in the selection, creation, production of news. Social media can provide this participation if used creatively.

Margaret Atwood Takes to Social Media Marketing

The well-respected Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, is now using social media and other channels to promote her latest book. Of course I learned about this through social media via @digiphile on Twitter. Toronto’s Gblobe and Mail reported on this in: Atwood Plunges into Social Media.

This is a good social media marketing success story. In addition to the usual book-signing tour for her new novel, The Year of the Flood, Margaret also created an interactive website, used Twitter it, blogged it, flogged it on T-shirts and turned the book campaign into a contest on YouTube.

In addition to promoting the book, her website, yearoftheflood.com, functions as “a clearinghouse for environmental activism. Fans can also use it to download ring tones for the new-age hymns peppered throughout the book, which are being sung by local artists in each of the theatrical “events” coinciding with the release.”

After the first theatrical Atwood tweeted, “First YOTF event brilliant actors & singers, rocked roof! RSPB made ££, yay!!” Lisa Charters, director of digital operations at Random House of Canada said, “You won't be able to not have a digital presence as an author going forward. Social media is here to stay. It already has become a key ingredient in marketing campaigns.”

I think the same think applies to most businesses. I am seeing that companies are seeing doing Twitter and a blog as a given.

A Few Thoughts from Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Does Social Media in Matter in Marketing

This was an excellent panel at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. I was distracted and did not get everything but here area few bits. Ben Foster, Allstate, Morgan Johnson. JetBlue and Greg Matthews Humana participated on the panel. Peter Kim was moderator

Ben said social media can be a cure chasing tool. Morgan said it was important to manage both followers and following. I like that they are reciprocal to many of the their followers. I try to follow as many of my followers who seem sincere in their efforts even of they have a only a few followers so far. I guess I am a softy but I also believe in reciprocation.

Greg Matthews said they are trying to push forward in a new frontier as a company and not just be a health benefits company be a heath company. They want to help people take care of their health. For example, they launched bike sharing program. Humana has created an Innovation center web site to aggregate their social media efforts. Their content lives all over the web and the Humana innovation site brings it together.

The panel said there are two emerging area where social media matters – customer service and innovation and new product development. People are talking about needs and frustration that will help you design new products.

Humana is looking beyond marketing but marketing remains important. Social media is helping with their geographic expansion and proving a positive image and brand recognition as they come to new areas. On the issue of internal support there is always tension when you introduce something new into an organization. Bottom up generation of ideas creates tension. They have a big data security concern as we have health data on people. They work with IT to stay separate from core data with social media.

The panel advised us to not focus on one tool as another will come along and replace it or go in a new direction. Used to be how to use technology. Now you can build your own technology. The greatest technology does not seem like technology. A good example is the iPhone.

How Social Media is Changing Late Night TV Landscape and Much More

Josh Catone of Mashable recently posted an interesting article, How Social Media is Changing the Late Night TV Landscape. New Late Night host Jimmy Fallon is someone who seems to understand social media. His debut was one of the best for a late night show, beating Ferguson’s 2005 premiere, and Jimmy Kimmel╒s debut on ABC in 2003. Josh suggests that one of the reasons Fallon might be doing so well, so quickly, is his superior use of social media compared to his competitors.

One of the reasons Fallon might be doing so well, so quickly, is his superior use of social media compared to his competitors. Jimmy is one of the most followed people on Twitter, with just over a million followers. He is how according to Josh:

“In January, when Twitter’s traffic was about 25% of what it is today and largely made up of a more tech-oriented audience, Fallon began making key appearances on web sites whose users are generally active in social media. His CES video with Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky received over 100,000 views, for example, and a week after that he appeared on geek-favorite web video show Diggnation. Later, Fallon invited Diggnation hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht on his show as guests during its first week, and helped turned a random audience member into a Twitter star (that person╒s follower count went from 7 to over 30,000 in just a couple of days). He also won the 2009 Webby Person of the Year award for being the celebrity who is “most actively engaging with his audience online.”

This is a useful case study and stands in sharp contrast to Dave Letterman’s luddite approach. Why does this matter? Look at what Josh goes on to say: Jimmy Fallen’s efforts “could be very valuable down the road as more eyeballs shift from the television screen to the computer screen. Because make no mistake, that is slowly happening. In February, Nielsen, the company that measures TV audience numbers, released their first-ever web TV rankings, because as Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank said, people are ╥using the web like it’s a giant DVR.”

This is spot on and what we are saying at TVissimo, TV and the Web will merge. Those that understand this will emerge the winners. Those that can use social media will be better able to take advantage of this opportunity.

The Rise of the Social Media Evangelist

Here is an interesting post, Are you promoting the company’s brand or your personal brand? by Dirk Shaw. Many firms are hiring social media evangelist. I know quite a few. Dirk is a social media evangelist for Vignette. He answers this question by citing some nice metrics that show the value of his work for this company.

“Brand mentions: 242 mentions of Vignette out of 918 total for top WCM competitors. Share of voice in WCM market: 25% of conversations about Content management include Vignette. Extend reach: Reached 40k people on twitter via re-tweets, 16 blog post resulted in 3k visits.”

