2. Surveying the Technology Supermarket
A strategy without execution is just a theory. And to execute, a company needs the right social media technologies.
Culture change and technology provide the foundation for success in all external social media efforts. Without these factors, a company is relegated to limited viewpoints and perspectives that will likely hinder organizations in their company effectiveness, innovation, and competitive relevance. Companies striving to become a social business require a very high level of collaboration across the organization.
Collaboration within the new business context of social media is defined as:
To facilitate an environment of open sharing, create the necessary mechanisms for regular cross-departmental communications, encourage intellectual risk-taking, and respect honest failures while turning them into successful ones, all while keeping the social customer in mind.
Today, different departments claim ownership of various initiatives, programs, and business resources. Customer support usually owns the service relationship, the sales team may own the customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives, and information technology owns all the existing server assets. Organizations assign ownership partly to establish some semblance of responsibility, accountability, and governance. But what about some of those softer concepts of business operations? What about collaboration? Is this the domain of executives, department heads, or team managers?
Collaboration is owned either by everyone or by no one. It requires many willing participants to be open, to share, and to communicate. Just one unwilling team member or disengaged individual can break the entire system. And as much as this book discusses collaboration, technology is the means by which a company can operationalize it.
The market has clearly spoken. Consider all the development and marketing resources spent to compete in the very crowded “social technology” space. With Jive, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Adobe, and Citrix all vying as major players and a variety of startups close behind, a clear demand exists for tools and technologies that facilitate cooperative interactions and demonstrate a more efficient way to work together. The trick is finding the right solution to catapult the organization into a fully functional social business.
Collaboration and community solutions facilitate internal communication among employees, but publishing tools also are necessary for publishing content externally, streamlining workflows, and gathering metrics. Tools such as Sprinklr, Awareness, and the Syncapse Platform not only enable companies to publish content to multiple communications vehicles such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but they also provide a dashboard for metrics in one easy location. Additionally, most publishing tools allow companies to set up workflows to ensure, for example, that customer support teams are following up from a discussion on Twitter flagged by a community manager.
Whether with collaboration software or publishing tools, it’s important to keep a close eye on the external landscape of social media. In the coming years, Facebook, Twitter, and the mobile space will change dramatically. From a pure social business perspective, companies must also change and adapt their programs, process, and capabilities to keep up with technology innovation and the conversations within these networks—especially if internal tools are integrated with the external tools through APIs.
Choosing the Right Social Software
Many types of collaboration software solutions are on the market. With standard collaboration tools, Internet-based tools that live in the cloud, internal communities, wikis, and microblogging, the options are endless. The first step in facilitating collaboration across the organization is to examine what’s available.
Jive
Jive is a social business collaboration tool with a wide array of features and capabilities. Jive’s flagship product, Jive SBS (formerly Clearspace), combines collaboration software, internal community software, and a variety of social applications. Its features include the following components:
• A collaboration platform that enables employees to share information, make suggestions, and ask and answer questions in real time
• Customer support software that supports “customer-centric” communities with built-in support applications
• Social media monitoring software that enables brands to monitor external related conversations
• Company-branded communities (internal and external)
• Sales-enablement software that allows salespeople to immediately pool their knowledge about prospects, share reasons for winning or losing business, and collaborate with each other in real time
In 2008, storage and data management provider NetApp turned to Jive to create a community for its customers. The company launched a new branding campaign that included paid media initiatives and a new web site redesign. Through extensive online research, NetApp found that many customers and partners wanted a community to share knowledge, collaborate, and discuss business and technology concerns. The company launched a branded community using Jive’s suite of products, with astounding results for a brand in the business-to-business (B2B) space:
• More than 9,000 registered users globally
• 78 percent of community users who are external (customers, partners, and technology experts)
• More than 900 discussions
• More than 50,000 page views of blog posts and whitepapers
Gartner, Inc., an information technology research and advisory firm, released its Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace in October 2010, which included an analysis on 23 social business software vendors in the space. Jive, along with Microsoft and IBM, was listed as a leader in the market.
Microsoft SharePoint
The most widely used collaboration software deployed in many organizations today is Microsoft’s SharePoint product.
The advantage of using SharePoint is that it integrates with the broad suite of Microsoft products: Exchange, Outlook, and the rest of the Office products. Additionally, the software integrates comfortably with internal communities, dynamic/static web sites and content, and business intelligence, document management, and insights programs. SharePoint also has a well-established search functionality.
