• The biggest day in advertising, just got a little bigger. Super Bowl advertisers looked to score with social media. Here are 8 social-media resources to enhance your Super Bowl experience.
• Facebook is cooking up a site-traffic storm and soon will surpass Yahoo in monthly page views. The recipe calls for a pinch of growth in developing markets, a dash of virtual currency, and a pile of consumer information. eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson discusses Facebook’s potential.
• I smell a snitch.  Tech-savvy gangsters assist police (unknowingly) by Tweeting and updating their Facebook status. Gang members become informants and investigators by using social media.
• An all-you-can-eat digital buffet. Digital advertising consumption continues to rise with advances in smartphones, large-screen mobile devices, and new tablet-PC form factors. See why 2010 will be the year of video for the digital-advertising industry.
• Aus Liebe zum Automobil. Volkswagon uses Facebook to educate consumers on the brand. The “Punch Dub” campaign takes consumers on a ride down memory lane.
• How to cause political Mass. hysteria. Scott Brown upsets Martha Coakley for a pivotal U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts. How? By using Facebook, videos, iPhone apps, and other forms of social media to enhance his efforts, the Brown campaign developed into a political movement.
• Its everyone’s favorite time of year — tax season! TurboTax and H&R Block are using social media to educate and entice potential customers.

• “Madame speaker, Vice President Biden, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans. Our constitution declares that from time to time, the president shall give to Congress information on the state of our union.” President Obama streams State of the Union live to 1.3 million people.
• Act globally, think locally. Twittter releases new feature called “local trends,” but what will its affect be? Some good, some bad.
• How do you like them apples? Well, turns out some people aren’t big fans of the fruit. Apple’s latest creation, the iPad is released to mixed reviews.
• Just the tip of the iceberg. 90 trillion emails sent, 1.73 billion internet users, 350 million users on Facebook, and more. A look back at 2009 in numbers.
• And the award for “Best Incorporation of Social Media into an Award Show Reticent to Change’” goes to… The Grammy’s embrace social media with “We’re All Fans” campaign.
• Everyday is a struggle, even for successful companies. With exponential growth in consumer adoption and usage, top brands struggle to incorporate mobile into their marketing plans.
• Its been a long time since we talked; too long. Baby boomers get caught up on old times by renewing personal connections online with social networks.

• Like dancing with two left feet.  The top 10 awkward moments in social media in 2009.
• The Super Bowl Shuffle redux. Super Bowl XLIV advertisers look to incorporate social media and mobile marketing into their marketing lineups.
• The secret of my success. Proven strategies in digital branding that will lead to the success of digital campaigns. iMedia sat down with Anne Murray of Southwest Airlines to discuss the essential strategy components needed to achieve the desired outcome.
• Patent pending. Microsoft files for a patent on a “user generated advertising” product in an effort to provide contextual targeting in social network advertisements.
• There’s an app for that… and that… and that. Mobile apps sales continue to rise and are anticipated to reach nearly $30 million in the next three years.
• When we were young, experts recommended 11 hours of sleep. We wonder what the recommended daily use of entertainment media is? A Kaiser Family Foundation study reveals dramatic increase in media consumption.
• Social-media socialism. Apparently, the revolution is over, but what’s changed?  A theory on why new media will never be the same.

• The ruling class: AOL, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are the authority in the ad network business.
• The theory of social-media evolution. The 10 stages of integration of social media into businesses.
• Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief. Mobile donations surge in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti.
• Google stands on the sidelines of social-media monitoring, but for how long? 5 reasons to expect a Google monitoring tool in 2010.
• Smart companies need to talk on smartphones. Mobile web access will surpass PCs by 2013 according to a Gartner study.
• Security! Escort this social-marketing campaign from the premises. Pepsi Refresh campaign is released, but so is personal information of project’s applicants.
• Proliferation, collaboration, innovation, with a lack of organizational action. Study reveals the necessity for governance and IT involvement with the increased adoption of social-networking tools and technologies.
• Changed for the better? A decade of social media has revolutionized the way we live and the world we live in.

You can and should read the whole article, but here’s the crux, worth repeating:

“Listening is scary. … It’s a big change from our traditional way of thinking. So, the single biggest opportunity in the history of consumer marketing lays dormant. The singular opportunity to tap into the brain of today’s newly empowered consumer in such a natural way that what we hear is the purest ‘research’ ever is buried in nay-saying.”