Good for Dirk. Like many social media issues, the issue of company vs. personal promotion is not new. I know quite a few people who have been questioned for promoting their own agenda over their companies long before social media appeared. They were very active on the conference circuit and I could not understand how they maintained that level of promotion and did some “real work” for their firm. Perhaps the conference circuit was their main responsibility.

I never had that option, as my employers always expected the evangelist work to be extra on top of the regular work requirements. Perhaps I had the wrong employers. Now social media makes it easier to be a full time evangelist without quite so much travel. Although you still need to get out and meet some of your audience in person.

A number of my blog clients have this responsibility as part of their work. I think it is an important one and I am happy to help them. I would be very open to doing it myself for the right company. However, I go back to Dirk’s excellent question. I think it only works well in the long run if you put the company’s agenda first. People can see through too much self-promotion. Let your skills come through more subtly in the act of promoting the company.

Who Does Twitter Reach? How Can You Reach Them?

I came across an interesting article, TV Twittering: a Subtle Art by Daisy Whitney on TVWeek. She wrote about the social media campaign that Fox ran to promote the TV show, Prison Break. In this case, the studio posted clues on social forums rather than issuing a blatant promotional message. Daisy pointed out this effort was consistent with the findings of a study that suggests networks will likely have more success using social networks for brand building, as Fox did, than for directly driving audience.

The research firm Knowledge Networks reports that Twitter is best used by TV networks to connect to influential people, such as bloggers, reporters and critics, than it is to encourage viewers to tune in at 8 p.m. Despite Twitter's meteoric rise, the service is still only accessed regularly by a small percentage of the population. A recent Nielsen study found that 60% of people who sign up for the service stop using it after one month.

Of course that means that 40% continue and that percentage is becoming part of a bigger pie. However, David Tice, vice president of the media practice at Knowledge Networks was quoted by Daisy, "With Twitter, people don't succeed with the hard sell. It needs to be more subtle.”

This TV story is consistent with what I am seeing in other areas. For example, Wyndstorm used Twitter and a variety of other social media to promote, Moogis, an Allman Brothers inspired music site where you can see concerts among other things. Wyndstorm felt it was unlikely that many of the Allman Brothers fan base are avid social media users. So they reached out through social media to the people who know have a strong reach to this audience such as Twitter followers of Rolling Stone magazine, bloggers and PR people in the music space, message boards in social networks that fit the demographics of an Allman Brothers fan, and the web communities of similar bands.

Wyndstorm began Twitter conversations (through twitter/moogis) with 50 people in this space that also included NFL radio stations, TV syndicates and IPTV sites, as well as retail ticket sites. After this Twitter campaign and the other social media efforts, 58% incoming traffic to the Moogis site came from sites where they did not have ads and this is not typical.

So they used Twitter to reach influencers and it worked. However, they needed to have an appealing message and product. At least, the Allman Brothers appeals to me. This will not work if all you are offering are the get rich quick on Twitter schemes that seem to be expanding.

Being subtle is also is also key, as I have heard from many others (see for example, Central Desktop Using Twitter for Sales, Service, and Brand Monitoring Conversations). If you are at the Enterprise 2.0 conference on June 23 in Boston, come to our panel on Twitter and business.

67 Social Media Web Reputation Monitoring Tools and Sites

I short while back I posted on Ten Ways to Track Your Online Reputation. Marc Meyer went 57 varieties further and posted on How to listen in a bad economy - 67 social media/web/reputation management tools and sites. Some are free, some are cheap and some are pricey. I say generally you get what you pay for.

His first one was Google Alerts, free with many false positives and it misses a lot but the price is right. He also listed tow others I use with are better, Techrigy and Filtrbox. I use the free version of Techrigy and the least expensive version of Filtrbox. They both give me stuff that Goggle misses, including coverage of Twitter. I learned about them when I interviewed their CEOs for blog posts.

There are 64 over options including the ten in my prior post. What web monitoring tools work best for you?

Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook Top Growing Social Media Marketing

Here is another study on the growing use of social media in marketing. In a survey, Social Media Marketing Industry Report, by Michael Stelzner with almost 700 responses an overwhelming majority (88%) of marketers say they are using some form of social media to market their business, though 72% of those using it say they have only been at it a few months or less. The Media Buyer Planner reported that the study found that Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook - in that order - are the top four social media tools used by marketers. See below for links to other studies.

I would imagine that many of the Twitter uses fall into the recent category. I wonder what the relative ranking was a year ago and what it will be within a year. It is nice to see blogs up there. As I written many times, I think Twitter and blogs complement each other. Twitter gets attention and blogs can provide substance. I am now advising my blog clients on Twitter use, although some have used it longer than me and I learned new stuff from them.

Here is perhaps the most interesting statistic. The survey ‘found that there is a direct relationship between how long marketers have been using social media and their weekly time commitment. For people just beginning, the median weekly time commitment is two hours per week. For those who have been at it for months, the median jumps to 10 hours per week. For those who report social media marketing use for years, the median is 20+ hours each week.”

This would seem to indicate that the value of social media becomes more evident the longer you use it. Then you invest more time for this benefit. Of course, we have to be careful that correlation does not equal causation. It could be that it is the really committed to who stick around to be included in the longer time social media groups. I would want to see the total numbers in each time of use category.

