Posts Tagged ‘listening’

The Need for a New Listening Movement: From monitoring to learning

The market for listening services is rapidly maturing with vendors such as Radian6, Spiral16, Crimson Hexagon, Research.ly, Lithium, Sysomos, and many others improving how businesses monitor consumer conversations and experiences. The wide array of options and capabilities are nothing less than baffling, requiring expert analysis prior to committing any significant investment of finances or organizational resources now and over time. For those seeking top line advice on the differences between many of the top listening vendors, please read this helpful post at SocialMedia.biz.

What’s the R.O.I.? A Framework for Social Analytics

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
- Albert Einstein

Say hello to my little friends, R.O. & I.

Yes. Return on investment have become the bane of an entire new media industry. However, avoidance is not the answer.

While the question of “what’s the R.O.I. of social media” is difficult to answer, it is necessary as it forces us to dig deeper. The result is maturity.

Salesforce Listens to Market Trends, Acquires Radian6 for $326 Million

Boom Boom Pow.

Salesforce, a purveyor of cloud-based solutions for customer relationship management (CRM) & collaboration for enterprise organizations and small businesses announced that it is acquiring social media monitoring platform Radian6 for $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock. Radian6 is used by more than half of the FORTUNE 100 and companies like AAA, Dell, GE, Kodak, Molson Coors, Pepsico, and UPS to monitor, analyze and engage in social media conversation.

From Community Management to Command Centers

In early 2007, Chris Heuer, Shel Israel, Deb Schultz, Giovanni Rodriguez, and I explored the evolution of social media within the enterprise at an intimate business event in Palo Alto. One of the more memorable discussions focused on the rise of an official role within business to listen to social discourse and channel inbound questions and comments as well as official responses. The question eventually arose, how do we classify this new role within the organization? The designation of “Community Manager” earned the greatest support that day, but it did so with a caveat, “communities, by organic design, could not be managed.”

The Brand Dashboard: Bringing Conversations to Life

Perhaps the most difficult aspects of Social Media to embrace are the changes in our behavior and overall philosophy it necessitates in order to earn relevance and ultimately prominence in consumer hearts, minds, and markets.

Simply put, Social Media makes us vulnerable and officially ends an era of perceived control threaded by the illusion of invincibility.

Active Listening on the Social Web; It’s Overrated

by Michael Brito


Getty Images

Wikipedia tells us that active listening is an intent to “listen for meaning”. Others suggest that active listening should “focus on who you are listening to, whether in a group or one-on-one, in order to understand what he or she is saying.”

These are excellent definitions. But as it relates to customer interactions on the social web, active listening is only one half of the equation.

I’m Not Talking to You


Credit: Natalie Dee

Social Media continues to fascinate me.

If you stop and think about it for a moment, we’re presented with something special…something almost too simple to appreciate.

Essentially, we have been given a gift – a looking glass into the thoughts, opinions,  feedback, and dialogue that represents a snapshot of market sentiment and behavior.

So, what do we do with this gift?

Unveiling the New Influencers

Traditional influence has followed a systematic top-down process of developing and pushing “controlled” messages to audiences for decades, rooted in one-to-many, faceless broadcast campaigns.

Personality wasn’t absent in certain mediums, it was missing from day-to-day communications.

For the most part, this pattern seemingly served its purposes, fueling the belief that brands were in control of their messages, from delivery to dissemination, among the demographics to which they were targeted.

It scaled very well over the years, until it didn’t…

Barack Obama, The Social Web, and the Future of User-Generated Governance

What follows is the unedited version of my latest post for TechCrunch, “Is Obama Ready To Be a Two-Way President.


Barack Obama’s flickr stream

Where there’s victory, there’s also opportunity…

America voted while the entire world watched and listened. Whether you supported Obama or McCain, we equally shared the hope for positive change and a new beginning towards a brighter future. This Presidential election was the first in 50 years, in which there was no incumbent President or Vice President from either party competing for the Presidential nomination. On Tuesday November 4th, 2008, history was made and America is now poised to break new ground as it continues to define and document unwritten history as we work together over the next four years.

Reinventing Crisis Communications for the Social Web


Source

Businesses, individuals, and organizations will, from time to time, make honest mistakes or in some unfortunate cases, intentionally support unethical decisions to dissuade or conceal something significant from its public.

Whether it’s an oversight or a matter of deception, savvy companies usually employ and deploy a crises response team to prepare for, manage and attempt to positively spin the potential backlash from customers, partners, and employees related to almost anything.

ABOUT ME

Brian Solis is principal at Altimeter Group, a research-based advisory firm. Solis is globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media. A digital analyst, sociologist, and futurist, Solis has studied and influenced the effects of emerging media on business, marketing, publishing, and culture. His current book, Engage, is regarded as the industry reference guide for businesses to build and measure success in the social web.

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