I’ve been reading and participating in Forrester “Wave” reports for years and it’s always interesting to see how people react to the vendor technology evaluations in these reports. Sure, it’s always great to be selected as one of the companies to participate and we are certainly thrilled to continue to be ranked as one of the top providers in the industry, but for me the real value of the Wave Report goes far beyond which companies were named “Leaders” and “Strong Performers.”
The inside information and trend data collected and synthesized by the lead analyst, in this case the extremely knowledgeable Zach Hofer-Shall, is usually as valuable, if not more, than designated vendor bragging rights for the next 12 months. You’ll see all kinds of online discussion and buzz about the report, but virtually none of it will be about the key industry insights and trends highlighted by Zach and his research team. With that in mind, here are a few of the key takeaways that I found most interesting:
the emergence of social media is helping companies transition from “Brand Listening” to “Social Intelligence,” the concept of informing marketing and business decisions with insights from social media conversations and data;
the industry remains still very much in relative infancy and will continue to be challenged even more in the future by the ever-moving target of new social media communities, technologies and shifting online consumer behavior;
the demand for improved text analytics and sentiment analysis accuracy will rapidly escalate in importance as social intelligence continues to infiltrate every aspect of a company’s operations;
social business insights is fast becoming an enterprise-wide discipline and is no longer being driven mostly by only the marketing and communications departments; and,
the winners and losers in this space will have nothing to do with how big a name they are or how much money they spend. Technology innovation combined with smart people and services will be the real winners.
As always, we welcome your comments on the industry and the “Wave” report, a complimentary copy of which you can download from our site.
Sometimes instead of talking it pays to step back and listen to what’s going on in your business and industry, especially when you work in the consumer listening space. That’s what I did for awhile and I learned a lot over the past several months by paying close attention to what our clients and other companies are looking to accomplish in social media in the near future.
One of the things that continues to surprise me is how much has changed in the last 12 months in this business and how much more I think it will change over the next 12 or so months. I’m not going to try to predict the future like so many people a lot smarter than me have done since the start of the year. That said, I don’t need to be The Amazing Kreskin to spot some emerging trends that are moving up the ladder in importance as the new year unfolds. Here are a few gaining some real traction in my opinion;
Organizational Design: Without a doubt, one of the most overlooked components of the entire social media business today is the development of a strategic organizational roadmap for brands to implement. One of the biggest corporate takeaways in 2009 was the natural migration of social media listening from one group to multiple groups. While not yet at a full-scale enterprise level, this evolution of more widespread listening will continue this year, and it is already spreading at a pace that strains the capabilities of many listening providers.
Any discussion about social media listening, measurement, and the now white-hot ‘customer engagement’ area without a full blown (global) organizational strategy is pretty much fruitless. This will continue to be a major issue in 2010 because, by and large, many companies haven’t yet recognized they have the need for it.
If I was running an agency or consultancy practice today, this is where I’d be aligning my thinking and resources for the immediate future. There’s been some work in this area by other firms besides ours, but nothing that I’ve seen that would make a Fortune 500 brand stand up and take notice.
Integrated Insights: Social media listening as a standalone data set has a life expectancy of less than 24 months, in my opinion. It may live longer in non-strategic or measurement adverse areas of a company, but it has no long-term lifespan with the real corporate decision-makers, internal brand strategists and research insights leaders.
I’m convinced more than ever that social media will grow in importance within the corporate environment, but just not the way it looks and feels today without a strategic facelift. This type of change will take place in the yet-to-be tapped world of social media data integration with other forms of traditional research and exploratory data mining. The recent Millward Brown, Dynamic Logic and Cymfony partnership is a step in this direction.
When this becomes more commonplace, listening and measurement will really begin to provide brands with a more robust level of actionable business insights and ROI measurement. Companies will demand that and those who don’t provide it will not be around for the long haul. Most people would be shocked how much more you can get from social media when you view it through the prism of other data sources. I expect companies to step up work in this area in 2010.
Brand Activation Analysis: Over the past couple of years it seems like everyone has been enamored with online customer outreach and pushing brands to get out there and address customer problems and issues on the Web. Call it the “Twitter Effect” if you like, but the focus has been more on the need to do something, especially if your competitor is already actively participating in social networks.
