The Social Organization

Collecting All Social Media Metrics

Even the companies that are most forward-thinking in their use of social media tools are looking for other examples of what people are tracking and counting in order to judge the success of their investments. There are some things that are inherently difficult about this - can we, and should we, measure the quality of a relationship and then relate that back to business benefit?  At an individual level that seems very mercenary but as businesses we have to prioritize where to spend money and time so we have to evaluate whether our efforts to build relationships make sense. 

What we are left with is the slightly stale sounding business practice of tracking metrics.  Once you have metrics you can track against your own previous performance or you can benchmark against other companies in a similar category. Metrics in the social media space are just emerging and many companies are simply using activity-based metrics (pageviews, time on site, etc.) to track 'success' but we collectively need to understand how that activity translates into business results.  In relationships the payoff sometimes takes a while to appear so we also need to think about the expectations - in time - we set to achieve ROI.

I've started a list of the common - and not so common - ways in which social media success is measured within the enterprise. What metrics do you use?

What I've Learned from Social Media

I grew up in New England as the daughter of two ministers so modesty and restraint were high on the list of virtues.  Promoting and drawing attention to yourself was not something polite girls did. When I first started blogging about 4 years ago I had an anonymous blog that was really just for friends and family and had interesting, stupid, or funny things that I found online.  I didn't want anyone to find it or associate it with me - god forbid someone think I was silly! 

The idea of blogging and having my image and name online still makes me uncomfortable - but I've learned some important things from both artistic friends who make their livings on project work and from social media friends who put themselves out there all the time, in a wide range of ways.  Here's what I've learned:

- In the creative world, business often happens based on serendipity of someone connecting with another's work and then connecting with them which often leads to collaboration.  In the creative world that is a large part of how business gets done.  The lesson for more traditional businesses is: if your ideas/projects/work is not transparent, business serendipity cannot occur.

- Ideas are what cause emotional - and trusted - connections to occur. Most marketing documents and content are traditionally stripped of emotion and therefore completely unmemorable.  Good salespeople in that environment are the ones that need to make up for that lack of connection by establishing relationships.  The lesson: if you don't put your ideas - irrespective of your product or service - out there in a conversational way, people cannot make a trusted connection with you.

- It doesn't have to be about *you* per se.  The aspect of putting myself out there that makes me most uncomfortable is the underlying assumption that I may be tooting my own horn.  What I've learned is that it doesn't need to be about that rather it is just me participating in the conversation and adding my perspective.  It is not saying, I am the best...it is just me participating.  The people that see and read what I put out there are the ones that will determine whether my perspective is interesting or not and whether it is valuable. For me, knowing that is incredibly useful - if I am not hitting the mark, that is very useful information for me so that I can re-evaluate my thinking or change course - or be inspired by the feedback I get.  It's invaluable.

So my advice: Get your ideas out there; make connections; understand how your audience is reacting.  It will pay off in unexpected ways.

Blog Roll: Examples of Enterprise Social Media at Work

People ask me all the time for use cases, examples, and best practices around using social media in a business environment - for a variety of business purposes: Marketing, customer support (internal and support team collaboration), new product development, HR (new hires, alums, recruiting).

I've pulled together an initial list of examples that can be seen publicly - there are many others that are behind firewall that I can't link to.  This is an initial list but I would be happy to extend the list - just email me at rhappe at idc.com. 

Hope you find this useful.

My Take: The Role of the Technology Analyst

Since the topic of analysts has come up recently and I'm being asked about my perspective privately, I'll add my perspective publicly – for what it is worth. I've been a logistics analyst (at the Pentagon), a management consultant and I've had a number of product and management jobs at software companies so I am not a career analyst and I feel like I am relatively (you can decide on your own) unbiased.

First I'll start with the various responsibilities that I have had over the last year – and this is not necessarily representative of all analysts or even of most analysts at IDC.

• Writing: I wrote roughly 40 documents last year, 15+ of them major documents
• Research: Surveys, interviews, and participating in online discussions
• Presentations: 6+ presentations at conferences and briefings
• Modeling: Forecasting and developing systems models to mimic market behavior
• Briefings: I'm going to estimate that I've taken 150+ briefings from companies (and I turn away many)
• Inquiries:  2-3 a week from buyers, Wall St. Firms, VCs, or big services firms
• Customer Events: I've probably been to 15-20 of these events
• Customer Projects: Whitepapers, presentations to internal groups, or strategy days with senior product, marketing, or M&A teams
• Talking to the press
• Responding to emails, scheduling, returning phone calls
• Talking to prospects, preparing proposals, preparing surveys, cleaning data
• Program development and planning
• Program marketing: collateral, sales training, etc.
• Collaborating with other analysts

What is great about that job:

• The access such a diverse cross-section of market influencers: vendors, buyers, investors, and press and with it the opportunity to see so much
• Endlessly interesting – the conversations I have and the people I meet and work with are a great part of the job…goes along with 'Never a dull moment'
• My colleagues – I've been learning a huge amount from colleague who have seen the rise and decline of markets
• The flexibility to prioritize where I spend my time and what research to pursue

What frustrates me:

• The expectations that I can grow a new program, write extensively, get visibility, and manage the administrative side of my job…and be human. I feel a little set up to fail and I don't like that. Granted most of these expectations are my own.
• The limited ability to explore new business models – I'm a start-up girl and I'm used to being able to experiment
• The craziness of all the things that I do feeds my ADD (no..not really) which is not always helpful.
• I'm a doer and I like developing a product with a team and seeing its evolution - I'm disconnected from that as an analyst

That's my perspective on what it means to be an analyst…but what does it mean for you? Here's where I think analysts can provide value:

• Because of position, analysts hear and see more than most other people in a market; we are hubs and the better we synthesize information (and that depends on the analyst) the better insight we provide for corporate strategy, product planning, marketing strategy, and marketing      communications.
• Also because we are hubs, we can introduce people. Call it old-fashioned match-making but we typically know senior managers and they are likely to respond to our introductions.
• Press and financial analysts like a third-party perspective. If you want your message put in a larger context we can often be helpful – whether that is in general or for a new product release. We cannot, however, help much if you repeat press releases to us – the more we know, the better we can put your strategy into a larger context.
• Frameworks, data, and trends: This can be useful for market messaging, market strategy, product planning, corporate strategy, and sales training.
• Acting as an external team member that can review and comment on plans.
• Using the visibility of the analyst to get attention – this is highly dependent on the analyst

Hopefully that's useful – I try and provide as much of this value as I can when I brief with companies (who are generally not our customers) but in essence what our customers pay for is regular access – we obviously can't brief with most companies according to their preferred schedule but we spend a lot more time with our customers and will always fit meetings in if at all possible. And I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't talk about interesting companies that I brief with who are not my customers - that is, in fact, part of what my customers are looking for.

I think a lot of people find us analysts frustrating to work with and from what I've seen it is rarely due to lack of interest and intent on the part of the analyst…we just have a lot coming at us through a lot of different channels.

The Abacus and the Typewriter

Chris Brogan got me thinking about information filtering in this age of information overload and as I thought about it, I thought about what the leap from an abacus to a typewriter must have been like in its ability to express information.  The current information access and filtering issue is analogous in some ways.

By IDC estimates 80% of digital content is created by individuals and 70% of content is unstructured (this roughly means too complex to fit neatly into one database field).  Thinking about those number it makes sense - most content that we absorb is language-, music-, or graphics-based - not data or individual words.

The enterprise software market has excelled at solving data-based problems; accounting, supply-chain, and financial workflows can be largely automated through collecting, managing, and producing data.  While those solutions have taken decades to evolve...they in many ways solve the 'easy' information problems.