Intel uses SharePoint to manage internal collaboration among team members and across geographies. The company uses it to share files, marketing plans, editorial calendars, organizational charts, and other team documentation. SharePoint also helps Intel manage its internal digital training program, called Digital IQ. When fully deployed, SharePoint is an excellent tool that can facilitate collaboration across organizations, which is a key component of any social business.
IBM
The IBM social collaboration platform consists of three software packages, Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, and Lotus Sametime. Lotus Connections is a full-scale intranet, communities application, and social analytics platform all in one. It features commonly used capabilities such as blogs, file sharing, forums, wikis, and profiles for both internal and external use. Lotus Quickr is a team collaboration and enterprise content-management platform that can also be used for sharing files, hosting websites and communities, and maintaining content libraries. Lotus Sametime is an integrated, real-time communications services for voice, data, and video. This feature makes it easy to collaborate with colleagues, customers, and business partners.
Box.net
Box.net is a cloud-based file-sharing and content-management solution for individuals, small businesses, and large enterprise organizations. The company provides 5GB of free storage space for personal accounts and charges monthly fees for business accounts. A mobile version of the service is available for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. Box.net is good for small companies that haven’t yet invested in a full-scale social technology solution.
Tibbr
TIBCO has recently released tibbr, an enterprise-class social computing tool that lets users follow not only other people, but also information and events from deep inside their company’s mission-critical systems.
Tibbr breaks business users free from one-dimensional social tools that focus on people by allowing information to be organized by subject or topic. The software enables users to follow and create subjects they are interested in, such as updates from accounting, urgent shipments from their supply chain, and sales orders. These status updates are posted onto a Facebook-style wall, along with the latest posts from whoever else in the company they’re following. Feeds from external programs such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Alerts can also be added; users can even use tibbr to read and respond to email.
Yammer
Yammer is an application that enables employees to microblog, share files, send direct messages, and create profiles all behind the firewall. It closely resembles Facebook’s look and feel. It has the potential to replace entire intranets if fully deployed with all its capabilities. Yammer also can scale its functionality and can grow as a company grows and hires more people. In addition, Yammer’s functionality includes the following:
• Private and public groups
• Company directory with search functionality
• Capability to tag topics
• Knowledge base
• Secure communications
• Open API so that other applications can be integrated
• Mobile application for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry devices
Many top companies use Yammer for a variety of reasons, particularly because it’s easy to deploy, is cost-effective, and is quickly scalable. AMD, for example, deployed its software mainly to engage with employees. The company uses the microblogging feature to encourage real-time discussions so that employees can ask questions at the quarterly WorldCast.
Yammer is growing quite rapidly. In November 2010, it raised an additional $25 million in new funding led by U.S. Venture Partners. The company has already added a variety of new features to increase its functionality, including polls, chat, events, links, topics, Q&A, and ideas. It also added a new Activity Feed that aggregates content about the employees’ social graph both on and off the Yammer tool.
Although community and collaboration applications is one form of social technology to consider, platforms that facilitate communication via desktop sharing, conference bridge, and video capabilities are just as important.
Cisco WebEx Meeting Center
Whereas tools such as Jive, SharePoint, IBM, Box.net, and Yammer provide for document sharing and long-term collaboration, Cisco WebEx Meeting Center is best known as a conference bridge and a document/desktop–sharing video application. Used by three and a half million people every month, it has become synonymous with collaboration. WebEx is packed with a variety of useful features that help participants operate in an intuitive and efficient way. It’s worth noting that WebEx has also evolved into a number of similar product variations, including WebEx Event Center, WebEx Support Center, and WebEx Training Center.
Collaboration ideas can be used in innovative new ways. In 2009, Seagate Technology used WebEx Event Center to create consumer buzz about a new solid state drive. The strategy for this B2B company was to go directly to the consumer.
Seagate decided to conduct a product launch via a live webcast that would give consumers direct access to Seagate’s offices for demos, Q&A sessions, and so on. Seagate needed an online event-hosting solution that could accommodate many thousands of attendees, provide the highest-quality audio and video, and allow the event to be produced without any technical failures.
