Openingupbrands

@jobmuscroft on Social intelligence, Open leadership, NewMR and Brands

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With more than 225 million users worldwide, LinkedIn has become a tremendously popular site for job seekers and those looking to make professional connections. Business owners are realizing the value of the networking site, too. According to data compiled by Wishpond, a maker of social media marketing applications based in Vancouver, British Columbia, 27 million brands have a LinkedIn company page.

And it seems to be paying off. According to their research, 77 percent of LinkedIn members do product or service-related research on the site, and 60 percent of users have clicked on ads on LinkedIn

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Webinar - 5 Things To Do With Social Data That Aren’t Keyword Tracking

“5 Things To Do With Social Data That Aren’t Keyword Tracking,” the first webinar in our “How Stuff Spreads” series.

Like what you see in the recording? We’re always available for a chat or for more information. You can join our newsletter to be informed when our next webinar will be, or contact us  for more information about how you can use Pulsar TRAC for your business. Just contact us.

*Francesco D’Orazio is the Chief Innovation Officer at Face. Connect with him on LinkedIn here, or share your thoughts about Big Data with us at @FaceResearch.

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Ferguson Retires - Twitter Reaction Infographic via @faceresearch

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How Stuff Spreads #1: Gangnam Style vs Harlem Shake – Full Study and Data Visualization

Anatomy of Two Memes

As you might have heard, we’ve just launched a new social media intelligence toolPulsar TRAC, and along with it, we’re releasing a new series of data studies called How Stuff Spreads in collaboration with our social data partners Datasift.

How Stuff Spreads will look at how digital content (videos, articles, websites, and images) travels the social web. This, the first instalment, looks at how two memes spread on Twitter: Gangnam Style vs Harlem Shake.

Gangnam Style and Harlem Shake were viral phenomena, generating thousands of spin-off versions and billions of views. By using Pulsar TRAC’s Content Tracking technology, we are able to track any social media conversation containing a specific URL and analyse who is talking about it, gateways and hubs, topics of discussion, geography of the discussion and key channels.

Me (@abc3d) and Jess Owens (@hautepop) wanted to understand how Gangnam and Harlem became global memes. So we set out to compare how the top 5 versions of each video were shared on Twitter, looking at 8 dimensions of each meme:

Shape: Number of shares per video, over lifetime of the meme

Lifespan: Number of consecutive days where people shared the meme 500+ times

Popularity: Number of unique users sharing the meme over its lifetime

Shareability: Total Twitter shares per each million of YouTube views

Globality: How international was the meme?

Amplification: How influential were the people who shared the meme

Variation: How much did attention to the meme vary day-by-day?

DiffusionNetwork: Hubs and nationalities who drove the spread of the meme

Here’s what we found out.

1) Memes have different shapes. Gangnam Style showed a top down or ‘vertical’ pattern, with the original video generating 10x as many YouTube views and shares as any of its variations. Conversely Harlem Shake was more bottom up or ‘horizontal’ in its dynamic, with the original seed sparking thousands of variations, some of which did better than the original in terms of views and shares.

2) The shape of a meme affects its lifetime. We defined a meme as ‘live’ (popular and actively shared) as the time when it was getting at least 500+ URL shares on Twitter per day. Whereas Gangnam Style lived for 172 consecutive days, Harlem Shake only survived for 29.

Why did Gangnam, the “top down” meme, live over 5x longer than the “bottom up” Harlem Shake? A possible clue may come from the three-part-process of social movement formation which Charles Duhigg describes in his book “The Power of Habits”:

“A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances.

It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together.

And it endures because a movement’s leader gives participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership”

Whereas Gangnam Style offered a strong top-down narrative with an easily identifiable leader in Psy, Harlem Shake had a more distributed narrative with no real leadership and guidance outside of the format. Consequently it didn’t succeed in creating a ‘habit’ that would outlive the interest from the local and community networks who where the real engine behind this meme.

3) Regardless of their shape, memes spread in waves. Both memes showed a very spikey distribution, with attention to the video fluctuating dramatically day-by-day. We quantified this variation by first calculating the standard deviation of the daily sharing rate (i.e. how much sharing levels varied day by day), then dividing by the mean to give us the coefficient of variation.

Typically all the videos saw a lot of variation in the rate they were shared, with Gangnam Style being more consistent (196% variation) then Harlem Shake (338% variation). But three videos stood out for showing much more variability: YouTube Gangnam Rewind (807%), Britney Spears learning Gangnam on the Ellen Show (574%) and basketball team Miami Heat’s Harlem Shake (517%). These videos each saw a massive launch spike – e.g. Britney with 15,792 tweets carrying the link on September 11 2012, and Miami Heat’s Harlem Shake with 63,927 on March 02 2013.

How did they achieve this? Each video was led by an individual or organization with massive reach – YouTube and Britney Spears both have 26m Twitter followers, and Miami Heat has a strong community of 1.2 million. This means they were able to activate a big existing audience to get the video out very quickly on Day 1 – hence the big spike in sharing. But within a couple of days, that audience was saturated – everyone who’d be interested had already seen the video. The Britney Spears variation of Gangnam Style, linked to The Ellen Show, was only newsworthy within a brief timeframe. Miami Heat’s take on the Harlem shake was particularly relevant to the basketball community and expired once the “local” reach was somewhat exhausted. So sharing dropped off precipitously – hence the big variation score.

It’s almost a risk to be a social media influencer – you can activate a large audience very quickly, but that attention can be burnt through equally fast. By comparison, the Gangnam Original video had one of the lowest variation scores (114%). Psy was new to Western and Latin American audiences, so the video travelled more slowly through social networks – but this helped attention sustain for fully six months.

4) Small communities drive virality. The relationship between communities and viral spread is reinforced by the fairly high density and modularity of both the Gangnam Stye and Harlem Shakes networks. This highlights the key role of small communities in spreading the meme. Within the Gangnam Style network, 14% of the people sharing the link passed it on or grabbed it from someone, while within the Harlem Shake network the connected sharers increase to 17% of the overall pool of users. These figures are remarkable considering the globally dispersed diffusion of the memes.

By contrast, influencers only accounted for a small percentage of the total buzz. Out of 767,000 unique mentioners of the Gangnam Style videos only 64 generated more than 100 retweets and only 8 more than 1000. Out of 173,000 unique mentioners of the Harlem Shake videos, only 9 generated more than 100 retweets. That means that for Gangnam Style less than 5% of the total shares were directly connected to the influencers, and for Harlem Shake only 1%.

5) Both memes transcended physical geography, even though both were born out of specific geographic areas and subcultures.

We measured the memes’ Globality (% of shares coming from countries other than the top one, usually the USA). Both memes were very international, but Gangnam Style turned out to be more global then Harlem Shake (78% vs. 63%) This makes intuitive sense – Gangnam Style started in Korea and spread to win massive popularity across North America, Latin America and Europe. Most viewers didn’t understand the lyrics, but the strong visual character meant this didn’t matter. By contrast, some of the Harlem Shake videos were much more geographically and culturally specific – particularly the Miami Heat basketball Harlem Shake, which got fully half (49%) of its sharing from within the United States.

This is also clearly shown in the network analysis, where the number of retweets spanning from the central nodes of the Harlem Shake meme network confirms this US-centric pattern of engagement. Conversely the central nodes in the Gangnam Style meme network are connected to a very diverse range of countries.

6) Popularity doesn’t mean Shareability, and Shareability doesn’t imply Popularity. While Harlem Shake turned out to be 3x more shareable then Gangnam Style, it still ended up being 4.5x less popular in terms of the number of unique users sharing it.

How did this happen? This is certainly connected to the higher mainstream coverage of Gangnam Style which lowered its currency in social media – there’s little value in sharing something people are seeing all over the TV. It’s also connected to the greater iteration and ‘localization’ of the Harlem Shake meme. This made its videos more relevant to hundreds of small local communities across the globe – so the Norwegian Army video was heavily shared in Norway, the Miami Heat video in the United States and so on. Essentially Harlem Shake had currency but didn’t have scale. Gangnam Style had less currency but had massive scale.

It’s a difficult balance for a meme to strike. Community drives Shareability but doesn’t give you Scale (Popularity). Top-down influence drives Scale (Popularity) but kills Shareability. While Shareability is a key requisite of virality, scale is what enables and sustains exponential growth.

7) Memes are like currencies: you need to balance accessibility (or ‘money supply’) and inflation. Gangnam Style became globally accessible through top-down mainstream sources (High Popularity), but this gave it high social inflation so it wasn’t valuable to share (Low Shareability). However, scale sustained its long term growth. Harlem Shake was not as easily accessible because it was driven more by small communities (Low Popularity), but for the same reason, being less easily accessible, it remained highly valuable (High Shareability). Lack of scale was what made Harlem Shake growth short-term and eventually killed it prematurely.

Conclusions: 8 things we learnt about how stuff spreads in social media

Based on what we’ve seen from studying the spread of the Gangnam Style and Harlem Shakes memes on Twitter, we see 8 common things to watch out to make things go viral:

Bursts and Rises: 2 models of virality. The Burst model is bottom-up: the variations are more powerful then the original seed and there’s no clear leadership or narrative. The meme relies on community relevance to spread. The Rise model is top-down: the original seed is always stronger than its variations and has a clear leader dictating the narrative. Bursts spread widely more quickly but don’t endure.Rises spread more slowly and less widely but they tend to endure because the meme has a focal point. Chose your model of virality and plan accordingly.

Triggers. Whatever the model, virality is triggered by surprise, cultural relevance to a community, and endorsement by a leader or the media.

Waves. Whatever the trigger, virality is not a steady affair; it spreads in waves and spikes.

Communities drive viral spread way more than influencers.

Glocality. Memes transcend geography but a successful meme needs a balance of both local relevance and global appeal.

Leadership. A meme needs a focal point to live longer. Virality is only sustained through a strong narrative and leadership.

