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Great talk by Chicago native Jason Fried:

 

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. 

• 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

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.

• Set objectives and value metrics
• Define scope of activity
• Set budgets, allocate tasks and define success to those involved
• Select your tools
• Listen
• Filter
• Triage
• Engage
• Measure
• 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. 

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). :)

Wow...what a day. Four days after an election with numerous credibility issues the people of Iran are shouting back but not just in the streets. It seems they have walked in silence to avoid confrontation but that did not last long. They need to vent some anger and chose a significant place to do it. It directly challenges the authority of a regime that has squashed opposition. There has been some great coverage but not always by the big companies (see #CNNfail). As usual, its the Twitpic, twitter, youtube, mobile video feature set being utilise to convey real emotions and at a volume that has not been since the revolution, 30 years ago. Check out the coverage on the web, a good help guide can be found as usual on mashable. A list of tweople who are covering events from Iran.  Google can help you filter news here. This is where the TV and newspaper companies are getting their content..... I'm worried about the reaction overnight. I wonder how many tweople will disappear over night. Check the #iranelection for more info... I think the only thing that can save them is turning out in more numbers. This needs to spread now. Will the government cut the communications to stop its only hope? Come on Internet!! The data files will out eventually. This is another live story brought to you by the power of the web. These events reinforce the benefits of accepting it and embracing it.....more then they are now. Update:

IRAN: A Nation Of Bloggers from ayrakus on Vimeo.

From http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dear_cnn_please_check_twitter_for_news_a...

I've been busy for a few weeks now with travel and working on some ideas and thought it was time to share some of the notes and thoughts I've put together. A good friend of mine, Julian Walker introduced me to Peter Phelps a few years ago. Peter is a great Entrepreneur with a fascinating story to tell. His travel have taken him across the globe and across many markets and he is has been very successful. We met again at another event organised by Julian not, to talk about those part his activities, he wanted to talk about something bigger - The Earth. There were many other great people there and the day was very inspiring but I couldn't help but feel that I could help with this project. To my shame, I'm not an active volunteer in charity work. I donate money occasionally and recycle at home but this project and approach caught my eye. This was a project that needs the ultimate campaign and social media could make it happen. The Restore The Earth campaign has the ultimate objective. I let the site do the talking. http://www.restore-earth.org We are launching in 2 weeks and have selected a designer and chosen Wordpress, Huddle and Twitter to try and mashup a framework to deliver information and increase and display participation in restoration of the evirnoment. Here is the strategy proposal: http://prezi.com/56064/ Here is the workflow: http://prezi.com/100213/ These are the drafts put together for internal purposes. As ever, I'm all ears if anyone has anything to say. I'm looking forward to spending time on this. It's going to be a great challenge with a worthy goal.

I spent a couple of hours on Youtube last night and found some great piss takes of the industry so I thought I'd share them. Unfortunately I think I've met most of these people. Sit back, relax and prepare to LOL.

  

The number of examples of digital crowd sourced information and coordination is growing. I saw this and it gave me a great deal of satisfaction to see it working where it really matters and all the benefits can be realised.  IT done right. I've been spending a lot of time looking at site user interfaces and wondering when we will see the shift in presentation that unlocks more productivity for users - 3D views on lots of information. To me - views on large volumes of data seems to be an underfunded area and the tools for doing this are few and far between and vary in quality. We can get stats but where can we get insight? We need a social media dashboard... News organisations and PR people beware. This will change the game like big bang did in London in the 80's. Maybe this is this answer?

After reading, mashable earlier on twitter recent growth spike, I've just been playing with compete.com and found some interesting trends to share. 1 -Twitter's velocity is reletively high both historically and compared to its social rivals. 2 - Website Traffic is rising but is way short of fb and ms 3 - Twitter has risen up the long tail  4 - Google trend shows there is a long way to go NB API use not included. I've been wondering when twitter will tip in terms of user numbers.   How long will it take to reach 100m registrants? My prediction is by November 2010.  I'm now activily looking at twitter business opportunities and have some ideas. I think this is going to be an exciting space over the next couple of  years.