Labels: Enterprise 2.0, Social Media Intelligence, Social Media Monitoring

Labels: Social Media Monitoring

Labels: Ideas

• Because of lack of information, processes, and tools, through 2012, more than 35 per cent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets.
  
  
• By 2012, business units will control at least 40 per cent of the total budget for business intelligence.
  
  
• By 2010, 20 per cent of organizations will have an industry-specific analytic application delivered via software as a service as a standard component of their business intelligence portfolio.
  
  
• In 2009, collaborative decision making will emerge as a new product category that combines social software with business intelligence platform capabilities.
  
  
• By 2012, one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered through coarse-grained application mashups.

Labels: Cebit

"Webciety, a vibrant and informative multimedia display of the power and potential of the Internet for today's working and social worlds, will bring the Internet home to CeBIT Australia 2009 in Sydney next month after proving to be one of the smash hits at this year's CeBIT show in Hannover, Germany.

CeBIT Australia's Webciety pavilion put the spotlight on today's Web-based society, featuring mobile Internet, wikis, communities, blogs, microblogs and other interactive Internet services which are making our lives increasingly digital.

The concept behind the Webciety Area is to show the Internet at work by using the tools of the Internet itself - essentially creating a "walk-through" Internet."

Visit: http://webciety.cebit.com.au/

Labels: BuzzNumbers, Cebit, Events

Labels: BuzzNumbers, Startup

Labels: Online Reputation Monitoring

Labels: Blog Monitoring, Online Reputation Monitoring, Social Media Monitoring

Labels: Online Reputation Monitoring, Social Media Monitoring

Labels: Social Media Monitoring

Labels: Social Media Monitoring

Labels: Press

"For all the talk about listening to consumers, few marketers think their companies are doing so effectively and even fewer are monitoring what people say about their brands in social media, according to a new survey by the CMO Council.

Despite all the hype about social media, only 16% of survey respondents said their companies have any routine system in place for monitoring what people are saying about them or their brands online.

The survey comes, however, as big marketers are paying growing attention to monitoring and leveraging social media. Procter & Gamble Co. has a Social Media Lab that's about 18 months old, and Unilever last month hosted a word-of-mouth summit at its U.S. headquarters dedicated largely to understanding how social media affect its brands.

Another big marketer, Johnson & Johnson, became acutely aware of the trouble social media can cause when complaints on the microblogging site Twitter led it to pull the plug on an ad campaign for Motrin in November."

Labels: Blog Monitoring, Consumer Influencers, Social Media Monitoring

Labels: Japan

Download the Press Release (1 Page PDF)

Labels: BuzzNumbers, Social Media Intelligence, Social Media Monitoring

Labels: Market Research, Social Media Intelligence

With the Prime Minister on Twitter, blogging his way to the next election, maybe business should get a little more serious about social media. All the evidence suggests it will.

Twitter, a micro-blogging venture in which users post views, or "tweets", to a maximum of 140 characters, is still tiny.

But numbers are up more than 500 per cent this year in Australia, says Hitwise. And the time Twitterites spend with the application is greater than MySpace, Facebook and any of the big five online publishers, including ninemsn and Yahoo!7.

Twitter is just one emerging social media application, but combined with others (and there are hundreds) it is creating a boom for the PR industry because someone's got to interpret what's being said about companies and brands online. Most critically, they've got to figure out the tone - and algorithms can't do that yet.

Technology may be helping media audiences swim in more ponds outside the mainstream - blogs, social networks, podcasting, vodcasting, video-sharing sites and the like - but it can't deliver what companies need: automated insight about consumers. Statistics, yes, but good thinking is a different beast.

Companies the world over are starting to dabble with social media - and they have to.
Universal McCann's latest global round of research on the media, derived from interviews with 17,000 active online users in 29 countries, hammers home the booming participation in this arena. Here are some of its statistics on online users gathered this year:

* Bloggers globally: 184 million;
* Those who watch video clips online: 82.9 per cent;
* Those who say they have joined a social network: 57 per cent;
* Those who have uploaded photos to a network: 55 per cent;
* Those who have uploaded videos to a network: 22 per cent;
* Those who have uploaded a video clip to a video sharing website: 8.5 per cent.

These are global figures, but UM breaks out some numbers for Australian users: 62 per cent say they have read a blog, up from 21 per cent in 2006 and 55 per cent last year.

But here's the critical point for companies: 34 per cent of bloggers say they post opinions about products or brands.

This underlines the rush by PR firms to figure out how to use social media for commercial gain, or at least damage control. The first step is usually monitoring online conversations, but the real action is how to participate in them.

There are pitfalls - just ask National Australia Bank and one of its PR outfits, Cox Inall, about the drama of overtly "seeding" commercial messages on Twitter without following the right protocols or tone.

In contrast, Launch Group quietly introduced clients such as Lovells Lager to pub gatherings of Twitter freaks with sponsorship deals so low-key many at the bar were not aware the beer was free.

"The demand is growing very, very fast for specialised services in social media," a Bendalls Group director, Fi Bendall, says. "We're looking not at influencers, which might be a blogger with a big following, but more the propensity of those influencers to actually advocate and spread the word with an independent passion.
"It is about very different engagement tactics ... To sense the emotion people are feeling online about brands, issues or whatever it may be you need to have human analysis attached to it."
Tricky stuff, but it is a grand irony that with all the latest online technology, humans are still needed to decode other humans. For the digerati, it must be so uncool.

Labels: Social Media Intelligence

• Google only has 1,000 displayable results for any given search phrase
  
• Google doesn't allow you easily track changes (other than google alerts)
• Google doesn't show you the context and influence of a given result.
• Google only updates its results sporatically, and you cant be sure than something of interest will make it into the top 10 or even the top 1000
  
• Google doesn't allow you to track activity on a time based chart
• Google doesn't show any trends or deep insight into activity

• A marketing department may use social media monitoring to research consumer issues about a product, and use that insight to create marketing campaigns that address the concerns of their customers.
• A market research / R&D team may use social media monitoring to research customers discussing shortfallings in their product or new features that they may be hoping for to drive product development.
• PR departments may use social media monitoring to track bloggers and other influencers conversations so they can quickly manage any negative publicity
• Communications departments may track their suppliers and distributors discussions about them to ensure they are addequately supplying them with the correct and up to date information they need
• Advertisers and Digital Marketers may use social media monitoring to track the impact their online campaigns are having with consumers and to measure the effectiveness of their activities.

Labels: Social Media Intelligence, Social Media Monitoring

• Marketing & Advertising Departments
• Communications Departments
• Public Relations
• Investor Relations
• Internal Communications
• Market Research / Consumer Insights
• Innovation / R&D / Product Development

Labels: Enterprise 2.0, Market Research, Social Media, Social Media Intelligence, Social Media Monitoring

Labels: Crowdsourcing

• Believing that your customers are monolithic, that they all want the same thing.
• Believing that loud customers speak for all customers.
• Worrying that if you don't satisfy short-term, loudly articulated needs, you will fail.

• When someone is in pain, recognize it and address it if you can.
• You decide, not your customers, where you want to go. Lead, don't follow.
• Amplify the voices of the people you care about, those with the most value to you in the long run. Give them a platform and make it easier for them to speak to you and the rest of the market.

Labels: Consumer Influencers, Market Research, Word of Mouth

Labels: Buzzz, FAQ, Help

• Online Reputation Monitoring 
• Online Reputation Defence
• Online Reputation Engagment

Labels: BuzzNumbers, Online Reputation Monitoring

Users Make User Generated Content, But Few Marketers Monitor It

A Jupiter Research report on this subject analyzes the risks of negative buzz. The report is entitled "When Good Social Marketing Goes Bad," but it should be noted that most people use the term "social marketing" to apply to campaigns that mean to bring about social change. The Jupiter report, however, uses the term more casually to mean any marketing campaign that relies on user-generated content of a viral nature.

What they discovered was that although marketers have been quick to embrace this new trend - 35% allow for user-generated content (UGC) on their own web site and 21% have a profile on a social network - they have not been as quick to monitor and combat the negative buzz that some of their consumers will create.

In fact, only 29% of marketers using these techniques are monitoring the online discussions about their products on an ongoing basis and a shocking 17% don't monitor online discussions at all. Also, despite the availability of professional "buzz monitoring" services like Nielsen BuzzMetrics or MotiveQuest, only 8% of marketers used these services in 2007.

Who's Talking Trash?

The Jupiter report was also able to build a profile of the typical creator of negative user-generated content. This person is usually a heavy user of social networks, predominantly male (60% are male) and into technology (40% are influential in this area and 23% are considered "early adopters"). They are also a potential valuable audience for marketers as 49% tend to act as brand advocates - which means they tend to be vocal influencers who spread the word online.

How to Fight the Negative Buzz

Before trying to combat the negative buzz, the first thought needs to be whether or not it's worth the effort. Often, marketers will attempt to offer these negative UGC creators special treatment or invite them to be beta testers in order to keep the feedback private and productive. However, these tactics are not always practical and they don't always work, either.

A marketer must be aware of how far and fast their company will go to fix a legitimate complaint and also how likely the complainer is to adjust their response. Keeping in mind that research shows that only 12% of online adults think UGC like those posted on social networks or message boards is "trustworthy," going to great lengths to quiet the naysayers is not always worth the effort.