Slow and spikey wins the race. Weak ties and communities sustain for weeks but they don’t give you scale in the short term. Top-down media and celebrity endorsement gives you instant scale but burns out within a couple of days by decreasing the shareability of the meme.

Memes are like currency: you need to balance supply (or accessibility) and inflation. In order to achieve high shareability and high popularity the meme supply has to be expansionary but strategically controlled so that it doesn’t negatively affect its shareability. This at the same time gives the meme the scale that can trigger and sustain exponential growth.

Originally posted on www.facegroup.com

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PULSAR TRAC - Big Social Data for Research

 Pulsar TRAC moves the marketing industry beyond social media monitoring  www.pulsarplatform.com

Today we are unveiling Pulsar TRAC, an advanced social intelligence platform which pushes social media research beyond keyword tracking.

Born out of 10 years experience of research and planning with social data, Pulsar TRAC is built on a robust intelligence framework enabling marketers to do more than just keyword tracking: measuring the reach of conversations, mapping brand audiences and tracking content diffusion.

It solves many of the issues found in current social media monitoring tools, such as the obsession with volume-led metrics, the lack of demographic and behavioural context, no understanding of the audience, poor interfaces and the inability to weight the impact of conversations.

That’s why Pulsar TRAC is the only platform on the market currently that allows mining of big social data in four new ways:

1) Visibility measurement- estimate the reach of each post

2) Audience mapping – who are you talking to and what do they like

3) Content tracking – how does your content travel the social web

  4) Advanced filtering – 14 behavioural, contextual and demographic filters to find exactly what you are looking for

“We’ve been really impressed with the speed and efficiency of Pulsar TRAC and its ability to provide real time actionable insight. We’re particularly excited about the audience mapping and content diffusion capabilities – they allow us to really target and understand specific groups of people in real-time.” - Jake Steadman, Head of Real Time Research at O2 Telefonica.

“Face’s Pulsar TRAC is invaluable for identifying real-time insight into the way that our audiences are engaging with content and stories. The key difference with PULSAR TRAC is that the platform offers a high quality social media insight system, supported by analysis that creates meaningful stories from the data with clear actionable steps for our business.” - Justin Wyatt, Vice President of Primary Research at NBC Universal.

Engineered for complexity, scale and speed, Pulsar’s Big Data engine is built on Apache Cassandra and Solr. This enables Pulsar TRAC to store and index multiple data points besides keyword mentions, including social graphs, interest graphs, demographics and behavioural data.

Our Chief Innovation Officer, Francesco D’Orazio, explains what drove the design of Pulsar TRAC:

“There are more than 200 social media monitoring tools on the market, and yet none of them allowed us to do proper research on social media data. And that’s why we built Pulsar TRAC. Whereas all traditional social media monitoring platforms on the market only look at the content of the conversations, we found a massive opportunity in indexing and analysing everything around it. This means very Big Data. But with Pulsar TRAC we can now process all that and still deliver on the real-time user experience which is key to exploiting Big Data’s real potential: finding out what you don’t know you don’t know.”

Our CEO, Andrew Needham, comments:

“With Pulsar TRAC we are delivering on our vision of social intelligence for brands by helping companies put consumers at the heart of their business, giving them a real time, in depth and holistic view of their customers. Having doubled in size in the past 12 months with offices in New York, Singapore and Hong Kong, Pulsar TRAC is the first in a series of planned product releases from Face which marks an evolution of the business from a research agency to a technology driven insight consultancy.”

The Pulsar TRAC platform, designed to deliver real-time insights for global brands and agencies, is now available at www.pulsarplatform.com. 

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3 Steps - Social Media Research Audit

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man might be lying.”

I heard the phrase above a few years ago and it stuck with me. It came from a planner, describing the sudden mad urge for brands to embrace social media. ‘Social Media Ninjas’ and ‘Engagement Gurus’ sprung up overnight, offering shadowy principles on how to tame this new beast, and were given credence simply by virtue of being young and au fait with a world many knew nothing about.

A few years later and social media is no longer the Wild West of the communications world. Books have been written, seminars held, a catechism of accepted practice has been disseminated around boardrooms across the world. But still social media proves unwieldy and unpredictable. What’s a marketer to do?

Image by Eboy

If you’ll excuse the tortured metaphor, I like to think about building a social media strategy as if it was building a house. Before you can even begin to think about what your house is going to look like, you need to know where it’s going to go and what function it’s going to serve. And to know that, you need to know who’s going to be using it. Time to call in the surveyors.

When trying to create a social media audit, or a survey of a current social media landscape, we employ a three-pronged approach; three separate streams of activity designed to feed into one holistic overview:

Consumer Social Listening

Brand Social Audit

Competitor Social Analysis

1. Consumer Social Listening

This is a search for keywords and brands that are relevant to the category in general. The purpose of this stream is to let us know what role the category playa in the digital life of the consumer. Searches are set up around the world in relevant markets, in local languages, to track organic mentions of category-specific keywords and brand names across a search period of about one month. This would yield the answers to the following questions:

Which specific topics do consumers talk about in relation to certain categories?

How do they talk about these topics?