In as much as that’s true, it signals a tremendous missed opportunity. Though it’s important to note that many ad agencies and large brands DO get it. They understand that listening can fuel insights that drive better campaigns, ad buys, and ultimately, business. Our client list features many forward-thinking, major brands and agencies, and it’s growing.

But Neff is right, generally, about the foot dragging. And here’s one explanation, beyond “new is scary.” It’s the confusion between the benefits of monitoring and listening.

Monitoring is best at finding threats. Listening is best at identifying opportunities. Many times, these terms are confused or used interchangeably.

Even Neff’s piece, which starts off talking about “listening,” devotes much of the space to discussing the value of tracking threats (e.g., Johnson & Johnson Motrin-gate).

It’s understandable that marketers might be resentful about the need to monitor threats via social media. After all, brands used to own their reputations to a much greater degree before social media came along and handed the keys to the consumers. It hardly seems like a gift if it means one more new front to defend on. Previously, the only way into a brand’s castle was via a phone-based market-research report.

Monitoring will become increasingly routinized, straightforward, and inexpensive or free. The future of listening holds limitless possibility.

As ad agencies and brands increasingly understand the real advantage of listening—letting consumers’ opinions and ideas provide the fuel for insights—the value becomes clear. Consumers now provide a speedier, comparatively inexpensive source of market research and innovation. And that’s a far different perspective than watching consumer activity like a dark cloud on the horizon.

• The car comes fully loaded and factory equipped with social networks. Ford Motor Company to add web browsing and communication features to 80% of its models by 2015.
• Big brother is always watching. Big marketers have a huge opportunity with location-aware applications.
• The balance of power has shifted. With the help of social media, consumers now are in control. See why customer service will be the primary focus of companies in 2010.
• A social-media bailout plan? Is social media the light at the end of the tunnel for the automotive industry?
• I can use it, but you can’t. CIOs are using Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but they don’t want their employees to. Businesses develop social-networking policies in 2010.
• Your honor, I would like to present Exhibit A, the latest trend in social media. Will social-media lawsuits become the next big thing?
• “Speak your messages in their language.” The key concepts to make your branding strategy a winner. Take a look at branding amplified through social media.

• 10…9…8…7…6…5…4…3…2…1… Happy New Year! A look back on the biggest stories involving social media in 2009.
• Twitter expert wanted in 140 characters or less. E-commerce startup seeks social-media marketer that “tweets in their sleep.”
• Just give it plenty of sun and occasionally add water. Social-network advertising expected to continue to grow in 2010.
• What is the recipe for PR success? Blending social media with traditional media is a challenging prospect for those looking to develop media-relation campaigns.
• It’s a wonderful (social-media) life. Facebook attempting to block “social-network suicide.”
• There is nothing to fear but fear itself. Companies are wary about negative conversations around their products as they mull over social-media strategies.
• Not everything that glitters is gold. 2009’s top social-networking mistakes to avoid in the new year.

Our new office is located at 33 E Main Street, Suite 251, on the Capitol Square. The move is necessary to accommodate continued growth in business and employees. The new space, designed for Networked Insights by architect David Jennerjahn of Chicago’s Valerio Dewalt Train Associates, is larger and better reflects the tone and style of the company. I’d love to give you a tour.

Madison, Wisconsin, is known for it’s resilient economy, bolstered by state government, UW-Madison, and biotech. Government and the university have nurtured biotech and created a thriving industry.  Those same dynamics can support all kinds of successful tech ventures — we’re proof of that. The intentional groundwork has yet to be laid to support broader tech companies, but the city is naturally suited to the task. We’ve recruited and retained some of the smartest developers around to build SocialSense into a premier social-media-analytics tool. Madison is a great place to do what we do.

It’s been a great year, promising continued success in 2010 for Networked Insights:

• Client use of the company’s flagship SocialSense application increased significantly: corresponding revenue is up 240%.
• We’re hiring! We’ve recently added a few, top-notch employees. When we fill our open positions in early 2010, we’ll have grown 25%.

Highlights were many. They include a major, ongoing partnership with print and online publishing giant IDG and successful engagements with American Family Insurance, Fox Interactive Media, Oscar Mayer, Toshiba, and many others.

We enjoyed a slew of national press, including coverage in BusinessWeek, featuring an analysis of Superbowl ads and their engagement on social-media sites. And we increasingly became a source for insights on social media, as in this story about Facebook at Bloomberg.com.

