Entries Tagged 'Mike Spataro' ↓

I have been part of the social media generation – professionally and personally – for a number of years, but last week was the first time I found myself social networking in the midst of a potential crisis situation – the Hawaiian Islands Tsunami Warning while vacationing in Maui.

Being jarred out of bed at 6 a.m. on a Saturday during vacation by the sound of emergency sirens blaring across the island is not something I will soon forget. The Tsunami Warning announcement slipped under our door from the Maui Westin Resort staff didn’t offer much comfort and advice either, especially given the hotel wasn’t even built the last time a major tsunami hit this island in 1960. To make matters even more concerning, our oceanfront room was roughly 1,000 feet from the pristine West Maui beach.

This was not the way I envisioned spending our last day of vacation.

The warning estimated the tsunami would strike Maui at 11:40 a.m., three hours before our scheduled flight back to Boston, a city where people would have trouble pronouncing the word tsunami let alone survive one. I wasn’t sure what to do at first, but I immediately flipped open my laptop and started searching for Hawaiian emergency sites before I even turned on the TV to see what local newscasters and CNN were reporting.

Working for a social media listening company over the years has taught me that the fastest way to find out the latest is from the wisdom and information-sharing of the online crowd. As Google loaded sites onto my laptop, I grabbed my Blackberry and headed for the hotel lobby to see what the in-person crowd had to say.

Maybe it was my previous background as a reporter for United Press International that kicked in, where you always put out snippets of breaking news as they occurred, but by the time the elevator reached the ground floor I posted my first update on Twitter.

The lobby was filling up fast with other information-seeking tourists and it was easy to see the hotel staff was ill-prepared for an event of this magnitude. Nervous-looking staff at the registration desk were telling people that the coastal highway leading inland and to the airport was closed by emergency officials at 7 a.m., something I found out later from people online was untrue. I thought it was pretty ironic that Maui was shutting down what they had designated to be one of the island’s main evacuation routes. Any thought about fleeing to higher ground or getting to the airport was now a moot point.

When the hotel broadcast an emergency announcement that all guests would be moved above the 4^th story of each tower in preparation for the first wave, I really got to thinking this could be the real deal. We’ve all seen the video of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

So while some people started heading to a nearby convenience store to stock up on supplies, I returned to my hotel room with the idea of riding out whatever the storm might bring and getting as much information as possible from others on Maui and across the other Hawaiian Islands. The first waves were scheduled to hit the Big Island 20 minutes prior to Maui, so finding live Web cams of that area seemed like the place to start, particularly ones on the west side near Keauhou Bay that matched up to our west side location in Lahaina, Maui.

As I sped through finding new sites to track – the Hawaiian Civil Defense, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, and The NY Times Live Twitter feed – local TV newscasters were having trouble reporting anything of substance. In the meantime, Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle looked like she was auditioning for ‘Amateur Hour’, apparently with technical broadcast issues before finally opting for a blurry-image address via Skype.

Over the next two hours leading up to the estimated arrival time of the first wave, I shared everything that seemed relevant from what I heard on-site or from other people in the same situation as us, including updates on road closures, businesses shutting down, planned emergency power outages, and unusual water conditions in other areas of the island. Like any emergency situation, there is always a ton of bad information put out by people, but I found the good far outweighed the bad. I was also surprised that Starwood Hotels, owners of the Maui Weston, did not leverage their Twitter presence at all to broadcast emergency information to guests at their multiple Hawaiian resorts.

When the deadline finally passed, people started to finally lighten up, but it wasn’t until an NOAA official announced that “Hawaii had dodged a bullet” that everyone really started to relax, an announcement shared online roughly 20 minutes before it was carried by CNN.

Within minutes of my first online update, I began to receive dozens of reactions from friends, family and many strangers too, wishing us the best of luck, offering safety tips, and thanks for the updates from the island. It was really comforting to know so many people were listening and cared enough to send a message. I’m hoping that was the first and last time I’ll be part of such an event.

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.

Mike Spataro
Visible Technologies

It’s amazing to me that as we approach the third decade of the commercial Web that many companies still don’t fully understand the business value and risks of online reputation management. In fact, I would go as far to suggest that most still don’t understand the concept of managing reputation in an increasingly digital world

I recently attended another panel discussion on this topic, entitled “E-Defense” sponsored by Weber Shandwick, a global agency that I worked at for nine years. This was one of the better events on this topic, but even so it didn’t take long for the discussion to slip off topic and dissolve into a larger discussion around the pitfalls of social media.