Where do they talk about them?

Who are the influencers in this category? What are the dynamics of these conversations?

What role do brands play in these categories, if any?

This quick search is invaluable at giving an insight into how brands behave online, and how consumers interact with a category. We can uncover a category’s most salient topics, the areas of greatest need, and the less relevant aspects for consumers.

2. Brand Social Audit

After the internet-wide social listening search, we then do a manual and qualitative deep-dive into the client’s current online activities. By looking at the use of the brand in online conversations and discussions, we can uncover what role it plays in a consumer’s online life. The contexts in which they mention it, who they mention it to, where they mention it – all these factors are vital in determining the social cachet a brand has, and what function it can play in the lives of its users.

By looking at the type of content that customers engage with, and are willing to share with their personal networks of friends and peers, we can build a picture of the brand online, and begin to work out how the brand is being used and interacted with by its target market. This is the basis on which the digital team can start to design the architecture of its new online strategy.

3. Competitor Analysis

In Malvina Reynolds’ satirical anthem ‘Little Boxes’, she bemoans the proliferation of identikit maisonettes in America’s suburbs. And so it remains: variety is the spice of life. Through in-depth, qualitative analysis of competitor brands, we can provide detailed commentary on how to ensure a standout digital presence. We work to identify the positioning that most accurately reflects the needs and desires of the brand’s target audience.

Social media offers an unprecedented level of access and reciprocity between a brand and its users. The key to unlocking this is to find a territory where your fan or follower or subscriber is willing to engage with you, while remaining distinguishable from your competitors.

Originally posted on www.facegroup.com

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6 STEPS TO A SOCIAL BUSINESS

Stage 1: Planning - "Listen to Learn"

The goal of this first stage is to ensure that there is a strong foundation for strategy development, organizational alignment, resource development, and execution.

Stage 2: Presence - "Stake Our Claim"

Staking a claim represents a natural evolution from planning to action. As you move along the journey, your experience establishes a formal and informed presence in social media.

Stage 3: Engagement - "Dialog Deepens Relationships"

When organizations move into this stage, they make a commitment where social media is no longer a “nice to “have” but instead, is seen as a critical element in relationship building.

Stage 4: Formalized - "Organize for Scale"

The risk of uncoordinated social initiatives is the main driver moving organizations into Stage 4, where a formalized approach focuses on three key activities: establishing an executive sponsor; creating a hub, a.k.a. a Center of Excellence (CoE); and establishing organization-wide governance. Organizations should plan for a potential CoE pitfall, however, as creating one may lead to scaling problems in the long-term.

Stage 5: Strategic - "Becoming a Social Business"

As organizations migrate along the maturity model, the social media initiatives gain greater visibility as they begin to have real business impact. This captures the attention of C-level executives and department heads who see the potential of social.

Stage 6: Converged - "Business is Social"

As a result of the cross-functional and executive support, social business strategies start to weave into the fabric of an evolving organization.

Original posted by Altimeter Group

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How Social Intelligence Will Power Business - Mckinsey

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How social media research helped turn around their business

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Useful visualisation - The Case for Social Intelligence 

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Recent IBM report found while most companies are accelerating their social media plans, many are struggling to figure out what it all means.

IBM's survey of 1,160 IT professionals shows that while 46% of the organizations increased their social technologies investments in 2012, only 22% believed that managers are prepared to incorporate social tools into their daily practices. In addition, two-thirds of respondents were not sure they sufficiently understood the impact that social technologies would have on their organizations over the next three years.

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The Rise of the Chinese Social Consumer

China’s Great Fire Wall has blocked out the Western social networks to a greater or lesser degree. But even without the West’s direct influence in the social networking scene, social networking in China has expanded, becoming an intrinsic part of many people’s lives. As Yin Mei said on Mashable, “Connections mean ‘power’ in China. This is why social networks have become part of the relationship-building fabric of Chinese society.”

Here are five specific reasons why brands should be participating in China’s social networking scene.

1. 300 million consumers using social media

China’s size makes it impossible to ignore. China has over 300 million social network users and that’s around only 58% of total internet users in the country. Given that the country’s total population is 1.34 billion, there is huge growth potential here. But of course, what people are doing on social networks is what makes this important.

You can accomplish a lot when you get a bunch of people together. One of China’s largest social networks, YY.com, has a virtual currency system that allows users to earn real money, perhaps even make a living off their skills. This could through be performing a virtual karaoke concert or giving college class tutorials.

2. Chinese social consumers are highly active

Chinese social networking users return to their social networks of choice much more frequently than those from any other country. According to a McKinsey survey, 91% of Chinese social network users claimed they had visited a social networking site in the last six months. Compare that to other Asian countries such as the ever-connected Japan at 30% or South Korea at 70%. Even in the US, the birthplace of Facebook and Twitter, only 67% of users said they had visited a social networking site in the past six months.

