Monitoring Social Media 2010 London and Integrasco Event Presentations

I’m in London all of this week doing a series of public and private speaking engagements beginning with Monitoring Social Media 2010 Monday and followed by a private event co-sponsored by Integrasco, a social media monitoring firm and platform headquartered in Oslo, Norway.   Here’s the presentations for both appearances.

For the first presentation I am focusing on the “soft” metrics around Social Media and how it’s going to be hard to plug them into a Return on Investment equation since their value is not set.   That got me thinking on how value for a object or service is often set by an market or trading service.   A razor, bottle of soda, sofa bed, bar of chocolate, these all have some value assigned to them that might fluctuate but is still possible to calculate with precision.

Friend, Re-Tweets, Likes?  What kind of financial numbers can you put against them?  Sure, there are people coming up with some figures, but there is no currency exchange, no market where one could or would want to exchange friends or ReTweets, for example.    It’s not clear to me if such metrics could really be plugged into any ROI equation unless someone assigns some monetary value to these things and be willing to pay for that value.

The other event (I’m actually speaking at a third event on Friday, November 26th at the CIPR for Glide Technologies in London  but don’t have the presentation ready for it yet) involves making the right technological choices.   Look, we are faced too often with decisions made that are disasters but affect our lives.

Perhaps,  I can help illuminate the choices that are made in monitoring out of ignorance of what is “out there”.   Most of all, I’m interested in streamlining work so we can all have a life.

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In one week – Monitoring Social Media London #MSM10

Speaking in London a week from today (actually I’ll be in London from this Saturday till the following Sunday, November 28th, with a short trip to Oslo, Norway and another to Brussels).  As I’m a speaker at this event, anyone who wishes to attend can get a 10% discount by applying the code SPKR10.

I’ll be speaking about Social Media ROI, but in my thinking, it’s really more like Reverse ROI, and that was the insight I had when I attended Monitoring Social Media 2010 NYC on November 4th and 5th.  While in London I’ll be speaking at two private events, one for Integrasco on November 23rd and another for Glide Technology on November 26th.

Meanwhile, I’m busy writing my book which is coming together nicely.  I thought my readers, who may not have seen the executive summary, might want to read it here – so here goes:

Social Media Analytics, the Book (or the Social Media Analytics Book)

This book will cover much of what is currently known about Social Media Monitoring and Social Media ROI.  It will breakdown what businesses need to track on the web in Social Media based on verticals and applications.   Best practices for effective social media analytics will also be put forward.

Analytics refers to the behind the scenes data relating to web sites, visits and visitors: the source or referral that got them to a page (where were they before they clicked on the site or the specific page), what sort of computer or operating system they use (Mac or PC), how long they spent on a page, how many different pages on the site do they visit, how often do they return to the site (provided cookies can track their information) and many other statistics of interest to owners of web sites.

In an endeavor of this size and scope I’ll reach out to a variety of experts with exposure to different areas of social media and monitoring to contribute thoughts and ideas, and will welcome their suggestions to help round out the book.

Section 1 of Social Media Analytics will cover how to setup up Social Media Monitoring for effective analytics tracking.   This section will contain  definitions of the terms  used for social media monitoring, a history of Social Media return on investment tracking, as well as tracking Word Of Mouth .  Some areas present difficulties for accurate tracking, such as international listening projects.   The book will explain what’s needed to set up effective monitoring for different industry segments, including Branding, Marketing, Public Relations, Sales and Advertising.

The second section will offer several case studies over a diverse arena of online business activity.  Among the business categories currently proposed for inclusion: Real Estate, Restaurants, Hotels/Hospitality, Personal Grooming, Soft Drinks, Public Relations, Politics, Banking and International Brand Monitoring.   Case studies will be looked at in relation to how many more customers did we get? Or how many more products did we get? Or how often was content viewed or updated and finally how many more Sales margins are we able to complete and how many more referrals were gained.   The author will show how limiting or limited a platform can be.  This can depend on the types of tools available, the types of industries where monitoring is used and matters of scale in projects that encompass multinational reporting and analysis.

Section 3 includes chapters on planning and executing Social Media Analytics.  The core questions of Analytics will be addressed.  How to determine what information is required?   This section will review how to ask the right questions, how to check the needs of the organization, how to assemble the right team of tools and people.

Further to these points, the book will deal with how to conduct a cost/benefit analysis. It will offer tips on evaluating service providers as well as new entrants in the social media monitoring space, and how to determine which vendor or the right platform in order to acquire useful data.

Section 4 includes several reviews of existing Social Analytics platforms such as Radian6, Sysomos, Cision Social Media, etc.  Once the platform is chosen, and then comes the need to configure it properly to capture the types of information to be analyzed.  This may include Geolocation, the social graph, crisis monitoring and alerts, identity profiling and reputation management. This section will also cover how to establish the right governance of social media listening platforms within an organization for effective, accurate monitoring of the social web.

Section 5 covers what to look for capturing data.  Add to this “gotchas” and insider tips. Plus overall good information to know related to each of the many analytics platforms covered in the book.

Section 6 covers the Future of Social Media Monitoring.  Questions abound as this field matures:  what’s coming up over the next few years, what new data or types of available social media information will emerge?    A summary of this and an overview of the field will round out the  book.

Now the book site which will be linked to from Webmetricsguru.com is almost ready, but it does need a few more tweaks before going live, so I won’t release the link just yet (unless you can guess it).

I’m also getting an appreciation of how hard it is to pull all the pieces together this book requires and it’s no easy task but I’m learning fast.  As far as my book site goes, my web designer, Charlie Oliver from ServedFreshMedia.NET is doing a great job and the finished site will probably differ in some ways from the image above, though it’s mostly there.

My trip to London will fill out many of the remaining case studies and interviews book will contain.  I see myself almost as a museum curator, picking the very best paintings, or the best bottles of wine, and putting them in a exclusive wine shop.   The premise of the book, from my perspective, which I’ll speak to in London is the technological choices we make have a profound influence on the success or failure of our efforts in Social Media (or for that matter, almost any enterprise effort).

I see so many people think the made the best choices when in fact, they choose horrible ones, that impacted their workflow and ability to succeed, perhaps for years to come.

And … I’m thinking about standing, metaphorically, at the top of a pyramid,  seeing all the different products / platforms come together and  how they contact (or don’t) and that experience enables to know what really is the best thing a business enterprise or individual should engage in (after asking them a bunch of questions to find out what they really need).

In fact, the technology one chooses to employ and the skills used to leverage it have profound implications for pipeline workflow and profitability and I have seen it firsthand, over and over.

Choose wrong and find yourself under the 8 ball, choose right and you work can almost “do itself“.

Needless to say (but I’ll say it, anyway) I’m working on the book that points to how to make the right choices, so that everything else falls into place (almost like a waterfall, following the path of least resistance).

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Converseon and CIC – International Social Media Monitoring coming of Age

As I’m writing a chapter on International Social Media Monitoring and Analytics it comes to light Converseon and CIC have partnered to add depth to Conversation Miner’s  Chinese monitoring capabilities.

November 10, 2010, New York, NY.–(PRWEB)—Converseon, the international, full service social media consultancy, and CIC, the leading Chinese social media intelligence provider, announced today a strategic partnership to effectively integrate CIC’s Chinese social monitoring and analytics capabilities into Converseon’s global Conversation Mining Listening solutions. The partnership extends Converseon’s social mining capabilities into Mainland China, while enabling CIC to access Converseon’s other multi language capabilities and social media consulting services for its clients.

The agreement helps marry a Chinese based “best of breed” provider into Converseon’s rapidly expanding global listening platform to help provide multi-national brands with a consistent, robust and comprehensive social listening solution. Converseon was recently recognized as a leader in a recent independent report by Forrester Research Inc: “The Forrester Wave: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010,” Forrester Research, Inc., July 12, 2010.

When you think about it, this deal makes alot of sense.  4 years ago English and Japanese were about equal in number of blog posts, imagine what the numbers look like today (I can’t find an equivalent chart for 2010, else I’d have presented it instead).

I meant to write about this yesterday, but as I mentioned I lost a good part of last night’s post due to bug in WordPress.  Part of what was in that post was my mention of the Converseon / CIC deal.

I think we’ll be seeing more deals like this soon.

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Monitoring Social Media 2010 Conference & Bootcamp NYC thoughts and Recollections

Decided to write about Monitoring Social Media 2010 and Monitoring Bootcamp, along with some videos I made without my notes (I took many notes on my iPad, but found they are more to help me remember what’s important and paste here).

Katie Paine thinks Social Media isn’t entirely measurable because people are unpredictable (and she’s right); Katie also presented several case studies showing Social Media ROI but it struck me that what we should be calling this is “Reverse ROI” because most of what I hear from Social Media Case studies is how money is saved, how processes are optimized that already existed.   I think what makes more sense is to say that we can generate income from Social Media outreach but we don’t yet have all the neccessary data or processes in place to do so.

And when we can get ROI from Social Media, it’s usually an e Commerce site or business.   The rest of the case studies talk more about money saved, so they really translate into what is generally understood as Return on Investment; ROI does not suit Social Media as a metric, basically.

Trey and Loic from Synthesio had a very nice way of taking the “4 elements” and turning into the 4 Brand Types, and mentioned how monitoring had to be different for a “Boring Brand” that is functional vs. an “Exciting Brand” like Lady Gaga.   If your a “Vital Brand” then you need to be especially responsive to your customers.  I can see where we can make this a built in segmentation in monitoring tools such as Radian6.  It may be the ideal way to collect the data we need is to merge qualitative information such as surveys into monitoring by embedding individuals in target communities to collect slang terms and other types of information that could be used for a listening platform, but can’t be gotten the normal ways by just searching on keywords you’d think the communities are using, but totally bypass the important words and insights they actually use, a problem we often see in this type of listening.

That reminds me – don’t have time to write a full post on it yet but Radian6 is rolling out some improvements shortly, possibly by Monday  that will give users (including me) the following features, most that I’ve been asking for.

- Baseline vs current (last month vs. this month)

- nearness operators (we so need this)

- hashtags and other special characters are recognized (very needed).

Can’t wait to see what my dashboards look like Monday (if they do roll the changes out  this weekend).

Cory Hartlen from Radian6 talked about the key metrics they monitor for with their clients (there are several) and mentioned the presentation of these metrics is up on their Slideshare account – Cory also showed me the neat features that I just mentioned that are coming up.

Giles Palmer, CEO of Brandwatch also went through several case studies showing ROI of Social Media and that’s when the idea of Reverse ROI (should be the subject of  my second book, you know!!!) came to me.

Chase McMichael talked about being able to track the content that is most shared, top affinities and Social Relevance – he gave me a widget I will put up on this blog shortly to show what that all means and mentioned a community manager needs to feed their community good content and do we always know how to find that out?  Well, Chase’s company has found out a way to do that and to know what that content is.

There was also a very interesting presentation by People Browser and a lot say about the Bootcamp yesterday, but that will need to be in another post – but not to leave you empty handed, here’s a few videos I made Thursday and Friday.

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