One of the big challenges it seems for many companies is figuring out how corporate behavior impacts brand perceptions across the increasingly growing Conversation Prism (credit Brian Solis). Time and again, I have seen very smart executives and marketers baffled by the concept of extending successful business practices and principles to new Web communication channels. For whatever reason, some companies feel the need to start from scratch rather than applying previous lessons learned to these new environments.

At the seminar Weber Shandwick and The Economist released a study based on interviews with more than 700 executives called “Risky Business - 15 Realities and 15 Rules for Managing Reputation Online” - designed to address the key challenges companies face today and specific actions that need to be taken. The highlights included:

• Nearly 70% of executives regard their company’s reputation as vulnerable, but they are universal in their belief that non-traditional outlets like blogs are the least important in building corporate reputation;
• Virtually all executives surveyed regard the Web as important in measuring corporate reputation, but almost none of them believe the Internet is crucial when making important business decisions;
• Despite previous surveys that indicate the reputation of the CEO is closely linked to the reputation of the company they work for, very few executives seem to believe that and fewer than 40% have even Googled their own name;
• Most surveyed executives say they utilize the Web more for competitive intelligence than understanding their company’s reputation positioning; and,
• Despite overwhelming shifts in consumer media behavior trends, global executives put much more stock in brand perceptions that appear in mainstream media channels than what’s said about them in online communities.

As any good CEO knows, reputation is the direct result of how a company behaves over many years, but there is a real lack of education and understanding in executive suites around the world about how that methodology has been impacted by the Web.

Mike Spataro

After another recent nationwide swing to meet with companies about their social media initiatives and speaking with a few industry colleagues, I’m more convinced than ever that now is the time for social media measurement providers to come together to establish their own association to address the difficult issues we face before it’s too late.

I know the concept of yet another industry group sounds difficult to swallow and that a lot of people think social media is nothing more than a niche segment of word of mouth marketing and should fall under  WOMMA, but I disagree.

As a discipline, social media analytics has grown up over the last few years and now warrants its own industry-policed association run by people who work in the field. Some of the brightest minds in our industry work at companies like Nielsen, TNS, J.D. Power and Dow Jones. I’ve seen a real passion across the industry about how to help companies convert insights from social media into actionable business intelligence.

We could call the group The Social Media Standards Association, or something similar. The name isn’t important.

The last two years of explosive growth underscore that now is exactly the time for social media listening and measurement companies to work together to better define the basic parameters of this industry. We need to do a better job of helping brands understand how social media insights fit within the corporate environment and can really help companies build customer loyalty and revenues.

As an industry, we doing a great disservice by not creating agreed upon measurement standards that all brands can understand and apply to their operations. The recent Forrester Wave Report on the world’s best “Listening Platforms” alone contains in-depth background information about how the top seven vendors in the field define measurement, and the differences alone would make your head spin. (A free copy of the report can be downloaded from our site).

Some of the topics and issues, to name just a few, that require the industry’s immediate attention for common definition include:

• what constitutes a social media data source?
• which author attributes should be included in defining influence?
• what are acceptable minimum standards for sentiment analysis?
• how to define community vs. individual influence?
• how social media data complements other forms of corporate research?
• what are acceptable standards for social media engagement?

The list goes on and on.

Some of the people I’ve spoken with also feel brands need help understanding the underlying technologies that support the industry’s research capabilities.

Word of mouth marketers helped build their credibility when a group of forward-think industry types like Pete Blackshaw, Dave Balter, Jonathan Carson and others came together when no one else thought the idea held water. That’s exactly what our industry needs to do now too. You could argue there is a lot more momentum in social media now than when WOMMA began five years ago.

As always, I’d love to hear what you think too.

Mike Spataro

Both Mike and I have been talking about Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s, at the time, up-coming book groundswell lately. This highly anticipated book really solidifies the importance and power of social media, which we are all actively working to understand, define, and harness.

While I was at the Forrester Marketing Forum last week I was able to pick up a copy as well as a couple signatures from the authors. Returning to Seattle I was bombarded with requests to borrow my new book. Being that my signed copy may eventually put a child through college I went over to Amazon (just down the street) and picked up 25 copies for the office.

Congratulations Charlene and Josh on a great addition to the growing library on social media and technologies.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies