I would like to take this opportunity to provide our  perspective about Social Media Monitoring,  Marketing and Social CRM.

Radian6 has been very good at coining the “phone is ringing” expression. This was very clever and so true.

Social Media is like a phone. And as with the phone, different functions in the enterprise make a radically different use of it.

• a call center agent, with limited expertise and decision power, uses the phone to put a customer back into operation as quickly as possible. This makes for reactive, time constrained, result driven, high volume, point interactions – i.e you tend not to speak to the same person more than once.
• sales reps who need to find qualified leads and some context around these leads. They are engaged in both reactive and proactive, medium volume, repetitive interactions.
• product marketers who need to analyze trends and insights from a specific audience. The result is proactive, usually small volume, very targeted and deep interactions.
• a brand marketer who spends as much time as possible influencing the right people in his target audience so that he is covered properly and his message is understood. What we have here is proactive, small to medium volume, influencers focused, ongoing relations and trust building, highly repetitive interactions.

R6 and monitoring solutions in general have provided an excellent solution for sales and service. They are very good at grabbing tons of opportunities (and noise) for brand to solve customers’ and prospects’ problems.

But for marketing, IMHO, it’s a complete different story. Marketing without segmentation and focus does not make sense.

This is where Seth Godin comes to the rescue with the idea of Tribes. As Seth explained, social media/web 2.0, by lowering the cost of writing and building up audiences & virtual communities, has enabled the emergence of zillions of Tribes (Mommy bloggers being the most famous). The challenge for marketers is to rethink their strategy and segmentation to address these new “organizations” that come in with influencers, rules, dynamics, logic and places.

Monitoring, as long as it does not provide capabilities to uncover, analyze and engage with these tribes, leaves brands blind on what the social landscape really is, and does not do the job for marketing.

For CRM – and Social CRM – it is a different story and it is quite natural to me to see Radian6 going the CRM/ Salesforce direction with this acquisition.

Dominique – @dominiq

• HP is good
• Dell is good, but I still prefer HP
• The new Dell PC is good but the previous one worked better.
• The new Dell PC is good but I miss the look of the previous one.
• HP works great but I hate them
• Dell works great but I hate them
• Dell is as good as HP
• HP, Dell  today’s PC’s are the same crap, maybe Dell a little bit less
• HP and Dell are nice entry level products
• Dell is good if you can afford it.
• Dell is exclusive.
• I would only recommend Dell’s PC to small businesses.
• HP is the Dom Perignon of Netbooks.
• Apple is to Dell what Saint Amour is to Beaujolais Nouveau
• I worked too much on my Dell last night and I got sick looking at the screen.
• Dell is only good for gaming
• HP is like it was in the Packard’s time
• HP is like what it was in Carly’s time
• No wonder why the Dell stock is going South
• I love HP (from HP’s PR agency or Director)
• I hate HP (from an employee recently fired)
• A tweet re-purposing the one above without any additional comment
• eCairn is delivering automatic sentiment in 50 languages with 105% accuracy.

Hard to rate isn’t it? Maybe you should do it again ?

These are fairly standard sentences, not corner cases. There is no irony and no borderline use of language (except the last one), but it just shows that:

• Sentiment is subjective
• Sentiment is role based: depending on whether you’re the brand manager for Dell overall, or in charge of the new Dell notebook, or the Small Biz vertical, QA manager, Investor relations, or looking into competitive analysis, you may have different views on what positive means.
• Language to express sentiment is context dependent and cultural (wine analogy)
• Language to interpret sentiment is context dependent and cultural (see the HP history analogy)
• Sentiment analysis has to factor in the “who”, and account for real and pseudo duplicates. Same conversation from different persons, similar conversations but from the same person. Everybody is re purposing nowadays, re tweeting, using ping.fm or alike, not counting the huge amount of “robot “ sites or blogs that just sit there to attract traffic and ads.
• “Social media” is not a valid sample of any user base, even when the user based is defined as internet users. As an example: the Opensource/Linux community is way more vocal than the windows one. Just taking data from the river of news from community is a statistical heresy, except if you want to study Linux fans. Taking into account the re purposing point, twitter is even not  a representative sample of the “twitter” population…

That’s why solutions with so called automatic sentiment ends up with 60+ neutral, 70% precision and manual options to override the machine generated sentiment.

