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.

Mike Spataro

An interesting report on social marketing to the Hispanic market care of friends at Hispanic PR Blog, Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and Hispanic Public Relations Association (HPRA). The guide features best practices and some great discussions for leading voices about current and upcoming trends related to Hispanic social media and marketing.

I know most of the clients that we work with are continuing to optimize and expand their best practices for listening and scaling engagement for English Social Business initiatives but adding Spanish to the mix is a key based on US  demographics and an important ingredient for most Fortune 1000 brands that operate in the US.

Download the report here.

Blake Cahill
Visible Technologies

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

Most brands and marketers invest lots of time and energy into customer segmentation programs in order to develop unique offers or programs based on demographics or buying behavior of their customers. I would propose that understanding where your customers and prospects are “hanging out” is an equally important data point if a brand or marketer wants to maximize exposure to existing or target segments. One such group that appears to be ripe with opportunity is boomers and seniors.  Recent data highlights the massive uptick in online time and social networking participation among them.

According to the NielsenWire Online, while people 65 and older still make up less than 10% of the active Internet universe, in the last five years their number has increased by more than 55 percent, from 11.3 million active users in November 2004 to 17.5 million in November 2009. Among people 65+, the increase of women online in the last five years has outpaced the growth of men by 6 percentage points.

Not only are more people 65 and older heading online, but they are also spending more time on the Web. Time spent on the Internet by seniors increased 11% in the last five years, from approximately 52 hours per month in November 2004 to just over 58 hours in 2009.

88.6% of seniors, check personal e-mail as the No. 1 online activity performed in the last 30 days. Viewing or printing online maps and checking the weather online were the second and third most popular online activities.

The No. 1 online destination for people over 65 in November 2009 was Google Search, with 10.3 million unique visitors. Windows Media Player and Facebook were No. 2 and No. 3. Interestingly, Facebook, which came in at No. 3, ranked No. 45 just a year ago among sites visited by senior citizens.

Overall, the number of unique visitors who are 65 or older on social networking and blog sites has increased 53% in the last two years alone. 8.2% of all social network and blog visitors are over 65, just 0.1 percentage points less than the number of teenagers who frequent these sites.

Marketers would be wise to do more than test online marketing programs with seniors as we head in ‘10.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies