They’re many solutions out there, and  no “one size fits all” one. Thus, ahead of starting your social media initiative, it’s key to develop a strategy aligned with your business objectives.

Roughly, the “find” technology powering social media marketing solutions fall in two different categories:

1. Keyword Search – you’re asked to input a few keywords and then an engine crawls for conversations that matches the search strings. Results are aggregated, sometimes attempts are made to identify the most influential people for this bag of keywords and to provide a social interpretation  of the results (graph analytics, mashup with social sites), which can be leverage for future searches.
2. RSS Readers -  the user is left finding places, people on his own and over time collects the people and places that make sense. He/She can dive in the conversation zooming with keywords on conversations of interest from people in target.

There are pros and cons in these two approaches.

Keyword Search

• +simple and easy to use, (at least from a first sight), it’s like Google and people have experience searching with keywords.
• + present extensive results. since you don’t focus first, you shouldn’t miss any conversation about a topic, brand, to the extend that your provider can go deep. (note Google itself only index 69% of the internet, deep search engine cost 100′s ok K’s - here is a very interesting study).
• - tend to produce a lot of noise. Even looking at presentations/demo  from providers  you usually can “feel” the noise.
• - very difficult to establish relationship with such approach, from one day to the other you end up getting to different authors
• - almost impossible to segment your audience. i.e: when communities using the same keywords differentiate on dimensions that are not easily captured  with keywords ( commercial versus community, expert versus novice, solution provider versus independent)
• +ideal if your brand is known and if your main focus is brand monitoring
• – More challenging if you research on a given topic (let’s say you want to understand how bailout is perceived in the experts blogs of the democratic side) or a mid range brand (high probability that you get nothing returned, or nothing more than what a google search would give: sporadic posts but no real conversations).

RSS Readers

• - this approach means you focus first so you will miss conversations. you can compensate by having an open search along with your RSS approach but this calls for “two level of reading” (the relevant and the rest)
• + you can calibrate your effort towards a limited set of people and places and you spend more time on each of the places and people you select. This gives you more chances to establish a relation that can be activated for word of mouth, recommendation, affiliation.
• + you can go deep. whether for influence measurement, trend identification. A few conversations about “sarah palin” become very visible in IT security blogs when her email was hacked, they were almost impossible to spot or discover in the open web.
• - it takes time and it adds an additional level of complexity.  One you have to identify who’s and where is relevant for you and only then you can start monitoring and engaging
• + you can segment your audience along your target market and business initiatives.
• this approach is better for research, relationship builiding and growing influence in a niche community. it is also better when you want to do lasershap monitoring on specific topic.

In the course of his lively speech  Shel illustrated the speed and efficiency of twitter using the well-known examples of Motrin, Ford Ranger, Chevy Volt and the Pepsi Suicide advertisement which all triggered a mini revolution within impacted communities.

Some thoughts went through my mind then and I’m sort of dumping there here.

Could it be that now group of individuals outside, a.k.a tribes,  use technology and have adopted  a culture that is just far superior (for collaboration) to the ones still used inside nearly every company? Every second, tons of new connections are made by people with a shared sense of purpose, knowledge is created/shared at the speed of light and it’s done in an open/trust oriented manner.

It does seem like yes.

Indeed, while individuals have embraced web2.0 technologies, most companies are still bogged down trying to figure out the ROI of such technologies.  To make the matter worst, technologies that have been very successful outside (like RSS), are failing inside. Not good! the 10 reasons mentioned by Mike sound all too familiar and don’t really exist outside companies.
They’re exceptions. According to Bertrand Duperrin, Cisco made/is making the move. No surprise, Cisco has always been at the bleeding edge of new technologies that improve operations (I remember 10+ years ago their amazing support website which got awards for using web1.0 technologies when everybody else was just calculating the ROI).  Note what Chamber’s said: The future is the group. We’re back to the tribes.

So what’s the alternative for enterprises?

They’re playing catch up and they have to become part of relevant tribes where the tribes hang out online (by the way, they are welcome by 92% of us);
Fortunately, there are  people in any organization who will naturally become champions of the social media initiatives.  It’s key to welcome and empower these people, nurture their knowledge, connect them together inside and outside even if they’re not part of the same function/organization…and make it easy for them to get / share knowledge, experiences, and expertise .
It’s very powerful; a few years ago, I saw the quick adoption of IM in a software development organization.  People brought it in from the outside (without asking IT or top management), it started with a few ‘open minded’ folks who saw it as a solution to their need for quick back and forth communication (oops conversations). Not long after, everybody was using it in development, quality assurance, marketing..and communication just got better, faster.

It’s just a matter of time before enterprises embrace the right combination of collaboration model and technology that has made their customers so powerful.

By coining the expression, “dell hell”, Jeff Jarvis made it possible to track the spread of his story around the blogosphere and measure its impact on Dell sales, share price aso.

Some data points:
Buzz and Jarvis represent a 25% market share of the “dell hell” search in google, for a total above 44K articles, way above “hp hell” or “apple hell“.

( sound like if you’re a consumer electronic manufacturer, a 3K range in Google for “yourname hell” is a decent score which is quite a number, just compare to walmart hell )

With his story getting momentum, J Jarvis also created a symbol that signals whether someone belongs to the social media community or not. As you read this post, either you already know the story behind “dell hell” and this is a strong indication that you’re deep in social marketing or you don’t and you are probably not spending your life in social media.

So what’s the learning there:

- one of the paradigm shift of the social web, is that people are writing for communities and no longer building one size fits all articles. This means using symbols & styles to discriminate who’s in and who’s out, things that only community members (and our patent pending search algorithm) will spot and decode.
- people also collectively build “explicit routes” for the content to flow. Using trackbacks and blogroll to name a few, writers creates community maps that overlay the web structure and take an active role in a process that used to be left to search engines

This, to us, means that symbolic web is the best candidate for web3.0 in a context where the internet is transitioning from universal to social.