We’re thankful to customers, employees, investors, conference organizers, partners, and more. So many people over the year have contributed to our growth by writing about us, making connections and introductions, or giving me the opportunity to take the stage and convey our vision of what is possible when we focus powerful analytics on the greatest data set of consumer information that’s ever existed.

Here’s to an insightful 2010!

• Pepsi skips placing ads in the big game for the first time in 23 years,  predicting social media will be bigger than the Super Bowl.
• No more emotionally resonant narrative, sharp copy, and persuasive imagery? Just a bunch of tweets? Trident officiates the union of new and old media as it rolls out its new Layers gum.
• If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go and what would you do when you got there? If you need help, just ask your network. Social networking practically makes your vacation plans for you.
• Yes. No. Maybe. Maybe not. Okay. Hold on. Alright. No thanks. Well maybe. We’ll see. Yelp and Google can’t find common ground on major partnership deal.
• Possession is nine tenths of the law. But how does this principle apply to a social media strategy that exists in every department of an organization?

• Did you feel that? There it was again. The USGS to use “a little bird told me” approach to monitoring earthquakes.
• Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails aside, music-industry critics keep telling musicians to embrace social media. In response, musicians are asking “what year do they think it is?”
• Depending who you ask, size may matter. Check out the biggest (stories in social media) of 2009.
• Where were you when Michael Jackson died? A lot of people were checking out NYTimes.com. This mesmerizing video shows a huge pulse of traffic as the news of Jacko’s death broke.
• Can the book really be better? The We Feel Fine site is a brilliant interactive tool examining human feelings from across a huge social-media dataset. How can the magic survive in print form?
• Social networking in the name of protesting the Simon Cowell pop machine’s climb to #1. Fans campaign for Rage Against the Machine to get the Christmas No.1 spot in the U.K.
• Ready. Aim. Fire. FCC official becomes a target of conservative (social) media’s “smear campaign” and isn’t too happy about it.
• Knock knock. Who’s there? AT&T becomes a part of a joke that gives way to the social media mob mentality.

• Nerds use social networking to find big red balloons. Would you like that $40,000 in cash or check? MIT students quickly solved Darpa’s treasure hunt by going viral.
• See traditional and digital marketing integration at its finest: 5 companies that got it right in 2009.
• I call your “search-engine optimization” and raise you “real-time search” plus a huge dose of social-branding reality. The nimble behemoth continues to evolve as Google integrates real-time search.
• Now when drug dealers say, “everybody’s doing it,” they’re telling the truth. Pharmaceutical companies take their recommended dose of social-media medication.
• Step right up. Don’t be shy. Brands look to flex their marketing muscles on the social web.
• CEO: Are you sure this is going to work? CMO: 2/3 of us think so. Companies to increase social media budgets in 2010.
• Come out, come out, wherever you are. The location-based social networking space just got a little more crowded.
• I want $55k/year, 401(k), vacation, stock options, medical/dental insurance, tuition reimbursement, gym membership, and access to my social networks. See the future of employee compensation demands.

Visit Hope Beyond the Hype

Google introduced Alerts in 2004 and became the first true technology solution for the PR industry. The digital clipping service has now become an indispensable tool for PR practitioners everywhere. In May of this year, Google rolled out near real-time search with their search-options functionality. Whether or not this was in response to the growth of Twitter, it made the search giant even more of a player in the crisis-management game. Now, hot on the heels of real-time search comes Google’s patent on sentiment analysis — a clear sign of their desire to own the monitoring space.

This combination of features now competes head-to-head with most of the monitoring companies at a price none of them can match. Ever wonder why all of them give away a free month? They have to; they’re competing with free. For PR, this is the land of milk and honey: one of the most innovative and technologically advanced companies on the planet providing the exact tools needed for crisis management… for free!

Advertisers and marketers need more sophisticated tools geared toward marketing and business strategy though. Google has yet to explore things like semantic search (understanding the meaning behind words, not just the words themselves) because the Google infrastructure is focused on searching for specific things and retrieving that data as fast as possible instead of using large-scale analytics to uncover themes in the data. In addition, Google still has not moved beyond its rather simplistic influence analysis and towards ideas like the evaluation of idea propagation. All this means that analytics companies need to get focused.

Obviously cheap energy is highly desirable and there are lots of ways to get it.  The problems come in when you need enough energy that is cheap enough and clean enough.   That’s the interesting part (and the crux of the problem):  recognizing that there are lots of legitimate needs and many of them are in direct conflict (cheap vs. clean, clean vs. high quantity).