These consumers are online discussing and engaging with brands. Indeed on Sina Weibo, 27.5% of users reported searching for brand content. Not all of this content is good, though. Just like with Twitter, a single post can light up a firestorm of controversy. In late September a Starbucks opened by the Lingyin Temple in Hangzhou to the roar of controversy. The news was shared at least 4,000 times on Sina Weibo as people weighed in on how they felt about the juxtaposition of traditional Chinese culture and a symbol of foreign cultures.

3. They are spending online

Ecommerce is booming in China. China has 193 million online shoppers. That’s more than the US’s 170 million, and five times that of the UK, according to the Boston Consulting Group. But it’s still only 14% of the population. By 2015, China is expected to be the largest ecommerce economy with a projected size of $2.83 trillion spent by 300 million online consumers.

But we’re not looking at e-commerce business as usual. Homegrown players are innovating the space. Taobao is a leading consumer-to-consumer auction site like Ebay, but that’s where the similarity seems to end. Unlike Ebay, Taobao doesn’t make its money by charging sellers for listings and sales. Rather, it sells search rankings and personalized storefronts to sellers. Taobao also has a more community feel than Ebay in the US, with fashion and entertainment news as well as practical shopping tips. It’s a new kind of e-commerce.

4. They listen to social recommendations

Chinese consumers observe what others are doing very closely. They are more likely to consider a purchase if the product has been mentioned on a social media site. Around 60% claim that friends and family are a major source of product information. The basic logic is that if more people are using a product, the more likely it will work, not break, and not embarrass the user. Link this use of social media with the growing ecommerce market, and it’s not hard to see the opportunity.

To capitalize on this, Taobao lists products by popularity as a default. This provides users with the assurance that other people have tried out the product and that it works, encouraging sales. Due no doubt in part to this and other innovations, Taobao has a 90.3% stake in the consumer-to-consumer market.

5. Social consumers are not just urbanites

China’s native social networks are targeting more than just the affluent members of the urban elite (though they have their own network, too: P1.cn is invite only and just for the top 10% of earners). Tencent, a large social networking company, has three platforms that focus on people living in rural and second tier cities (those with more than 1 million residents but are not Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen – 1st tier cities).

These sites are huge, too. Qzone, which targets teens and rural users, has 597 million users. QQ, the instant messaging social network, has 784 million users and targets the same demographic. Social networking in China offers a wide range of audiences. Brands can pick which audiences they need to reach and move from there.

Originally posted on www.facegroup.com

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Learn more about this work............

What’s next after social media tracking?

How do I measure my brand’s social audience?

How can I connect social media data into the other research we do?

The FACE Social Intelligence team are excited to be leading a workshop on Advanced Social Intelligence at the ESOMAR 3D Digital Dimensions 2012 conference on 4-6 November.

This is going to be an advanced session – not just an introduction to social media research, but a guide to the cutting-edge methods we’ve developed over the past 3 years with clients such as O2 & Telefonica, RBS, Unilever, and Royal Mail.

The workshop will cover our 7 Pillars of Social Intelligence, detailing the techniques and exploring case studies for each – plus exercises to give you first-hand experience in putting these techniques into practice. They are:

Brand & Topic Tracking Using keyword tracking to map how a brand or a topic are discussed online in terms of audience reach, engagement, reaction, perceptions, and attitudes.

Audience Mapping & the Brand Graph How to create a snapshot of an online audience to measure who they are, what they are about and how do they behave online. Case study: Mapping the O2 Brand Graph

Real-time Segmentation How to integrate your segmentation model with real-time data from social media in order to best plan their activities in terms of product innovation and marketing.

Content Diffusion How to map the spread of specific pieces of content (such as campaign videos, articles, or press releases) in social media: through which audiences, using which channels and to what levels of reach and engagement?

Influence Mapping How to uncover influential users and connectors responsible for routing different types of content within a network, or shaping conversations and awareness of topics and brands. More info: Understanding Influence in Social Media

Community Augmentation How to add wider social and behavioural context to a market research community by integrating social media data about its users. Our philosophy: Augmenting Brands

Audience Simulation Haven’t got a big social following, or wanting to reach a new one? How to simulate the behaviour and attitudes of a specific audience online using social media data to create realistic personas based on actual users.

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5 Characteristics of a Social Business

1. A social business understands at the C suite level that the organization is made up of people who probably already engage with friends, family and business colleagues in social media. And, rather than trying to create two separate personas between the proverbial 9 to 5 worker and the social creature, the C suite recognizes that the employee is a social creature whether at work or not. As such, being a social business embraces the social element in at least three functional groups of the organization: 1) human resources, 2) customer service, 3) marketing. Ideally, the Sales organization also embraces social, especially when an organization invests in social business technology empowering sales people to collaborate with all corners of the organization to achieve sales objectives. Executive level support also means transparency. When C suite execs participate in social communication both internally and externally, it sends a strong message to employees and to the market that the organization is genuine in its actions as a social business.

2. A social business understands that marketing is not a function of one department. A CMO collaborates with other C level executives to identify strategic goals, then defines the content strategy and communication plan to achieve the goals. In a social business, the CMO is empowered to recruit other functional subject matter experts to participate in marketing execution plans. A content strategy that involves all customer-facing departments must include cross functional subject matter experts. Such participation allows for creation of more relevant content. Engagement in the market place with subject matter experts is far more credible than engagement with employees of a marketing department who may lack technical subject matter expertise on certain topics.