The respondents also reported that the top benefit of social media marketing is gaining attention for the business, and 81% say their social media efforts have accomplished this goal. Next comes improving traffic, followed by building new partnerships. Owners of small businesses (2 - 100 employees) are more likely than others to report benefits. More than half of participants say a major benefit is the resultant rise in search engine rankings that often comes with increased efforts. Social media has long helped the small businesses gain attention they could not get otherwise. It helps to level the playing field. I learned of many cases like this when I did my business blog book.

This study is very consistent with others and more good news for business bloggers. See for example:

Forrester Says Firms to Increase Marketing Investment in Blogs

Business Blogs Trump Social Networking Sites as New Business Drivers

Blogs are Climbing the Gartner Slope of Enlightenment

Blogs Still Matter for Social Media Marketing in 2009

Predicted Increase in Social Media Marketing in 2009

So blog on but remember that it takes a while to gain a Blog following – be persistent.

The Evolving Google Rankings Algorithm

Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz's CEO, recently posted his personal opinion of how some of the key factors in Google's ranking system have changed through the years he has been in SEO. I learned about this from @o0x on Twitter. Now I do not claim to be a technical SEO expert but I have figured out how to get blog posts on the front page of Google. I did this first just for fun and now (warning commercial coming) to help others. So I was very interested in his opinions. He covered the four big factors. I provide a brief summary of what he said for each. Go to this blog for the details. These factors were the ones I knew so I was very interested in the graphic on his blog that shows their relative rise and decline.

Domain Trust/Authority – He said came this into consciousness in 2003 and over the last couple of years, has become the dominant factor in the success of rankings at Google. Anchor Text in External Links – He said while this is still a very powerful ranking tactic, it's not as it was before 2004. I really felt that it didn't carry the same power it did for those years afterwards. “Today, my belief is that anchor text has come to be regarded much as PageRank was after its dominance in the algorithm - as a technique that SEOs have focused on gaming to such an extent that much of it has become noise, and it's only really valuable when found in conjunction with other positive signals.”

On-Page Keyword Usage – He said that it not lost all of its ranking power, but it “still sits in the middle as an essential element, but one where "more" won't help you. This is in direct contrast to the other elements I've included in this diagram (where more does equal better rankings).”
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Raw PageRank / Link Juice - PageRank used to be everything and it built industries of link sellers and buyers. PageRank has been on decline as a ranking factor so some time. Remember Google keeps its methods secret and is always changing them to stay ahead of the gamers. So this is just his opinion. However, it is consistent with my intuition and experience.

My advice is to not game but do what best communicates to your readers. I use the second and third factors above more but with the goal of providing better information to readers. My understanding is that the first goal is more something you achieve than technique. I stay away from gaming methods on both blogs and Twitter and just try to have meaningful conversations. Also, remember that you have to speak to two audiences, Google and your readers. If you only speak to Google you might get readers but they will not stay or come back.

What has been your experience?

Post Script Thanks to Searchnewz for reposting this.

Forrester Says Firms to Increase Marketing Investment in Blogs

Here is more good news for business blogs. ReadWriteWeb recently covered a Forrester report, Despite The Recession, More Than 50% Of Marketers Will Pursue Social Applications, by Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester. Jeremiah surveyed 145 global interactive marketers in both B2B and B2C companies with more than 250 employees on their social media marketing plans. Blogs are included in the social media mix and they had the highest combined total for increasing or staying the same in marketing investments.

One question was, “Assuming that the economy us in recession in the net six months, how would you change your investment in the following marketing channels.” The results included: Blogs – increase 65% stay the same 31%% decrease 4%; Social networking – increase 72% stay the same 22% decrease 6%; Display ads – increase 16% stay the same 44% decrease 40%.

I continue to see active interest in business blogs in the many software venders I speak with, supporting these results. The key to success is to align the blog with your business objectives. At the same time, you do not want to simply use your blog as a PR and marketing channel but provide value to your readers. If you have a business blog, what are your plans?

IDNTITI Open Ups Reputation Management

Here is a new reputation management service that provides users with a platform to rate people, companies, and products in a social networking environment by ranking their identity and reputation. I spoke with Sreedhar (Sree) Unnamatla, CEO and Founder of IDNTITI. Sree said that IDNTITI is pronounced “identity”. There are many reputation monitoring tools (see Ten Ways to Track Your Online Reputation) and many rating sites, as well as many other sites that have a rating component.

The biggest differentiation in IDNTITI from other rating sites is that the parameters being rated are user generated. Therefore, it becomes a highly democratic rating system with no custodian restricting feedback that user wishes to provide. Sree said within the new web “you are (on the web) what people say you are” and not “what you think you are,” despite the positioning you might do.

On IDNTITI, anyone can start a rating page for a company, a product, a movie, a restaurant, etc. You do have to identify your relationship to the organization or subject you are rating. A suggested set of attributes are offered, depending on what is being rated, but you can add more attributes. Here is sample page rating Intel. You see many one to ten ratings which helps with the analytics.

I asked Sree about how they handled the potential for rater fraud. He said they have a user authenticity module that catches and deletes all unauthenticated users. The data used in the analytics is from authentic users only and therefore the possibility of fraud and fictitious user data is reduced. Authentication of a user happens using multiple filters – both technology & process based. You have 60 days to be authenticated or your ratings will be removed.

