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.
“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, 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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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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