3. A natural extension of the “marketing is not a department” concept is the notion that some of the participating cross-functional employees that participate in community engagement can develop a brand of their own. A social business embraces individual employee branding because a social business provides guidelines and encouragement for both parties to benefit – the employee and the employer. I call this the “halo effect.” A social business has alignment with select employees whose brand develops in the market. When such alignment exists, we see this halo effect. One of my favorite examples is Matt Cutts of Google. He is the face of Google to the SEO community. Additionally, many other Google employees shoot videos discussing product announcements.

In a social business, social media channels are just that – channels. There is no talk of “social media strategy.” It’s abusiness strategy! Social media channels are just part of the enablers in the business strategy.

4.A social business understands that technologies are needed to facilitate internal engagement among employees, external engagement in the market, development of content, social sharing, social engagement and measurement of outcomes. Recent acquisitions this year in social technology include: Salesforce acquired Buddy Media andRadian6. Oracle acquired Vitrue. Microsoft recently announced they are acquiring Yammer. These acquisitions are evidence that enterprise software companies must provide tools to their customers to enable their social business.

5.A social business is very analytical. It must understand the make-up of its employees, partners and customers. And, the only way to truly understand each of these segments is through data. As referenced in the previous point, use of technology to analyze big data is critical to have a keen understanding of each segment. We live in the age of relevance. Whether we’re marketing to prospective customers or engaging with employees or partners, communicating in hyper relevant ways is absolutely necessary. In today’s social culture, generic communication and engagement is received as not relevant. Nothing turns off a person faster than a non relevant engagement. People simply don’t have the patience for non relevant communication. More importantly, people have options and with a simple click can turn away from your message or engagement. Even worse, the negative sentiment created in non-relevant communication can have a long lasting and potentially viral effect.

Data driven marketing also refers to keen analysis of customer reaction to marketing programs. Technology investments are necessary to make data driven decisions. A social business understands the necessity of making this investment in order to make data driven decisions.

Originally posted on www.findandconvert.com

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What Makes A Social Business

Social business, which is the application of social technologies as a formal component of business processes, revolves around understanding how your customers or stakeholders connect to your business and how you reshape your business to understand, accept and innovate, based on their involvement.

Social business is about integrating all of your business functions: customer support, marketing, the executive team and more. It means doing this for the purpose of creating collaborative innovation and engagement at meaningful, measurable levels tied clearly and directly to your company’s business objectives.

Participative Social Business

Ultimately, social business is about participation with and by your customers and stakeholders in pursuit of an organization that is strongly connected to them through participative and collaborative processes.

As a result, a social business is often better able to respond to marketplace dynamics and competitive opportunities than a traditionally organized and managed firm. This may occur through participation in a social community, a support or discussion forum or any of a variety of other social applications and contexts.

The efforts leading to the creation of a social business often begin with identifying or creating an opportunity for participation with (or between) customers, employees or stakeholders within communities or similar social applications.

Building a social business starts with establishing a community or other social presence around or in which your brand fits naturally, whether through a casual presence on Twitter, a more involved Facebook business presence or your own community built for customers, suppliers or partners.

Encourage Customer Participation

Regardless of who the community is intended to serve, strong communities are best built around the things that matter deeply to the members of the community: passions, lifestyles, causes and similar fundamentally aligned needs.

The core elements powering a social business in any case need to be something to which the community members (customers or potential customers, for example) will spontaneously bond with and that as a result will encourage them to invite others to join.

If you’ve ever met a small business owner, you know how passionate they are about what they do. A very effective way through the practices of social business is to tap this by identifying and serving the needs of that small business owner by encouraging discussion about issues related to his/her business that your company can help them with.

Similarly, smaller communities, where personal interests drive strong relationships are prime opportunities for social business initiatives.

Getting the activity focused on something larger than your brand, product or service is critical to the successful development of social behavior within the customer or stakeholder base and as well within the firm or organization itself.

By understanding the passions, lifestyles and causes that are relevant to your customers, you can identify the best social pathways through which to build connections to your product, brand or service.

This is where a number of otherwise well-intentioned efforts go wrong: Attempting to build a community around a brand or product will often fail if participation is driven primarily by advertising expenditure and costly promotions rather than by organic interest generated by and between the participants themselves.

Use A Strong Anchor Message

The surest way to avoid this trap is to appeal to passion, lifestyle or cause; in other words, to anchor your initiatives in something larger than your brand, product or

service.

Appeal to your target audience with a strong message, one that is carefully selected to both attract the people you want to associate with and to provide a natural home or connection to your brand, product or service.

To increase your market share with today’s customers, you need to obtain a better transactional view of the customer.

The customer receives your marketing messages, for example, buys the product or service and then also goes on to provide feedback, whether directly via CRM or similar or through a listening program that collects and analyzes conversations.