The pages allow for customized analytics as you can choose a subset of attributes to use for your own evaluation. You can also look at the demographics of the raters and sort the ratings by these demographics, looking at any subset of raters. Users can re-compute scores of an entity, based on the selected demographics or ratings by their community members (people similar to the user who the user selects). All ratings can be seen through graphs and charts.

They have started a series of templates for different types of things to rate such as the restaurant template below.

IDNTITI also allows you to start a rating page for yourself. In this case the ratings are only accessible to yourself and to those that you give access. The ratings of companies and products are always public. The personal rating page allows you to get ratings on both personal and business issues. Here is a sample personal rating page.

The service is free to research on ratings, but registration and sign in is required to contribute which is all for free and drilling deeper into self reputation data requires a $1 a month fee. IDNTITI scores are sharable (with a custom widget) among friends on today’s leading social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. They have also started an IDNTITI blog to provide more context. I think they have a good niche here.

MyVenturePad – Comprehensive Resource for Growing Businesses

I discovered another resource for entrepreneurs. The Social Media Today people also operate MyVenturePad. It is a “moderated online business community for people who manage growing companies and the professionals that advise them.” There are a wealth of resources.

Like Social Media Today as “a registered member you can create your own profile and view the profiles of others. You can leave comments, rate posts, and directly connect with other members. You can add your existing blog feed to the content flow or blog here directly.” Scanning the blog posts, you can see high quality. I found quite a few useful such as Twitter is this year's Second Life.

I found out about this because Jerry Bowles asked me to join and the opening to my Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise series was featured as the top post on March 11. This was appreciated as this community represented a target audience for that series. Last week it was number five on the most read posts list. I was pleased to learn about this community.

Filtrbox Offers Market Intelligence for a Broad Audience

Here is another cross post from AppGap on a tool I have started to use. I last spoke to Ari Newman, CEO at Filtrbox shortly after their launch (see Create Web Monitoring Filters with Filtrbox). Now they have launched the second major iteration of this product, G2, built on lessons learned in the months since they first appeared. Filtrbox has redone the core platform to increase performance, simplified the user experience, and are more sharply focusing their marketplace positioning. Filtrbox is targeted at the business professional in any department who wants to control their own market intelligence and needs more than basic, free services as Google Alerts. They have priced G2 to fit an individual budget and even their group version would likely fit easily into a department budget.

Ari outlined several scenarios on how business professionals might want to use Filtrbox. Individual sales people can follow their prospects, customers and competitors. They can find reasons to call customers about their latest moves or changes in the market. They can track the problems their business addresses to stay current in the market and more intelligently engage with their prospects, as well as see the moves their competition are making. Executives can track what their competitors are doing as soon they make a move in the market, or even before through such channels as Twitter. Product management and marketing professionals can monitor the conversation around their brand. Investors can hear the market buzz on their portfolio companies directly from the early adopters. In difficult times it becomes even more important to be smarter about what is happening in whatever you are doing. I would agree.

To address these issues Filtrbox monitors millions of online sources based on user specified business logic. You can set up search terms and tell it what not to look at and block domains to keep the noise down. For example, I do not need to see what my blog is doing as I already know that. The FiltrRank algorithm qualifies and scores results prior to delivery. The system aggregates results for multiple searches in a single interface, and features historical analysis of results over time demonstrating trends. The results are identified as either: mainstream news outlets, blogs, or social networks like Twitter, but delivered in a single interface. Here is a sample Filtrbox dashboard of results.

Here is sample of reporting by source.

Here is a sample of trend analysis on several filtrs.

Filtrbox also delivers a well-formatted email every morning containing new articles. They call this the Daily Briefing, and Ari says many of their customers have become addicted to reading first thing in the morning. I can see why as I look these types of briefings every morning myself. Additionally, the service provides custom RSS feeds so you can read your Filtrbox articles in a portal or RSS reader on your computer or mobile phone. Here is a sample create feeds screen.

Filtrbox G2 also adds team collaboration features that allow managers to provide a shared knowledgebase of continuously updated intelligence on their company, competition or industry. FiltrRank scoring allows you to control the volume of your results by providing a qualified score for each article; allowing you to set thresholds to manage the volume of results and dial the noise down. You are able to set an unlimited number of searches or filtrs and get a six month history for each. Ari said they overhauled the platform to handle this increased offering. This allows you to do simple brand monitoring and look at any issues that seem worthwhile, even your favorite sports team. They also provide a Filtrbox blog to offer more context to what they are doing.

I also asked Ari how he is using Twitter, a current interest of mine. He said they are using it in three ways and they use Fltrbox to better filter the tweets for their areas of interest. First, they look for conversations around issues that they can address. Then they send out @ messages to those who seem like they would be receptive to engaging in conversations about these issues. If tweets are directed at Filtrbox, they use the company Twitter account to respond. If it is indirect, Ari will use his own Twitter account to engage. Second, they use Twitter for customer support. People can send public @ or private DMs to the company Twitter feed to ask for help. Third, they use it to communicate what is happening at Filtrbox, announcing new features, blog posts, tips, and other information that might be useful to their followers.

