2010, the year of the Social Anti-Guru

The social gurus, the self-proclaimed leaders of Social Media, Social CRM, and everything else social….   

In 2010 businesses are going to return to a focus on delivering business value, this is your last day of hype, enjoy.

In 2010 government agencies will focus on delivering real value to its citizens, taking the open government initiative  and converting those high-level thoughts into strategies and tactics.  Plan to be amazed.

In 2010 we will remember that personal branding only works if you have a true message to deliver, real value beyond the great photo and 140 characters of the twitterverse.  Deliver value.

The anti-guru, the individual that cuts through today’s hype to help deliver on the real promise of social as a component of how we do business, how we govern, how we self-promote, will be fully on the scene, replacing the thousands of self-proclaimed gurus.  For those of you being displaced, please jump on the augmented reality train as it is leaving in a few minutes.

My wish for you is that you become that Social Anti-Guru, the person that helps your organization deliver true, measurable results.  With that in mind, I wish you all a very Happy New Year. 

John (Social Anti-Guru in Training)

p.s. Take the survey on your 2010 Social and CRM Plans (Thanks).

Dear CRM provider, are you proud of your products?

If you are proud of your products, your services, whatever your offerings are, you should take every opportunity to spread the message, right now, not later.  I reached out to one of the Social CRM vendors, back in October, to ask for a demo of their product.  True, I was not interested in buying, just interested in learning about their offering and sharing my thoughts with you.  The reaction at the time was simply:

“I appreciate the kind words for #######.  However, I must apologize.  ###### had made it sound as if Swimfish was looking for a set of solutions.  As such, I’ve forwarded this on to some of my colleagues to get the ball rolling on this.  I’ll be in touch when I have something.”

Two months later, after no follow-up, I reached out once again, this time hearing:

“###### alerted me to your lingering need for some demos.  Our functionalities our best framed out by much of the collateral available on our website.  You can find a wealth of information here:  …”

Lingering needs….  I did express disappointment, frustration, and, as someone who believes in telling it like it is, I told them like it is…   The follow-up, another head scratcher…

“…without a verifiable project or pressing need with a  company or division therein, it is difficult to put together a demo for you as our capabilities would necessitate a demo that would literally take days.  Further, our technical resources  are at a premium at this time of the year.”

Two things:

• If setting up a demo takes you days….  Well…. You are doing something wrong.  Helpstream has a demo environment (free trial), Gist does, CoTweet, Salesforce.com is literally sign-up and give it a whirl….. 
• If someone wants to write about your product, put it in context for a broader audience, why would you pass up that opportunity.  I know, my blog is only read by three people outside of my immediate family, but come on, they need to know what is happening, right now, not later.

What do you think?  Am I missing the mark?  Are my expectations too high?

John

Some insights on how San Francisco is going Social

I spent some time chatting with Adriel Hampton about the ins and outs of Social Media and Government 2.0.  Adriel is in a great position to speak on the topic, being heavily involved from several angles, as part of his work in the San Francisco’s Attorney’s Office, in his past bid for a seat in the US Congress, and in his role producing and hosting the Gov 2.0 Podcast series.  You can read more about Adriel’s experience, if interested, by checking out his blog.

Government 2.0, in my opinion, is all about engagement and transparency, providing citizens with a clear picture of what is happening within their government and seeking to get citizens engaged in co-creating, co-governing.  As I tweeted today, Engagement + Transparency = Government 2.0. 

Adriel notes that he sees a lot of politicians, campaigns, and agencies, using social media as a pure push technology, delivering one-sided conversation.    Many people are starting out this way, treating twitter, Facebook, and other social channels similar to how they have always used e-mail, radio ads, TV.    When I asked who was ”doing social well”, who is engaging and going above and beyond, here is what Adriel said:

• The Massachusetts Governor’s office, @MassGovernor.  I have reached out to the account today, will share with you more about their level of engagement as I chat with them.
• Martha Coakley’s office has been a model that has been followed.
• Sarah Bourne (CIO in Massachusetts) has been another model followed.  I have to 100% agree  this one, Sarah is fantastic.
• SF Deputy Director of Public Works is also doing a great job, as are many of the agencies in San Francisco.
• Gavin Newsom, the Mayor of San Francisco.

San Francisco is doing a great job of sharing data, pushing social campaigns, working to get citizen engagement to ever higher levels.  In fact, Adriel is providing training session focused on getting people engaged on social channels.  This effort, which he calls Citizens 2.0 training, focuses first on those individuals that are already involved with politics but not yet involved on the social front.  He works with them to give them the training they need to bring this passion to the broader social networks.  I am really interested in seeing how this works out, especially if he is able to go a level deeper working with the less politically involved.

So, how did the Attorney’s office get started?  First, Adriel had to convince his bosses to go social, that there was value from doing so.   They initially started out using social channels as an additional broadcast tool, pushing out their press releases, blog posts with details about what is going on in their offices.  Much like the State of Washington is doing in their Department of Transportation, they are working to get the story out, the full story, good or bad.  They have done a really good job of building an online press room with media kits for their big cases.  While the newspapers can typically only write a small amount about any given case, they use they use their presence to push out much more detailed information, enabling people to get the full story.  This gives individuals, businesses, agencies, a chance to be their own press.

Other things I like about their efforts:

• On their twitter account they clearly identify all of the people involved with the account.
• They typically initial responses so that you can see who has responded.  I have seen many more accounts following this practice, including @MassGovernor, @JetBlue, @MidwestAirLines, and others.
• They are posting regularly.  As I have noted before, and others have as well, content is king.  Keep providing fresh information on a regular basis, otherwise people will not be there to listen.

Do you have questions for Adriel?  Feel free to leave him a comment.

John (aka The Social Anti-Guru)

Following up on Which Social Media Monitoring Solution is most discussed

If you read my post from a couple of days ago on this topic you saw that I was able to share data based upon monitoring information from Scout Labs.  I wanted to give you this quick update, based upon data from Alterian Techrigy SM2, showing the same basic breakdown in terms of level of discussion around the brand.

Drumroll please….

As with Scout Labs you can see that Radian 6 is getting the majority of the conversation, with SM2, followed by Scout Labs…  What is interesting, however, is that Synthesio, not Filtrbox, is in 4th place in from the SM2 perspective, which I attribute to the fact that SM2 does cover, from what I have seen so far, a slightly broader range of data sources than Scout Labs.

I will be continuing to chat with additional solution providers in 2010 and I suspect this chart will evolve over time. 

Finally, if you know of a great Social Media Monitoring, Social CRM, or Social Support Community solution that I have not yet checked out, please let me know.

John

How Overdrive Interactive does Social Media Monitoring

I am always looking to chat with real business or government users of CRM and Social Media Monitoring (SMM) solutions and was pleased when I saw Nick Cifuentes post on LinkedIn about his recent results with SMM.  I quickly reached out to Nick to ask him to share his experiences and that is what follows.

Please note that this post is about Radian6, which has received a fair amount of coverage on my blog.  This is not due  to any bias on my part but more a matter of the customers I have engaged with to date.  If any of the CRM or SMM providers would like to introduce me to your customers I would be happy to hear from them and share their stories.

Here is Nick speaking about his adventures with SMM, let me know if you have any questions for him:

“Overdrive Interactive is a full service-marketing agency specializing in customer acquisition and retention. For a number of years, we specialized in Search, both Paid and Organic; however, over the past few years we have turned a great amount of attention to Social Media Marketing. 

While evaluating our position in the marketplace, we discovered a process and built internal procedures for on boarding and maintaining a social media processes for a variety of clients. Discovering this process over the past few years, we expanded our efforts and were in the market for a monitoring solution that would give us a tool that would allow us to monitor social media data 24/7 for our clients. Social Media, being a channel that is “always on,” we must focus on our client’s reputation and listen to what customers are saying about the brand in a real-time format. By measuring social media through blogs, comments, forums, micromedia, Facebook, photos, images, mainstream news etc…we can discover the “chatter” that is happening around our clients at all times.

In addition, we have built a custom dashboard and reporting tool for our clients that utilizes the wonderful API’s that Radian6 offers – giving us the ability to integrate Radian6 into our dashboard.

While we were in search mode of a tool to use last year, we sifted through a number of options, including Visible Technologies, Buzzlogic, TNS Cymfony, Nielsen, Trackur, Techrigy, and a few others. Radian6 had one of the most intuitive dashboards and setup that allowed us to track keywords across all types of social media, monitoring everything from sentiment to location on a global scale. And in addition, they provided real-time data on several dashboard widgets I can tie back into our client dashboard solutions. And now that they started to integrate data from WebTrends, Salesforce, and other analytics and CRM solutions – it really allows the solution to expand with the marketplace, a very crucial decision-making point we had in choosing Radian6. And, the customization and workflow process for each piece of discovered information within the Radian6 dashboard is absolutely unbeatable when compared to any of the other competitors in terms of performance and customization.

In terms of results to date, we have experienced a tremendous amount of success since integrating Radian6 into our social media monitoring efforts. As I can’t discuss specific numbers, we have brought more than 5 clients into daily monitoring efforts using the variety of tools Radian6 has to offer, and have been able to keep a constant  finger to the pulse of our client’s activity in the social media space. Tracking activity in Radian6 in a real-time effort; we are able to harness the conversation into our custom dashboard tools and use that information to stress to our client’s the worthwhile moments in their marketing campaigns, how it happened, why, and where we can make any recommendations; significant or negligible.

Radian6 has the ability to harness conversation from all the significant points within social media, and in real-time. One of the great aspects of Radian6 is the ability to create profiles to “test” with various bits of information, and draw the timeline back up to 30 days of information if necessary – all this without having to commit to a purchase of the “topic profile”, as they refer to a new client account within Radian6. Also, the capacity of Radian6 to search within micromedia, blogs, Facebook; then break that number down by language or country if you choose; even specific media type for each; this tool cover everything! 

Something new from Radian6, an option many of us have been waiting for was an auto-sentiment tool that would rate posts based on a sentiment scale. When we first started, the auto-sentiment was still in a manual operation where we’d have to take each piece of information found and rate it ourselves. And now, with auto-sentiment, we can turn it on and watch the magic happen. One downside though is the control of it from a computer to human emotion scale – things like sarcasm and figures of speech; it has the possibility to ‘mix’ up the auto-sentiment device and more likely give a piece of information the incorrect sentiment. 
 
In terms of building on Radian6’s capabilities, it’s hard to try and build on a social media superhero they have established themselves as. Radian6 offers an incredible amount of information, sometimes, too much; if you see that as a negative. Some businesses or brands absolutely will if they don’t have an agency or enough staff to handle the amount of information that might be coming through Radian6. 

Price point, something many brands and companies might turn a shoulder at, can be a bit high – but when you honestly break down the Radian6 features, the power of the tool and what it offers compared to the ‘cheaper’ competitors, Radian6 is well worth the price, well worth it! 

Something I think Radian6 could begin to add to their capabilities would be an additional solution to not just track and analyze, but respond directly; possibly giving the user the ability to setup their accounts for certain social networks within Radian6. Even work in tracking URLs using specific systems, or integrating directly with a variety of URL shortners. I want to see one campaign, launch it across all my social media channels and have the option to launch the entire campaign or post through Radian6, and watch the response as it happens. Go one step further and have the ability to schedule content to go out and push live through the platform would build on top of that. 

Something else that might be useful would be to consider the use of customizable content within Radian6. Let’s say they came up with the idea to create the backend to be able to launch content from; now, let’s say they give you the ability to place that content in a customized landing page that you can then integrate into the tracking and monitoring systems that Radian6 offers. Think how you could customize that landing page to hold your branding, click options, links, RSS Feeds, etc…and sync that landing page with your regular analytics systems and Radian6. I know, I’m dreaming a bit in terms of how quick I want to move on the capabilities of Radian6; but in a perfect world, maybe this would happen. Ha-ha.

Something that would be great to see would be the ability to track and analyze at the campaign level and individual posts level if possible. For me to go into Radian6 with a specific URL or content post and see who clicked from where, how often, at what time, etc.   

I think better dashboards and stronger graphical interfaces when it comes to reporting and taking information away, in a physical event, from the download options – I’d like to see a more customized sizes, better graphics; this is more a personal preference – not any kind of systems change.
 
Using Radian6, we have pulled information about new blogs, new potential twitter influencers, been able to contact those users specifically and enhance some of our client’s relationships with influential bloggers and Twitter influencers. 

We also have had situations where we could locate unusual spikes of unusual activity in some of our client’s accounts, and was able to report that information to our client’s who had no idea otherwise, make a recommendation to respond, and act on it for their advantage; whether it was positive or negative.”

Which Social Media Monitoring Solution is most discussed?

While the level of discussion about a product/company is never the full story, it does provide insight into how well a company is doing in getting its message out, how far the message is travelling, and, in my opinion, the likelihood of the product/company to be successful.  At this moment in time I still have evaluation access to the Scout Labs and the Alterian Techrigy SM2 products and decided to give both a try to answer this simple question:  Which of the five Social Media Monitoring (SMM) solutions that I have been reviewing has generated the most discussion over the course of the last six months? 

Here are the solutions I have been evaluating: 

• Radian6
• Alterian Techrigy SM2
• Scout Labs
• Filtrbox
• Synthesio

Scout Labs Results 

Setting up the searches within Scout Labs was very simple, generating some useful information.  Answering my simple question was simple and I was able to generate this pie chart of the results.

Scout Labs Comparison of SMM Chatter

 

This chart represents all searches for these products, based upon my search setup.  Radian6 leads the way with 57%, Techrigy is second with 19%, Scout Labs has 14% of the total, Filtrbox comes in 4th with 9%, and Synthesio has 0% of the total.  Key points to keep in mind, however: 

• While easy to set up, the searches were for a simple search term in each case.  For example, Radian6, Scout Labs, Synthesio.  This type of search is incomplete, but probably covered the majority of the important searches.
• Scout Labs is not necessarily performing a complete search of the known universe.  For example, Synthesio, a European provider of SMM solutions, is likely being short-changed in the overall volume of searches.
• The 0% of results returned for Synthesio does not indicate that no search results were returned.  Conversations were returned, just a much smaller percentage of the total.
• Scout Labs is relatively new to the market, only coming onto the scene this year and should be excited about hitting the 14% mark with less than a year of public awareness.

Alterian Techrigy SM2 Results 

I spent a lot of time trying to set up a similar search but was unable to do so.  While I am certain it is possible I have yet to figure it out.   Once I do so I will update this post with the results from an alternate data set. 

What’s next? 

Ultimately I would love to have access to all of these solutions all of the time so that I can share with you a completely view, maintaining as unbiased an attitude as I am able to.  I will let you know if I am able to set up this sort of arrangement with each of the companies as I know it will benefit all of us. 

John

Government 2.0, Washington State Style

As you’ve probably noticed, I have been talking to a lot of companies, and now government agencies, to educate myself and, in the process, provide you with real world examples of what is working in the real world.  One thing that is crystal clear to me…. Very few have social media down to a science.  At best, they have social down to an art form and some still view it as dark magic that is not yet ready for prime time.

I recently spoke with Jeremy Bertrand, the person responsible for managing the web and social interfaces for the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT).  WSDOT is clearly past the dark magic stage and they are leveraging social media in ways that provide true value to the citizens of Washington State.  In fact, WSDOT has won its share of awards and, according to Jeremy, he has spoken to somewhere between 50 and 70 agencies nationally about how WSDOT does social, how they got started, how they keep it going, and lessons learned.  The message is spreading.

Why is Washington State on the leading edge of social media?  It is simple, and it is a lesson that applies equally to both the private and the public sector….. The ingredient….  Strong, focused, leadership.  The previous Secretary of Transportation not only believed in transparency, but demanded it at every turn.  The Secretary believed that the Department should be a leading source of news, good or bad, and worked hard to always get the message out there.  Too many businesses and government agencies are quick to publicize the positive and hide the negative.  He took a proactive approach and it has worked well.  A few things to keep in mind:

• WSDOT has had a blog since 2006, you can find it here if you are interested.
  • The blog is updated every 2 – 3 days, focusing on delivering quality content.  This is critical, of course, for anyone working on social channels.  Content, high quality content, is critical and you must deliver it on a regular basis.  You cannot expect to throw up a blog, twitter, Flikr, Youtube, or other account and have people come along just because you have created the accounts.  Deliver great content, engage appropriately with your customers/citizens, and you will do well.
• WSDOT has had a Twitter account since 2008.  In fact, it now has multiple Twitter accounts to help them better segment information to the right audiences.  For example, they have a twitter account delivering information for the Mountain Pass traffic which is different from the Twitter account that delivers information about traffic in Tacoma.
  • Smart segmentation ensuring the delivery of information to the right people at the right time.
  • Initially, WSDOT did not utilize Twitter well, using it as a news push with little interaction.  For social to be successful it requires two-way communication, true engagement.  They are on the right track now and have more than 7000 members in their Twitter community.
  • Maintaining all of these Twitter accounts takes time, it does not come for free.  They have 1 persone actively maintaining their presence on twitter.
• WSDOT is working hard to deliver quality content on multiple channels.  Thave a strong presence on Flikr with tons of photos, a good presence on Youtube, and you’ve read about their blog and Twitter accounts.  Remember, meet customers/citizens where they are participating.

While WSDOT is doing an outstanding job there is much left to do (as is always the case).  For example, WSDOT is not using a CRM system.  Collecting, then leveraging, all of the data coming from social channels is critical for businesses and government agencies.  While there is clearly work to do, they are on the right track.

John

A short chat with the Delaware Division of Libraries, Going Social

I had a short e-mail based question and answer session with Richard James, who works for the Delaware Division of Libraries.  He has been heavily involved with the Library’s social efforts, their efforts to deploy a Government 2.0 approach.  I hope you find this helpful.

Q. Why do you use social media in your job?  What are you looking to accomplish?

A. About two months ago I was at a meeting with webmasters from other state agencies. There is not a centralized authority for agency websites in Delaware in any meaningful sense, and we meet periodically to discuss technology trends and the like. At that meeting, there were only two or three webmasters in the room who expressed a favorable opinion regarding social media. I’d like to use social media as an example for more widespread acceptance, since we were an early adopter and haven’t encountered any problems. Otherwise, I mostly value social media as a method of efficiently communicating in both an informal and formal way with a broader constituent base, especially those who may be falling away from library use because of perceptions about relevance.

Q. How long have your been “social” for your job?

A.  Division has had a blog for about 18 months, but migrated an official state-branded WordPress template in July 2009. This allowed us to be a featured link from the delaware.gov page, along with the Lieutenant Governor, who has a genuine blog, and one other agency. Reference library staff have used twitter as @askalibrarian for about six months to answer questions and stake out an authoritative presence, and we also use Delicious.com (delawarelibraries) to record useful and current reference and informative websites- delicious weblinks are integrated into our blog and also broadcast on twitter via twitterfeed. We have a passive presence on Facebook for about a year.

Q. What agencies, local or Federal, do you learn from?  Who is doing it best?

A. Most examples I use are from early adopting public and academic libraries. When the state created its social media usage policy early in 2009, we did review a number of federal government policies- the armed forces were particularly relevant, as an example of innovation in extremely bureaucratic agencies.

What else would you have asked Richard about?

John

Early data from my Social and CRM Planning Survey

If you have not yet taken this quick (30 seconds) survey do so before reading on. ….   It’s okay, I’ll wait for you…..  Did you do it yet?  Okay, as I have noted before I will keep the survey open through January 8th, but here are some of the data at this moment in time:

• We have around 100 responses in, not too bad given the time of year.  These respondents have heard of the survey through e-mails (I sent to a list of around 500 people), Twitter, and Facebook.  The audience is social savvy but that does not mean their companies are as well.  The goal is 1000 responses, please help us get there by sharing this with EVERYONE.  Yes, you can even ask your grandmother as long as she has a business.
• In terms of where their business or government agency is planning to invest in social media in 2010, the respondents have said, so far:
  • 54% will use it for customer service.
  • 34% will use it for internal operations.
  • 80% will use it for marketing.
  • 44% will use it for sales.
  • 2% will not use it at all.
• In terms of plans to deploy a CRM system we are seeing:
  • 37% say yes.
  • 59% say no.
  • 4% are asking what is a CRM system.
• In terms of the primary focus areas for the company or agency, here are some of the numbers:
  • 20% of the companies are  involved in strategic or business consulting.
  • 10% are involved in publishing, advertising, or entertainment media.
  • 3% are involved in educations, colleges, schools.
• In terms of company or agency size, here is a sample of the current the current breakdown:
  • 62% have fewer than 50 employees.
  • 15% have more than 1000 employees.

I will update you again once the survey closes and provide the full results.  Stay tuned.

John

Social CRM Tools growing out of Social Media Monitoring Tools

Alright, you have been hearing me talk about CRM and Social Media for a long time now and if there is one thing that I have made perfectly clear, it is that the first successful Social CRM tools that I am seeing in the market are Social Support Communities.  HP, and others, are producing very successful results for both the customers and for the companies that have ventured into this quickly evolving world.

The next round of successful Social CRM tools, in my opinion, will not come from your traditional CRM providers.  Instead, Social Media Monitoring (SMM) companies are poised to further shake up this space, going from a place where they simply provided you with buckets of raw data to a place where they will be providing you with clear, actionable information.  This week I have chatted with four SMM providers, Scout Labs, Alterian (formerly Techrigy), FiltrBox, and Synthesio.  I did reach out to Radian6 last week to learn more about their sentiment analysis changes and was asked to review their web site as information would be flowing outward.  I’ll get to that soon enough but will have to comment only based upon the companies I have had the benefit of chatting with recently.  Here are some of the areas I am hoping to see these companies, and those like them, attack in 2010.  If they do, and I feel they will, we will really start blurring the lines between Social CRM and Social Media Monitoring tools leaving customers both a little confused and also very, very happy (picture a drunk relative at a wedding if you want to picture what they will look like ).

• Actionable Information through basic ticketing system capabilities and CRM Integration.
  • Many of the SMM providers have basic ticketing capabilities, the ability to assign items for follow-up through either email or internal to their own systems.   Those that do not have these capabilities are likely to add them in 2010, those that do not will fall painfully far behind.
  • If these vendors choose to look at pulling in e-mails, accepting user-entered data (phone conversations) they will be able to compete with many of the traditional Support-related CRM vendors at a basic level.
  • APIs will continue to be fleshed out, enabling richer levels of integration between traditional CRM systems.  These systems could also become feeding systems for other applications, applications like Gist, Microsoft SharePoint, etc..
• User interfaces, usability.  The vast majority of today’s CRM products look like they were built by database developers based upon relational databases (or maybe that drunk relative we were discussing).  They do not look like systems that were built to be easy to use, transparent, to support, marketing, sales, and others in a company.  I am really impressed with what I am seeing by many of the SMM tools on the market and I expect to see them continuing to deliver usable applications.
• Automated Sentiment Analysis combined with relative tone.   Yes, automated sentiment analysis will never be 100% accurate.  However, give me  70 – 80 % accuracy as a starting point to guide my actions and I am happy to go from there.
• Pricing.  It is important that one of the SMM solutions unifies the lower end of the market with the upper end (Enterprises, Government Agencies, etc..). 
  • Avoid offering freemium pricing as it will kill your business.  Pricing is an indicator of the worth/value of your offering, only go with freemium pricing if you want to sell to pre-schools.
  • Get ride of named-user licensing.  It is important for everyone in a business to have access to the social data to maximize its benefits.  Support, marketing, sales, product development, executives, etc.., will all benefit from this information.
• Mobile Support.  It’s hard to take any CRM offering seriously if it does not provide access to data from your iPhone, Blackberry, Android, or Windows Mobile phone.  Give me access to the information that matters most, however, do not try to replicate the full user interface and all features, they are not all needed.

What do you think?  If you are not yet using SM for your personal use, for your business, for your government agency, should you be?

John