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. 

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?

It seems that all we hear about these days is the credit crunch and misery of its effect on the economy. The downside effects of the economy is front a centre of peoples minds but speaking to lots of people in the USA and UK it has struck me that there is a real lack of understanding of how this has happened.  The media haven't taken the time to really explain it to people and give them a proper overview of how it can be stopped from happening again. Whilst browsing around the web, I thought I'd draw together the best explanations of what has happened and the most useful information I have found. Its definately out there, it just isn't being out in front of enough people. There are obviously a lot of other factors that have influenced the situation but I thought these videos did a good job explaining the major factors. Values of banks before and after crunch began: [caption id="attachment_171" align="alignnone" width="480" caption="bank market caps"] [/caption]   Useful sites for more details: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7893317.stm http://www.ft.com/indepth/global-financial-crisis http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c2c12708-6d10-11dc-ab19-0000779fd2ac.html We live in interesting times......

I watched the speech and thought it was very inspiring. President Obama has a difficult challenge with the Economy at the moment. He has to:

• Set Expectations realistically
• Show he knows people are hurting
• Inspire America to rise to the challenge
• Prepare sectors of business and the population for more pain
• Avoid talking the markets down further
• Get past the blame game
• Get unregulated markets back under control so they can be deleveraged and lower exposure

I thought there was a good balance of all of these. America is a great country that has proven its ability to rise to huge challenges. Many in the population have the drive and capability to deliver when called on. I think linking patriotism to the way forward is sensible but risks a swing toward protectionism and a focus on "buying American". This would be a mistake. China won't like that and might stop buying US paper. That would be a huge problem. Whilst China has no incentive to see its savings decline in value, they have deeper pockets at the moment and are still growing (even in at a declining rate). China holds many of the cards at the moment. It will be interesting to see what price they extract for cooperation. I'm my opinion increased interdependence and coordinated actions will lead to a quicker recovery and in all likelihood decrease the chances of animosity between the major powers of the world. The last thing we need now is Russia, India or China to pipe up and count on US weakness or unwillingness to take on more responsibility in international affairs. The republican response was interesting. It tried show the difference in the big picture view. It kept on with a call for tax cuts (surprise surprise) and reinforced the big government vs small argument which separates the parties.  I'm not convinced that the way forward is just returning money to people via tax cuts. They will save it, pay off debts and wait and see. Those aren't bad things but they won't create jobs at the rate needed fro recovery and increase tax receipts. That will also not solve the bigger issues that must be acknowledged (e.g energy independence, US carbon emissions and global trade). America need more and better quality infrastucture and more research and development. That won't come from entrepreneurs and corporate america (in this climate at least). As ever it isn't a black and white situation and the solution will most likely involve a mixture of all the suggestions/policies. The markets are struggling to find equilibrium and aggregate demand/supply is in flux. This will take time to settle down. Price discovery will be rocky and reactionary. The markets will need several quarters of positive corporate earnings and a higher confidence in financial stability and consumer confidence to call a recovery in process. Here are two other ways of looking at the 2 speeches (From wordle.com):

We live in intersting times. The next year will determine much more then the fate of economies of the world.  New opportunities and risks will present themselves. I'm keeping an eye out...

Do you have a favourite TED talk or site that inspires you? Leave a comment below a share it with me.