To solve problems like enough energy or accurate analytics, you have to optimize the competing variables or invent a way where those variables are no longer competing.  As we work on our analytics, the competing variables are accuracy, analytic power, speed, and cost.  The important thing to realize is that these are not either-or situations (either you have accuracy or you don’t), they are continuous values and you can give up a little of one to get more of another. Accuracy is not about a number on a page or a reported percentage, its about a give and take between accuracy and all the other competing variables.

So, an interesting discussion of accuracy would define it, talk about ranges of acceptable values, and discuss the cost of having high accuracy and how to optimize that problem.  Without doing that, we’re just saying to companies “try to power your offices with free energy… yeah, that will make things better”.

So what are we doing to make our analytics more accurate?  There are four areas of social-media analysis affected by the accuracy problem: semantic search, organizing information, influence, and sentiment.  These are exactly the four areas we are focusing on to constantly improve the accuracy of our analytics for the future.

To give you an idea about where we (and the market) are heading, Senior Research and Development Engineer T.R. Fitz-Gibbon will be sharing more over the next few months about how we are evolving these four main concepts.  Stay Tuned…

Marketing and advertising, on the other hand, have more strategic needs that can only be addressed by deep analysis and trend discovery. Marketing organizations are not structured to respond to tens of thousands of mentions, they are structured to work on the 25-30 major themes and customer needs that cut across the entire conversation. Marketers need to gain understanding about their customers and their market place in order to create messages and campaigns that play out over several months (at least). While PR practitioners are often forced to live from crisis to crisis and spike to spike, marketers have the freedom to sit back and watch how things develop, casting a critical eye on the relevance of groundswells.

Think of it in terms of stock investing — if monitoring is the best day trader, then analytics is Warren Buffet. Day trading keeps a close eye on the sharp peaks and valleys of daily stock prices and relies heavily on tips, rumors, and hearsay. As day-traders are acutely aware, one bad guess or reaction can spell disaster. Strategic investors are not concerned with the daily spikes but with the much smoother trend line of activity spread out over weeks and months. Lots of day traders make and lose their wealth many times during their lifetimes; their day-to-day lives are full of fear and turmoil. When it comes to your brand, what type of investor are you?

But there’s a better way. Using social media you can listen to the language that people are actually using to talk about your brands and products. You actually know what your high-value words are. Do people really search for “footwear” when they’re looking for shoes? A lot of marketers think they do. Not only do you know the words people are using, you can understand themes and ideas that go with them. That gives you a leg up on writing the copy. Taking some of the guess work out of buying Adwords shows real ROI: more click throughs and conversion and more mileage for your marketing budget. This is just one example of how social media is not just about social media; it’s just data to help you make the marketing decisions you struggle with every day. Stay tuned…

Most companies today have evolved the social media conversation from “why should I” to “where does it fit in my organization”.  And the answer that is becoming more commonplace seems to be “Everywhere, of course!” Product development, human resources, accounting, marketing, customer service – if it’s a department, surely it needs social media!

But after the buzz wares off, it starts to look very daunting. At first, integrating social media across the enterprise seems hard for most organizations because it resembles an Oracle implementation – time intensive and requiring a lot of customization.

The problem is the expectations created by web 1.0. The first generation of the web resulted in technologies that provided nearly immediate increases in efficiency – sending files over the web, hosting online meetings, processing payments in the comfort of our home, online bidding for RFP’s, etc, etc, etc. No additional steps required to harness the power.

In many ways, Web 2.0 has been about data access technologies like one we have here at Networked Insights called SocialSense. These technologies are providing richer information and are getting closer and closer to real-time every day.  In theory, the vast amounts of information that are now available should make it easier for companies to find, understand and market to their customers.

But unlike 1.0, the data itself does not make companies more efficient. The fly in the ointment is the fact that employees in organizations are not equipped to handle all of the insight and information they are getting.  Employees have a corporate DNA that hinders them from being able to use real-time information about their customers’ wants and desires.

Of course this is a stereotype. There are notable exceptions in progressive companies like Dell, Oscar Mayer, Salesforce, Lenovo, and others. These companies have recognized that Web 2.0 is not only about connecting technologies that provide data, but it is also about being able to hire the right people to sift through that data and make it useful.

