Alex Griffiths:

A bit of background

It is early days in the social media space but it is changing the world we live in. The market has experienced a rapid ascendancy, claiming large audiences and frequent attention at the cost of traditional media companies whilst redrawing the landscape in the view of those who pay for media – the advertisers.

Google searches for "social media" 2000-10

In the first decade of social networks, some key trends have emerged:

• Web users like socializing online where they have a common connection to a theme or other people
• Most large traditional media companies have failed to utilise the potential of the web in their content and are now threatened by their own high cost financial model
• Online communities or tribes can have a dramatic effect in the real world
• The web user no longer gets their news from just 1 provider
• Advertisers are more focused on conversion to sale then where they place their media
• Monetization models have stabilised around display and performance but are supplemental to content.
• In social media the content is free to distribute and can be cheaper to produce.
• The depth of measurement available in online advertising has facilitated a better price discovery process relative to traditional media
• All social networks that have achieved scale have been funded it on a freemium model, the pursuit for profits and VC payback has begun
• There are lots of social media consultants and it considered and art not a science
• The market is moving at a very fast pace
• This real time chatter covers all subjects and languages
• Governments are not exempt – national security, elections and the freedom of information are all effected

This video by @equalman tells the story well.

Even better, his follow up video describes the opportunity for companies (of all sizes) very nicely.

A new marketplace needs new tools

These are plenty of success stories to inspire and entice new entrants. But these successes have one thing in common – they were successes by early adopters of technology. What about everyone else – the other 97% of web users who are happy with e-mail and still use mobile phone to makes just make calls and send invoices on fax machines. How should they get involved in this new frontier of marketing?

I’m not sure there is an answer to that yet but there is a nascent but rapidly growing group of companies that are rapidly bringing to market  a new breed of online discovery and productivity tools to address this problem. Their target markets are the media agencies, companies (of all sizes) and every niche or cluster of users that wishes to use social media and the data it yields in a more productive, structured and measurable fashion. These SAAS (software as a service) technology companies build, develop and sell social media monitoring systems.

If you are an early adopter then finding the information is not the problem – its the time it take to do. There are plenty of free tools on the web if you know where to look. The problem is assembling it in a format so it can be sent to others to be analyzed and then making it easy to undersand so that something can be done about it.

The Process

I think that a successful social media monitoring and engagement program needs to follow some basic steps to get a ROI.

1 – Set objectives and value metrics

2 – Define scope of activity

3 – Set budgets, allocate tasks and define success to those involved

4 – Select your tools

5 – Listen

6 – Filter

7 – Triage

8 – Engage

9  - Measure

10 – Don’t stop

Another view on this process is described by the diagram below. I think we have all been thinking along the same lines but as ever with an emerging market the language is still a little fuzzy.

http://www.kenburbary.com/2009/10/introducing-the-social-analytics-lifecycle/trackback/

The Problems

“Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden, not a benefit.” – William Pollard

I think this quote pretty much covers the situation we are faced with. There are lots of social networks that have search features built in to their sites. Some have opened their search engines to other search engine so that we can see the results all in one place. But how do we get all the data in one place so we can analyse it? How do we define what we are counting and make it easy to understand? The average CEO doesn’t relate to the new language of retweets, mentions or followers. I believe there is a genuine demand for  a simple tool that is waited equally across the process so that is doesn’t generate too much information so it can’t be processed quickly. Similarly it must be an end to end product. By that I mean that I must be able to listen, sort, act and measure the effect of my engagement. My view is that most of the products spend to much time on the listen and machine based sorting tools and not enough on the act and measure part.

In short I see the problems in the social media space as:

• Making meaning from social content or data and deducing actionable data
• Tagging or grouping content and profiles so that they can be analysed in depth or acted upon separately
• Visualizing what is happening and presenting it to clients and management
• Creating automated responses to basic questions
• Creating action, objective or campaign based templates that can be measure and compared
• Share responsibilities and manage accounts as a team
• Measuring ROI over time

The right tool is…….

There are lots of tools out there. There is a great list hosted by @kenbarbury at wiki.kenburbary.com/home. As you can see, there are many companies that have spotted the opportunity and are trying to solve the problem.

In my view, the tools are still finding their way. They have different language, coverage and approaches. All have strengths and weaknesses. I’m going save how to choose a social media monitoring tool for another blog post as this is already a bit of a rant.

Why is it such a big opportunity?

“Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.”  Kofi Annan

Imagine being able to look at a crowd and know what they want. That is the implication of a good social media monitoring process. You can learn how they feel about you, your product, your brand, your competitors or discover what they want, need or are willing to share. The potential spans commerce (products and services), politics, research, medicine and almost everything western civilization holds dear. In my mind, it is the biggest opportunity for the next decade. During this decade the race is on to find the tools, methods and means to unlock all that potential.

What do you think?

I couldn’t believe my eyes. This is a good speech. I’m so glad that a leader is thinking about this big picture in the context of the web.

Mr Brown – This could be your election campaign. Why not experiment and make the next election about the big picture and how the UK fits into it. You might to have anything to loose. BTW I might be able to help you out by then ……(more on that later).