The Momentous XT webcast was a successful product launch: Several thousand people attended the online event, and the conversation went viral. Just a few short months later, Seagate continued to reap the benefits. The company sold thousands of devices on the day of the event and for months afterward. In fact, Seagate exceeded its sales goal by 300 percent.
Regardless of what reviewers and analysts say, business leaders must evaluate different social technologies and use criteria such as cost, implementation, integration with other technologies, and scalability before making the final decision. One such technology that is vital to integrate with collaboration tools is social listening software.
Social Listening Software Commoditized
Organizations have plenty of options for social media listening software applications. Social listening software monitors conversations in social media channels—blogs, forums, Twitter, and Facebook—based on a set of keywords. Users simply enter a keyword (such as a product or company brand), and the software reports on where these conversations are happening, the frequency of conversations, and even the sentiment. When using these tools, companies must think, beyond just listening. Listening without action is worse than not listening at all.
Radian6
Radian6 is a web-based social media listening platform that enables organizations to view and report on relevant conversations about a product or brand from around the social web. It offers a robust picture of brand-related conversations everywhere, including on blogs, Twitter, forums, and comments in YouTube.
Radian6 can also be used for enterprise collaboration. The software supports customized workflows by classifying posts (or external conversations), tagging them, and assigning them to other teams for follow-up and engagement and to see when a ticket has been closed.
Even more impressive is Radian6’s innovation of the product. The company recently launched its Engagement Console, which enables users to not only listen to online conversations, but also to engage directly within the Radian6 platform. Radian6 also integrates with web analytic software such as Google Analytics, Omniture, and Web Trends.
A real-time scenario might look something like this. A community manager who is using Radian6 to monitor online conversations comes across a blog post giving false information about a technical product. The community manager can tag the post, adjust the sentiment, and assign it to a team member of the customer support organization. Customer support then gets flagged, addresses or comments on the blog post (or Twitter) directly from Radian6, and then closes the ticket. The community manager can see when the ticket is closed.
Radian6 also offers robust reporting that’s useful for making data-driven decisions. The following reports are available:
• Brand Overview—A quick analysis of what’s being said about the brand (volume, sentiment, share of voice, and any visible trends)
• Sentiment Analysis—An analysis that reports on the general sentiment toward a brand and how it changes over time
• Influence Analysis—A report that discovers which influential people are talking about the brand and what they’re saying
• Competitive Analysis—An overview of how one product or brand is competing with another product or brand
• Engagement Analysis—An analysis that assesses how internal teams are interacting with the community
Lithium Social Media Monitoring (Formerly ScoutLabs)
Lithium Technologies, the leader in social customer solutions, acquired Scout Labs in May 2010 for good reason. For the most part, Lithium’s product is similar to Radian6, with a few exceptions. Lithium’s interface is easy to use, navigate, and pull reports from. This tool is much easier for first-time users.
What sets Lithium apart from other listening platforms is its automated sentiment analysis. Lithium uses natural language processing to assess the tone and sentiment of conversations. Even better, the system lets users override the analysis with their own assessment and then adds their input to the algorithm. For example, if the system automatically labels a particular conversation as negative but, after reading it, the user realizes that the conversation was more neutral, the user can change it. This happens a lot with slang. In other words, as more people use the tool, the system gets smarter and smarter.
Lithium also has a useful Frequent Words Analysis module. For example, when important topics emerge on the social web, they appear in the Frequent Word Analysis module, displaying the frequency of these terms in the conversation. This is extremely important from a crisis communications perspective because it enables organizations to stay ahead of the curve and equip themselves with actionable business intelligence before a situation spirals out of control. You can imagine the panic if terms such as “your brand” and “sucks” and “battery blew up” or “caught on fire” began to appear in the Frequent Word Analysis.
Lithium stands out among competitors for its breadth of social customer capabilities, as with its branded community platforms. Many big companies, including Sephora, Best Buy, and Hewlett-Packard, use the Lithium community platform, and the data it offers on the social customer is extremely valuable when coupled with external listening data.
Lithium’s Customer Intelligence Center also can help companies identify the biggest influencers today and those who can potentially become advocates tomorrow. The tool delivers fine-grained details about consumer behavior and identifies the wants and desires of brand advocates so that a company can continue to deliver on its brand promise, excite the community, and potentially drive long-term business value. It’s an additional service offering that provides data on customers, advocates, and influencers who are conversing about a given product or brand.
Meltwater Buzz
Meltwater Buzz, part of the Meltwater Group, might not be as well known as Radian6 or Lithium. However, with more than 100 million dollars in revenue, over 18,000 clients worldwide, and smart acquisitions in 2011, the Meltwater Group is certainly one of the strongest players in the online monitoring and social media listening applications space. What clearly differentiates them from others is their comprehensive suite of products that can be integrated into one platform. Not only do they have Meltwater Buzz, which monitors, analyzes, and reports on conversations in the social space, but they also have Meltwater News, which pulls similar data from traditional online media publications. Other tools within their suite include
• Meltwater Press—A media contacts database and press release distribution tool that pinpoints the most relevant journalists and influencers to send any press release or media pitch to by the content they publish using a new smart technology, Natural Language Processing
• Meltwater Reach—A platform that automates, optimizes, and provides more visibility into cross-channel, search-based advertising campaigns
• Meltwater Drive—An online collaboration environment that enables individuals to work more efficiently with their colleagues, partners, and clients
Additionally, in March 2011, Meltwater acquired JitterJam, a web-based Social CRM platform that combines social media, email, and mobile engagement with a contact database and the tools designed to turn social interaction into opportunities. JitterJam’s capabilities are going to be fully integrated into the existing Meltwater Buzz product and bring a breath of new capabilities with focus on social profiling, social engagement, and tools for social marketing. The built-in deep analytics will measure the effectiveness of your communications and campaigns, the buzz around your brand, the growth of your database, and much more.
With this acquisition, Meltwater Buzz will be positioned as the first “online monitoring” application that has unique social CRM capabilities as a part of their core feature set. Meltwater is an Edelman Client.
Although social listening tools are excellent ways to help companies understand external conversations on third-party blogs, forums, and other sources, other technology providers manage, listen, and engage directly with the community in a brand’s owned media channels, such as a brand’s Facebook page, YouTube account, and Twitter stream. These tools are known as Social Relationship Management Applications.
Social Relationship Management Applications
Companies that own and manage multiple Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube accounts will have trouble publishing content, responding to comments, and pulling metrics reports efficiently. Having to log in and log out of multiple accounts each time to post content is not an effective use of time or money. Luckily, tools can help manage this process of quickly publishing content across multiple channels and also pulling metrics just as easily. Many social relationship management applications offer similar features, including these:
• Governance, workflow, and approval processes
• Capability to manage multiple conversations and publish across multiple channels, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, foursquare, Gowalla, SlideShare, and various blogging platforms
• Robust one-click reporting
• Audience management and the capability to find influencers within owned media channels
• Message white labeling
• Report integration with common web analytics programs, including Google Analytics and Omniture
• Hosted solution
Sprinklr
Sprinklr is one of the industry’s leading tools that manage social media programs. It has a robust analytics engine on the back end, which is one differentiator from its competitors. Sprinklr can pull reach and impression metrics across all social media channels and can rank a contact according to three different measurement criteria:
• Previous interactions
• Size and influence of networks
• Level of engagement
Awareness
Similar to Sprinklr, Awareness is a social media management software service. One of the main differences, however, is that Awareness enables marketers to respond to comments, delete comments from any of the social media channels, and flag comments for review by team members directly from the tool. The tool also can measure the sentiment of each comment made within the social channels. This is an extremely helpful feature because marketers can quickly respond to both negative and positive comments, as well as identify their detractors and advocates within the given community.
The Syncapse Platform
The Syncapse Platform is enterprise social media management software that helps brands acquire new fans and customers, build engagement to drive loyalty and sales, identify and motivate influencers and advocates, and measure ROI. The dashboard is very similar to both Sprinklr and Awareness. However, Syncapse also offers an additional data analytics package above and beyond measuring reach, impressions, engagement, and fan growth.
Syncapse’s advanced analytics package reports on key measures that enable social marketers to understand performance of their programs. This includes values to gauge the return social marketing initiatives produce including Earned Reach, Earned Engagement, Earned Media Value, and Brand Favorability. This gives organizations the ability to evaluate social media spending in the same framework that they do traditional marketing spending, clarifying the value of social media marketing to senior executives within their organization.
Hearsay Social
Hearsay Social is a social media platform for organizations with many local branches, offices, or franchises. The product is designed to empower employees and branches to express themselves on local social media pages in an authentic voice, while ensuring compliance with corporate brand guidelines and industry regulations. Hearsay Social is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform with two views: corporate view and local view.
The corporate view for management includes compliance features for full message archiving, keyword flagging and filtering, workflow and approval capabilities for sound corporate governance, and FINRA/SEC/FTC and brand compliance. It also has the ability to publish content timely for campaigns and content suggestions, which can be dispersed by region or subregion as desired. Analytics also provide visibility across the entire organization’s social media efforts with in-depth, real-time analytics, as well as the ability to drill down by region or subregion.
The local view for reps and branches includes streamlined content and simultaneous posting of suggested content and branded tabs (such as corporate marketing campaigns, contests, and videos) to Facebook, LinkedIn, and/or Twitter, with the ability to select and tailor to local preferences. It also has core social CRM features, including social contact management; it shows a 360-degree view of Facebook fans and friends, LinkedIn connections, and Twitter followers in a consolidated contact record that aggregates social network activities (such as posts, likes, comments, and tweets) and profile information.
What’s important to realize with these social relationship management applications is the value proposition they bring to an organization: real-time analytics and content-publishing efficiencies. Real-time analytics help companies make effective data-driven decisions. If a certain community isn’t responding well to certain types of content, these tools make it very apparent right away so that companies can make editorial changes to the content. Publishing efficiencies simply save time and free up companies to spend more time thinking about strategy instead of having to log in and out five different platforms every day.
Real-Time Analytics and Publishing Efficiencies
The benefit of using social relationship management applications is real-time analytics, which enables marketers to share the right content (or message) at the right time, to the right customer, in the right channel.
Whichever publishing tools are being used to publish content, it’s important to keep a close eye on the data. Tools such as Sprinklr, Awareness, and the Syncapse Platform, among many others, are excellent tools for understanding, in real time, what types of content resonate with the community. The alternative means taking the shotgun approach and making assumptions, similar to the way traditional content is published on corporate web sites. Consider this quick illustration of social relationship management applications in action.
Imagine a brand that posts content to five different channels: two Twitter accounts, two Facebook pages, and one YouTube channel. Now let’s say that a community manager looks at the analytics only at the end of each month when he pulls the analytics reports to share them with the broader marketing teams. The reports most likely aggregate page views, impressions, engagement (Retweets, Likes, Shares, and so on), and all the other important metrics. Senior management will almost certainly ask, “What content is working and what content isn’t?” That data would certainly be easy to find, but it’s useless at the end of the month because it’s not actionable and the community is constantly changing. In other words, it’s not actionable because the data is old.
On the other hand, imagine a brand that is very data driven about community growth, in the same scenario of managing five different channels. The only difference here is that the community manager looks at the content daily. The advantage here is actionable insights. Smart companies are using this data to influence editorial calendars and future content in real time. For example, if the person posting content is using a social media management tool, she will be able to see, almost instantly, which content is being shared, retweeted, liked, and clicked on the most. So if the content is a tutorial, the intuitive action is to share more tutorials. The end result is a more relevant customer experience and an increase in the content being shared, retweeted, liked, and clicked on.
Real-time analytics give tremendous insight into the times and days to post content within an existing community. Referred to as day parting, this is a popular practice among search engine marketers.
A 2010 study by Vitrue, a social media management company, titled Managing Your Facebook Community: Findings on Conversation Volume by Day of Week, Hour and Minute, identified when Facebook users are the most active on branded fan pages. Here are some key findings:
• Usage skyrocketed during three different times of the day, on weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m., and 8:00 p.m. (all Eastern Standard Time).
• Wednesday at 3:00 pm EST was consistently the busiest day and time of the week.
• Sunday is not a good day to post content.
• Content posted in the morning performed better than content published in the afternoon (39.7% more effective in terms of user engagement).
• Content posted at the top of the hour performed better than content posted at other times.
By using real-time analytics and research provided by firms such as Vitrue, companies can publish content on Facebook at peak times when users are most active, to achieve maximum engagement.
The Future of External Social Technologies
Most of this chapter examined internal social technologies such as collaboration, listening, and social media management software. It’s equally important to take a close look at external social technologies, to see how they are innovating, integrating, and merging. Why? Because many companies today are using internal social tools that have open APIs and are synching them with Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Besides, what self-respecting book on social media would be complete without a hypothesis for the future of social technologies?
Innovation within the social landscape progresses at lightening speed. New business plans are written and proposed, venture capital is spent, and social apps are developed and released by the tens of thousands each month. The lucky few who achieve high levels of mass adoption, such as Facebook, Twitter, and foursquare, become part of an exclusive technology movement that influences the evolution of social media.
Many trends could really take off and change the social landscape for businesses everywhere. Here’s our short list of things to plan for.
The Entire Internet Will Be Facebook
On 60 Minutes in December 2010, Mark Zuckerberg told the world that users can do basically anything on Facebook that they can elsewhere online: shopping, searching, poking, stalking, chatting, blogging, emailing, collaborating, and more. And it’s safe to say that the common question of “Are you on Facebook” is almost as popular as “Did you Google it?”
In 2010, comScore reported that Facebook finally surpassed Google in total time spent within its network, at 41.1 billion minutes over Google’s 39.8 billion minutes in the month of August. Nielsen also released data showing that Americans spend nearly a quarter of their time engaging in social networks. Even more research from Nielsen found that the average time users spend using Facebook per month grew nearly 10 percent, topping seven hours. That’s about 14 minutes per day and growing.
Facebook hit 500 million users in 2010 and is growing quickly. It’s also building new products seemingly every day and is achieving high degrees of adoption. Given all these data points, Facebook is surely threatening other tools and technologies that at one time dominated a particular market segment:
• Search (Google, Bing)
• Chat (GChat, Yahoo! Instant Messenger)
• Email (GMail, Yahoo!, Hotmail)
• Blogging (Blogger, Wordpress)
• Groups and collaboration (Yahoo! Groups)
• Location-based services (Foursquare, Gowalla)
It’s no wonder many executives fear the growth of Facebook. In fact, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz admitted at a New York City event in 2010 that the company’s “greatest competitor probably is Facebook, more so than Google.”
Facebook also is gaining widespread adoption of its Open Graph (API) platform, which enables third-party sites and applications to share information about users to provide a more relevant customer experience—even if that user has never been to those sites. In addition, during the Le Web conference in Paris in December 2010, Facebook’s head of platform, Ethan Beard, told the audience that more than 250 million people globally are using the Facebook Connect ecosystem every month.
It wouldn’t be a surprise if one day Facebook launched an enterprise version of its social network that companies could deploy behind the firewall to replace entire intranets and then potentially use Facebook Connect to replace enterprise single sign-on (SSO) solutions. This could pose a threat to companies such as Lithium and Jive that offer SSO as a core feature set of their community applications.
The point is clear: Facebook is well on its way to global dominance, and even Google can’t stop it. The question is whether companies are ready to hop on for the ride.
Network Consolidation
The future of social media will surely hold several mergers and acquisitions. There are already many happening in the social media listening market, with Lithium acquiring Scout Labs, Attensity acquiring Biz360, and Meltwater acquiring JitterJam. But one acquisition that will likely gain the most attention is Google acquiring Twitter. And by the time this book is published, several more are sure to take place.
This will happen for several reasons. Google unsuccessfully launched two products: Wave and Buzz.
Google Wave is (or was) a software application positioned for real-time collaboration. First introduced at the Google I/O conference in May 2009, the product was discontinued less than a year and a half later; Google announced that it didn’t plan to continue Wave as a standalone product. Wave failed for many reasons, mainly because it was just hard to use.
Buzz is Google’s attempt to take share away from Facebook by integrating “the stream” into Gmail. The product enables users to share links, photos, videos, status messages, and comments organized in “conversations” and visible within the Gmail inbox. The product is similar to Twitter and Facebook, in that sense.
Buzz hasn’t failed yet, but the product has caused plenty of problems for Google. When the product first launched in February 2010, it “opted in” every user of GMail to automatically “follow” those with whom they interacted with the most, via email or chat.
Many users felt their online privacy was violated, and class-action lawsuits were filed on behalf of every registered Google Buzz user, alleging violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and other federal and state laws. Less than nine months later, the Associated Press reported that Google and the plaintiffs agreed to a settlement; starting in December, Google will start a fund worth $8.5 million to help pay for legal expenses for nonprofit organizations focused on privacy education.
With all this headache Wave and Buzz caused Google, it only makes sense that Google will go after Twitter. Twitter has a loyal community and has the mind share, infrastructure, data centers, and smart engineers already in place. And by acquiring Twitter, Google can only improve its search results. This is an important factor, considering that Facebook has partnered with rival search engine Bing to bring more relevant search queries based on a user’s social graph.
This is relevant to social business because such an acquisition would position Google as a real-time collaboration tool and threaten the likes of Yammer and possibly IBM. Google can become a dominant player in the space if this acquisition happens.
Taking the Next Steps
When considering tools and technology, it’s important to make strategic decisions and take a long-term view for any social business operation. Ultimately, missteps in this process can cause confusion organizationally, sour the adoption of social technologies, contribute to lost enthusiasm, result in political losses for an organization, and ultimately call into question the relevance of social media as a viable and measurable communication channel.
Technology is a critical part of any social media operation that hopes to scale and socialize its business. The following are some practical take-aways when considering technology integration and adoption of social applications.
Social Technologies
Every business is different. Each has its own individual processes, IT infrastructure, governance, and culture. And although this chapter covered many tools and technologies, it’s important to remember that a solution that’s a great fit for one company might be a disaster for another. Companies must take their time and test before making long-term technology decisions. The following are a few key questions to consider:
• Is the software scalable? As the company grows in size and infrastructure, can this technology also grow with it?
• Can this technology integrate with other internal databases and systems? This is especially important because many organizations are now employing social CRM programs.
• Does the company have the technical expertise to manage and deploy such technologies internally? If not, is a staffing plan being considered?
• Is IT involved in the decision of whether to use this technology? If not, it should be.
• Are other teams, regions, or business units already using the technology? If so, the company should understand the obstacles, if any.
Additionally, it’s good practice to talk to others who have deployed the software within their organizations. Get their feedback and learn about what they like and don’t like about the software. The more feedback it gets, the better equipped a company will be when making purchase decisions. Most collaboration vendors also offer free trials for 30 days. Spend time using an option and determining whether it’s a good fit in terms of technology and culture.
Build a Listening Station: Listen and Act
Listening on the social web is one of the most important acts a company can take. Listening provides insight into what the community, customers, advocates, influencers, and press are saying about a given brand. This listening exercise should happen well before any external engagement takes place, or at least simultaneously.
What was once a cumbersome activity involving many disparate tools has given way to much more powerful technology solutions. This chapter touched on some major enterprise-class solutions, such as Radian6 and Lithium (formerly ScoutLabs), that are popular enterprise picks for social listening.
In 2010, Gatorade gained a lot of coverage by launching its Gatorade Mission Control Center inside its Chicago headquarters. It’s basically a war room for monitoring the Gatorade brand (and competitors) in real time across various social media channels. The room features six LCD monitors, complete with data visualizations and dashboards (which are also available on employees’ computers). Gatorade uses both Radian6 and IBM technologies.
For companies that cannot afford expensive enterprise-grade solutions, war rooms, and fancy dashboards, alternatives are available.
• Google still works. Google the brand name in quotation marks and use competitor keywords.
• Google Blog Search and Twitter Search. Although this method is completely manual and provides no historical trending data, it can still provide a quick snapshot of the sentiment of any brand in real time.
• The web-based tool Amplicate gathers the collective feedback from a community and reports both positive and negative sentiment on just about any topic. It also provides links to the actual conversations.
• Social Mention is a free social media monitoring tool that scrapes blogs, Twitter, forums, and the rest of the Web. It does lack reporting.
• Twitter Sentiment can pull just Twitter sentiment about any topic.
• Google Alerts also offers a subscription.
Social listening should be a major priority for any social business, but the actual insights from listening are where the true business value is found. It’s not good enough to just listen—companies need to have a plan of action and a strategy for how to respond. Organizations that splurge on expensive listening and reporting subscriptions but fail to understand how to respond and react to this information are simply wasting valuable financial and human resources.
A social business is one that invests in technology that will allow it to collaborate, interact, share, and engage both internally and externally with customers. This chapter highlighted several well-known social technologies, but each company must determine which ones can grow and scale with the business.
A social business also takes into consideration the external landscape of social media. With the growth of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and mobile applications, companies need to understand the technical implications of what is happening externally and plan accordingly internally.