It just does not make sense. Putting everything neutral may well be a better bet from a recall and precision standpoint.

I’m not saying it can’t be done. It just can’t be done “generically”. Now if you build a solution for sentiment analysis specializing in the stock exchange/ investor community, this is another story and I can give you solid pointers for that , just email and have your checkbook ready.

You would have to  build up dictionaries, invest in a learning algorithm, train it… and yes, that sounds doable but it would be very expensive to setup and the applicability of this would be limited to “stock exchange”, even maybe to stock exchange in 2010.

So forget this Holy Grail, stop wasting $$$ on producing low quality results and come back to the initial objectives of the brand:

Get sentiment on its brand from a specific audience with a reasonable investment.

There are alternatives to reach this objective and the good news is that maths comes to the rescue.

1. Why not sampling? , Marketers have always used focus group and samples, why not extending that on the social web?

2. Why not rating manually? When you zoom in a specific community,  manual starts to make sense. We looked at the top Mommy bloggers that we’ve mapped (top 3500) and went down to 2000 discussions about Pampers in the last 6 months. One can do a good job rating 3 conversations per minute, so it’s roughly a 12h job, at $20/hour, that’s $240 over 6 Months.

3. Moreover,  focusing on a specific community brings more consistency between the conversations that you rate and the quality of the rating would be higher ( Apple means Apple and Orange means Orange , in other words, fruits in the Food Community and brands in the Wireless/Telco Community).  It’s easier as an example to establish a standard to rate blog conversations from Mommies on Pampers, than  one for any conversation on Pampers (that would go for analyst report on sustainability  to conversations from experts to comments on their new ad campaign)! Conversations are more consistent, more alike and easier to rate with a focus. You also get specific results for your  key target communities and way more actionable results.
4. While you rate, you also spot insights, key conversations to share, ideas for content marketing.
5. Also doing it this way, you will actually find your promoters and detractors. Connecting conversations to people, you will see who’s moving in positive territory  and see whether clusters of influencers are moving in the right direction. This is key for targeted outreach campaigns.

Last but not least, I’m still wondering what type of actionable plan a brand can take when its “sentiment” drops by 3% with an accuracy claimed at 70% … The Motrin case went wild over the week end, Domino Pizza within hours. So for crisis management, investing in Proactive ORM and building up a solid base of fans within the target community is a much better option. (Ford’s approach).

The morale: when 93% of consumers say they want brands to engage in social media, I doubt that they mean engaging with algorithms and I bet they are expecting real and empowered persons. But that’s another story.

SMM Rolodex

From a 2000 feet prospective,  social media solutions are all the same. They more or less enable brands to listen and engage with communities.

In practice, it’s way more subtle and one analogy I’d like to propose is that you’ve providers that build Yellow Pages and others that build Rolodex (we fall into this category).

Both are useful and there are differentiated benefits from both type of solutions. What is critical however is for brands and agencies to clearly articulate their business needs and select the appropriate tool-set for the task at hand. It’s also very important to think beyond the first use of the solution selected.

Social Media Monitoring Solutions tend to be easier to setup and to operate. You just plug in your brand keywords and bingo.  (This, provided of course,  one can find the appropriate set of queries to search the Social Yellow pages).

Rolodex approach requires more work, more thinking around how a brand wants to organize its Social Rolodex and how it wants to structure its listening and engagement in different communities.  This is even more important if the Rolodex is a shared Rolodex within a mid-size/large company.

Again the analogy works very well. It takes minutes to open the Yellow Pages whereas one may spend several hours a week organizing and maintaining its Rolodex.

What’s key with Rolodex is that it enable people to build a differentiated asset that will deliver value over multiple enterprises functions and systems.

Let’s take a not-so-fictive example of an IT company that’s delivering services & product for Cloud Computing.

Using a Yellow Pages approach, it can get some pretty solid indicator relative to share of voice and (with rating) sentiment. However, without any qualification of the sources of the information (expert, influencer, audience, position in the community, analysis of what this person says over time, level of connection with the company or with competitors), it ‘ll be very difficult to transform this into actionable knowledge.