The difference here is that there is a feedback mechanism. As such, compliments and concerns can flow your way. This opportunity to listen and understand and thereby craft a response is a direct benefit of participation with customers through the Social Web.

The strong anchor message forms a common bonding point for both the business or organization and customers and stakeholders and in particular in the context of social participation with a business.

This connects the brand with the customer through a shared value and purpose, something larger than the brand itself and to which both the brand and customer simultaneously aspire to. This creates a very powerful linkage that transcends the basic brand-consumer relationship.

Social media takes this practice to the next level. Social media inherently revolves around passions, lifestyles and causes, issues that define larger social objects to which participants relate.

The social media programs that are intended to link customers to communities and shared social activities around the business, and thereby around the brand, product or service must themselves be anchored in this same larger ideal.

Creating A Strong Social Business Presence

The appeal with a strong anchor message to a lifestyle, passion, or cause is what drives organic participation and growth in online social communities. The payoffs are lower ongoing expenses and a higher degree of stickiness and participation as well as advocacy for the community.

Great social sites grow organically based on an individual’s realization of a reason to be there: Facebook and Orkut both deliver on the basic desires of people to meet other people and socialize. Members see the value in more members so they actively encourage their friends to join. The obvious purpose and basic appeal of these sites combine to drive organic growth.

As a result, participation and organic growth occur naturally, without the need for costly promotions: People will join social networks like Facebook and Orkut and use these services on their own, for hours at a time without paid incentives.

In social business, collaboration occurs in two venues: customers to customers and between customers and employees. In the latter, collaboration generally occurs only when your customers develop sufficient trust and your employees develop sufficient visibility, such that the two groups begin conversations about how the business may be changed for the better.

When charting your course in social business, be sure that you distinguish between social media marketing efforts and social business programs that more tightly link the personal lifestyles, passions and causes of customers with the business and its products and services.

Social-media-based marketing efforts can drive awareness and there is value in that. That said, there is a need for organic growth and participation in the underlying communities by naturally placing your product into this context. There is a compelling and measurable value to the brand in that, too.

Original posted here http://osemecreate.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/what-makes-business-social.html

[openingupbrands-blog]

Why Social Intelligence gives companies a competitive advantage

The movement of information is key to today's global economy. Companies like General Electric send their design concepts to countries like India, allowing developers there to localize products to suit the domestic market. Firms like Intercontinental Hotel Group create customer communities to gather input from customers to fashion new services.

Businesses like handheld device manufacturer Psion (recently acquired by Motorola) build social platforms to connect their partners to their customers in order to formulate new solutions.

And prospective customers tap into social media like Facebook and Twitter to gather information and express ideas, which we see has the power to alter the course of companies as well as countries.

In this environment, a successful company's competitive advantage comes in part from its ability to grow an information advantage -- the ability to share, process, and act upon information more rapidly than the competition.

But how does a company go about gaining this advantage?

Forrester's research shows that it comes through removing the barriers between people (employees, customers, partners) and information, while making it easier for people to work together using that information to solve business problems. We call this a social business. While the concept seems simple, the number of businesses that are truly executing upon it are surprisingly small.

Now you may be saying to yourself, "How can this be? Forrester's told us over the years that business leaders have made significant investments in the collaboration and social technologies that make social business possible." You're right, of course, but that's only part of the story.

We've seen no uniform way in which social initiatives are developed, launched, and managed within organizations: Marketing departments might implement a listening platform to monitor customer chatter; the product teams might roll out an ideation tool to manage feature requests; sales personnel may use a file sharing tool like Dropbox to share documents with customers; and human resources could deploy a social human capital management tool, like NationalField, to help managers track employee contributions.

These haphazard and disjointed efforts, while potentially successful in their individual silos, don't fully realize the power of social business and expose the business to other risks such as:

Lost opportunities through untapped data. The information collected in these social business tools can provide a business important information about employees, partners, and customers. However, if they're housed in separated, non-integrated systems, it is difficult for business leaders to compile and understand the data in their possession.

Poor scalability. A solution implemented among a small group of employees may work well for that group, but fall flat when it is presented to the broader workforce. This could be because the tool is not technically capable of serving the business's broader needs or its design and usage model are only applicable to a subset of the workforce.

Misunderstanding of business potential. A small pilot may fail because it's not big enough to have the network effect necessary to make it truly valuable. So, business leaders can draw the wrong lesson -- the tool isn't worthwhile -- from this experiment. Conversely, a successful small pilot may lead business leaders to believe the tool is ideal for only a small number of use cases and miss the broader potential.

Failure to remain in compliance. Social business technology experiments conducted within the lines of business may not adhere to the government or industry regulations that govern how they store, transfer, and publicize information. This opens the business up to potential action from regulators.

Increased risk of security breach. Employees interacting with partners and customers in the social arena expose the business to attacks from cyber criminals. These potential breaches could lead to data leaks that affect product development and customer relationships, as well as risking potential litigation from parties harmed from said leaks.

Higher costs for the organization. Complexity, too much heterogeneity, and duplication of systems make technology more expensive.Integrations necessary to tie the tools to business processes and workflows create expensive to maintain applications. Furthermore, the lack of centralized contract negotiation opens the door for suboptimal pricing and contractual terms.