For brands already in the second and third generations of their social media strategy, the honeymoon period for brand activation is starting to wear off and fast. The novelty of “participating” is giving way to an increasing demand to understand the impact of this new generation of B-to-C (brand to consumer) communications. Like listening, brand activation is also starting to spread across companies with a real plan. The concept of the single Community Manager is starting to give way to integrated teams activated across different disciplines, such as customer service, marketing, crisis communications, sales, and other departments. It’s not widespread yet but the handwriting is already on the wall.
This new level of corporate engagement is also putting pressure on the development of new models of brand activation metrics and analysis. That may not sound so hard when you have one corporate responder on Twitter, but meaningful outcome analysis gets a lot more difficult when there is a global cross-functional team online. Measuring the impact on the brand gets a lot trickier. Dial-up your local social media listening provider and ask which button in their application will spit out that type of report. Good luck. Again, I have seen some work in this area, luckily some by our own company, but we all have a long way to go in this area.
The calendar has turned the page to another interesting and challenging decade, and as usual, I welcome your feedback, ideas and experiences in these areas.
Opening keynote of the 2009 NewComm Forum which is organized by the Society of New Communications Research is kicked off by Charles Best the founder of DonorsChoose.org. Charles was inspired while a social studies teacher in the Bronx to create a place where people could donate to charity online and have the donations directed to classrooms projects in need. They have given us all gift cards for us to donate to a classroom or project in need. He initially invested $2,000 dollars to create the version 1x. Quickly the teachers began posting projects and donors were directing micro-donations to specific projects. Word spread among teachers in the Bronx and Charles became the equivilant of “Robin Hood”. Social Media provides a great platform for charity.
Charles shared some amazing “Citizen Philanthropy” stories. One great story was a partnership with Crate and Barrel to provide customers with gift cards to donate on behalf of CB to whatever classroom project of their choosing. Customer feedback was overwhelming and the purchase/loyalty results proved amazing. Crate and Barrel customers who donated actually spent 16% more and even customers that only opened the mailing with the gift card spent 5% more. Social Media ROI via charitable giving. Some, interesting stats from Charles about donorschoose.org - 74% of donors are new to charitable giving.
Great to see the web and social technologies enabling so much good in this world.
I recently had a chance to sit down and spend sometime with Todd Friesen and hear his latest thoughts on Social Media. Naturally, the conversation turned to Twitter fairly quickly. Todd is very active on Twitter and offers us some perspective on micro-blogging and its impacts on brands, search and SEO. Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts Todd. It’s always great to catch up. Looking forward to seeing you at the next SMC Seattle event.
An amazing panel today by Kate Niederhoffer of Dachis Corp. and Marc Smith of Telligent about going beyond buzz measurement. To get beyond Buzz Measurement one needs to understand the social and psychographic dimensions, sentiment, influence, engagement and meanings of social conversations. However, many of these are superficial. It’s time to move beyond the buzz machine and “blackboxing”. It all needs more science.
First, understanding the social network theory is important - social structure emerges from the aggregate relationship (ties) among members”. Second, the Context of the Conversation involves relevance (signal), mindset (person), role (persona), and ecosystem (environment). Ways to measure “signal” are to look at term and network maps around topics, time and look for unique patterns but also look at the data from multiple lens. Glad Visible provides those type of maps for our customers to measure signal and relevance.
Second, measuring Mindset through linguistics like: demographics, emotion, cognitive style and personality also provide many clues and insight into a consumer passion on the social web. More pronouns and more verbs equally more passion especially in reviews. Pay attention to use of “we” and “I” in conversations.
Third, Marc from Telligent is now talking about the “meso” layer. What is the role of persona and ecosystem. Using ecosystems or “Egonets” to determine density of conversations to understand the core connections. There are people like Answer people and Reply magnets. Depending on what you are trying to attract then for your marketing initiative this can be a measure of success of failure if you do or don’t attract the right type of folks to your initiative. Some categories of “persona” are spammer, flame thrower, warrior. Use these to understand who is in your graph and do you have the right mix.
Fourth, looking for ties that bind or blind. Using ecosystems and analysis to best use your lens or variety of lens to determine ROI. “Social media spaces vary and roles are present”. Social media is about collective action. Measuring conversations is about measuring the context in which those conversations arise. Value is and intermediate step in calculating ROI. Moot to bypass it. Techniques from social science help capture “the immeasurable” in social media and the enterprise. The future of conversations - the enterprise being one - is about cultivating the conversations.