I signed up and gave it a try. I was impressed that I did not have to ask for help, as is often the case for me with new software. It was indeed completely intuitive. You also get reports of trends in the search topics you select. I found information that I had not seen in other resources and very few false positives. I could easily delete those to keep the trend data clean. I like the icons for the three sources types: mainstream news outlets, blogs, or social networks. I recommend giving it a try. It is now part of my tool kit. There is a free version but the paid version has a 14-day free trial and more features.

Business Blogs Trump Social Networking Sites as New Business Drivers

Sally Falkow reports in Blogs are Better Business Drivers Than Social Networking Sites that a recent study “Harnessing the Power of Blogs,” (sponsored research by BuzzLogic and conducted by JupiterResearch, a Forrester Research company) found that blogs can have more impact on purchase decisions than social networks. The study went on to conclude that while social networks help people connect, but blogs create a conversation and become a trusted resource that influences purchase decisions. They also said that blog readership has jumped 300 percent in the last four years.

This is consistent with the recent Gartner study that concluded, “Blogs have grown from a novelty to a mainstream platform for content distribution. Therefore, it is time to align IT and business forces to develop a blogging strategy for corporate and public-facing opportunities. Enterprises must define clear strategic objectives for blogging, and support them with policies to encourage executives and employees to maintain regular entries and to identify and discourage harmful blogging practices… Increasingly, any public-facing media company or enterprise must have a blogging strategy.”

All of this is welcome news to business bloggers and confirms what I have been seeing informally in conversations with my clients and others. A blog allows you to go beyond the sound bytes in Twitter and Facebook status fields. They allow for the development of a complete thought and then the ongoing elaboration of that thought through subsequent posts. Comments are also not limited in their length and allow for the exchange of ideas, moving beyond simply being pointers to more comprehensive content. They become destinations in their own right. At the same time Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn status can be useful pointers to your blog content and others. I often find useful links to blogs through both Twitter and Facebook. These tools complement each other when used in manner that is consistent with their features.

Filtrbox Monitors Twitter with it Own Tool Set

I have written about Filtrbox before on this blog (see Create Web Monitoring Filters with Filtrbox) and more recently on AppGap (see Filtrbox Provides Market Intelligence for the Rest of Us). I want to share the Twitter part of that conversation with Ari Newman, their CEO. He said they are using Twitter in three ways and they use Fltrbox to better filter the tweets for their areas of interest. First, they look for conversations around issues that they can address. Then they send out @ messages to those who seem like they would be receptive to engaging in conversations about these issues. If tweets are directed at Filtrbox, they use the company Twitter account to respond. If it is indirect, Ari will use his own Twitter account to engage. Second, they use Twitter for customer support. People can send public @ or private DMs to the company Twitter feed to ask for help. Third, they use it to communicate what is happening at Filtrbox, announcing new features, blog posts, tips, and other information that might be useful to their followers.

Central Desktop Using Twitter for Sales, Service, and Brand Monitoring Conversations

There has been a lot of discussion about Twitter on this blog. This entire week will now be devoted to Twitter stories. Here is one example of how a company is using Twitter for a variety of customer facing activities. I have written about Central Desktop several times (e.g., Central Desktop Moves Up with Enterprise Edition and How Barack Obama is Using Web and Enterprise 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign Through Central Desktop). They provide a comprehensive SaaS based social technology platform used by business teams to interact, share and manage their daily work activities. Unfortunately for me I have no other connection with them (disclosure).

I recently spoke with Isaac Garcia, their co-founder and CEO, on another matter, how they are using Twitter. Isaac said that they first started experimenting with Twitter more as an interesting toy. They established a company account and Isaac and few others also started their own accounts. This was last March. They would point to selected blog posts, company news, as well as comment on more issues within their market niche. If they saw conversations about Central Desktop or relevant social media issues, they would join the conversation. This latter move was when it began to get exciting.

Isaac said they were able to respond to questions about Central Desktop, as well as both positive and negative issues. In the later case, they could often correct wrong impressions such as a Tweet hoping for the addition of a feature that they actually provided. People would often be amazed after simply Twitting to the general world about an issue connected to Central Desktop, that the CEO himself would provide a personal response, answering their question. It has become a great listening device for them and a way to engage in conversations with client and prospects.

Then it went beyond customer connection and service to become a sales channel. Prospects have been contacting them to learn about features. In one case, a marketing firm contacted them through Twitter and they began a Twitter exchange addressing their questions and concerns. The firm was considering whether to expand their current on-premise solution or move to a SaaS offering. This conversation went back and forth between public replies and some private direct messages. Finally, the firm called Central Desktop and signed up. Soon the story spread throughout Central Desktop about a 27 Tweet and one phone call sales close. People were amazed that they had closed a sale on Twitter and more people became engaged with the channel. Many other sales have now involved Twitter in the process.

I asked Isaac for his advice to others who want to use Twitter to better engage with customers and prospects. He said to not be too aggressive on the promotional side. It can compromise the authenticity that people expect with Twitter. He feels that because of the chatty nature of Twitter, authenticity is even more important than with blogs. Just engage in conversations. Look for people talking about your product and provide answers. Do not avoid negative discussions as you can often turn these around with honest answers. People have been amazed that they get instant responses at the moment of frustration. Central Desktop is now asking questions on Twitter such as “has anyone in a (certain industry) used Central Desktop for (a certain purpose)” and they are getting responses. It is a great tool to listen to whatt customers want. Prompt them with questions rather that start with your answers and then answer their questions.

