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.

I’m not going to take this time to preach about the importance of listening nor am I going to focus on which platform will best meet your needs. I would like to explore a very real issue around the enterprise-wide adoption of monitoring systems, or perhaps better said, the lack thereof, and also what businesses should think about as social media becomes increasingly consequential to the organization.

Social media is praised by experts for its promise to open up dialogue between customers and businesses. Perhaps most notably, social media is celebrated for giving a voice to the consumer and eyes and ears to companies for which to see and listen. The reality is that customers always had a voice. Social media amplifies and organizes that voice and packages it as a tremendous gift for businesses ready to earn relevance in a new genre of consumerism. Nothing matters however, if businesses are not ready to learn, engage, or take action based on what they hear.

According to a recent study by Capgemini, 57% of businesses currently monitor online conversations about the brand, products or services. But 20% do not listen at all and another 23% of respondents weren’t sure whether or not the company is listening to online conversations.

Yes, businesses are learning to listen. But what does that actually mean? To what extent are businesses capturing insights, solving problems, learning from recurring themes, and engaging customers and prospects? According to the Capgemini report, the conversions of conversation to action are impressive, but nowhere near their potential.

The majority of businesses polled, 41%, only respond to customers when a direct question is asked. This behavior must shift to full engagement to realize the opportunity that lies before them. Engagement is the currency of relationship building. Those that listen and engage across a greater set of conversations, 36%, are well on their way to building a social businesses. However, there are 20% today that listen and never respond. This is a number that I actually would like to see diminish over the years.

Monitoring vs. Listening

Everything indeed starts with listening. But, notice that the word “listen” is absent in the Capgemini graphs above. Instead, the industry is standardizing around “monitoring” as it more accurately reflects the behavior of businesses today in social media. Monitoring is the process of tracking keywords and reporting on the various attributes surrounding the activity of each. For example, tracking mentions of the brand, products, key personnel and also competitors are analyzed and reported out to key stakeholders to portray the state of conversations and sentiment, capture the share of voice, and set the foundation for benchmarking and metrics. Monitoring also encompasses potential crises and serves as an early warning system for businesses. Listening however, builds a layer on top of monitoring that examines conversations for enterprise-wide learning and cross-functional engagement. The difference between monitoring and listening is initiative, the ability to take what’s observed and take action internally or externally to solve, improve, or validate experiences.

The enabler for listening is monitoring, but a case must be made for action as defined by responding, connecting, and adapting. This case must emphasize how corresponding actions improve customer experiences, relationships, and in turn, influence their capacity to act and guide their peers. To listen takes a culture focused on customer-centricity and a philosophy that is intended to steer customer experiences.

Revisiting the Capgemini report, we can clearly see that 32% of businesses surveyed are on their way to designing what many would refer to as a social business or a social enterprise. These companies see listening as an integral part of marketing, selling, and servicing customers. As customers continue to come into focus, 32% see listening as a means for better understanding customer sentiment and needs and another 25% view social media as an additional customer service channels.

Asking the Unthinkable

In a time when progressive companies such as Dell and Gatorade are celebrated for their newly erected social media command centers, it is their ability to truly listen and their openness to allow conversations to reverberate throughout the entire organization that serves as a next-generation model for customer-centricity. But how many businesses can build a command center where technology opens doors to bona fide organizational transformation? Sure, many large organizations house sophisticated business intelligence divisions and certainly big data is well on its way to dramatically impacting how a business captures, analyzes, and translates data into actionable insights, but in the mean time, social media lives outside of B.I. and thus is limited in its ability to transcend silos.

To listen to conversations and build an infrastructure that can 1) Learn, 2) Engage, and 3) Adapt across the organization, the construction of a listening framework becomes far more complex than merely monitoring keywords and reporting out to key stakeholders. And for those of you who have had to program dashboards in some of the most popular social media monitoring systems, you can attest to the complexity of development. Factor in the complications of programming, the typical user experience of most monitoring platforms, and the day-to-day needs and responsibilities of stakeholders, and you’re faced with a series of hurdles that impede adoption. These challenges face any organization looking to scale the act of monitoring, let alone the development of an infrastructure for supporting engagement and adaptation.

Programming dashboards around keywords, filters, exclusions, associated alerts is arduous. Deploying these systems across the organization and expecting lines of business and other business functions to adopt complex systems is an incredible ask. Many monitoring vendors offer dedicated or part-time resources to support programming and also monitoring, which businesses are keen to employ based on resource limitations and lack of expertise. But those services come at a notable cost. And, the cost of adding seats and keywords to these systems is also not inexpensive. More important, these costs are not commensurate with the perceived value of “social media monitoring” among executives.

An opportunity exists for outsourced command centers to assist social businesses with monitoring, listening, and engagement support while the overall value for social media and customer-centricity matures. Whether this model exists within a vendor infrastructure or that of an agency that maintains multiple vendor relationships, organizations need cost-effective, efficient, and proficient solutions at the ready.

Existing vendor support models are expensive and limited in scope as tied to the product.

Current agency models are dedicated to the function they are typically designed to serve, for example, marketing, advertising, service, etc.

A new model built on the technologies, systems, and processes powering some of the most renown command centers in play today, can help expedite the customer-centric evolution of a business and how it listens, learns, engages, and adapts over time. Additionally, this model can free-up resources within the organization to build the necessary architecture to capitalize on social opportunities to demonstrate business critical value and the overall promise of social media to executives and stakeholders.

I’ve had an opportunity to work with some of these hybrid models where the best of each system is employed against the needs of each business. Expertise is part of the value proposition and that know-how is translated into actionable insights and opportunities for the companies they help. As businesses mature, the listening framework migrates internally, preserving the investment and setting the stage for scale and adoption.

Businesses testing outsourced command center models will report both challenges and successes. But nothing about the evolution of business is designed to be easy. We’re dealing with culture and a significant investment in legacy systems and supporting processes. The reality is that the future of business is based on listening and the actions that manifest as a result. Businesses are forced to invent frameworks as they go, but stepping back to address the bigger issues of what monitoring and listening solves and accordingly, how that translates into tying business priorities and opportunities is where businesses must initially focus. Building an infrastructure around those answers is the opportunity for stakeholders, vendors and service providers to solve today.

Are you a vendor with ideas or experiences that can help businesses?

Are you a representing a brand that is solving this problem?

Are you a service provider that has built an outsourced command center?

Please share your insights in the comments section for the benefit of all.

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“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.

This conversation is important as you are expected to answer it not just today, but and also over time.  The source of the question though, may also impede innovation and experimentation. Why?  The answer in of itself is as elusive as the question asked. As much as the previous sentence sounds like a riddle, it is a very real observation. Often it is asked without a clear understanding as to whether or not the answer will actually change the company vision or the current course of business. Sometimes it is genuinely asked to do just that, change the vision and the course of business toward relevance. Either way, this is an opportunity to show how new media enables desired business outcomes.

Before we tackle the question, let me share a quote with you. After hundreds of executive discussions, I’ve stitched together a recurring theme that I believe will help you…

“If you come to me with a request for budget and resources for social media, to make it a priority for our business, you will lose every time…If you tie social media to our business priorities and objectives and demonstrate how engagement will enable progress, you will win every time. Social media must be an enabler to our business, just show me how.”

- Your CEO

Your job is to connect the dots between the value of new media, the expectations of your customers, and the business roadmap the company is operating against.

So, when it comes to R.O.I. in social media, perhaps we’re asking the wrong question.

Again, the answer is difficult, but not impossible to answer. If I ask you, “how are you?” you will probably respond with “fine,” “ok,” “good,” or “great.” But if you take a moment to think about it, each of those answers begs a follow-up question to deepen the conversation, “why?” Or, “why do you say that?” Otherwise the question serves no real purpose other than to casually acknowledge another person or to run through the traditional ritual of easing into a conversation. The same is true for R.O.I.

If we are indeed to discover the “Return,” we need to tie it to more than the “Investment,” we need to understand the circumstances, intentions, and potential impact and outcomes business leaders need to see in order to understand new or foreign opportunities. Said another way, we need to define the “R” that defines tangible success and work out a formula that allows us to find the answers. Therefore, R.O.I is specific to an outcome or a goal, which means that there is no one answer.

To help, Susan Etlinger (@setlinger), my colleague at Altimeter Group, recently published an open research report, “A Framework for Social Analytics.”

The report opens puts ROI in context to help you focus on business value in your social media efforts:

“What is the ROI of social media?” This is one of the most frequently asked questions related to social strategy. While 48% of social strategists reported earlier this year that their primary internal focus is to develop ROI measurements,2 ROI is just one metric in the social business toolkit. Rather than focusing on social media as a monolithic entity, businesses should evaluate it based on its contribution to a range of business goals. Says Richard Binhammer, Strategic Corporate Communications, Social Media. and Corporate Reputation Management, Dell Inc., ‘There is no single ROI for social media.’”

As we see in the executive quote earlier in the post, tying social media to business objectives and metrics helps them see a clearer picture. We have to remember that executives most likely do not use social networks personally. It’s impossible for them to see what you see, therefore taking the extra time to connect the dots helps you make the case and in doing so, brings the R.O.I. answer into focus.

Susan also does a wonderful job of not only showing us how businesses should view R.O.I, but she also helps businesses identify how to develop analytics frameworks that define the “R” or the return for specific business objectives.

Prep work: Assess how your business is measuring R.O.I. on other fronts today

Step 1: Align your strategy with business objectives

Step 2: Determine how you will measure success and also define critical milestones

Step 3: Evaluate your organization’s readiness to measure social media and bridge the gaps

Step 4: Choose the right tools to measure progress and outcomes

Remember, there is no one way to measure R.O.I. There are many business pillars that stand on a solid foundation for growth. Susan introduces the Social Media Measurement Compass to guide businesses as they’re planning social media programs. Remember, social media doesn’t just belong in the marketing department, a social business is customer-centric and social media enables more effective engagement, learning, and adaptation. Therefore, it is the responsibility of other critical business functions to engage.

1. Innovation: Collaborating with customers to drive future products and services

2. Brand Health: A measure of attitudes, conversation ad behavior toward your brand

3. Marketing Optimization: Improving the effectiveness of marketing programs

4. Revenue Generation: Where and how your company generates revenue

5. Operational Efficiency: Where and how your company reduces expenses

6. Customer Experience: Improving your relationship with customers, and their experience with your brand

The three tenets of social business, Connected, Engaged, Adaptive create a transparent relationship with customers that opens the door to meaningful metrics to measure success and improve everything in between. In the end, understanding the relationship between business objectives and social media tactics will create a series of relevant strategies and critical links that in of themselves serve as opportunities for measurement and the establishment of R.O.I.

We cannot measure, what it is we do not know to value…

You can download Susan’s report here and also follow her on Twitter for more insights into metrics and analytics.

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Google+ | BrianSolisTV
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The End of Business as Usual: Rewire the way you work to succeed in the consumer revolution

Pre-order now at Amazon | Barnes and Noble | 800CEOREAD.
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ENGAGE!: The complete guide for businesses to build and measure success on the social web

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Click here for your favorite infographics…now in 22 x 28 poster format!

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.

Chairman and CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff shared his thoughts on the acquisition, “With Radian6, salesforce.com is gaining the technology and market leader in social media monitoring. We see this as a huge opportunity. Not only will this acquisition accelerate our growth, it will extend the value of all of our offerings.”

With this acquisition, Salesforce is doubling-down its business strategy to boost the “S” in the socialization of CRM (sCRM) and help businesses integrate the social customer into its customer relationship management methodologies. The social customer is forcing businesses to adapt processes and systems as their behavior as well as their needs and expectations are evolving along with their use of social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogs, et al.

Consolidation is in the air. With this Salesforce/Radian6 deal, Lithium’s acquisition of ScoutLabs and MarketWire picking up Sysomos, we can expect to see businesses place greater importance on the social customer outside of marketing and communications. As my colleague at Altimeter Jeremiah Owyang observed in a recent report, almost 50% of social media programs live inside of marketing today. In order for a business to become a social business, it requires the creation of bridges between business functions and social customers and bridges between existing silos.

Salesforce’s acquisition of Radian6 clearly places a great importance on monitoring into what Jeremiah refers to as the social business stack. Additionally, the integration of monitoring into a business is the first step toward a long road of change. For the most part, monitoring and analytics services are used to track the state of social for the brand as well as the efficacy of its campaigns. The social business will use monitoring to introduce relevance into the business mix to adapt to the needs of customers internally and externally through a virtuous cycle of…

1. Listen
2. Learn
3. Engage
4. Adapt
5. Repeat

The Salesforce acquisition of Radian6 demonstrates the importance of social activity to create a new framework for a new generation of business. It’s more than technology, it’s not equally about philosophy and social science. With each day that passes, social media plays a greater role in the shaping of customer experiences throughout the entire life cycle.

UPDATE: My Altimeter colleague Susan Etlinger adds additional perspective to the discussion, “Salesforce.com acquires Radian6: Implications for the Social Analytics Market.”

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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.”

Fast forward several years, the community manager has evolved into an industry standard position within the social media value chain; it is also the beneficiary of its own appreciation day.

If a conversation takes place online and we’re not there to hear it, did it really happen?

Community management is indeed a critical role in any fledgling social or adaptive business. Monitoring keywords provides us with invaluable insights that reveal the sentiment, volume and reach of activity within our markets. Identifying, tracking, and engaging customers and stakeholders helps us cultivate rewarding communities measured by loyalty and advocacy. Listening to conversations provides us with an opportunity to feel what people are saying and the experiences they’re sharing. If we pay attention, we can surface the ideas and touchpoints that gives us purpose and provide us with opportunities to earn relevance.

Over the years, the role of the community manager has evolved. What started as a gateway to surfacing the conversations related to brands in the emerging conversational landscape, evolved into something far more sophisticated. And, we’re just getting started.

Houston, We Have a Problem

When I think about those famous words, “Houston, we have a problem,” I immediately envision scores of individuals seated in rows, each facing desktop terminals, while collectively positioned in front of a series of large screens. This was after all, mission control, and the fate of the astronauts in Apollo 13 rested in the hands of the technicians and scientists overseeing the operation.

In the realm of social media, community management usually entailed one person tracking keyword mentions as they appeared and reacted accordingly, hosted dialogue with customers, prospects, ensured that channels between information and representatives were seamless, and identify opportunities for improvement across the board. As conversations amplified and social graphs propagated, brands affected the most by never-ending activity in social networks and blogs required a more advanced solution for tracking, measuring, and potentially engaging stakeholders, influencers, and detractors. This new obligation only intensified as social media moved from digital outliers to the mainstream. Now, some of the socially vulnerable brands in the world require a mission control not unlike what we envision when we hear those two words, “mission control.” The difference is that this new infrastructure is designed to ensure positive brand experiences as well as the impact of real-time brand democracy.

In some cases, brands receive thousands to tens of thousands of mentions per day. In reality, it was too much for any one person to command. And like that, the importance of listening and monitoring intensified and rapidly demanded a new support infrastructure. We are now moving from the era of community management to fully fledged command centers.

Several months ago, Gatorade debuted its version of a social media command center. Spawned within Gatorade’s marketing team, Mission Control allows employees to track and visualize conversations, sentiment, and also the performance of existing campaigns.

Mission Control is manned by as many as six individuals that track various activity and in some cases, feed insights back into the organization for response and also introduce shifts in current strategies. Additionally, the team is monitoring clickpaths and reactions to improve landing pages, content, and digital bridges to optimize efficacy and outcomes.

Carla Hassan, Gatorade’s senior director of consumer and shopper engagement, is not content with simply monitoring and adapting. In an interview with Mashable, Hassan intends to “take the largest sports brand in the world and turn it into the largest participatory brand in the world.”

Gatorade’s move is bold and admirable. It sets the tone for brands around the world to listen, engage and also adapt. As a result, the company is already fostering increased interaction between customers and athletes and scientists. The goal of any participatory brand is to introduce mutual benefits at the point of engagement as well as throughout all possible touchpoints online and in the real world. The reality is that in order for Gatorade’s mission control to prove its value beyond yet another corporate cost center, it will have to yield revelations, barriers and opportunities to ultimately justify its existence across all of PepsiCo.

The Dellwether of Customer Sentiment

In social media, Dell is one of the most oft cited best practices in the hallmarks of social media.  The Dell Hell days were nothing short of historical for any business. Consider it a baptism by fire if you will. Dell was forced to listen, engage, and adapt in order to weather the social storm. And, over the years, Dell has perfected the art and science of linking listening to relevance. While you may grow tired of hearing about Dell’s successes in Social Media, the truth is that their social endeavors have affected the entire organization, opening doors between departments and collaboration and ultimately eliminating the walls that once siloed critical business functions. In many ways, Dell is years into designing both a social and adaptive business. With the recent launch of its Social Media Listening Command Center, customers officially become part of Dell’s value proposition.

In December 2010, CEO Michael Dell and CMO Karen Quintos officially launched the company’s Command Center as the operational hub for listening and engagement across all social media, globally. Dell made its name in social media by responding to customer problems. But, this is bigger than customer service or marketing. Dell is embedding social media across the fabric of the company, connecting with customers to listen, engage and act on every facet of business. The Web is now a point of convergence to build stronger customer connections and improve products, service, and business overall.

According to Dell, the Social Media Listening Command Center tracks on average more than 22,000 daily topic posts related to Dell, as well as the mentions of Dell on Twitter that have a reach greater than the circulation of the top 12 daily newspapers in the United States.

Tracking surfaces:
- topics and subject of conversations
- sentiment
- share of voice
- geography
- trending across topics, sentiment, geographies

The reality is that conversations on the social Web touch every aspect of Dell’s business. As a result, Dell’s efforts in social media and community are focused on hearing everything to ensure that the relevant people in Dell’s businesses receive feedback and connect with customers directly. More importantly, it’s about learning and changing based on repeat feedback.

With more than 5000 Dell employees now trained in social media, many are actively listening across the Web as part of their jobs.

Operator Please: Creating a Social Switchboard

When I talk about the idea of the social or adaptive business, it is to the extent that social media impacts the entire organization. Responding to problems is only one facet of listening and engaging. The intelligence rife within the always-on focus group yields insights that can inspire new products, services, and improvements across the entire organization. For example, Dell monitors keyword clouds to see if certain negative words represent emerging trouble spots. If a hardware or software issue gains momentum, the company can hone in on the root cause and issue a fix before the problem reaches a boiling point. Diffusing the problem before it’s everyone’s problem greatly diminished the likelihood of earning attention from influencers, bloggers, and press.

The truth is that no amount of social media brilliance or creativity will save you. This must be more than a dazzling show because the world expects you to have a presence on Facebook, Twitter and other relevant networks.  Gone are the days of operating in a vacuum.

Before we can collaborate externally, we have to collaborate within. This is also about efficiency and cooperation where it hasn’t really existed before. We are now creating feedback loops wherever touchpoints and intelligence are active and brewing.

Listening and responding only gets us so far. The goal of any adaptive business is to sense empathy along with opportunities for real-time and right-time engagement. Community management is now more important than ever before and it is only gaining in prominence. It was never just about listening, monitoring and responding. No matter how sophisticated these processes become, this is still and always will be about building a community where communities are active and emerging. This is about investing in a community through inspired action and engagement. And, this is about creating an adaptive business to not only compete for the future, but compete for relevance.

Rich Karlgaard and Brian Solis on the Forbes Video Network discussing Dell

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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.

Everything we thought we knew and valued is now in dire need of reassessment. We are entering into a time when we are affected by voiced sentiment in the public spotlight and backchannels of the social Web. What we hear, see and observe can and should touch us.

Businesses are now responsible for not only delivering beneficial products and services, but poignant, personalized, and aspirational experiences as well. This is true today and tomorrow as we compete for the future that is revealed through the actions and words of the people we wish to reach and inspire.

In Social Media, We are All Brand Managers

The process of evaluating, measuring, and defining brand stature was once relegated to a brand manager, expert, or team and shaped by a top-down process of activities designed to reinforce the message and personae. Now however, the brand is the direct responsibility of each person representing it, individually and collectively. When we listen to the activity that populates the statusphere and the blogosphere, we find that in addition to the overall brand, conversations map specifically to the individual departments that define the business foundation, which ultimately supports brand stature and resonance. In turn, these activities inspire immediate and long-term responses either directly through focused interaction or indirectly through product refinement, adaptation and overall messaging, targeting, and positioning.

Individual representatives indeed contribute to the collective repository of brand value and perception through distinct engagement and contributions while also assessing and embracing themes and trends to move the business in a more meaningful direction altogether.

No One Group Owns Social Media

Whether social media management and engagement is centralized, distributed or community powered, the sum is always greater than its parts. Individually and collectively, we contribute to the cycle of customer acquisition, retention, loyalty, and influence as dictated by market behavior and the direction that these influencers dictate implicitly or explicitly.

Among others, online dialogue connects consumers, influencers, and prospects to brand ambassadors representing…

- Sales
- Product
- Service/Support
- HR
- Partners (Value/Design Chain)
- Marketing
- Communications
- Finance

In many ways, we become social seismologists, monitoring and measuring the human seismograph as it triggers activity that affects us both positively and negatively. As actions speak louder than words, we must put our words into action. And, part of acting is reacting whether it’s through conversations, change and evolution, or a fusion of participation and modification. By engaging we learn how to diffuse situations, empower communities and more importantly, how to discover and embrace new ideas that beget prominence.

The Brand Dashboard

Much in the same way we compete for attention through the frequency and volume of appearances in the consumer attention dashboard, brand representatives track brand health, risks, and opportunities through a dedicated brand dashboard. And, almost every division will have a person or team dedicated to orchestration of their respective social activity. These socially-tuned tools allow for customized search, reporting, and analysis across multiple social properties, revealing market intelligence in real-time and charting our next steps to stay connected and relevant. These dashboards radically improve the rate in which each team within the organization learns, reacts, and adjusts, delivering pertinent solutions, information, and products/services in the process.

If we evaluated conversations on Twitter for example, we could examine activity through the lenses of distinct branches of the business (click the image for a larger version).

There are many solutions to consider including PRNewswire’s Social Media Metrics, Radian6, Techrigy, among many others. For the sake of this discussion, I’ll highlight free tools to maintain a balance while demonstrating possibilities. In this case, we’re tracking “iPad” in Twitter, but we could use the aforementioned services to track activity across the entire Web.

Using TweetDeck or Seesmic, for example, we can track the product/brand (column 1), which represents the information stream that benefits the community manager or the person responsible for trafficking conversations in an sCRM or SRM workflow. This column or columns will feature keywords that include the brand, products, market-related topics as well as competitors (column 2).  In addition to a community manager, column 1 is also important to customer service to identify potential issues and directly respond where applicable and also document discrete issues that can expedite fixes or resolution.

Column 1 also benefits the brand team as conversations allow for brand managers to analyze the composition and collection of important words used in conjunction with the brand to gauge success, failure, and areas for improvement (see below).

In addition, the combination of columns 1 and 2 impact marketing and communications (as well as IR/finance) professionals who can also benefit from the ability to assess influencer activity, facilitate rapid research to build target lists based on keywords, and dictate participation/response programs when and where necessary – all in real-time.

Columns #2, 3 and 4 are designed to monitor and measure potential or existing sales and the invaluable feedback that will define our immediate and future revenue landscape. This research allows us to materialize invaluable information tied to lead generation, loyalty, and revenue.

Here, we’re tracking our keywords in conjunction with other keywords that reveal the state of potential transactions. In this case, and really just for a simple example, you can see the dialogue around competition in addition to conversations that feature a combination of our keyword plus other verbs that surface intention, (iPad) + “buy” and  “thinking+about” + “buying.” When fused with word clouds, we can grasp a greater awareness for opportunities to shape sales activity.

If we hone in on keyword combinations that reflect referrals and recommendations, we can discover activity related to assessing the value of the Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer referrals, community advocacy, and word of mouth. In addition, we can also peel back the layers that historically prevented us from realizing emotion as shared with peers. Adding words to our fixed keyword searched such as “love,” “hate,” “sucks or sux,” “want,” and “fail” creates a bridge between impressions and the specific instances and people behind the words. This process is critical in the earning of empathy in order to champion meaningful responses and more importantly, change.

For example, from a recent discussion with Richard Binhammer of Dell while attending Le Web in Paris, Dell actively monitors for compatibility issues with other products to initiate fixes before they amass into critical issues en masse. This dramatically decreases the time to market from ID’ing the problem to offering a solution, many times, well in advance of the masses ever knowing a problem ever existed.

To What Extent…

Custom feeds stemming from keyword searches can represent much more than referral and loyalty value of our customers however. They can also paint a picture of experiences and sentiment to engender opportunities to ensure satisfaction. Exporting feeds or text from your dashboard into a system such as Wordle, we can see conversations and associated opinions in one cloud. Tip: Using Searchtastic, as one option, you can export tweets directly to Excel for review and organization.

Understanding sentiment and trends at a high level is important when understanding the state of consumer satisfaction online. We can review samples of reactions across multiple networks in order to identify communities of relevance and as such, prioritize our attention and activity – and to what extent. This real world and suggestive information also sparks ideation and hopefully innovation within to inspire significance outside.

Using one of the many available tools such as Twitter Sentiment and Trendistic, sentiment and trends anchored to keywords become visible. And, when combined with word clouds, doors representing new possibilities unlock.

For a deeper view into the conversations contributing to the sentiment outlines, solutions such as pb.ly by PeopleBrowsr offer real-time dives into positive, neutral, and negative conversations in the form of management-ready reports.

For representatives across the organization, these reports (from PeopleBrowsr and other service providers) deliver the intelligence necessary to take action. And, therein lies one of the greater challenges facing social media champions today. Change is only possible where potential for improvement is recognized.

Organizations must have an infrastructure in place to support a clear and present path that channels insight from the outside to the center and back out again as we earn relevance, trust, and loyalty among influencers, customers, peers, and prospects. Defining a workflow that unites brand representatives to streamline the system for identification, prioritization, assignment, and follow up of important instances will ensure structure and organization around a formal process. A workflow also connects ideas and trends to change agents, product architects, and decision makers and those who can transform words into action. It’s how businesses will survive this ongoing (r)evolution of Social Darwinism.

Monitoring keywords across various departments is only part of the equation. Measuring activity that hits designated landing pages completes the chain of connectedness. All experiences must have a beginning and an end and if we’re not providing direction that leads to decisive action, then we essentially send our prospects from a very interactive and dynamic environment to a static dead-end. Read: If you think that sending people to your corporate website is a means to an end, think again. Chances are, your www.brandname.com is in desperate need of focus; most likely a complete social makeover is overdue.

In the now web, it is our job to define the experience. Many brands find success in the implementation of dedicated landing pages that extend social engagement while still channeling visitors into a rich hub of information and action. If participation and engagement represent the point of introduction, then the landing page is the beginning of the end. And as one thing ends, something new begins.

However, without insight into the activity in and around the LP, we are blind in our direction.

Our influence lies in our ability to elicit action and in turn, measure it.

The social Web is an incredible conductor to fusing action and metrics to measure the cost per action (CPA).

Information is the concrete in which we build the foundations for interaction, service, direction, and commerce.

Integrating a mechanism for measuring activity on that landing page allows those responsible for defining experiences and engendering change, not necessarily the Web team or Web master. We’re empowered, and required, to analyze the results of our activity. Here, we can ascertain our top referrers, our highest converting words, as well as costs per action, click and overall cost of acquisition.

There’s what we say and then there’s what they say…which carries greater weight?

If we’re not listening, observing, and learning from the world around us, we lose touch with those who dictate the perception, reputation, and direction of our brand.

In the end, we earn the relationships we deserve.

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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.

Take for example, this brief illustration. A man gets home from work and starts engaging in a meaningful discussion with his wife about his bad habits (or rather, she engages with him). She insists that she is tired of picking up his dirty socks from the living room floor; and asks him to be more mindful of picking up after himself. He actively listens to her, agrees; but forgets to put his dirty socks in the hamper that evening.

What happens next might sound familiar – lather, rinse, repeat; or in other words, active listening with no action for the simplest of requests. The end result is an unhealthy relationship in some cases.

A lot of organizations today do an excellent job at listening to their customers online. In fact, some very well respected companies and technologies have emerged that address this new trend of listening on the social web (BuzzGain, Radian 6, Visible Technologies). Many of these tools have great reporting functionality; and some even help create feedback workflows for brands. But the work doesn’t stop there.

The question for brand marketers (and I am talking to myself as well) is … “how long can we expect our customers to continue talking to us if all we do is just listen?”

Given the example above, there is much more than just listening. A recent report by Charlene Li and Wetpiant might shed some light on this very subject.

The report looked at several brands and measured their breadth and depth of engagement with consumers on the social web. Here are the top ten brands with their scores:
1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie – Yahoo!/Intel (85)
What makes this report even more interesting is the correlation of engagement and financial performance. The analysis groups each brand with the greatest depth and breadth into a category titled “Social Media Mavens”. On average, those who were classified as “Social Media Mavens” grew 18% in revenue over the last 12 months. On the other hand, the companies who were least engaged with consumers on the social web unfortunately suffered an average of 6% decline in revenue. Here is the actual report (PDF) for reference.

A closer examination of the top two companies’ social initiatives leads to an intuitive revelation.

Both Starbucks (ranked #1) and Dell (ranked #2) do not only listen to their consumers, but they also act. Take for example the My Starbucks Idea initiative. The site allows for just about anyone who registers to make suggestions directly to Starbucks. One that just caught my attention was a suggestion to “please bring back the mapleoat scone…it is one of life’s little pleasures.” Great suggestion; I registered and voted. I love those maple scones.

What’s even more important is that Starbucks is doing more than just listening and building a fancy site that allows people to vote/comment/suggest. They are actually implementing many of the suggestions that Starbucks customers are concerned about; and ensuring that everyone is aware.

Dell was the first to do this and is the recognized leader for listening to their customers. The IdeaStorm web initiative launched a few years ago and they have the same model as Starbucks. Their top suggestion from the community is to “Standardize Power Cables for Laptops”.

Again, they do more than just listening. They actually pick up their dirty socks and put them into the hamper every night.

For example, Dell just recently announced its FastTrack option for quick shipping to get pre-configured systems directly to customers as quickly as possible. This program was generated from the multitude of ideas/suggestions straight from IdeaStorm, to include:

• Offer Nextday Delivery
• Delivery Time – Please Reduce.
• Maintain a minimal stock for immediate delivery

What I am suggesting is that organizations that listen to their customers online are doing the right thing. There is nothing wrong with investing in software and human capital that helps a brand listen. Listening is good; as it gives immediate insight as to the breadth of the community, how they are feeling, what they are saying, passion points, etc. But listening without acting, in my opinion, is worthless.

I am not an analyst, nor am I very analytical. But a close examination of the correlation between engagement on the social web, financial performance; and brands taking action should not be ignored.

This post written by Michael Brito. You can follow him on Twitter, add him on Facebook or check out his social media blog.

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?

A few, but growing faction of businesses realize the value in listening and learning. Others focus energy on conversation monitoring and mining. Well, and most are either incognizant of this incredible conversational microscope, but will soon awaken to the reality and influence of the outside world.

Whether you believe that Social Media symbolizes the future of all media and communications, at the very least, we can agree that it represents the democratization of information and the equalization of authority. Value on the other hand, is debatable.

The so-called wisdom of the crowds can be disappointing at times. It can also surprise and inspire us. Our returns in Social Media stem from our investment into it – through dedication, heart, soul, value, and wisdom.

In most cases of corporate Social Media, conversations equate to chatter, which to be honest, is child’s play. It’s a perpetual cycle of moving and reacting and I have yet to see the true value, scale, and return in responding to everyone on Twitter. Yet, if you attend any conference where Social Media is at the crux of the experience, you’d believe that Twitter is the only social network on the Web.

The fact is that participation should resemble an integrated and streamlined system of strategic fieldwork (digital anthropology), research, analysis, internalization, service, systematic workflow for translating information into meaningful action and growth, the outward communication of support, empowerment, and vision, and the evolution inspired by the absolute experience.

Everything must start with a plan and covenant that established a strategy for presence, not visibility, and the actions that define and strengthen it over time. This should not be news however.

You’re either a host or guest.

You’re either a leader or a follower.

You have to collaborate within in order to collaborate outside – prior to engagement. Without an infrastructure to truly support what you will indeed learn in the “now” Web and the internal support to adapt to best meet the needs of your customers and influencers today and tomorrow, then what do we accomplish by spending and applying significant resources to the proverbial conversation?

We’re all learning together, and perhaps for me, that’s where the magic lies.

It’s time to shift from a mindset of monitoring and mining to one of collaboration, leadership, and justified adaptation.

Give them something to talk about…

MarketingSherpa released a report that surveyed social media marketers in late 2008 about the effectiveness of their practices. I thought you might find the data interesting and helpful.

eMarketer translated the data into a visual presentation for our review and analysis.

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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…

Unbeknown to many companies, a quiet revolution was amassing over the last two decades. And, slowly but surely, the whispers eventually intensified into roars.

The socialization of the Web and content publishing disrupted the balance and is now forcing a media renaissance that is transforming information distribution, human interaction and everything that orbits this nascent ecosystem.

It is the dawn of a democratized information economy, which is engendering the emergence of champions and visionaries who endeavor to manifest a more media literate society while transforming the way we publish and share relevant content.

The Social Web heralded the arrival of mainstream consumer influence and a global ecosystem that supports and extends their observations, complaints, opinions, and recommendations.

It served as a great equalizer, capsizing the existing balance and redistributing influence.

Not only is it changing how we create, decipher, and share information, but also it is forever reshaping how brands and content publishers think about their markets and the people who define them.

We are Media

We the people demanded personalization in engagement, improved services that put the customer back into the spotlight, and acknowledgment that our feedback would incite a more value-added circle of overall communications and product adaptation.

Although there were numerous, sensational attempts to silence us through the misdirection and suppression of critical yet ignored or unheard experiences, insights and feedback, we have emerged influential and consequential to the bottom lines of businesses all over the world.  As consumers, we fervently stormed these new platforms and staged a social revolution that forced the attention of those who so readily dismissed us – silence was no longer golden.

Social networks and platforms have transcended the role of the consumer from customer to authority, ambassador and critic. Those who master their domains are developing persuasive and important communities around their areas of expertise, interests and passions and now possess the prowess and authority to direct, instruct, and steer decision makers and referrers.

Aside from the disciplines and behavior our profession dictates, we are far more than communicators, marketers, publishers or chroniclers of life events.  We are also knowledgeable people with ideas, opinions, observations, and experiences that cannot be discounted.  We bring opinions, experiences, rapture, and frustrations to each conversation as a consumer. But when its time to reach our peers and colleagues, we regress to broadcasters and purveyors of information and lose site of how what we represent truly impacts those we’re trying to reach.

We essentially lose perspective and personification.

In the end, we earn the influence that our activities and shared experiences justify and warrant. Our presence and participation impacts the decisions and impressions of those around us.  We connect people to products and services and ultimately assist in the governance of future actions among those within our immediate social graph as well as the graphs that link our friends, their friends and also the friends of friends (FoFs) network.

As a brand manager and also as someone who’s responsible for extending the company’s products and value propositions to the marketplace and building meaningful communities and relationships, I personally welcome you to a new genre of distributed influence, one where we must earn authority on both sides of the conversation – as representatives and consumers.

We are the people we’re trying to reach.

Building a Bridge Between Brand and Markets

We’re paying attention to a-list bloggers, from technologists to moms to lifestyle to politics and everything in between and forgetting or ignoring the magic middle, those bloggers who actually inform and interact prospective customers.

We’re blindly jumping into social networks and engaging with the “avatars” tied to keywords instead of identifying and recruiting those who can help us create valuable, thriving communities that support the exchange of pertinent information.

Tastemakers and trendsetters are the new influencers, but their roles in affecting consumer behavior are not derivative of the Social Web. Instead, these tastemakers and trendsetters who individually contribute to a more influential public are now readily discoverable courtesy of the search boxes and APIs that facilitate their recognition within the communities of consequence. Social Networks, blogs, microblogs, and all other forms of people-powered platforms provide a looking glass into the interaction between consumers and also the ability to discern the level of authority each one possesses.

You’ve heard it time and time again; “People do business with people they like.”

While that’s true, they also spend money on products that help them do something that they couldn’t do before based on existing needs and desires or frustrations with current experiences. Therefore people are looking for answers, not necessarily friends. They’re seeking societies where they can learn, share, and contribute. And they’re using the tools, channels, and networks to connect with one another.

Listening counts for everything nowadays and it’s by and far the easiest step in embracing and ultimately leading the transition from an introverted organization into an extroverted, community-focused human network.

It sets the foundation to not only listen and respond on the front lines, but also it necessitates the modification of the entire infrastructure to adapt to the real world needs of customers and the insights they choose to share.

This is a privilege and an opportunity.

It’s the shift from top > down broadcasting to a more holistic methodology that embraces consumers directly using the tools and channels they use to communicate. In order to build a bridge between brand and markets requires the personification of the company and it’s ability to not only humanize its story, but also listen and respond to input and dialogue through words and the adaptation of products and services.

Direct to Consumer (D2C) Connections

Influential customers collectively create a network of information beacons that help others successfully navigate within their respective markets and industries.  We’re awakening to a new era of stature and authority that augments broadcast communications with the participatory groundswell of user-generated leverage and impact. In the world of Social Media, brands can also earn influence using the same tools and networks that have empowered bloggers and tastemakers alike.

So how do you establish a D2C program that tunes into inbound feedback, fosters relationships, and creates a foundation for material evolution? How do you identify these beacons and genuinely approach them to potentially establish a collaborative engagement?

Authoritative customers and bloggers are noticeably absent from mainstay databases and systems that have long helped marketing and public relations identify traditionally influential voices. The systems and algorithms required to accurately identify conversations and the people who fuel their public development. Most of this “real time” technology that is facilitating potentially prominent conversations and also the ability to discover them is just now demonstrating promise and proving value.

Since everything starts with systematic listening, we can’t sit and wait for existing applications and solutions to acclimate to the dynamic of our business and supporting markets. We need to identify and embrace the tools that help us find out who’s important to us right now. And here’s the good news, most of them are free.

Listeners Make the Best Conversationalists

Actually listening, hearing, and internalizing the words of others inherently qualifies someone as worthy of engagement. Interaction, however, is measured by the exchanges that further the development and direction of the hosts of the original conversations as well as those who were peripherally observing and affected.

Tastemakers and those who’ve earned the ears and eyes of their peers are either dubious of corporate outreach or opportunistic in assessing the overall potential. Your approach counts for everything. And, this is not – at least for the purposes of this discussion – about buying or leasing the outcome of the interaction.

Those who pay attention to the dynamics, intricacies and psyche of the words, tone, and nature of the dialogue can make the difference between simply responding, reconciliation, and resolution.  But please take note, if the process of listening and responding was relegated to simply searching keywords and responding to specific instances, “by the book,” this currently coveted role quickly downgrades to the general ranks of basic conversational competence.

Conversation is simply conversation, regardless of tools. The qualifications to maintain dialogue are trivial. The true question is what is it that we’re trying to accomplish as the task of simply showing up to the table is honestly, child’s play.

When discussing social media and participatory protocol, let’s no longer share the examples of standing on top of a table during a cocktail party and obnoxiously yelling out messages at the crowd.  Honestly, this is an example social etiquette, not strategic social listening and engagement.

Identifying influencers is one thing. Engaging people and enticing not only attention, but ultimately establishing an association and striving to earn allegiance takes far more than interpersonal adeptness. Our aspirations and benchmark must rise higher than the basic ability to “communicate, communicate, communicate.”

We need to be acutely informed, open, and enlightened individuals who can engage at both an empathetic and genuine position.

As you listening?

Are you really listening?

The type of listening I’m referring to here, isn’t simply identifying updates or threads tied to keywords to inject canned responses, generic questions or disconnected updates based on the nature of the conversation.

Listening requires a dedicated infrastructure and support system; essentially the ability to not just hear something nor placate or acquiesce the emotions and concerns of real people, but the capacity and alacrity to adapt based on the information and insight that’s absorbed.

It’s the power of inflection.

The Mechanics of Attentiveness

Who’s responsible for listening? Someone has to take responsibility for the process of listening and channeling conversations. In some cases, a community manager is hired to act as the central hub to all internal departments. In other cases, PR has taken over the responsibility of listening, reporting, and analysis.  In other organizations, the function of monitoring, observing, documenting, reporting, trending, and conversation management is outsourced to an agency that specializes in new media. Depending on the firm, you can expect to pay between $2,500 – $7,500 per month for daily tracking/documentation.

It’s this function that serves as one of the most important roles in the transformation of any organization from an inward focus to an outward extension.  The intelligence and insight gathered during these exercises tells us everything. Most importantly, it reveals where we need to start and what is actually transpiring in this enthralling and persuasive landscape.

It’s where we need to start. It’s how we assess the opportunity. It’s also the only way to gauge the volume, velocity, and resources required to properly interpret, process, and address the situations that require our attention.

While jumping into Social Media is a given for some companies, others need to substantiate the effort in order to justify the shift in or creation of dedicated budget and personnel.

Before we can discuss ROI, we first need to understand the proportions of the investment required. The distance between perplexity and resolution is disclosed through research and appraisal. There isn’t another way around it. The answers lay in the process of searching keywords and reading, watching, absorbing, and logging the responses you encounter.

Hearing Aids and Prescription Glasses

I’m not suggesting that you’re losing your hearing or your sight. I’m metaphorically referring to the fact that we need assistance in order to hear and see relevant conversations and the related people and communities where they emerge and inhabit.

As you’ll see that the list is of tools to identify influencers, unearth and listen to online conversations, and track their paths, relevance, and status, is extensive and the available services and options will only continue to multiply.  The ONLY way to understand, truly grasp and appreciate, the tools that are right for you and match the needs of your organization and existing processes and workflow is to endure the undertaking of manually searching for relevant information.

Automation is helpful in that it saves time and conserves precious resources, and in some cases, provides us with answers to questions we never new to ask. The systematic procedure for distinguishing, tracking, analyzing, trending, and reporting conversations and would be influencers requires a direct experience in order to understand the differences in results between a hands-on approach and those run through algorithmic software.

I know. There are only so many hours in the day and it’s not possible nor scalable or sustainable to do everything alone. However, the truth is, that this is how you learn. This is how your garner perspective. It establishes a benchmark. This is the investment you’re making in yourself, your career, and your future.

Just do it. You’ll thank me later.

Now, let’s review the tools available so that we can start the process of uncovering the unknown and plotting our next courses of action.

Help me keep the list up to date and complete. Please add resources in the comments section.

Searching The Social Web

Collecta: Collecta is the first true real-time search engine that monitors not just Twitter but the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media sites, including Twitter, Flickr, among many others. Unlike a traditional search engine that displays indexed results and are ranked based on a series of links and ranking, results and trends in Collecta are updated in your search stream are as they happen – as they appear online. Think Twitter Search, but for the entire Web.

Google Alerts: Email updates of the latest relevant results for keywords on the Web, blogs, or some indexed social networks.

Microblogs

PeopleBrowsr: A dashboard for managing communications across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, FriendFeed and other social networks. The service also doubles as an integrated search network for each network in connects and the ability to track and manage automated or customer responses to the results for key words – providing an all-inclusive communications management platform.

FriendFeed: FriendFeed is a microblog that aggregates content from multiple networks into one, easy to follow collective stream. Friends can follow, comment, share and “like” updates and also spark threaded conversations based on their activity. Since FriendFeed can import updates from multiple properties such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, LinkedIn, and roughly 50 additional services, it provides a highly curated source for curated search. The advanced search feature in FF allows users to search the entire network for keywords that are syndicated through all 58 networks within the community.

OneRiot: Formerly Me.dium, OneRiot crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg, YouTube, and other social sharing services, then indexes the content on those pages instantly. The end result is a search experience that allows users to find fresh, socially-relevant, human curated content. It also displays a link to the person who first shared the item online.

Google Query: Expected to launch soon, Google Query will provide the ability to search microblogs similar to how users can search and sort data within Technorati, by date, influence, location, language, etc. Here’s the current description used in Google’s localization service: Recent updates about QUERY. This is the MicroBlogsearch Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format.

Twitter Search: search.twitter.com, oneriot.com, Twazzup, Collecta.com all provide the ability to search Twitter (and in Collecta’s case, the entire Web) for real-time results related to a key word. For a more detailed search based on timeframe, location, hashtag, people, and sentiment, try search.twitter.com/advanced.

Twitority: A based Twitter search engine solution that allows users to sort results by any, some, or a little authority.

Tweefind: Provdes search results that appear in order of user rank.

Twazzup:  Like Twitter Search, Twazzup displays the tweets in chronological order based on your keywords. The results also reveal other potentially relevant keywords, events, and hashtags associated with the subject matter you’re researching based on the patterns of those who collectively share similar updates. Results also include a list of top trendmakers as well as related pictures, videos, and most popular links related to your search criteria.

Twingly: Like Twitter Search, Twingly also provides results for other mainstream and niche microblogs such as Identica, Jaiku, Pownce archives, among others. Also see Blogsearch.

Blogsearch

Technorati: Considered the largest blog search engine in the world. Technorati tracks “blog reactions” (keywords) and blogs linking behavior.

Blogsearch.google.com: Similar to News.Google.com, Google Blog Search allows users to comb through blog posts for relevant discussions and also to identify authorities on any given subject. Google alerts are also available for blog search results.

Blogged.com: A community for identifying blogs and bloggers that cover particular topics from what’s popular to “the long tail.” Blogs are rated by the community as well as by blogged.com editors to provide a human perspective.

Twingly: Provides “spam-free” search results of blogs discussing your keywords. Results can be sorted by Twingly rank (a vetted process of rating individual blogs), time, and language. Results include a link to the profile of the host blog.

BackType: Usually blog comments do not appear in traditional or blog search results. BackType is a conversational search engine that indexes and connects millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media so people can find, follow and share comments.

Forums/Usergroups

BoardReader: Accurately find and display information within the Web’s forums and message boards.

BoardTracker: A forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information contained in forum threads.

Go directly to the source:
Google Groups
Yahoo Groups
Ning
Meetup

Listening + Conversation Management Systems

BuzzGain: A complete listening, influencer identification, relationship management and reporting solution, BuzzGain helps identify conversations containing keywords in blogs, media, and social networks and also the influential voices behind those conversations. Using the integrated research tools and reporting tools, users can also document and visualize trends, add commentary to results and publish customizable reports. It’s free during its public beta perios.

HowSociable: Provides a free look into brand visibility metrics by allowing a user to enter a keyword, name, or phrase and identify the content transpiring in 22 networks.

WhosTalking: WhosTalkin.com is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding important topics. It serves as a hub for search results on blogs, news networks, social networks, video networks, image networks, forums, and tags.

FiltrBox: Real-time social media and web monitoring, Filtrbox monitors thousands of mainstream news outlets, blogs, and social media in once place. By consolidating results in one dashboard, users can eliminate redundant searches and alerts. Users can also import their Google Alerts to manage noise, remove duplicate results and consolidate disparate results feeds.

Radian6: Radian6 is focused on building a complete monitoring and analysis solution for PR and advertising professionals so they can be the experts in social media. The Radian6 listening platform monitors the social web to uncover conversations related to specific brand on millions of blog posts, viral videos, reviews in forums, sharing of photos, twitter updates. It also provides the ability to analyze buzz about a company, products, issues, competitors, and outcomes of specific marketing campaigns and social media investments.

Buzzmetrics: Delivers trusted brand metrics, meaningful consumer insights and real-time market intelligence to help clients apply the power of consumer-generated media (CGM) to their businesses. BuzzMetrics services and solutions uncover and integrate data-driven insights culled from nearly 100 million blogs, social networks, groups, boards and other CGM platforms. The services include brand monitoring, brand connections and customer relations, consumer insights, and brand campaign planning and measurement.

Trackur: Online reputation monitoring and social media listening tools, Trackur scans hundreds of millions of web pages–including news, blogs, video, images, and forums—and reports any discoveries that match relevant keywords.

Visible Technologies: Helps users listen to and learn what consumers are saying about their company/brand in the blogosphere and social media communities. It also fosters customer engagement by enabling users to effectively participate in these discussions by placing the right messages in front of the right audiences for a more direct connection.

Sentiment Metrics: Sentiment Metrics social media measurement dashboard enables users to monitor and measure social media and gain actionable business intelligence to develop more targeted marketing, improve products and increase profits.

TNS Cymfony: Provides expert interpretation of how corporate messages are picked up across traditional and social media sources, enabling the ability to measure results and discover trends that affect the bottom line. Whether the goal is to influence the brand perception during a new product release, marketing campaign or even through a crisis, TNS Cymfony’s market influence analysis tracks consumer preferences across traditional and social media sources and provides the ability for listeners to act and engage quickly to keep perception on track.

BrandsEye: Traces and assesses online presences and provides real-time Reputation Score for both the user’s brand as well as their competitors. This allows companies to monitor the sentiments and opinions of their own customers, while making educated judgments about how to respond to attacks on their online reputation.

Cision Social Media: Social media monitoring of over 100 million blogs, tens of thousands of online forums, over 450 leading rich media sites, along with a complete database of influential voices on the web and in social media.

Techrigy: SM2 is a software solution designed specifically for PR and Marketing Agencies to monitor and measure social media. It works with the company’s Social Media Warehouse system that tracks blogs, wikis, message boards/forums, video/photo sites, mainstream media, blogs, microblogs, and social networks.

Trendrr: Tracks the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time.

SocialMention: A social media search platform that aggregates user-generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.

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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.

Close to 65% of the American population voted in this election, its highest turnout since the election of 1908.

By all means, this election was profound in its results. While I’m not an avid proponent of the Electoral College system for electing our President, the numbers were absolute and decisive. Obama won both the Electoral College vote 364 to 163 and the popular vote 53% to 46% with roughly 127,000,000 votes cast.

Credit: CNN

With Obama’s wins in key “swing states” including Ohio, Florida, Colorado, and Pennsylvania, this election is considered a monumental victory that fundamentally redrew America’s political dynamics. A Democrat had not won Virginia and Indiana in a generation.

Obama’s victory is deeply symbolic. It is a justifying, magnificent, and powerful testament and redemption to those who have struggled for national and personal freedom throughout the history of the United States.

Congratulations is the very least I can send to Mr. Obama and his campaign team.

For the sake of this discussion, let’s examine the election another way, one that may bring to life a different picture of how Obama earned his place in history, and in doing so, his campaign both redrew political lines and also forever changed the political ecosystem.

Over 46% of American voters and 22 states sided with John McCain. Either way you look at it, it’s still a significant portion of America who didn’t believe #change or #hope were attributes of the Obama campaign. These voters believed their future lay with another candidate.

Politics aside, whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, Independent or member of the Green Party, we can not overlook the power of real world community relations combined with the reach and engagement of online social communities and networks.

Again, almost half the country was split with a noteworthy percentage heading into the election undecided.

Online tools such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter contributed to the netting of record-breaking campaign funding and the staggering galvanization of a younger generation of first-time voters who truly made an impact and a difference. The Obama campaign, for example, outspent McCain nearly three-to-one on TV ads toward the tail end of the campaign, which many credit the technology and the corresponding impact of sociology in of itself. The Obama campaign leveraged multiple technology platforms, social immersion strategies and good old fashioned door-to-door relationship building to engage constituents directly, raising an astounding $600 million in campaign contributions.

They went directly to the people online and in the real world.

The Obama team, for example befriended almost 130,000 friends on Twitter with an almost equal amount following him.

On Facebook, the Obama page boasted over three million fans compared to McCain’s 618,000.

YouTube also swayed towards Obama with a network of 358,000 to 191,000 with the Obama camp posting over 1,800 videos compared to McCain’s 330. These videos accounted for millions of views.

If you compare the other social networks and communities from FriendFeed to MySpace to Flickr, the stats are asymmetrical in Obama’s partiality.

Many of these two-way tools however, were simply used as broadcast mechanisms to send updates, solicit contributions, provide updates, and to also rally and unite supporters, albeit successfully.

Reaching the Other 46%

My question is, what if these same social media tools where deployed to not only communicate “to” constituents, but also to listen and interact with supporters as well as those who don’t currently endorse the President-elect?

I argue that if Obama dedicates a team aside from the outbound crew that “pushed” content through social channels in order to strategically reach, listen to, and embrace the 46 % that voted against him, he might be able to run a truly democratic term and head into the next election with a record-breaking approval rating – curtailing the necessity to campaign while in office in order to focus on the issues we elected him to fix – while also cultivating the country for greater future prosperity.

Winning over, conservatively estimating, 5% of voters who were on the fence but ultimately voted for McCain, accounts for almost three million votes.

Since 1954, the approval rating of each President has been actively tracked and published as a reflection of sentiment among the American people:

Among those Presidents with the worst all-time approval rating, our current President holds the dubious honor of ranking at the top:

- George W. Bush – 76% (in a report published 11/10)
- Truman – 67%
- Nixon – 66%
- George Bush – 60%

Perhaps even most concerning is that each President has historically disregarded these numbers so that they could focus on the issues at hand. If the White House were a business, many of these Presidents would have filed for political bankruptcy.

All signs and words emanating from the Obama camp and Mr. Obama himself, point to a strategy of leveraging today’s powerful, two-way bridges of communication.

In a text message sent to supporters on the eve of the election, he reaffirmed that they will be part of Presidency moving forward, “We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.”

But perhaps the most revealing promise that revealed Mr. Obama will run his office for the “people” of the United States, not just those who voted for him, was shared through his inspirational words on November 4th:

I will listen to you, especially when we disagree…and to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.

His first step to bring the vision of running a cross party campaign is the launch of Change.gov, a portal for transparency and interaction during, and hopefully post the transition.

In a sense, Change.gov is a simple and engaging site, but also highly intricate in its goals to give voters a voice. It is resource center for sharing information, updates, jobs, and also provides a channel for people who share their vision, concern, and ideas with the President and his advisors through text, an uploaded image or video.

Mr. Obama offers a message to visitors:

I ask you to believe – not just in my ability to bring about change, but in yours. I know this change is possible…because in this campaign, I have had the privilege to witness what is best in America.

Change.gov is the first step in a long road of reshaping the dynamics of politics and communication with voters.

They’re on the right track however.

Obama’s history-making campaign that fused community relations with social sciences, after all, carried him to the Democratic nomination and also the Oval Office. Mr. Obama and his team have cultivated and collaborated with a database of millions of people that spans a sophisticated contact relationship management infrastructure that spans across the real world to all popular social networks.

With an elaborate and revolutionary channel that will only grow with his Presidency, Obama takes office with a powerful new medium that may eclipse the reach and drive of traditional broadcast media.

Transforming Voters into Customers, While Potentially Erasing Party Lines

But, what about those who voted against him?

What’s the channel for Obama to ask, “Why didn’t I get your vote?” Is it Change.gov or is it through the combination of inbound and outbound engagement that will unearth the concerns that offer genuine potential for not just listening, also but response and earned support?

Most successful businesses around the world place customers at the center of everything. Before the Web, Nordstrom built its engendering foundation on world-class, and now world famous, customer care. In today’s Social Web, Zappos is growing its business by engaging with customers and creating a public and transparent customer-focused culture that is quickly building the company into a global brand that will make it easy for the company to extend its business beyond shoes.

There’s an extraordinary opportunity here for the Whitehouse to leverage these new and influential channels of conversation to embrace and cultivate voters as if they were customers, winning market share, one person at a time.

This is era where information was and is democratized. It is also a live and unfiltered looking glass into the office of the Presidency and also the thoughts, insights, support, satisfaction, and grievances of the American People.

It’s a Two Way Street

This isn’t just about broadcasting content through new channels or merely soliciting feedback, participating in popular networks or actively listening, it’s the ability to identify and internalize themes to precipitate change and earn support through action – not just words.

For the first time, the U.S. President can simultaneously cultivate communities through traditional door-to-door interaction and also directly where people create, discover, and share information online.

Shortly after completing the first draft of this post, the Washington Post ran an article announcing that Mr. Obama will record the weekly Democratic address on the radio and also on Youtube. The videos will be hosted on Change.gov and the official YouTube video channel, with the first one already recorded.

Other opportunities include:

- Launch a social network at Change.gov and/or whitehouse.gov

- Create a citizen feedback and collaboration page at GetSatisfaction

- Solicit policy proposals that people can vote up or down on Change For Us.

- Open the blog to comments on Change.gov (with community moderation).

- Address the country on YouTube and all other video networks with updates, polls, and also address issues in between official State of the Union broadcasts.

- Capture behind-the-scenes footage of the inner workings of the White House and share across all video networks.

- Create a user-generated channel on Magnify.net that features content from constituen
ts.

- Create an @obamacares or @whitehousecares account on Twitter and other micro-blogging communities to listen and respond directly within each network.

- Complement the Presidential radio show with a regular podcast or livecast on uStream.tv or BlogTalkRadio and also interact with the people online, in real time.

- Publish speeches and important policy documents on document networks such as Scribd and Docstoc to be shared and disseminated throughout blogs and personal social profile pages.

- Create a portable and evolving Obama Widget using a SproutBuilder.

(What other ideas do you have? Add them to comments).

This is how a President, or any politician or business for that matter, can authentically connect with the people formerly known as the audience – in the real world.

It creates the foundation for people to participate in a crowd-sourced Government that doesn’t need Congressmen to share discontent or new ideas. The Web cuts through political tape to spotlight real time threats and issues to expedite support and response.

It’s through this collaboration that any public official, particularly the President, can continually maintain a real-time pulse of the country to learn from the human effects and responses to actions to run a more in-tune and effective campaign.

It’s the art and science of stripping down the politics to reveal truth. This is a political ecology rooted in sociology and conversations. People shouldn’t only have a voice during an election time; listening and responding should be an ongoing practice and process of any office.

The President can’t satisfy everyone, that’s just the reality. It’s human nature to disagree. This President-elect is not purporting to be perfect, but it seems he’s honestly willing to learn. With a national CTO in place combined with an informed engagement team versed in social sciences and psychology, we can use technology and two-way channels to not only increase economic efficiencies and boost education and media literacy, but also “listen” to those influential beacons in order to continue to redraw, or potentially erase, party lines.

My hope is that these incredible networks remain a constant source of conversation to extend beyond campaigning, but also collaborative governance that unite people across party lines.

It’s not about being Republican or a Democrat, it’s about representing the majority of the people, their views, passions, ambitions and struggles, in order to be a representative of the people for the people. This is Obama’s opportunity to use the tools and channels of today’s emerging voter demographics to rewrite the future of politics, while serving the best interests of the American People in the process.

Sometimes the best advisors and cabinet members are the very people who elected that person into office, and maybe, just maybe, also those who voted against him in the first place.

If the Obama camp reads this, I’m more than happy to release @obamacares and @whitehousecares on Twitter. I held them for you.

Special thanks to Drew Olanoff.
—

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.

Crisis communications is a branch of PR that is designed to protect and defend an individual, company, or organization, usually from a reactive response, facing a swelling public challenge to its reputation, brand, and community.

Throughout the course of history, we’ve learned that all that’s required to ignite a negative firestorm is a spark from a single voice or an organized congregation.

If a conversation takes place on the Web and you’re not there to hear or see it, did it really happen?

More often than not, we miss the very things that provide insight into a future response simply because we’re not conditioned or trained to proactively discover and diffuse threats or negative experiences.

Our weakness, however, is also our opportunity to manage and also respond to any potentially damaging or menacing public groundswell.

Conversations related to your brand, company, executives, products, and competitors take place each and every day, without our knowledge and perhaps worse, without our participation.

In the era of the Social Web, a story, and the ensuing public recruitment, rallying, and support, can rapidly spread unlike any crisis wildfire witnessed or experienced in previous generations.

Social Media is pervasive. At the very least, it is transforming how we communicate with each other and also how we discover and share information. As the adoption of Social Tools and applications progresses from the left to the right of the bell curve, Social Media will simply coalesce back to “the Web.” But, its migration, exploration, experimentation, and education will only contribute to its significance and resilience and ultimately change behavior and expand the infrastructure for corporate communications in the process. Regardless of genre, the sum of all social channels today equate to a powerful, influential, and revolutionary archetype for exposing and diffusing public opinion.

Perception is formed through the unique, individually-filtered experiences we each bring to the table. In that regard, our brand, and more specifically, our actions are open to public interpretation, support, and dissection. It’s what you say about you, what they hear, how they share that story, and how you weave that insight into future product and service iterations, communications, corporate infrastructure, and public conversations.

The tools and platforms available today are sophisticated, evolved, and designed for social distribution and redistribution. The Social Web forces a new level of understanding and participation in order for all communications professionals, in addition to crises response and reputation management teams, to understand its dynamics and the prevalence of information, positive, neutral, and especially negative.

To date, crisis communications and reputation management were relegated as a reactive response, while the groundwork for a potential predicament and the development of strategic communique is among the best practices for proactive crisis planning.

The traditional crisis communications planning and response workflow:

- Crisis Planning
- Negative Groundswell
- Crisis Response
- Public Relations
- Assessment/Monitoring

In the Social Web, I propose that many, if not a majority of potential crises are now avoidable through proactive listening, engagement, response, conversation, humbleness, and transparency (repeat).

I’d like to introduce you to an old, but new again, dynamic process to integrate into the existing corporate communications and marketing workflow. Today’s social tools and communities that can work against us, can also work with us, when proactively managed and embraced with an open mind, sincere intent, and genuine participation.

- Active
- Listening
- Observation
- Conversation
- Learning
- Planning
- Continued Adaptation and Engagement

The art and science of proactive listening, observation, and participation will not only inspire the creation of in touch, relevant, and poignant PR and marketing strategies, but will also dramatically reduce the potential for reactive response and crisis communications programs. Crisis communications teams can also partner with those responsible for monitoring online brand reputations (ORM – online reputation management) or vice versa, to jointly listen, respond, and incite change from within. This creates a more effective “public relations” organization.

The point is that this is about proactively diffusing visible, but not yet large-scale predicaments before they’re full-blown public crises. And, also through direct listening, engagement, and actively addressing concerns both inside and out of the organization, we’re diverting the momentum from tropical storms before they have an opportunity to form unforeseen and unanticipated hurricanes. It’s the ability to avoid a storm without knowing a storm was brewing by identifying weaknesses and opportunities as they emerge.

This is community-driven communications in its purest form which begets a community-focused and customer-centric organization.

Everything starts with openness and the ability to learn and adapt. It’s the acceptance that it doesn’t matter if the customer is always right. After all, a happy customer will share their good fortune with a group of friends and peers, but an unhappy customer will tell everybody.

Perception is everything.

For communicators, it’s our role to actively listen and translate conversations into actionable next steps. It’s not an automated process. It requires dedication and empowerment. Much of this responsibility is falling upon community managers and the new role of research librarians who are quickly acclimating to online conversations and how and where they apply to the internal decision makers, traffic coordinators, and metrics analysts. By partnering with these new, socially adept resources, Public Relations can can more accurately and genuinely participate with influencers, whether they’re media, analysts, bloggers, or tastemakers. When we step back and assess our markets, we just may find that they’re collectively one in the same.

What if you don’t yet have these roles or resources to help you listen and follow meaningful conversations? It’s not impossible for you to proactively monitor conversations and the cultures and behavior associated within each digital society in order to identify and prioritize opportunities for engagement, reform, and evolution.

Start with using free search blog search tools such as:

- blogsearch.google.com (set up Google Alerts via RSS or email)
- Technorati
- Blogpulse

As we all know, or should know, the social web extends far beyond blogs, relevant online conversations are pervasive and rampant in social networks and microforums as well. In that regard, be sure that your initial waves of search include:

- search.twitter.com
- Ning
- Facebook
- Google and Yahoo Groups
- Uservoice
- Getsatisfaction

For those with a moderate budget to evaluate dedicated SRM (social media relationship management) or ORM tools, consider:

- Trackur
- BuzzGain
- Radian6
- BuzzLogic
- BrandsEye

Search for keywords related to your business, such as the company and product name, key executives, as well as scouting discussions for the “suck” or “die” factor. This includes adding a combination of the following criteria in your search process:

- “product+sucks”
- “company+sucks”
- “die+company”
- “i+hate+company”

As the Web itself grew in pervasiveness, it also paved the way for customers to easily launch sites to vent publicly. Examples already number in the thousands, with some capturing significant public attention including starbucked.com, ihatestarbucks.com, boycottwalmart.org and againstthewal.com.

Fairwinds recently released a study that documents the power of Internet gripe sites. The Wall Street Journal explored the topic with an in-depth article, “How to Handle ‘IHateYourCompany.com,’” which explored what some companies are doing, or not doing, to protect their brands online.

In its study, FairWinds researched the Web to identify gripe sites specifically containing “sucks.com.” The study uncovered over 20,000 domains with only 2,000 ending in the phrase “stinks.com.” Of the major consumer-facing companies surveyed, only 35% own the domain name for their brand followed by the word “sucks.”

But domain names are only one of the many opportunities for customers to share their discontent, and in the new era of the two-way web, communications, customer service, and brand and reputation management teams must all work together together to actively survey the landscape to detect and diagnose negative experiences.

The Social Media and conversation landscape is a diverse universe. In order to identify a potentially dangerous asteroid on a glancing or full-blown collision course with your brand, you’ll also need a powerful telescope, or, a “Conversation Prism.”

The Conversation Prism was designed to provide a snapshot view of dialogue within mainstream and vertical social networks and communities that may be consequential to your brand. Every network provides a search box to unearth threads of discussions tied to connected keywords and inherent developments, negative or positive, that may affect the company brand and reputation.

Conversations and developing crises are probable across a multitude of online channels, including:

- Blogs and Comments
- Microcommunities aka Microforums
- Social Networks
- Lifestreams
- Customer Networks
- Groups

The ensuing conversations tied to your brand can quickly and easily amass, across multiple networks simultaneously. Don’t let those conversations fall upon deaf ears.

For the first time, we have the ability to identify and address potential crises as they surface. And not only do we have the ability to engage with people to address their grievances or discontent, we can also learn from each engagement and feed the corresponding lessons, experiences, and criticisms back into the sales, service, and product development departments to change everything for the better.

It’s the difference between simply placating customers and improving our business and products to satisfy many others who would have been potentially exposed to a potential deficiency.

Customers are among the new influencers and have the tools and platforms readily available to them in order to share their experiences and potentially incite the masses.

It’s not just about the gripes we’ve identified, it’s about the dialogue and actively and publicly addressing each issue to minimize the unforeseen eruptions from those who have yet to publish or rally others against us.

While our control has been crowd-sourced, perception management and crisis communications are ours to lead. Perception is reality and it’s our responsibility to invest in the relationships and the correlated activities that will help us cultivate and manage an industry leading, market relevant, and in-tune brand.

Listen, learn, and adapt. In the Social Web, and in the real world of business, companies will earn the relationships, and the crowd-sourced brand, they deserve.
—

UPDATE:

Now available as a downloadable and printable Word or PDF file at Docstoc and Scribd.
—
Recommended Reading on PR 2.0:
- The State of Social Media 2008
- In the Social Web, We Are All Brand Managers
- New Communication Theory & the New Roles for a New World of Marketing
- Comcast Cares and Why Your Business Should Too
- Will The Real Social Media Expert Please Stand Up?
- The Social Revolution is Our Industrial Revolution
- The Essential Guide to Social Media
- The Social Media Manifesto
- Free ebook: Customer Service, The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media
- PR 2.0: Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
—
Crisis Communications 2.0 Series:
Where the Streets Have Names: Learning from Bono’s Facebook Dilemma
Nike, Just Do It: When a Local Story Runs Away on the Web
Apple and the iPhone Price Bomb
The Skype is Falling
Microsoft PR Sparks a Blogstorm

Discussions and debates on the viability, necessity, and effectiveness of conversational aka social media marketing continue to roar across the Social Web.

There are three sides to this equation:

- New media pioneers and practitioners who defend and evangelize the art of conversations because they’re investing in people and their feedback and have the experience to showcase value and ROI.

- Social Media marketers who embrace social tools and promote their use in corporate/brand marketing and Public Relations, learning in the process and building relationships along the way. They may or may not be tying these initiatives to business metrics.

- Some experienced business and marketing professionals who view conversations as potential distractions that are immeasurable, expensive, not scalable, and ineffective in purporting corporate messages to their “target audiences.” To them, Conversational Marketing and Social Media are buzz words without substance or statistics to support their reason for being.

As Social Media continues to impact everything from journalism and communications to customer service and the foundation for Website design and network dynamics, it’s also inspiring a new army of purported and legitimate “experts” who are offering assistance to those companies seeking to understand and engage in online conversations.

Social Media Marketing combines, in a perfect world, the most effective attributes of PR, Web Marketing, Customer Service, and a working knowledge and genuine enthusiasm of the social networks and tools to listen to, spark, and engage in relevant discussions – not all but, those with influence. Marketers in the social realm will also embrace social sciences to observe and understand the online cultures and social dynamics where they ultimately wish to participate, while also maintaining a working knowledge of their company’s business model and markets..

Social Media experts must have the ability to determine which networks are relevant to the businesses that they represent, why they need to pay attention, how to listen, and how and when to engage. Most importantly, they must connect participation to brand resonance, customer loyalty and also the ever prominent “bottom line.”

Without a deep understanding of customers, markets, online communities, and the dynamics of their company’s business model, Social Media Marketers will succumb to the brilliance of shiny new social objects and remain hypnotized by their allure and promise – missing the true opportunities of engagement in favor of popular social tools.

Let me tell you where I stand…

Conversational Marketing and Social Media Marketing, to me, aren’t truly rooted in marketing at all, nor should they be. This is about learning from listening first, and engagement afterward.

It’s not a miracle cure for years of one-sided, top-down push marketing.

Assuming that we can change the greater public perception one conversation at a time isn’t realistic and it isn’t scalable in the short term, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t value by investing in the future, now.

If a conversation takes place online and you’re not there to hear or see it, did it actually happen?

Influential conversations are taking place with or without you. If you’re not part of the conversation, then you’re leaving it to others, and possibly competitors, to answer questions and provide information, whether it’s accurate or incorrect.

The ability to listen to public impressions, questions, and discussions that would have otherwise gone unnoticed or unanswered tell us everything. And, the exercise of genuinely engaging and helping forms valuable relationships and inspires brand enthusiasts in the process. These conversations are an opportunity to change perception through dialog, but more importantly, by feeding the information learned in the field back into a company can improve product development, enhance service, and educate executives through real world feedback.

But words aren’t a means to an end. Everything starts with listening and observation and as always, actions speak louder than words.

It’s not the act of conversations that immediately provide value to an organization, it’s the listening, observing and ability to then learn from the inspired engagement.

Are the results of conversations trackable?

Yes.

Is activity measurable?

Yes.

Are relationships scalable and able to demonstrate a return on investment?

That’s the million dollar question.

How do you measure the value of online relationships right now? It can’t simply be tied to sales when referrals, word of mouth, brand awareness, and evangelism are priceless and mostly immeasurable. And, there’s no price too great for paying attention.

I wrote about the concept of Conversational Marketing vs. Market Conversations almost a year ago. I believe it still holds true today…

If it’s one thing that we can learn about Social media is that people and the markets they represent have rallied against marketing and slick marketers and have demanded personalization, transparency, and sincerity.

They don’t want to be told what to buy, what to think, or have their views and opinions disregarded simply because they are not classically trained in the art of service, design or marketing.

Brands have become democratized. Audiences have evolved into factions of people linked together by common interests and populate and define communities throughout the static and social web. In some cases, there are thousands of conversations taking place across multiple networks.

Is it possible or even warranted to have a Community Manager track and respond to everything?

No way!

The chances of a company releasing a perfect product and having the public embrace and accurately share its benefits, applications, and value proposition through their peer networks is implausible. It’s called the grapevine and the story will lose precision and factuality in the process of storytelling. And since we live in the real world, not every product or service is perfect, therefore they require listening and discussions to improve them over time.

Perception management is the process of reaching out to these communities and quite honestly, it’s nothing new. The social tools available today only provide an easier solution for li
stening
and reaching people. It’s still designed to create champions and enthusiasts who can help you tell your story within peer networks, accurately and passionately.

Not only can we learn from these real time focus groups, we’re also guided towards the development of more informed and poignant outreach moving forward.

As Sean Maloney of Intel says, “It’s not what you say about you, it’s what they say about you.”

Talk is indeed cheap and a complete waste of time if conversational marketing is used to spin products or services into something they’re not.

However, if your company, and a completely renewed and redesigned infrastructure, is ready to change based on those conversations to improve product/service design and quality, as well as becoming a proactive resource to their communities, then talk begets action, and action is toll for change.

But participation for the sake of participating or engaging in online conversations must be more substantive than hosting one-off conversations in order to truly impact communities and have positive influence on the economics of business.

Richard Binhammer, a primary community leader at Dell, recently commented, “My actions on behalf of Dell are not mere talk and conversation. Everyday we follow up on the online listening and the learnings we get from customers, fixing issues and bringing customers’ perspectives inside Dell — real time, real views and real customer experiences. We believe that is improving our response times, contributing to better products and services and making us a better company, that is directly connecting with customers who care enough about us to talk about us on the web every day.”

As I’ve said before, it’s so much more than the ability to guide companies on how to create fan pages on Facebook, islands on SecondLife, accounts on Twitter, Pownce or (insert microblog of the month here), and profiles on YouTube and Myspace.

Businesses who socialize their marketing because Social Media is the New Black, are in for a rude awakening. Those who realize that conversations are taking place with or without them, invest in the process of listening to reveal public perception and identify the networks where meaningful conversations take place, engage with those seeking a response, and analyze the feedback to improve processes as well as future products, are investing in a brighter, more profitable future.

Insight can not fall upon deaf ears. And, silence is never golden.

It’s the listening, analytics, charting social maps, drafting strategies for meaningful engagement, understanding our relevance in the short and long tail, and the definition of metrics and ROI that count for everything to businesses and respective decision makers these days.

- Traffic
- Links
- Trackbacks
- Comments
- Threads
- Registrations
- Referrals
- Sales
- Loyalty

Functional, real world, and measurable attributes can be tied to any community-focused program today. But, we need to start first start backwards and work our way forward in order to determine and track ROI.

Remember, it’s what you say about you, what they hear, how they share that story, and how you weave that insight into future conversations that underscore meaningful community-driven efforts. And, everything starts with listening and observing in order to maintain relevance to the very communities we wish to reach, learn from, and inspire.

Other relevant voices on the subject for a balanced perspective:

Chris Heuer, “It’s About Conversation, Not Marketing”
e-consultancy, “The Problem with Conversational Marketing” – the comments are important
The Drama 2.0 Show, “Note to Tide: Detergent is Detergent”
Kathy Sierra, Be Brave or Go Home

Related articles on PR 2.0:

Free ebook: The Essential Guide to Social Media
Free ebook: Customer Service, The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media
The Art of Conversation – Thoughts and Observations
The Social Media Manifesto
Cultural Voyeurism and Social Media
Intel Insiders to Advise Intel on Social Media Strategies

UPDATE: Tamar Weinberg includes my definition in her post, “What Traits Define a Social Media Marketer.” It also includes quotes from Chris Brogan, Valeria Maltoni, Jason Falls, Geoff Livingston, MG Siegler, Allen ref=”http://www.centernetworks.com/”>Stern, Laura Fitton, Darren Rowse, Muhammad Saleem, Chris McGill, Adam Metz, Louis Gray, Jane Quigley, and other incredible voices.
—
Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, or Facebook.
—

I’ve been involved with Social Media since the beginning and the more I work, write, and speak, the more I learn. Over the years I’ve observed a series of questions and reactions that I’ve documented along the way and have actively included them in my posts, ebooks, contributions, as well as at my speaking appearances. Over the last year, I’ve assembled the most commonly asked questions and the answers into a free, downloadable ebook as a way of contributing to this active social community that has so graciously shared knowledge, insight, and experience.

The Essential Guide to Social Media is a “quick start” overview of how to listen and participate in social media and new media marketing.

I hope this helps you and please let me know if there’s anything missing so I can be sure to include it in the next version.

The content from the ebook is below and you also can download a Word or PDF file on Scribd or Docstoc.

The Essential Guide to Social Media

An executive outline of Social Media tools and resources needed to listen and participate, guiding PR, Customer Service, Product Development, and Marketing

Introduction – The State of Social Media and Business Marketing

We live in interesting times. We’re currently enthralled in an immersive, confusing, and definitive transition in our “day job.” If you don’t engage, your competition will. This session will help you become a Social Media sociologist and participant observer, not a cultural voyeur, in order to get to work and build relationships along the way.

Question: If a conversation takes place online and you’re not there to hear or see it, did it actually happen?

Indeed. Conversations are taking place with or without you.

If you’re not part of the conversation, then you’re leaving it to others to answer questions and provide information, whether it’s accurate or incorrect. Or, even worse, you may be leaving it up to your competition to jump in to become the resource for the community. Yes, there will be negative comments. Yes, you’ll invite unsolicited feedback. Yes, people will question your intentions. Negativity will not go away simply because you opt out of participating. Negative commentary, at the very least, is truly an opportunity to change the perception that you did or didn’t know existed.
Many companies are participating in social networks as a form of proactive outbound customer service with a twist of social marketing such as…

- Zappos

- JetBlue

- Southwest

- H&R; Block
- Dell

- Wine Library

- Freshbooks

They’re engaging customers on their turf, in their way, in order to help them solve problems, find information or simply engage them in valuable dialog. In turn, they’re turning customer relationships into a powerful competitive advantage.

It’s breaking new ground and it’s setting a new standard.

Engaging with and empowering your customers as an extension of your marketing efforts isn’t new. However, in the era of Social Media, there are new tools and philosophies to more effectively listen and engage with customers and in turn…

- Cultivate a more significant community

- Enhance your brand

- Build relationships

- And, create evangelists along the way.

Participation is marketing.

Intention is everything.

And, actions speak louder than words.

However, marketing needs to be clarified as I am not referring to the traditional marketing that typically “speaks” at “target audiences” through “messages.”

In Social Media, this is about dialog, two way discussions that bring people together in order to discover and share information. Joining the conversation isn’t as simple as jumping in however.

Social Media Tools

If you’ve ever walked into the tool section of any hardware superstore, you’ll be more than inundated with options.

There are tools for everything, more than we knew – with more introduced every week.

Let’s not forget that these tools serve a purpose, some general, while others more specific.

- You wouldn’t show up to fix a hole in the wall with everything in the store.

- You bring what you need and you learn how to use them.

With Social Media, there are more tools than you can possibly imagine and quite honestly, more than you can ever or should ever use.

We assess the tools based on our objectives and the conversations that are taking place.

- We don’t just start using everything because they’re shiny, new, slick, or popular.

We embrace only the tools that facilitate conversations between the people we want to reach, where they’re taking place.

- The rest is about Social Science and the art of nurturing discussions and relationships.

Social Media is About Social Science and Not Technology

Social Media is much more than user-generated content.

It’s driven by people in the communities where they communicate and congregate.

They create, share, and discover new content without our help right.

They’re creating vibrant and rich cultures across online networks and using the social tools that we learn about each and every day to stay connected.

- Any social network is a melting pot of various cultures.

What are the Social Sciences?

Social sciences provide us with an understanding of how human interaction and the ensuing ecosystem shape individual attitudes and behavior.

Sociology is the study of human social behavior, especially the study of the origins, organization, institutions, and development of human society.

- Observation of cultures, people, and the dynamics of interaction.

- The recognition of people independently from the tools is an important reminder that their interests are at the center of what we do.

Sociologists study society and social action by examining the groups and social institutions people form.

Anthropology is the scientific study of people, including the development of societies and cultures.

Ethnography is the study of people in their natural or “native” environments—where they live, work, shop, and play.

- In many cases, it is an ethnographer (or someone following in the guiding principles of ethnography) who observes a community to learn the socio-cultural behavior and interaction to hopefully become accepted by the community and in turn, engage as a true member of the desired digital society.

Margaret Mead is known for championing a style of anthropological research called participant observation.

Participant-Observation Fieldwork – When Margaret Mead studied in the field, she set out to both observe people and also participate in the life of the community. It was her belief that it was the only way to more fully understand the culture. Participant-Observation fieldwork is a hallmark of contemporary anthropology.

Social Sciences and Social Media

In Social Media, communities take the form of social networks and the communal groups within them.

People establish associations, friendships, and allegiances around content, objects, products, services, and ideas.

How they communicate is simply subject to the tools and networks that people adopt based on the influence of their social graph – and the culture within.

- Cultures are different and unique within each social network and the groups that define them.

Through social sciences, we’re learning to peel back the layers of our target demographics to see the people underneath.

It reminds us that we need to humanize our story.

- We would never speak to our friends and family through messages, so why should we speak “at” the very people we want to reach and befriend?

We’re opening our ears and our minds to acknowledge that we can no longer push our impressions upon people in order to earn resonance

We have to listen, talk, listen again, assess, and contribute value – as if we were citizens of each respective community we wished to join.

Differences Between Listening and Research

By listening, reading, and participating, brand marketers have an opportunity to make their brands more approachable and shareable than ever before.

Most Social Media Marketing initiatives have started with the tools first…

- Brands opt to engage using the most popular tools and networks to attract relationships instead of going to where their existing or prospective customers are congregated.

- They didn’t observe or listen prior to jumping in.

Many have incorrectly viewed the process of social media as “build it and they will come.”

Companies simply create profiles on Facebook and Myspace, accounts on Twitter, uploaded videos to YouTube and images to flickr, and simply hoped for a mass wave of friending and interaction.

- We can’t simply walk into a public square or park, plant a sign behind us with our name, interests and affiliations and expect real people to come up to us for meaningful and long-term dialog.

- This is the equivalent of setting up camp next to a village because you have the tools to do so and expecting the village to integrate you into their society.

Conversational marketing requires observation, which will dictate your engagement strategies.

It starts with a combination of social and traditional tools to discover, listen, learn, and engage directly with customers.

- It helps us find where the conversations are truly taking place.

- The goal is to help them make decisions and also do things that they couldn’t, or didn’t know how to do, before.

- Build relationships through conversations without objectives.

It’s about gathering intelligence.

It removes the tendency to “market at” people and instead naturally shapes a more honest, meaningful, and informative approach.

It helps us humanize our story in

order to create loyalty and earn customer business and ultimately their respect.

Social Media Voyeurs

Many marketers are merely engaging in cultural voyeurism at best

They look from afar and roam the perimeters of online societies without ever becoming a true member of any society.

They don’t truly understand what, where, or why they’re “participating,” only jumping in because they have something to say and have access to the tools that will carry their messages into play.

This like someone standing on top of a table during a cocktail party shouting marketing statements at the party in the hopes that it may inspire, compel, or resonate with someone to start a series of healthy and spirited conversations that extend the intended messages.

- Instead, the only conversation it’s starting is propelled by disbelief and/or anger for interrupting the dynamic of the interaction and the flow of dialog that was already underway.

The Breakup – A Comedic View of One-sided Relationships

Video Link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=DkOHsjZKBB0

There’s a popular short video circulating the Web that demonstrates the marketing stereotype of taking through messages without listening directly to the needs of the customer.

The video spotlights a young couple dining at a local restaurant where he represents The Advertiser and she The Consumer.

The scenario plays out with the woman raising concerns over their relationship, specifically complaining that “he” never listens to her, nor does he really understand her wants and needs.

As she continues to share examples of his one-sided behavior, he responds with witty, one-liner messages that paint a very vivid, and familiar picture of how brands usually approach relationships.

In one telling scene, the Advertiser proclaims he cares by referencing a big television ad, a print campaign and even a billboard in Times Square which “was like a 200 foot tall declaration of love.”

When the Consumer tells the Advertiser that she has changed and he hasn’t, the advertiser responds with “coupons!”

After being told that he knows nothing about her, the Advertiser says “I know everything about you. You are 28-34, Your online interests include music, movies and laser hair removal. You have a modest but dependable disposable income.”

The Advertiser merely continues to speak at the customer ignoring her complaints and concerns, behaving as he always has.

This is a representation of how not to engage in Social Media – but it unfortunately happens every day.

Relationships require more than one person and definitely offer benefits to all parties involved.

You can’t manage a relationship, you need to be a part of it, fully engaged.

By embracing the social science in Social Media, we can not only observe social behavior and engage with our peers, but also keep communities intact and unaffected by traditional marketing.

The customer comes first, and if we fuse sociology, social media, customer service, relationship marketing, experiential marketing, and traditional marketing, we’re creating a new formula for outbound influence and fueling a new generation of brand ambassadors and loyalists.

Getting to Work…

Observation

The true form of observation starts with just that, observation.

It’s the listening and monitoring that tells us everything.

We’ll learn:

- Where the relevant conversations are taking place

- Who’s participating

- What they’re saying and the tone of the discussions

- The specific information they’re looking for

- Impressions and conceptions

- The patterns of behavior within specific communities

Important Next Steps

Identify who your customers are and where they go for information.

Search for key words: Product and Company names as well as competitors and their products and services.

Please don’t forget the relationships that exist in the real world.

- They’re also indispensable for providing the feedback and insight you now and later.

Social Tools for Listening

There are many tools available to us for listening, both free and those that require subscriptions, which will reveal the conversational hubs that require our attention.

At the moment, the tools are mostly specific to each category of social media as well as specific networks.

Social Bookmarks

Ma.gnolia

Delicious

Diigo

StumbleUpon

Crowdsourced Content

Digg

Yahoo Buzz

Mixx

Hubdub

Reddit

Newsvine

Blogs/Conversations

Google Alerts

Blogpulse

Radian6 (paid)

BuzzLogic (paid)

Ask.com

Google Blog Search

Technorati

Blog Communities

Blogged.com

MyBlogLog

BlogCatalog

Bloglines

CoComment

Tangler

Micromedia

FriendFeed

Pownce

Tumblr

Seesmic

Jaiku

Plurk

Utterz

Pinger

Jott

Twitxr

Specific to Twitter:

Tweetscan

Hashtags.org

Summize

Twemes

TwitterLocal

Social Networks

MySpace

Bebo

Facebook

Niche Networks

Ning

Plaxo

LinkedIn

CrowdVine

Location

TripIT

Dopplr

BrightKite

TwitterLocal

Live Video and Audio

Ustream

Justin.tv

Veodia

BlogTV

Kyte

Qik

BlogTalkRadio

Customers Service Networks

YahooGroups

GoogleGroups

GetSatisfaction

Yelp

Video

YouTube

Metacafe

Blip

Viddler

Video Aggregation

Magnify.net

Pictures

Flickr

Zooomr

Smugmug

Documents

ThinkFree Docs

Scribd

Docstoc

Creating a Social Map

By searching for keywords in each of these communities, we can create a detailed blueprint for engagement. Here’s an example of the communities I identified that were important to my personal brand as determined by my research and listening.

Immersion

Sociology isn’t simply relegated to observation, it encourages and requires full immersion.

Once you’ve outlined the targeted conversations and who should engage, the process of participation craves a very human approach.

- It starts with respect.

- Participate as a person, not as a marketer, sales person or message factory.

- Be helpful and bring value to the conversation.

- During this entire process, you’re contributing to the personality and the perception of the brand you represent.

– It’s the only way to earn their respect in return and hopefully their business and loyalty.

- Remember, the lessons learned in the field should in turn be fed into the marketing, customer service, product development, sales, and executive departments.

– This inspires more intelligent, experienced, and real world initiatives across all forms of marketing, PR, sales, service, and advertising.

Any sociologist will tell you that the best way to truly “go native” in a new culture or society is through immersion.

- However, they’ll caution you on several things.

– Don’t be naive, don’t be ignorant, and don’t get too immersed where you lose your perspective and value.

Becoming the Customer

In life, you are also customers.

- You buy things.

- You complain about products and services you don’t like.

- You recommend those that you love.

You have to be a customer to think like a customer.

You have to have experienced the product or service your represent in order to be empathetic, knowledgeable, and genuine.

We’ve all heard that in Social Media, we can’t control the message.

- To some extent, we can’t control perception, but we can help steer it.

Be helpful and ensure that your solutions and benefits are clear in a way that can be understood by the different demographics of users that populate your markets. They need to hear things differently across each segment, from the head, to the long tail across every chasm in between.

It’s not just about the masses, but the niche markets as well.

The importance of engagement is to ensure that you engage on their terms according to the rules, and culture, across each community.

Be the people you want to help.

Resources – Personnel and Budgets

Based on the research results, you can measure:

- The average frequency of relevant conversations

- Identify the more active hubs and communities

- The context of the conversations in order to determine time and variety of resources required (a community manager is required at the very least.)

The formula is calculated this way:

- The number of average relevant conversations per day per community.

- Multiplied by the quantity of relevant communities

- Multiplied by 20 (minutes required to research and respond and also monitor for additional responses), variable +/- dependent on the case, usually +

- Divided by 60 (minutes)

- Equals the amount of time required and in turn, the resources and associated costs required depending on internal labor or external consulting fees

Throughout the research process, you’ll undoubtedly see that relevant conversations occur across disparate networks.

- They’re representative of a sweeping variety of related topics

- They require varying responses

- And, they usually map to specific departments within your organization (those most qualified to respond)

– Marcom

– Product management

– Customer service

– PR

– Executive management, etc.

Keep a pulse on relevant conversations.

Feed them, intelligently, to the right people internally.

Guide them on the required response.

Follow-up to ensure that the interaction is more meaningful and helpful

- Distribute the responsibility across existing resources.

Establishing Policies and Guidelines

Understand that whether they know it or not, everyone within the organization contributes to the public perception of the company brand.

Create communication policies and guidelines for all personnel, not just those tasked with participating in social media.

- There are examples and tips online, review them for inspiration and also adapt what works specifically for your organization.

Get IT involved as in many cases, popular social networks are blocked at the firewall.

Craft outlines and determine response strategies based on a series of predictable scenarios.

Assign leads for listening and responding.

Training and education bring things into perspective for everyone.

- Share examples of how to do it right and also circumstances where a variety of scenarios didn’t pan out ideally.

– Note how they were or weren’t corrected.

– One of the best lines I’ve heard when thinking about establishing guidelines is “don’t be stupid.”

Your Personal Brand

Even though you’re representing other brands, your personal brand is also a factor in Social Media.

- It is sculpted and shaped by your online activity.

Determine upfront, whether you are participating as “you” or as “you@company name.”

- Either way, be transparent in your engagement.

Beware the things you share on social networks.

- Realize that everything you share online can be used against you, usually when you least expect it.

- Everything you upload, say, tweet, comment, post, etc., is usually indexable and discoverable through traditional search engines.

- It can positively or negatively affect the company you represent.

Use this as an opportunity to demonstrate and build thought leadership, value, and expertise.

- Google is the new resume.

- Knowledge and relationships are portable.

Summary

At the end of the day, we’re all people and thus we should approach conversations as such.

It may seem like common sense, but as classically trained marketers, we tend to approach these things with our marketing hat on.

- It’s the difference between authentic conversations and one-sided talking “at” people similar to the examples above.

Conversations are feeding communities and communities are markets for relationships.

- Relationships need cultivation and value from both sides in order to grow into something of value and longevity.

Relationships are the new currency in Social Media.

In a social world, engagement is a privilege.

- Friendship, trust and loyalty are the rewards.

In Social Media, we earn the relationships, and the reputation, we deserve.

Additional Resources

Society for New Communications Research – www.sncr.org
SocialMediaClub – www.socialmediaclub.com
Gooruze – www.gooruze.com
Marcom Professional – www.marcomprofessional.com
Now is Gone – www.nowisgone.com
Sphinn – www.sphinn.com
Junta42 – www.junta42.com

Free ebook: Customer Service – The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media

Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, or Facebook.

Just a bit ago, I wrote a post covering my favorite tools for monitoring conversations on Twitter.

I’d like to add one more to the bunch. Recently launched Summize is similar to TweetScan, but also unique in its capabilities and in turn, changes how we may view Twitter search. At the very minimum, it’s a basic search tool that operates similar to how you would naturally search in Yahoo or Google. Both tools bring Twitter alive and expose the layers of conversations taking place that matter to your personal life, your professional brand or the companies/products you may represent.

Developed by Summize Labs, Summize’s mission is to search and discover the topics and attitudes expressed within online conversations.

Summize, provides clean, simple search interface that can be expanded to include more advanced options, similar to Google’s home page, while TweetScan is more of the Yahoo of Twitter search.

For those who are looking for specific content along with emotion, context, location, traffic, or embedded links etc., Summize provides a series of “search operators” to effectively and quickly navigate through the ever-evolving world of micro conversations.

Each search query offers an RSS feed to automatically search and monitor the results as well as the ability to send your results as a Tweet.

The only downside to Summize is that I haven’t noticed an auto-refresh option. It does alert you as new results are found, but you need to manually force it to display them.

Summize Labs is also currently experimenting with a Realtime Twitter Sentiment search tool that locates up-to-the-second tweets about your topic and automatically analyzes and displays the attitudes expressed in those tweets.

All-in-all, I find that I’m using Summize to monitor the conversations that pertain to the companies I represent in order to determine not only context and sentiment, but also the conversations that require our participation.

Companies such as JetBlue, Zappos, H&R; Block, Southwest and Dell are already actively listening and participating in conversations on Twitter and throughout the socialmediasphere. They represent a new era of outbound customer service-focused companies seeking to engage the very people who could in turn further evangelize their experiences. Tools such as Summize only help them, and you, identify the conversations that could benefit from personable, informative, and helpful outreach from you or someone within your organization. Otherwise, you leave it up to those who may or may not be qualified to represent your brand to potential stakeholders. And, even worse, you leave the door open to your competition to interject and earn a position of influence.