Of course, sometimes it is worth the effort, which is why the most important thing for a marketer to determine is whether or not the negative content is created by someone who just wants to take a cheap shot at the company, or whether it actually offers genuine insight into a product or service's failure. If so, then addressing those persons that created the negative UGC makes sense. Then, it can actually be helpful to engage those people openly in the public forum to show the company is listening to valid complaints and responding. That is a difficult choice to make for a company, as it only takes one loud negative voice to affect an influence on the larger group of the company's customers. However, when done well, this type of response can be a benefit to all.

Throughout the history of advertising and marketing, communicating with consumers has been a one-way street. Marketers produced and disseminated messages and customers consumed them whether they liked them or not. Today, every person sees thousands of advertisements a day—and totally ignores the vast majority of them. Yet, companies still spend billions of dollars each year yelling at customers who don't want to hear it.

I've just read this fantastic book, Join the Conversation  -  it questions and answers how marketers can adapt to the brave new world of the Internet, social media and networking, consumer-generated content, blogs, and podcasts by joining the rich, deep, and meaningful customer conversations already in progress.

Consumers today are active participants in the advertising process, not silent targets and sitting ducks for one-way communication. Forget about the medium being the message; today, consumers are both the medium and the message. The future is bright for organizations that can join the ongoing dialog and leverage their customer relationships to build win-win situations for businesses, brands, and individuals. Through the power of community, dialog, and partnership, marketers finally have the power to talk with consumers rather than at them.

Traditional marketing is a red flag smart consumers can see from a mile away; an outdated idea lurching toward them with the same predictable exhortations and tired come-ons. They've had enough, and it's time to change the dynamic. When marketing is a conversation, marketers can get to know their consumers as individuals, not as silent members of a faceless demographic subsection. Join the Conversation uses real-world brands and companies, real case studies, and real conversations to reveal how to talk to customers—and how to get them talking about you.

It's time for marketing and marketers to become more meaningful and authentic, or they will both become obsolete.

Imagine you are an advertiser, you want to place your banners on the most popular website, and you want to know how much to pay.



Globally, the leading site is Google, which has the most "page views". Or is it Microsoft, whose various sites have, in the jargon, the most "time spent"?

Or should you go by unique users, duration, hits, click-through, impressions, queries, sessions, streams, or engagement?

Whether or not there is truth in advertising, there is certainly none for online advertisers, at least none that is immediately obvious and simple.

The web produces data as "a fire-hose shoots water", and that working out what those data mean is rather like "putting a straw into the fire hose to take a sip". Get the angle even slightly wrong, and you are blown away.

Read the full article at the Economist

The following materials are from "The Art of the Start" conference, book, and speeches.

• The Art of the Start - How do you get going from just an idea? Learn the simple but critical steps necessary to quickly and effectively jump start your company.
  Video: Guy Kawasaki presents The Art of the Start at TiECon 2006

• The Art of Raising Capital - You've got to know the rules to get funded. First you have to decide if you are venture fundable. Then you have to figure out which investors are right for your company. Then you have to convince them — or find alternative funding options.
  Audio (mp3): The Art of Raising Capital

• The Art of Selling - The three most important words: revenue, revenue and revenue. Ten proven sales strategies and techniques for making the cash register ring. Let it Rain!
  Audio (mp3): The Art of Rain Making

• The Art of Pitching - To be effective presenting your company to investors, partners, or customers, you have to know what to say and how best to say it.
  Article (pdf): Perfecting Your Pitch

• The Art of Bootstrapping - What do you do if you are not (yet?) venture fundable? You do what lots of wildly successful companies did — you bootstrap! It worked for HP, Microsoft, Apple, Dell and eBay. Learn the tricks and traps of bootstrapping, including some recent variations on the technique.
  Audio (mp3): The Art of Bootstrapping

Social Target's Guide to Social Media Analysis is the worldwide reference to the companies who monitor, measure and analyze online social media. We've gathered the information you need to find services from basic blog monitoring and measurement to innovative market research and social media marketing strategies.

If you are

• a marketing or communications executive with a need to track social media in your market,
• an agency executive looking for a research partner to power your own services, or
• an investor interested in this emerging market,

Social Target's Guide to Social Media Analysis will accelerate your selection process with the most complete reference worldwide. (Not sure what this is? See the introduction to social media analysis.)

We conducted extensive interviews with 31 vendors from all over the world to put together an objective look at the state of the market, with a focus on three questions:

1. Who offers social media analysis services?
2. What do they really offer?
3. What makes one vendor different from the others?

From an overview of market trends and practices to detailed vendor profiles, the Guide will save you weeks of effort in finding and understanding the companies in the market.

Want to know more? Click here for more details, including the list of companies, contents of the profiles and a sample profile