Impressed with Twitter’s capabilities, Central Desktop is now evaluating approaches to implementing micro-messaging capabilities into their platform for secure use by teams within an enterprise.

I asked Isaac how they were doing in the down economy. It was good to learn that, like others in the enterprise 2.0 space, they're doing very well. The fourth quarter of 2008 provided record sales and profits. Isaac attributed this, in part, to the SaaS nature of their offering. People are increasingly seeing the low cost of entry that cloud solutions offer. You can try an application on a small scale without upfront software and systems integration costs. He also said their focus on the mid-tier enterprise market has helped. I am pleased at the continued growth in this sector. I do not think it is simply counter-cyclical, it will only expand as we move out of the downturn.

Attivio’s Thoughts on Improving the User Experience for Online Media Sites

Here is a comprehensive white paper on improving the user experience for online media sites from Sarah Meyer at Attivio. It offers this quote near the beginning:

“2009 PREDICTION(S): Five out of every 10 magazines and newspapers will go out of business, scale down their frequency or move entirely to the Web. This will not just be survival of the fittest, rather survival of the most willing and able to adapt to the changing media paradigm, and throw all of the old rules out the window.” - Andy Cohn, VP and group publisher, Fader Media

I have seen the same predictions for a number of sources so be warned that if you are a media company you need to get your web site in order to survive. This paper offers some excellent suggestions. Some apply to blogs, as well. In this era of user involvement, they rightly point out that you need both compelling content and an engaging user experience. They break their suggestions into three categories: focus on readers’ goals in the way you present content, address advertisers’ expectations, and optimize operations around innovation and cost control.

First, the readers view is covered. Sarah writes that most media company sites have a static design of site, low relevancy of search results, few services for building online communities, and limited access to historical content. As someone who frequently goes to media sites to track down stories I would agree with all these points.

Sarah then writes that advertisers are looking for significant page views to expose their ads, detailed reporting, ability to deliver ads to their specifically targeted audiences, and finally proof that you can offer something more compelling than the many alternative channels they have.

Operations need to be able to meet the needs of readers and advertisers in a cost effective and rapid manner. The paper goes on to offer suggestions for how to do this. These include adding opportunities for readers to contribute and explore (e.g., interactive charts that allow readers to change factors and see how those changes might deliver different results). Other suggestions include (in Sarah’s words):

“Aggregating content dynamically to meet reader and community interests.

Allowing more user-generated content that’s easier to read and interact with than a long list of user comments that are appended to a story.

Incorporating all relevant information in the content, opening up information resources – including all historical content – for content producers and readers. This will also provide incentive for syndication of your content.

Automatically generating links to relevant articles as new content is added to your site.

Replacing the simple search box with a more contextual exploration interface that iteratively helps readers find what they want, suggesting matches as they type. This ensures faster results and avoids the lost feeling users get when they have wandered through a series of pages without getting what they want.“

There is much more as the paper gets into specifics on how you can use technology to support these goals. However, Sarah also points out that is not simply technology. In addition to changes to your website, you need to look for enhancements to the way your staff works. This type of web site requires greater engagement by staff, as well as readers. Not all of the interactivity can be handled by software. This certainly applies to all the monitoring, analysis, adjustments, and responses. Excited engagement needs to occur on both sides of the site. It can be contagious. Getting the internal troops engaged can sometimes be the harder part for company sites, as well as company blogs.

I have written about Attivio before and they can provide the technology side to this equation (see Attivio Tightly Integrates Structured Data and Unstructured Content for a New Approach to Information Access). Be sure to also create a set of policies, practices, and governance for the people side. I recommend taking a look at the paper. It goes beyond simply pushing Attivio to offer general and useful suggestions.

Five Twitter Business Tips from Customer Collective

Niall Cook gave us some useful advice on business uses of Twitter. He states with this advice, “As Twitter gathers pace, we are seeing more use of the micro-blogging community by companies and brands. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but like blogging that went before they will come unstuck if they don't take the time to understand the platform before just wading in.” I could not agree more - see for a "what was he thinking" example ..

Here are his guidelines for the business use of twitter:

Listen. Niall points out that it is easy to set up and subscribe to a search of your brand or company name. I am now using TweetDeck for this.

Add value. Provide useful content for those that choose to follow you.

Only follow when followed or mentioned. Having an anonymous entity follow you is a bit like receiving spam. On the other hand, be careful who you follow. Niall says that if your following:followers ratio is more than 2:1 then you are probably being a bit desperate. I saw this with Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social tools. I have also now seem a number of 1:5-10 people. But do not be a snob. When someone follows me, I look at the profile to see if there is relevance. Then I look at their recent tweets to see if there is value to me. This is not a judgment of their absolute value just if there is stuff I want to see.

Reply. Respond to every tweet directed at you. Be sure to say current. Tweetdeck helps on this.

Use replies rather than direct messages. Be transparent about what you're saying to others on Twitter. True, but sometimes the reply is personal and/or you do not want to spam the others. Use DM when it is relevant.