With that in mind, the opportunity for the CIO is clear -- it's time for the rise of what Forrester is terming the social CIO. The office of the CIO must take control of the disparate social initiatives and create a uniformed strategy that lays out the necessary people, process, and technology changes to make a social business work.

In so doing, the CIO will help her business create an information advantage by helping the knowledge workers in her organization work more productively, be more efficient, advocate for the business, act resourcefully to solve problems, and create positive customer outcomes. Sounds great, right? But how do you get there?

Forrester has opened up a stream of research into social business & collaboration strategies. This Playbook designed to walk those in the office of the CIO through a social business transformation, shows that the road to becoming a social business requires those in the office of the CIO to:

Discover: Understand the need and appetite for social business. Creating a social business starts with recognizing that it's not as simple as rolling out technology. There are barriers -- managerial resistance, unaligned processes, and unincorporated technologies to name a few -- which may hinder the overall success of the business. Thus, it's critical that the CIO and her staff articulate the broad value of social technologies by showing how they address present business problems. Forrester's research into this area suggests that business and IT leaders should focus social initiatives on addressing areas in business processes where human latency -- inability to find location, issues replicating work, problems identifying experts, etc. -- delay or halt work. Solving this problem first requires IT leaders assess whether or not the organization's culture, leadership, employees, and technology capabilities are well positioned to accept the transition to a social business.

Plan: Align technology requirements with the business' needs. Forrester's POST (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) methodologyprovides the framework for helping IT leaders uncover the challenges workers and other constituents face when trying to share information and locate experts to solve business problems. Once you've indentified what people need, you can build a strategy that ensures you address these issues. And this strategy will inform how you develop your roadmap for rolling out the policies, procedures, and technology necessary to power your social business.

Act: Select tools and set policies that fit the business' priorities. The technology must fit the business's needs and integrate into the organization's environment (e.g. management capabilities, computing infrastructure, regulatory standards). In the playbook, we discuss the things a business should consider when acquiring social technology and the changes necessary in the IT department to manage social business technology. Additionally, the CIO and her staff must work closely with the business and representatives of the legal, marketing, and HR departments to set the rules of the road for employees using social business technology. This will help the organization avoid issues related to regulatory violations and information leaks.

Optimize: Ensure the company's culture and employees accept social business. Social business strategy cannot be successful unless it drives desired business outcomes. Thus, Forrester helps CIOs measure the performance of their social strategy. We also lay out what our research suggests are the critical success factors in delivering business impact. Here you will also be able to benchmark your social strategy results against other organizations to understand how well you are doing.

By TJ Keitt for Forrester Research 

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SOCIAL MEDIA INTELLIGENCE.......MORE THAN KEYWORDS

The research industry is rapidly adopting social media monitoring as another research methodology but there is more you can do with social data than simply track key words. 

  1. Audience Mapping / Brand Graph

  Based on tracking the activity of a defined audience, regardless of the topics of their conversations, audience mapping is used to create a snapshot of an audience to measure not what they are saying about a specific topic or brand but what they are about and how do they behave online. The Brand Graph combines mapping the social graph and the interest graph of a group of people who are connected to a brand online (following their Twitter account, Liking their Facebook page or simply mentioning the brand or the sector of interest on Twitter). Key information delivered includes Demographics, Interests and Passions, Behaviours, Influence Dynamics, Information Flows and Attitudes towards topics, brands, and media channels. Generally used to inform the brand's social media strategy and/or their content strategy in social media.

  2.Real-time Segmentation

  Audience studies provide companies with key segmentation models on the brand audience so that the brand can best plan their activities in terms of product innovation and marketing. The problem with segmentation studies is that they are really expensive and happen once every few years, which results in the segments constantly playing catch up with reality. An evolution of the Brand Graph study is the real-time segmentation study, where the insights about the online audience are mapped against the existing segments of the brand audience and constantly refreshed with real-time data coming from the web. Cheaper, real-time and more effective. Real-time segmentation is key for many areas of the business such as product innovation, product management, campaign planning and service design.

  3. Content Diffusion

  Content is the main currency online. This type of study looks at how specific pieces of content travel in social media, through which networks of users, using which channels and to what levels of reach and reaction. Mostly used to assess the impact of a specific campaign in terms of both performance and types of audiences reached. Content Diffusion studies are also key in optimising the publication of online content based on variables such as the specific features of the content, where/when it was posted, impact of metadata (such as use of tags) and content lifespan by network, channel and community.

  4. Influence Mapping

  This is about uncovering hubs responsible for routing different types of content within a network or shaping conversations and awareness of topics and brands. Usually done by mining and mapping the static social graph of the user by channel and across multiple channels (the network of people he/she is connected to), and then overlaying the interaction and engagement graph of the same users around specific topics and overall (the network of people he/she interacts with when discussing specific topics). Used to inform Campaign Planning, Social Media and Content Strategy, Campaign Management, Social Media Management and Social Customer Relationship Management.