No doubt about it. If you want to use the Internet to find something very specific, keyword search is a great place to start. But if you want to learn what you don’t know about customers and use that newfound customer intelligence to improve your company’s marketing efforts, I can promise you that keyword search falls flat. Why?

In Networked Insights latest report, “Thematic discovery: What every marketer — and marketing technologist — should know,” we explore three key reasons (pun intended) why search isn’t all things to all marketers. Then we introduce an alternative: thematic discovery.

Thematic discovery is an exciting new approach to social media data analysis — a marketer’s dream. It provides a highly accurate, authentic view of topics that people are engaged in through social media. It helps identify relationships between themes that may not have an obvious connection, how the themes correlate, and where people are likely to be talking about them simultaneously.

Learn more about how this information can help you develop media plans, choose celebrities to endorse products, and tap into the diverse interests of their target markets. Take a look at our report for a revolutionary new approach to social media data analysis.

For marketers, developers, designers and entrepreneurs, the annual pilgrimage to Austin, Texas for SXSW Interactive is a highlight in the digital world and this year didn’t disappoint. With surprise visits from Jay-Z, to well hyped app launches and star studded panel conversations, the week amongst the world’s best and brightest was inspiring so I thought I’d share my takeaways for those who didn’t participate.

Marketing Trends

Celebrities draw crowds
In today’s increasingly fragmented media world, with short attention spans and diminishing brand timbre, it’s kind of refreshing to see that some things never change. This was illustrated by the many high profile speakers who were both keynote speakers and panelists.

Launching an app at SXSW is hard
Highlight, a mobile networking app, seemed to grab everyone’s attention well before SXSW even started. It may have fizzled once users experienced the battery drain it caused while running in the background. Win or lose, what’s clear is the competition for new companies is fierce and the breakout apps of years past are proving tough acts to follow.

Seamless integrated brand experiences are critical
With the growth rate of mobile devices and tablets, we’ve entered a time where the consumer’s expectations for consistent experiences with brands and networks are higher than they’ve ever been. Maintaining a constant high quality presence is quickly becoming the standard.

In an always-on world, everything is old news in digital marketing
The thirst for knowledge, answers, tips and insights remains high amongst marketers at SXSW. I often wonder if in today’s hyper connected world, when information finds me at every digital touch point, if one can really learn anything new at a conference. While I still believe you can learn from unique perspectives, what’s clear is the rate at which we consume media and information has changed us and made us smarter. Perhaps it’s time to reevaluate how we interact at these conferences and look for new ways to connect, discover and explore.

Technology Trends

Marketers are talking more than ever
Digital professionals are connecting offline unlike ever before and I believe this is due to the powerful combination of social networking tools, the rate of change/evolution, and the need to stay on top of trends to uncover what’s working and what’s not.

The future is small screen experiences
Next generation products will be mainly on tablets and mobile phones. That’s the world to design apps and technologies for if you’re building tomorrow’s next big thing. For now, marketers are faced with asking themselves how long they can afford to not look at a 360 degree digital experience. The clock is ticking.

Leverage technology to keep today’s real-time consumer at the center
Social media listen, monitoring, and analytics is a game changer for marketers who need to track the pulse of the modern consumer. While a brand’s audience might be armed with social media and mobile devices, today brands are building bridges and accelerating business processes with social data and real-time analytics.

Consumer Trends

Social accelerates pop culture trends
Social media is proving to be an incredible cultural engine driving trends, memes, and messages further and faster than ever imagined. We’re just beginning to see the impact and understand how it happens. We’re establishing new rules and new norms as we adapt to a more connected and digital world.

Engaging more than ever before with TV and brands
Consumers want to talk back. They want to interact. And they want to share. Next generation winners and losers for both brands and networks will be defined not by quality of experience or branding alone, but how well you engage your audience. Making your brand the signal in the noise for consumers is the new mission in media.

Using social media tools to share, broadcast, and curate
Much of what marketers are experimenting with is about enabling advocates to carry your message for you. While lots of lip service is paid to the concept of influencers, the truth is a brand can’t know who and how to spread their marketing most effectively without a lot of cost. It’s cheaper to build an army of fanatics through inspiration, content and platforms that make viral possible.

Event Highlights

HBO’s Girls – Incredible launch and presence with blended offline and online marketing activities. Clearly stood out despite the noise.

American Express – Bold, daring, and dominant marketing. Innovative team that’s pushing technology to redefine the brand and company positioning.

Samsung – Well executed events and marketing campaigns for their target consumer. If your challenge is to take on the coolest brand in the world, these guys are quickly becoming formidable.

• 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.

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.

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?

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?

Until recently, the best solution for many of us has been something like Google Alerts. You enter your search terms (“Macintosh OR Mac -cheese -Fleetwood” and so on) and you get tens, hundreds, or even thousands of items a day; you know everything.

Or do you?  How capable are you, as a human being, at finding the most important information in a sea of data? Let’s take a shot at figuring that out.

On the plus side, people are very sophisticated text processors. We are highly skilled at reading a piece of text, understanding its meaning, and placing it in context with other information about the brand we are monitoring. We are very good at knowing what’s important.

But how do those skills scale at the volume we’re dealing with on the web? The problem isn’t “how skilled are you?” but “how much can you read?”.

Let’s say that you need to monitor the Macintosh brand. A quick search of Google Groups for “Macintosh OR Mac -cheese -Fleetwood” returns about 5,750,000 posts over the last 3 months; that’s about 64,000 posts per day. So, if you read 10 posts an hour, for 16 hours a day, for three months straight, you’d cover less than 0.3% of the posts about Macintosh computers!

Even with your tremendous ability to identify important content, you would be missing up to 99.7% of the posts concerning your brand. And, don’t forget, your time has been completely monopolized by one brand, so you are completely ignoring 100% of the rest of your brands (not to mention your family, social life, and general hygiene).

So, if you truly want confidence and omniscience, you do not want a service that gives you a bunch of posts to read, you do not want a monitoring solution. What you need is a system capable of processing all of your posts and finding the important information for you. This would free up your time to perform the important in-depth analysis for which there is only one tool: your human brain!