Thanks to Niall for these. Some tips are similar to blogs and other social media and some are particular to Twitter. One thing that seems clear to me that doing Twitter right takes time, just like blogging. Do not start unless you are willing to put in the time. I am just experimenting with twitter. I leaned a lot from my fellow FastForward bloggers. Any reader of this blog is welcome to follow me at https://twitter.com/BillIves. But I will warn you in advance, that unlike the blog, my Twitter use may be inconsistent. Especially since advance Twittering is an oxymoron. However, I am seeing the value more and more.

MeasuredUp Enables Company to Customer Conversations

There are many rating sites on the Web for both general audiences and all kinds of niches (food, movies, doctors, lawyers, teachers, consumer goods, etc.) and I have discussed many on this blog (e.g. Rise of Rating Sites). Usually, you rate something along with a lot of others and then other people go there to see how everyone felt before they make a decision to engage with or purchase whatever was rated. With the urge to rate, I am surprised that no one has added this to dating services, and then perhaps they have.

Marc Karasu, founder of MeasuredUp, was frustrated by an increase in poor treatment by businesses both large and small. So he designed a platform where consumers could share their experiences, vent or praise as appropriate and, ultimately, effect change. It is this last factor that makes it different from most other rating sites that I have seen so far. While it is a customer-service driven social networking site, it also helps companies make things right when consumers feel wronged. Marc has introduced the possibility of conversation between customer and company. MeasuredUp both gives customers a platform to express their views and it provides companies with tools to reach out to customers to solve problems and, in the process, have the opportunity to build trust, loyalty and satisfaction.

I have spent a lot of time in the customer service space in a former professional life. It takes around five times as much effort to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. If a customer gets bad service they will much more likely tell many others than the offending company. However, if the company takes the extra effort to fix the problem, the customer is usually much more loyal than before the transgression. The Web only amplifies this.

Marc explained to me how MeasuredUp works. The focus is more on customer service than product reviews. They do not want to simply provide a place for rants, but also try to obtain positive reviews when they are deserved. Anyone can set a page for a company. A consumer can write a customer service review or question and open up a support ticket requesting direct help from a company. This is all free and everyone can see what is said and any responses. Here is the MeasuredUp home page where you can see some of the features.

Companies can “claim their company name” through a new product called MeasuredUp Direct Connect for free. This gives a company access to a private turnkey dashboard to see aggregated company results and a history of support ticket actions. It does not give them opportunity to take down complaints. Only MeasuredUp can do this if they feel the complaint is unwarranted or not authentic. Here is the company claim form.

I asked Marc how MeasuredUp handles the possibility of unwarranted trashing by a competitor or other party with bad intentions. He said they have several approaches to this. First, they do IP filtering so if one IP address is putting up lots of reviews they look closely at what is being said. If it seems inauthentic they contact the reviewer. While reviews can be done anonymously, the reviewer must supply their email address that is not displayed. This is a common practice on many sites. If the reviewer fails to response to the MeasuredUp inquiry, they take the review down.

They also give the company a chance to respond to the review. If they feel the company has acted in good faith to address the problem and the reviewer does not respond, they also take the review down. They also do not allow bad or inappropriate language. However, if this occurs, they point out the terms of use and give the reviewer a chance to rewrite the review. Marc said with practice it becomes fairly easy to spot the fake reviews, both good and bad.

Small companies that cannot afford a customer service function can use MeasuredUp in this capacity. They just have to dedicate an employee or employees to keep up with the support tickets. These employees will receive email notification whenever a customer creates a support ticket. This service also gives small companies a chance to build brand presence in their category, as they will be operating from this aggregated site. Here is sample company page.

For large companies they can offer an independent third party review and support channel. Brands that are interested in their customer service image should welcome the openness and feel comfortable giving up control over what stays up on the site.

I asked Marc about the business model. He said that a company can claim their page for a fee which allows them marketing access to an identified space at the top of their company page where they can place messages, ads or speak to their customers as they choose. They also have access to aggregated results, as I mentioned. A company can also “sponsor a category” and have targeted banner ads and a stronger presence within that category.

Like Marc, I have been frustrated by poor customer service. It is an area that I have long had a passion about. I used to write the president of the company. Now I can still do that but through a site that allows others to see what I say and yet allows the company a chance to respond. I like the two-way nature of MeasuredUp and the efforts they are taking to have fair content. In this way it goes beyond what I have seen on many rating sites.

Marc also writes the MeasuredUp blog that covers both general customer service issues and what is going on at MeasuredUp. The key for the site will be volume and I wish them luck as I think they have a good set of features and business model.

Ten Ways to Track Your Online Reputation

Dan Schawbel wrote an excellent post on Mashable on the Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For. I have reviewed one of them on the AppGap – see Radian6 – Monitoring Social Media. You can find Dan’s view of Radian6 and 9 others through the above post. I list the complete ten below in this cross-post from AppGap with a very brief summary of what Dan wrote. See Dan’s post for much more useful detail.

1. Buzzlogic offers “BuzzLogic Insights” application. They let you know whose blogging about you and allow you to share this data within your company. They target two groups: marketers and PR people.

2. Radian6 lets you setup keywords to monitor on all forms of social media including blogs, top video and image sharing sites, forums, opinion sites, mainstream online media and Twitter.

3. TNS Cymfony offers Orchestra Platform, with a Natural Language Processing engine that automatically identifies, classifies, qualifies and benchmarks important people, places, companies and topics for you.