Here are the conversations taking place on Twitter related to Summize and the related sentiment (note: type summize and then search for sentiment).

Other relevant stories on PR 2.0:
- PR 2.0 = The Evolution of PR, Nothing Less, Nothing More
- The Value of Online Conversations
- Distributed Conversations and Fragmented Attention
- The Art of Listening and Engagement
- The Social Media Manifesto
- Will the Real Social Media Expert Please Stand Up

Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, or Facebook.

Have you ever met someone so energetic, positive and incredibly smart – someone who exudes passion and someone who “gets it” in an inspirational way?

I’m lucky to know one such person, Deirdre Breakenridge, and she has just published a new, must-read book, PR 2.0: New Media, New Tools, New Audiences. I’m honored to have my ideas, philosophies, experiences, and vision shared throughout the book. I’m even more humbled to have been asked to contribute the foreword.

PR 2.0, as I defined it many years ago, is the realization that the Web changed everything, inserting people equally into the process of traditional influence. Suddenly we were presented with the opportunity to not only reach our audiences through gatekeepers, but also use the online channels where they publish and share information to communicate directly and genuinely.

The book includes other thought leaders who are actively shaping the New Media landscape including Jeremiah Owyang, Jane Quigley, Thom Brodeur, Todd Defren, Tom Foremski, Phil Gomes, Chris Heuer, Anne Holland, Shel Holtz, Jeremy Caplan, Jonathan Schwartz, Jimmy Wales, and many more.

Deirdre has graciously allowed me to share the foreword I wrote in its entirety with you here. Thank you again Deirdre and congratulations on publishing a fantastic and incredibly helpful book!

Foreword: The Road from PR to PR 2.0 to Public Relations
by Brian Solis

Welcome to what just may be the greatest evolution in the history of PR. Modern Public Relations was born in the early 1900s, even though history traces the practice back to the 17th century. The term public relations was said to be first documented by U.S. President Thomas Jefferson during his address to Congress in 1807.

It wasn’t until World War I that we started to see the industry crystallize and spark the evolution of PR as an official profession.

Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays are credited with creating and defining the art and science of modern-day PR in the early 1900s. That’s almost 100 years ago; and yet, in what I believe to be PR’s greatest renaissance, many of their early philosophies and contributions can be sourced to further evolve PR today.

Ivy Lee developed the first working press release; you can love him or hate him for it. But, what we can’t overlook is that he believed PR was a “two-way street” where communications professionals were responsible for helping companies listen as well as communicate their messages to the people who were important to them.

Edward Bernays, who is often referred to as the father of PR, was most certainly its first theorist. A very interesting bit of history is that Bernays is a nephew of Sigmund Freud. Freud’s theories about the irrational, unconscious motives that shape human behavior are the inspiration for
how Bernays approached public relations.

What’s absolutely astounding to me is that he viewed public relations as an applied social science influenced by psychology, sociology, and other disciplines to scientifically manage and manipulate the thinking and behavior of an irrational and “herdlike” public.

According to Bernays, “Public Relations is a management function which tabulates public attitudes, defines the policies, procedures and interest of an organization followed by executing a program of action to earn public understanding and acceptance.”

Why is this astounding to me?

Basically, Bernays is the inspiration for the PR 1.0 publicity and spin machine and the architect of how a majority of companies still approach PR today—even though this is all changing right before our eyes. Many of his thoughts, which fueled his books, Crystallizing Public Opinion, Propaganda, and The Engineering of Consent, were on the cusp of predicting what PR currently is facing in the dawn of Social Media. And, Social Media is reintroducing sociology, anthropology, psychology, and other sciences back into marketing.

If we combined the theories and philosophies of Bernays and Lee with the spirit of the new “social web” aka Social Media, we might have a new outlook on this social science that resembles the new driving principles behind PR 2.0.

But what happened to PR?

It no longer triumphs as a darling among the various marketing disciplines, and in many cases, is regarded as a necessary evil these days. Somewhere along the way, we, as an industry, lost our vision. We got caught up in hype, spin, hyperbole, and buzzwords, and forgot that PR was about Public Relations.

Unfortunately, these days PR is more aligned with theatrics than value.

Enter Social Media and the democratization of the Web.

These are indeed exciting times as Social Media is truly the catalyst for reflection and an opportunity to do PR and amplify value and increase effectiveness in the process.

What is Social Media?

Social Media is anything that uses the Internet to facilitate conversations between people. I say people, because it humanizes the process of communications when you think about conversations instead of companies marketing at audiences.

Social Media refers back to the “two-way” approach of PR that Ivy Lee discussed in his day. It’s about listening and, in turn, engaging people on their level. It forces PR to stop broadcasting and start connecting.

Monologue has given way to dialog.

Now, enter PR 2.0.

Just so you understand, it’s not a trendy term meant to capitalize on the current trend of “everything 2.0.” Honestly, it’s already ten years in the making, but Social Media is truly advancing the adoption of a new, more significant role for PR.

Here’s how I defined it in the 90s (it’s dated, but it is still relevant today):

PR 2.0 was born through the analysis of how the Web and multimedia was redefining PR and marketing communications, while also building the toolkit to reinvent how companies communicate with influencers and directly with people.

It is a chance to not only work with traditional journalists, but also engage directly with a new set of accidental influencers, and, it is also our ability to talk with customers directly (through online forums, groups, communities, BBS, etc.)

No BS. No hype. It’s an understanding of markets, the needs of people, and how to reach them at the street level—without insulting everyone along the way. PR will become a hybrid of communications, evangelism, and Web marketing.

PR 2.0 was actually inspired by Web 1.0 and the new channel for the distribution of information it represented. It changed everything. It forced traditional media to evolve. It created an entirely new set of influencers with a completely different mechanism for collecting and sharing information while also reforming the daily routines of how people searched for news.

PR 2.0 is a philosophy and practice to improve the quality of work, change the game, and participate with people in a more informed and intelligent way. It’s not about the new Web tools at all. They are merely tools used to facilitate conversations…but everything, especially intent,
knowledge, and enthusiasm, are unique to YOU.

You are the key to new PR.

To be direct, the truth is that PR 2.0 is really what PR should have been all along. Now with the democratization of media, people are becoming the new influencers, complementing the existence of experts and traditional journalists, but still regarded as a source and resource for customers equally.

Understanding new PR to reinvent it is the goal of this book. Deirdre Breakenridge has poured her life’s experiences and passion into these pages to inspire and empower you with the ability to change, and ultimately, participate in new media. In doing so, you will learn today’s communication methods that will help you engage in meaningful conversations and build
stronger trusting relationships—both personally and professionally—with customers, influencers, experts, and traditional media alike.

PR 2.0 is about putting the “public” back in Public Relations.

Other relevant stories on PR 2.0:
- PR 2.0 = The Evolution of PR, Nothing Less, Nothing More
- The Value of Online Conversations
- Distributed Conversations and Fragmented Attention
- The Art of Listening and Engagement
- The Social Media Manifesto
- Will the Real Social Media Expert Please Stand Up

Buy Deirdre’s book on Amazon.com

Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, or Facebook.

Earlier this year, I wrote “The Value of Online Conversations,” to share and talk through my thoughts related to improving the quality of online discussions in the face of potential degradation and decentralization of important online discussions.

We live in the era of Social Media, which represents the socialization of content and conversations as well as the creation of communities around thoughts and ideas. People are the hubs of information and we’re witnessing the creation of mini-societies that expand, contract, and connect online and offline. This new paradigm for discovering, distributing and forging relationships based on thought leadership is inspiring and defining significant social and technological progression as well as conversational frameworks.

As Social Media evolves, the value of online conversations is becoming distributed and decentralized. As the host of any given conversation, it is almost impossible to expect your community to discover or congregate around your content in any one given place, especially the point of origin. It’s both the challenge and the promise of micromedia and social networks. The comments section of your blog, for example may not truly represent the community response or reaction because it may thrive across other disparate networks and communities, whether you’re aware of it or not.

And concurrently, those conversations that matter to you, from both a learning and sharing perspective, span a vast array of networks where you’re already participating as well as the networks you may not know exist.

Conversations might have thrived in comments for several years, but those conversations are also augmenting and migrating through thriving micromedia and active social networks. However, it’s important to note and also to remember, that conversations aren’t necessarily limited to comments either. Blog posts that are inspired by thoughts shared in other posts also contribute to and extend conversations and they only increasing in volume and frequency – regardless of whether the platform is traditional (such as WordPress or Blogger) or published on the emerging category of microblogs and micro media (such as Twitter, Jaiku, Utterz, Seesmic, Pownce, etc.)

Dan Farber of CNET recently discussed the importance of the blogosphere and its ability to help conversations evolve. He observed, “Moving the conversation forward is what the blogosphere does best. It starts with an original thought or angle, a scoop of perception, and others add their own perspectives and discoveries to the data pool. You end up with a rich “web” of information and links about a particular item.”

Sarah Perez recently tackled the subject on ReadWriteWeb, where she observed that conversations are only increasing in volume and frequency, “The truth of the matter is, like it or not, the conversations that once existed solely in the blogosphere have now moved on. People still comment, but in a lot of cases, those comments aren’t on found on the blog itself. So the question is, has the conversation become diluted among all the different services and applications? Or is it just adding layers to the original topic?”

Sarah also spotlights tools and shares tips to stay connected to the conversations that matter to you.

Indeed, conversations are no longer relegated to blogs. Nor are they limited to any one community. Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, et al, are not only online neighborhoods (or trendy tools), but they are also forums where your contacts may choose to share their reaction and thoughts directly with you instead of immortalizing those thoughts in the comments section of your blog. Conversations are not only adding layers to the original topic, they’re also more visible and influential than ever before.

After publishing my last several posts, I’ve noticed that a majority of feedback poured in at Twitter and Facebook, which complemented the blog, but also distributed the conversation nonetheless.

Is this a bad thing?

No. It’s just a reminder, that whether you’re a content producer or reacting to the thoughts of someone else, that all feedback accumulates into a repository of collected thought leadership, or lack thereof.

Since the best conversationalists are also the best listeners, the evolution of participatory media requires you to focus your attention across multiple networks in order to invest in the conversations that have value to you.

The investment isn’t inexpensive either. It requires your expertise, time, and attention. All this at a time, when many are already suffering from Social Network Fatigue. By not participating, you’re intentionally withdrawing your brand (or your company’s) brand from the conversation and creating an opportunity for your competition to steal the attention. Your community of strategic contacts is reflective of what you put into it. Since it’s an investment, you earn the relationships and the value that you deserve.

This requires focus and value-add. It requires participation. It doesn’t promote or encourage the practice of lobbing ideas over network walls with the hopes people will find it, discuss it, and promote it. Although the “online you” is distributed, it should also be concerted. The investment in value-added, distributed participation elevates your expertise, grows your online brand and contributes to your overall social capital, but it’s not easy.

Loic Le Meur, founder of video conversational community Seesmic, sparked a “distributed” series of online conversations. He charted his social map and made a noteworthy case to re-centralize content and conversations, in his case, back to his blog.

We used to have our social online presence very centralized, for me it was my blog. The current trend is very interesting, everything is decentralized and we only use the best services by type of media (text, photos, video, music, events etc). Everything we post is totally decentralized this is why tools like Mybloglog, Friendfeed and Socialthing start to gather all of these for us and it is a great idea.

The challenge for Friendfeed and the like is that while I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service.

It’s not an unreasonable request, and would in fact, inject a level of sanity, control, and management back into the equation of creating socialized content, but as Stowe Boyd puts it, “I think that day is done.”

Stowe continues:

Basically, conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation — the comments thread on blog posts — to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: in
to the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to where is is most social. Personally, I don’t think the genie can be put back in the bottle.

The truth is that we are embracing new tools because they’re are either intriguing and fascinating to us and/or because those within our social graph are also adopting them to stay connected and participate in distributed online conversations.

We are responsible for the decentralization of our content and our attention. We need to embrace it focus.

I created a Social Map that outlines where I create, discover, collaborate, and socialize and it serves as a stark reminder that I am distributed and there’s no turning back – at least not yet.

I participate in the communities where I find value and where I can in turn contribute to the value. It is distributed. It is decentralized. However, it is this way because each community sustains its own unique culture, a culture that is only partially represented through the latest crop of aggregators and activity hubs such as FriendFeed, SocialThing, and Ping.fm.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch also introduced the notion of Data Portability into the mix and it does open up some interesting possibilities for helpful solutions.

Data Portability may turn out to be the answer that people are looking for. And it may turn out to be a sort of anti-FeedFriend. The whole point of Data Portability is to get social networks talking to each other and exchanging user data, with their explicit permission. Want to add your flickr photos, twitter messages and YouTube Videos to your blog? Data Portability is working to help make that happen through consensus driven policies and procedures. In essence, data portability embraces the Decentralized Me, but lets users re-centralize it wherever they please.

I embrace and invest my attention in those communities that offer a return. It isn’t much more scalable as it is and I may adopt new tools to help me participate through an aggregated fashion if I can do so without losing the context of the conversation stream and the overall culture.
I am but one person. Businesses, on the other hand, have an opportunity to scale with the conversations that represent the ability to deliver value to each respective community as well as its bottom line.

The reward for participating and adding value to these conversations is Social Capital. The penalty for self-promotion, one-sided conversations, or lack of genuine participation is evident in the lack of apparent ROI as well as the lack of respect you’re granted.

The centralization of the decentralized me starts with identifying the communities of value instead of merely trend surfing. Cultivate relationships where those relationships benefit from your participation, which in turn, ultimately help you. Creating a complex social map isn’t the end-game. Creating a social map that outlines the distributed conversations that impact you or your brand is the goal. Identifying these opportunities and observing the cultures of each community will help you determine the resources and time investment required.

The best conversationalists are also the best listeners. Conversations are distributed and the tools for finding them are available and increase in functionality every week. It requires a proactive approach to find them, for they may not necessarily find you.

Recommended Reading:

Gary Vaynerchuk Puts the Social in Social Media

The Art of Listening and Engagement

The Social Media Manifesto

Conversational Marketing

Facebook is the Hub for Your Personal Brand

Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, or Facebook.
blog

There are many of us running back and forth from the edge to the center who would love to drop “2.0″ from new evolution of PR. Hey, it’s even the name of this blog, and has been for years, but there’s a reason I haven’t changed the name yet.

The subject itself is a catalyst for healthy, informative, and motivating conversations.

I was reminded of this as good friend Kami Huyse shouted on Twitter recently, “I hate PR 2.0 I HATE PR 2.0. I can’t say it any louder, you get my drift. Come on folks, we aren’t software developers here.”

The irony is that when I first started using the term in the mid-to-late 90s during the Web 1.0 era, it was indeed inspired by software development. To reach a state of “2.0” after releasing the first iteration of software is a momentous step – a proof point that we’re on the right track, but that by listening to customers and also innovating, you could constantly release a better product.

And she’s not the only one talking about the so-called PR 2.0 contingent.

Noted PR fortuneteller, Amanda Chapel, captured it so eloquently, “History won’t be kind to PR 2.0, i.e. a moment in time when infatuation with tools replaced understanding of communications.”

It’s clear that there are those who want to help and those who want to cash in. I’m in the help category; so let’s do something about it.

Regardless of terminology let’s just say that there are those who believe…

PR 2.0 = Good Public Relations, i.e. effective communications.*

Yep, that’s a footnote.

*In a perfect world, it is what PR should be and should’ve been all along, but it isn’t.