One idea of how companies can use Web 2.0 with the right set of employee skills resurfaced last week at Blogwell when General Mills CMO Mark Addicks said the words I used 18 months ago… Curate, Create then Syndicate. He was referring to the time and money spent by most companies creating content. Content for their websites, advertisements, employee training manuals, welcome packages, annual reports, etc.

This content is typically created without any interaction with the audience it is intended for. Sure the content is sometimes tested with the audience after it is created but not in the creation process.  There are tens of millions of content creators in the workforce today.  Social media is a great way for companies to shift from creating all of this content to Curating content. Sites such as CNN and the Huffington Post and Brazen Careerist are showing us how to do this successfully already.

If this model were applied to ecommerce sites we would have truly unbiased reviews, fresh and relevant content and the site would be engaging. The sites would also stay relevant in the search engines because they have content created by the customer and they are linking back to the sites content originated from.

Curating has a low barrier to entry; for example at Networked Insights we curate content into SocialSense and even put a value on what is good and what is bad from both experts (bloggers) and the general public (forums and microblogs).  But in order for a company to take advantage of this type of strategy they need to hire individuals that have grown up with sharing, finding and distributing content in real-time – yes the Facebookers of the world, Generation WE.

Content curation is a singular example. Yes, social media fits into many aspects of your business, the technology is going to make you more efficient, but you need to hire the right people (there are probably few of them in the organization today), put the right process in place that allow for speed (as my friend Jeff Minsky at OMD says about twitter posts “Legal, it is 140 characters it should not take 5 days to approve”), and it will create lots of cash in terms of revenue and operational savings.  My sense is that the next Jack Welch will be writing a book about this and we will be reading about their success, that CEO is probably 2-5 years into their career and they will write that book in the next two years,

Networked Insights has proposed three panels for this year’s festival and we would be proud to present again this year but we need your vote. Please vote for our panels at SXSW by using the thumbs up icon and leave some comments while you’re at it. (You’ll have to create an account first!)

• Amazing Grace: Once Blind, Now We Tweet
  The traditional marketing roles of large organizations are changing. The old model of broadcasting a message to a world awaiting your announcement is shifting to one where customers have a voice in regards to the success or failure of your campaign or product.
• Should I Shave? A Date With Social Media
  So you’re the brand manager for Company X? What’s it like having millions of unofficial assistants working under you and creating messages that you can’t control? Let us help you figure out what role social media analytics should play for brand managers. How can it contribute to creative insights for campaigns, product development, etc.? How can it help you figure out who to target? How can you use it to discover unmet needs? There are answers and they’re found in this panel!
• Nobody gets in to see the Wizard. Nobody!
  For many marketers social media and social media analytics are still a mystery. The value is fuzzy and the technology behind it is poorly understood. Let’s pull back the curtain on our own technology by demonstrating the value of social media.

Thanks for listening…

Such a great point. Counting brand mentions is only the tip of the iceberg yet it’s what so many of the current crop of social media monitoring tools are trading on. They count brand mentions, aggregrate content, and report on it. While they get you looking at social media, they are decidely slim on contextual information unless you have time to do a LOT of reading. Malcolm talks about the importance of framing social dialogue and I think that is key to the next step in the evolution of these tools.

Framing (Malcolm’s take may be slightly different so I won’t speak for him) is essentially a more holistic view of data. It’s putting data in context – relative to a market, a segment, a shared affinity or a goal. This is a shortcoming of many current monitoring tools as they focus on mentions, popularity, sentiment etc. but don’t do much to help you understand the implications of all this data.

Searching for brand mentions and verbatims is relatively cheap and easy to do (as evidenced by the price pressure in monitoring right now). Marketers need more context than brand mentions to make sound business decisions and large companies just coming to the social media table are reluctant to bet significant sums of money on such thin evidence when it comes to informing a large marketing campaign.

So what’s next? Malcolm mentions the new feature from Scout Labs called “Quotes”. It’s a good first step. They are attempting to push the envelope a bit in terms of giving their data more value to the end user. But what can you do to really push the envelope?

How about trend discovery and text analytics? Monitoring solutions rely on keywords – that means that you will find what you look for. What current monitoring tools lack is the ability identify trends or patterns in data that you didn’t know to look for. Text analytics opens this door.

Text analytics is basically a trend discovery engine of the best kind. It identifies trends or patterns in data that you didn’t know to look for. It is a very compelling and powerful technology. Combine deep text analytics with a segmented approach (something we do with SocialSense) and you have what we think is the next step in the evolution of social listening tools. I’m curious, what do you think is next?