4. Nielsen offers Buzzmetrics, wich gives brand health metrics and consumer commentary from all consumer-generated media. There is ThreatTracker with alerts of real-time online reputation threats.

5. Trackur offers a key word monitoring plan for individuals, companies, enterprises, and agencies. Trackur was “built by one of the leading experts in reputation management, Andy Beal” who was was also a case study in my business blog book.

6. Brands Eye offers reputation management packages for bloggers ($1 per month), small businesses, and enterprises. It tracks every online mention of your brand, giving you a score that reflects the state of your reputation over time.

7. Reputation Defender offers four different services: Internet references of your child or youself, ability to remove your personal information from people search databases, and a solution for owning your Google results.

8. Sentiment Metrics helps you monitor what is being said about you, your brand and your products across blogs, forums and news sites. It tells you if the mention is positive, negative or neutral.

9. Visible Technologies offers TruCast, a comprehensive solution for social media analysis and participation used by enterprises and TruView which protects and promotes reputations online.

10. Cision claims to monitor over 100 million blogs, tens of thousands of online forums, and over 450 leading rich media sites. Their service is powered by Radian6.

It is important to monitor your online reputation and what others are saying, both good and bad. You should at least use Google Alerts, which is free. However, I frequently learn many things through Google Alerts about other people who share my name or worse people who only share my first or last name, or even worse, things like legislative bills. However, there are times I find very useful mentions that I would not have known about otherwise such as Lilia Efimova’s study of bloggers on Mathemagenic. If you want more and are willing to pay for it, try some of the above.

Do you know of other tools to add to the list above?

Blogs Still Matter for Social Media Marketing in 2009

Here is a post by Chris Aarons, Social Media For The Masses, that I appreciate. Chris starts with this, “As the number of social networkers and Twitter-ers continues to grow, advertisers and marketers often find themselves employing tactics such as setting up a “Fan-page” on Facebook, posting tweets on Twitter or developing applications to attract consumers to their brand. But all of these tactics ignore a critical player in the online marketing game—blogs.”

I agree. He goes on to say that blogs play a bigger and more important role for marketers than ever before. A blog can be the foundation for a social media marketing campaign. Then you can use other channels like twitter and email newsletters, as well as forum to focus attention to the blog. Twitter can only offer sound bytes while a blog can provide the complete message. It is hard to establish a thought leadership position with Twitter or even a forum but blogs are built for this.

Chris gives some stats to support blog use including the finding that blogs had almost twice as many unique visits as Facebook. I found this data and some more in the 2008 Technorati report on the blogosphere. About 50 to 75% of US web users read blogs. The same report mentioned that 71%of survey respondents feel that blogs are getting taken more seriously as sources of information. Half feel that more people will get their news from blogs than traditional media in the next five years and blogs are just as valid sources as traditional media. The report also said that bloggers are more likely to be enticed to learn more about a product by other blogs than any other source.

Chris mentions four components to blog’s power: consumer generated content, third party validation, social media and search results. Chris said that reaching influencial bloggers can often be a better way to get noticed in social networking sites such as Facebook than going there directly yourself. On the last component, Chris noted that blogs stand for “better listings on Google” which is very true. There is both an art and science to achieving these results.

I would add that blogs give you more control over your message will allowing for input by others. So here comes the commercial – if you need help with your marketing blogs, let me know.

Some Great Blogs about Facebook

I found these blog through a post by Chris Brogan’s post on What Facebook Fan Pages Taught Me About Relationships. Here he talks about the “problem” of reaching the 5000 friend Facebook limit and having to start a fan page. It seems that 5000 friends is an oxymoron and a fan page is more appropriate at that level.

I found a solution for Chris and those who are approaching the 5000 friend limit. Burger King has a promotion offering Facbook users a free Whopper (value: about $3.70) if they delete 10 of their friends. See the NYT - The Value of a Facebook Friend? About 37 Cents. Your friends can get you into the growing group of over weight Americans. I once read that it takes six glasses of a good Bordeaux to counter the cholesterol in a Whopper or Big Mac. perhaps it they throw that in...

Anyway, I was more interested in learning about some top blogs that cover Facebook. Here they are:

Inside Facebook is an independent blog based in Palo Alto, California, focusing on Facebook and the Facebook Platform for developers and marketers. Inside Facebook was started by Justin Smith in April 2006 as the first blog focused on tracking Facebook and the Facebook economy. In 2007, he wrote the Facebook Marketing Bible, the most widely referenced book on Facebook marketing today.

Why Facebook is written by Mari Smith with sub title, social networking for fun and profits. There was no shortage of self promotion here. I learned about the Shorty Awards that honors the best producers of short (140 characters or less, on Twitter) content in 2008. There are many categories (e.g., sports, news, food, personal photography weird). Mari was pushing her readers to vote for her. It is too late for the initial tally as the initial round of voting, which will last until midnight December 31,

However, as Tech Crunch writes the “five Tweeters with the most nominations in each category will take part in a final round between January 5th and 14th. An awards ceremony will be held in New York in late January, where the winners of the “most important categories” (the site doesn’t say what qualifies as important) will be able to deliver acceptance speeches in person or via video in 140 characters or less.”

How do they say this with a straight face? What is next? Perhaps the Oscars should adopt this principle to avoid overly long acceptance speeches, as our attention spans get shorter.