Somewhere along the way, PR lost it’s way and created a new “sub” standard for what should have been one of the most respected positions within business marketing. Words such as shill, spin, sales, BS, bluff, exaggeration, arrogant, sensationalist, and oblivious, have become synonymous with this once golden profession. While the majority of the PR industry truly believed they were doing the right thing, the truth is that it took the Internet to expose our weaknesses and most importantly, it provided the infrastructure for us to learn from our mistakes publicly.

The reinvention of public relations was sparked ten years ago and its just now gaining momentum.

1) PR as an industry is in dire need of evolution in order to not only stay relevant, but also prove that in the social economy, it can be one of the most effective forms of marketing that cultivates customers, ambassadors, and enthusiasts.

2) Social Media is not New PR. It is a classification of “socialized” media and it is inspiring new PR, but they are not one in the same.

3) Darwinism will weed out those who don’t get it as well as those who pretend to get it (even if they don’t realize they don’t get it).

There’s a tremendous amount of confusion within the globally distributed halls of PR, and instead of debating and focusing our energies on 1.0 vs. 2.0, we should be working together to help people make the migration to new methodologies, strategies, and showcase the tools to participate.

The divide between those who do get it and the people that don’t is oceanic. Equally, there are veterans and opportunistic marketers who “believe” they get it, but actually don’t and are actively pushing this substandard, naïve, or manipulative form of person-to-person marketing…and they too must also learn.

Narrowing that chasm is a personal objective for me.

Here’s how I defined it years ago:

PR 2.0 was born through the analysis of how the Web and multimedia were redefining PR and marketing communications, while also creating a new toolkit to reinvent how companies communicate with influencers and directly with people.

It is a chance to not only work with traditional journalists and analysts, but also reach out to a new set of influencers, customers and peers.

No BS, no hype, just an understanding of markets, the needs of people, and how to reach them at the street level – without insulting everyone along the way. PR is evolving into a hybrid of communications, evangelism, and web marketing strung together by the teachings and benefits of sociology and psychology.

Obviously, the Web matured over the years. You could have simply subbed “multimedia” with “new media” several years ago and most recently, “Social Media.” Yet they’re all still relevant.

The classification was simply a reference for reflection, inspiration, and education.

Let me be clearer.

PR 2.0 is the understanding and practice that communications is a two-way process and incorporates the tools, principles, strategies, and philosophies for reaching, engaging, guiding, influencing, and helping people directly in addition to the traditional cycle of PR influence.

Social Media, the interactivity of the Web, and the rise of democratized content indeed represents a much-needed reinvigoration for a tired and complacent industry.

The only reason I run spend my free time writing about this is to spotlight the ongoing evolution of marketing to bring things from the edge to the center so we can all learn and grow together. It’s also one of the reasons I joined Chris Heuer and a group of other pioneers to co-found The Social Media Club. If you get it, share it.

In this regard, the principles and
philosophies of PR 2.0 (originally) are truly different and noteworthy when compared to what we practice in traditional Public Relations and what we’re taught in school – although there are some fantastic people out there working to change this, Jay Rosen, Dr. Kaye Sweetser, and Robert French, just to name a few. There’s a balance between old, proven, and what’s new that we must equally embrace in order to be successful and effective.

What’s undeniable is that the Web has created and forced new channels for the distribution of information “at,” “to” and “between” people. It changed everything. It’s forcing traditional media to evolve. It’s creating an entirely new set of influencers with a completely different mechanism for collecting and sharing information, and is also reforming the daily routines of how people discover and contribute content.

The debate surrounding the “name” for this renaissance is insignificant and is a distraction from the more important parade of new and renewed ideas, strategies, and practices that help companies tell their story more effectively, genuinely, and convincingly. People will align with the moniker they believe in as long as it all nets to the same thing at the end of the day.

This isn’t about the critics or those who believe they’re above the rest of us, or even the enthusiasts who are overly passionate about the tools they use for sharing content in Social Media Marketing, this is about those who are learning, and more importantly, who want to learn about how PR can change for the better.

It’s not the tools. It’s the communicator.

It’s not the story; it’s the personalization and the targeted benefits and value proposition that compel someone to not only listen, but respond.

Let’s help those millions of Public Relations professionals and students who are just now, or soon will be, introduced to the new world of communications many of us have already been navigating for years.

They’re embracing the new school of PR as a personal responsibility and commitment to make things better.

Credit: Hugh MacLeod

New PR is only new until it’s not, and quite honestly, everything simply folds back into Public Relations.

Until we can get the rest of the world on the same page however, New PR deserves its own attention in order to help those looking to learn and understand where they need to be.

PR 2.0, New PR, Online PR, Social Media Marketing, Conversational Marketing, Influencer Relations, Relationship Marketing, Community Marketing, whatever we call it, there’s no denying it is representative of a shift in communications. It’s migrating from a broadcast mechanism to a hybrid assembly of traditional PR combined with web-savvy, social-awareness, intelligence, and a real understanding of markets.

These more enlightened communicators get it and can effectively ignite relationships with people directly (conversations) and through peer-to-peer influence. One-to-many PR does not dissipate either; it becomes more targeted and informative.

For over ten years, we have had the ability and the privilege to virtually communicate directly with people, complementing our traditional channels of influencer relations.

The difference though, is that we’re required to participate in a more informed and intelligent way. It’s quite simply the minimum ante to jump in. Unfortunately, however, many communications professionals are merely using the same old tools and strategies to reach a very sophisticated group of consumers.

It’s not just about “finally” getting on Twitter, blogging, podcasting, creating profiles on social networks, putting videos on YouTube or uploading artwork on Flickr. These tools will come and go. It’s about what you do with them to create mutually benefitial relationships within each online community.

Be the person you want to inspire.

It all comes down to social sciences and the understanding, that New PR and Social Media Marketing is guided by sociology. The study and observation of online cultures, their interactivity, and the humanization of what it is we’re hoping to carry into these important communities will by default, improve the foundation for forging successful and mutually beneficial relationships. That’s where it all starts. Spin, hyperbole, messages, pitches, blasts, and voicemails have no place in the new world of communications.

Think intelligently.

Whether we’re talking about traditional PR or new PR, it was and is still rooted in relationships.

Online and offline PR require strategies that were supposed to be part of PR all along (know what you’re talking about and to whom your talking, who/what you represent and why it matters to the people you’re trying to reach).

In my opinion, there is no such thing as PR 2.0 as a practice. It is simply a game-changing mantra. But, if 2.0 is a mantra for evolution and change, then yes, it implies that there was, and still is, a traditional way of looking at things.

Whether you subscribe to the label is moot. If you believe in the reinvention of a more socially conscious, informed, and relationship-driven form of public relations, then that’s all that matters. Call it whatever you want, just as long as you contribute value to the evolution instead of stealing from it.

So, what are we going to do about it?

Update:

Dennis Howlett, a respected enterprise and IT related finance thought leader and author, responded on Twitter, “@briansolis: if it’s evolving then why does it continue to fail? ”
(see what you’re up against?)

My response, “@dahowlett it fails because people feel that there’s nothing to learn. Good news, there’s an undercurrent and I’m trying to e
xpose it.”

Howlett, ”
@briansolis No point in exposing it if the practitioners don’t get off their backsides and do something about it. I hope you’re successful. ”

Recommended Reading:

Cultural Voyeurism and Social Media

The Social Media Manifesto

The Art of Listening and Engagement

Dear Chris Anderson, An Open Letter to Make Things Right

Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, or Facebook.

In August 2007, I wrote about a public discussion including Chris Messina, Stowe Boyd, and myself on the value of creating channels within Twitter. Its an important discussion because Twitter was and still is representative of a powerful form of emerging media – but it’s missing something.

Twitter leads the way for other forms of MicroMedia and represents a white hot medium for connecting people in a way that no one would ever believe possible.

Along with its growth and continued rise in global popularity, the noise level in Twitter is also deafening.

But up until recently, the conversations taking place on Twitter was progressive yet finite. While some discussions thread into brilliant movements, most vanish into the history books…except in this case, there aren’t any history books per se.

In the world of Social Media, listening to online conversations is the keystone to genuine participation. What if you could find the discussions that were important to you?

There are now several ways to find relevant topics and join productive conversations on Twitter. This is especially important, if you are a representative for a company and/or brand seeking solutions for effectively listening to the community in order to help them answer questions or provide them with useful information.

Enter Hashtags.org.

Suddenly the most powerful form of MicroMedia is now taggable and searchable and allows Twitter users to create channels or topic streams similar to the functionality that has existed in Jaiku for over a year – although at the moment, Jaiku’s channel product is much more elegant and friendly.

The whole idea here is that you can tag your tweets in a way that they’re discoverable by those who seek similar content. Remember though, you have only 140 characters to make an impact.

Hashtags require you to include “#” in front of any keyword that you wish to index. For example, if I’m writing about #hashtags in Twitter, I would simply type: “Writing about #hashtags for #bub.blicio.us and#pr2.0.”

In order to have your hashtags indexed, you have to add the hashtags bot, @hashtags, to their twitter account.

Tags need to be one word for now. So for example, instead of tagging #brian+solis or #brian_solis, it’s simply #briansolis. To search it for relevant tags, bookmark http://www.hashtags.org/tag/. Continuing the example, to search briansolis, the URL would look like this, http://hashtags.org/tag/briansolis/ and the result:

Twemes, at the moment, is a friendlier solution for searching tags.

You can also search by the most popular tags, recently added, or monitor the river of every tag.

However, the community is split on whether or not #hashtags will take off and enjoy mass adoption. Many enthusiasts have expressed distaste to its aesthetic pollution to the Twitter stream, instead of seeing the contribution to the legacy of topics, channels, and keywords. At the very least, those you use hashtags should be strategic and thoughtful in what they choose to tag.

Chris Messina dives deeper into Hashtags here.

Twitter is also searchable outside of the world of #hashtags, which also substantially increases the value of content contained in the Twittersphere as it brings past tweets back to life.

Enter Tweet Scan, a basic search tool that operates similar to how you would naturally search in Yahoo or Google.

For example, if you’re searching for tweets related to Perez Hilton, simply type “perez hilton” into the search window and peruse through the tweets as you would via traditional search results. In this case, we see that Perez has some breaking news on Britney Spears via WeSmirch.com (an aggregated channel for entertainment and celebrity gossip and news produced by TechMeme’s Gabe Rivera.)

Twitter is now an even more powerful and important tool in the realm of Social Media in order to participate and listen to the online conversations that are important to you.

New services such as hashtags, Twemes and Tweet Scan empower us to shift from the typical broadcast mentality and limited group discussions to a rich conversational stream.

More about online conversations at ZDNet.

More tools for listening can be found at ReadWriteWeb.

Jeff Nolan on Twitter Analytics.

Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, or Facebook.

Sociology – The study of human social behavior, especially the study of the origins, organization, institutions, and development of human society.

About a year ago, I wrote an article entitled “Social Media is About Sociology and not Technology.” The recognition of people versus the tools is now more critical than ever. Although, it still isn’t necessarily embodied in many of the words and work shared by fellow Social Media Marketers.

Less talk, more learning and action are required.

There’s no shortage of people who understand and present existing and emerging Social Tools for us to use as a mechanism for “engaging” in “conversations.”

Participation after all, is marketing right?

Let’s change that.

Informed, mutually beneficial, and genuine participation inspires relationship marketing.

However, many purported Social Media experts are merely engaging in cultural voyeurism at best. They look from afar and roam the perimeters of online societies without ever becoming a true member of any society. This means, they don’t truly understand what, where, or why they’re “participating,” only jumping in because they have something to say and have access to the tools that will carry it into play. This is unfortunately a representation of the greater landscape of Social Media Marketing and it’s time to take a step back and study the sociology of Social Media in order to keep communities intact and unaffected by outsiders.

The future of communications requires the consideration of sociological principles when integrating Social Media into the marketing chemistry. This is one of the most important points where we simply need to stop and think about things. As in all of marketing, the most effective campaigns start with listening, reading, watching, and observing. In the world of Social Media, this is not an option. It’s dependent on Sociology and the study of people and cultures online before we even think about engaging them in conversations.

Again, Social Media is about sociology and not technology. This is about people and the cultures that shape respective online communities.

Is Social Media, we’re reminded that “listening” is the key to engagement. In Sociology, this is referred to as observation. By observing, either directly or virtually, we become Social Scientists in order to feedback intelligence and insight into the marketing loop.

Two basic types of observations exist:

1) Unobtrusive. The observer is detached and does not take an active part in the situation.

- Observer as participant. Observer admits their role and just observes the situation, behavior and interactions.

- Complete observer. Observer hides their true identity.

2) Participant. The observer joins a group and studies as an inside member.

- Complete. The observer hides their identity. There are a number of problems with this type of observation: ethical, is it morally right to use such methods? By joining the group the observer may alter its behavior and culture; and going native and adopting the norms and values of the group.

- Participant as observer. Here the observer does not hide their identity and is truthful about their goals and objectives.

Most Social Media Marketing initiatives I have observed (whether I was asked to assess a company’s program specifically or simply watched a very public campaign as a student), have not observed much more than the “latest and greatest” tools that can get them in front of bubbling and active social networks and communities.

This is the equivalent of setting up camp next to a village because you have the tools to do so and expecting the village to integrate you into their society.

It just doesn’t work that way.

Sociology provides us with an understanding of how social forces shape individual attitudes and behavior. Sociologists study society and social action by examining the groups and social institutions people form. In Social Media, these communities take the form of social networks and the communal groups within them. People form associations, friendships, and allegiances around content, objects, products, services, and ideas. How they communicate is simply subject to the tools and networks that people adopt based on the influence of their social graph – and the culture within.

Sociologists also study the social interactions of people and groups, trace the origin and growth of social processes, and analyze the influence of group activities on individual members and vice versa.

The basic goal of sociological research is to understand the social world in its many forms. Social Media, and marketing in general, could only benefit from intelligence. And at the very least, it removes the risk of “marketing at” people and instead naturally shapes a more honest, intelligent, and informative approach.

Quantitative and qualitative methods represent two main types of sociological research. Quantitative methods, such as social statistics or network analysis, investigate the structure of a social process or describe patterns in social relationships. Qualitative methods, including focused interviews, group discussions and ethnographic methods, reveal social processes.

Social Media is much more than user-generated content. It’s driven by people in the communities where they communicate and congregate. They create, share, and discover new content without our help right now. They’re creating online cultures across online networks and using the Social Tools that we learn about each and every day to stay connected. And the societies that host and facilitate these conversations cultivate a tight, unswerving and mostly unforgiving community and culture. As Shel Israel describes it, people are populating Global Neighborhoods.

Technology is just that, technology. The tools will change. The networks will evolve. Mediums for distributing content will grow. The tools will change, but in most cases, people don’t.

It starts with intent and the realization that the communities you wish to reach are not “audiences.”

You simply cannot get answers or run a meaningful Social Media program through cultural voyeurism.

Social Media Marketing requires observation, which will dictate your engagement strategies. It starts with combination of using Social and Traditional tools to discover, listen, learn, and engage directly with customers to help, not market, but indeed help them make decisions and also do things that they couldn’t, or didn’t know how to do, before. And, most importantly, the lessons learned in the field should in turn be fed into the marketing department to create and run more intelligent, experienced, and real world initiatives across all forms of marketing, PR, sales, and advertising.

Read, “Transforming Customers into Evangelists: The Art of Listening and Engagement,” to learn more about how to listen and observe.

Today Social Media Marketers state that conversations are markets and markets are conversations. This is the foundation for conversational marketing.

But what does that really mean?

Instead, let’s look at it this way.

Conversations are feeding communities and communities are markets for relationships. Relationships are the new currency in Social Media, and as we all know, relationships need cultivation and value from both sides in order to grow into something of value.

In this world, engagement is a privilege. Trust and loyalty are the rewards.

Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, or Facebook.