Using a Rolodex approach – and spending the time to built it-, this company will be able to:

• Build a common repository of people that constitute the community of  “Cloud Computing”  & listen to them wherever they  write, tweet and comment (blog, twitter…),
• Perform targeted sentiment analysis on these key stakeholders.
• Spot whether any of these stakeholder are over time more positive or negative about them. Build action plans to change perspective.
• Influence specific clusters through outreach, buzz and content development.
• Thru regular participation in the conversations,  build up trust.
  
• Prevent crisis, making these influencers  more careful propagating rumors or false information about the brand i.e people that they know and trust.
• Perform deep qualitative analytics. Since the “river of news” is built from similar sources and is noise free, it can be mined with greater results.
• Spot candidates for virtual focus group, crowd sourcing of new ideas (btw, I’m amazed that people embark in crowdsourcing without targeting. If a brand makes a strategic decision to focus its solution for small business, wouldn’t that make sense that it restrict s the crowdsourcing of new ideas from the specific small business community ?).
• Develop communication strategies that leverage community and influencers
• Socialize their corporate web site with the voices of these trustable sources and their audience.

and so on…

From a strategy standpoint, these approaches also differ widely:

On the Yellow pages one: the goal is to spend as less time as possible in social media, while grabbing as much as what can be learned with a Google Search like interaction. But there is no social engagement. People even dream of automating sentiment and are totally adverse to the idea of reading conversations.

One can even say that here, brand uses technology to mitigate the risk of not participating in the conversations.

On the Rolodex one: the goal is to capitalize every minute spent in social media and putting this capitalized knowledge at work for maximum benefits.

Here, listening and engagement is view as an asset and an opportunity, not as a liability.

Two paradigms, Two solutions … and so many opportunities.

Using Lee’s example of  hybrid car, let’s start building a fictive business case: you’re Toyota and you want to use social media to market a new hyper efficient car.

Lee provides us with the a sound social media roadmap:

audience => objective => strategy

and using Radian6, a well-known social monitoring platform, and a series of keywords, Lee comes back with the list below as the target audience, ranked by influence.

The problem is that these blogs may be both very influential on one end and blogs having recently talked about hybrid cars on the other end. But in no way do they define a community. They are therefore of very limited help for social marketing.

Looking closer, it’s  a patchwork of green blogs, auto blogs or blogs that come from the Personal Finance community like GetRichSlowly. We also have sites like Engadget, Digg, Youtube, Autopia and AOL.

What would a real social marketing program for the Highly efficient cars be then ?

1) First, Toyota should define the communities it wants to market to.

They could be the:

• green community
• community of car addicts
• the one of people in market for cars
• the frugal community

2) Next, Toyota should characterize these communities in terms of:

• influencers
• people positive/aware about high efficiency cars
• people that are negative about high efficiency cars
• people with existing ties with its competitors
• and so on

3) Last, Toyota should develop unique strategies for each segment.

Strategies may be just listening, monitoring interest, crowd sourcing ideas or explaining the key benefits of its new offer by participating in the communities (and again, there are tons of ways to do that from buzz to outreach to advertising).

But it’s not a one size fits all:

- for the green community as an example, the challenge for Toyota may be to convince people there is more environmental return in investing in a fuel efficient car than improving one’s house or commuting with other people.

- for the auto community, it could be to demonstrate that it has solved some issues like autonomy on electric cars… or that a car can be fuel efficient and fun, featuring an hybrid nascar car youtube video.

- for the frugal community, it could be providing templates so that the reader can evaluate the ROI of making the move, or advertising financial services that ease the initial purchase.

I’m not a car marketer so this is way oversimplified. The point I want to make is that social/community marketing is mainly executing marketing strategies while leveraging communities and the social web.

It’s not a one click affair and requires a different approach than “conversation monitoring”. It requires a top down approach strongly aligned with a company marketing strategy (that can be fueled by monitoring) and cannot be implemented keywords up.

It takes time.  Most of the benefits come when every marketer in an organization is able to leverage communities and the social web to increase its productivity, maximize the relevance and impact of its action… and measure it … thru monitoring .

]]> http://blog.ecairn.com/2009/04/24/the-limits-of-social-media-monitoring/feed/ 2 domlah hydrogen-cars-toyotafchv radian6-influence