Now that we have developed the abacus... how do we get to the typewriter?  The typewriter is where systems understanding language, meaning, and tone and can 'converse' with the end user to narrow in on the information, people, or conversations they need.  This is where search and fuzzy matching technologies come in but search technologies are quite varied and base their matching technologies on a variety of methodologies depending on the need and approach.  Keyword matching, link analysis, and 'most viewed' are some basic approaches.  As you move up the complexity scale there is categorization,  machine learning, natural language processing, text analysis,  stemming, co-occurrence, semantic analysis, and sentiment extraction. It's enough to make one's head spin but these technologies are becoming more and more important as the amount of digital content expands. All discovery applications - advertising platforms, recommendation tools, merchandising tools, and online intelligence application - need search and matching technologies at their core.

We've all learned how the abacus works and now we have some typewriters but we are just beginning to see how they can be used for information discovery and filtering.  And as this technology has become more important it is not hard to understand why Microsoft recently bought FAST.

I believe we are only beginning to see the solutions that are possible using search and matching engines. Please drop a note if you have seen any particularly interesting deployments, examples, or technologies in this space.

Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

I've been reading a great book recently - recommended to my by Sue Feldman with whom I work closely.  It is an absolutely fascinating book ostensibly about the founding of the Santa Fe Institute. Really however, it explains how a number of experts in fields ranging from economics to medicine to psychology to physics all came together to learn more about their own discipline by understanding the leading thinking in other disciplines.

If the book was only a history of the founding of the institute it would probably be interesting but Mitchell Waldrop has a great gift for explaining this relatively complex subjects in regular English and in doing so introduces the concepts that started the field of complexity research.

Particular things I've found quite interesting:

• Large sets of things (the first example was biological elements) will self-organize
• Fewer than two connections per element will lead a set to die; more than 12 will result in never-ending cycling.  Between 2 and 12 connection per element and the set will self organize into a logical complex system. (I suggest reading the book for the exact details here).
• At a certain level of activity a set of elements will have a phase change.
• Catalysts are critical.
• Increasing returns are a critical component of complex systems.

To me, social networks are a clear example of complexity in action and we see the above characteristics in social networks as well:

• Left alone people will self-organize
• People will optimize productivity when they are connected but don't connect just to have more connections (i.e. each connection is a rich connection versus a superficial one)
• People who introduce people are critical to the functioning of the network as a whole
• A congregation, or subnet, can produce more value than the sum of its parts

And I haven't even finished the book.  I highly recommend the read and would love to discuss it with any of you.

Scarcity and Abundance

As humans we have been trained for millennia to operate in an environment of scarcity.  We therefore habitually horde; we horde food, information, resources even if we don't need them - 'just in case'. Today, in the U.S., we live in an environment of abundance. Not everyone has adapted well to this environment but those who have adapted have learned to prioritize and be selective. 

Businesses often operate as if they are still operating in a scarcity economy but the Internet - and the global marketplace that it has created - has given their customers an abundance of options too.  Custom-build solutions are no longer as prohibitively expensive as they used to be because of access to global talent. 

So what do people - and customers - select when they have an abundance of choices? They choose to do business with people they like and trust. Businesses who do not understand this will increasingly loose opportunities to companies that not only provide a valuable product or service but also provide customers with access, transparency, and friendship.

Search Reconsidered - Yahoo!'s Open Search

Today Yahoo! announced details about its open search project in a move that changes the debate about what search effectiveness is.  For years the discussions around search have focused on relevancy of the query results and the algorithms that prioritize what gets shown first.  But Yahoo! is now showing that relevancy is only one part of the search process.  Just as important is how quickly the user can act on the results.

Yahoo!'s Open Search platform will allow anyone to add data and semantic relationships to Yahoo!'s index.  Take a search for a Cannon Elph for example - an online store like Amazon could provide Yahoo! both the link to its Canon Elph products and links to a photo, reviews, product details, and a buy button.  When the user searches at Yahoo! for a Cannon Elph they would see the Amazon link to the product page alongside the photo, a link directly to reviews, basic product details, and a buy button.

This dramatically changes the conversation from "Did the query result in the most relevant content" (which may be a little esoteric for users anyway) to "How effectively did search get the user to their destination".  Wow.  It makes the user's goal, not the search alone, the primary focus.

A couple of weeks ago I published a post call "Publishing is for Acting" which highlights that people both post and consume information in order to *do* something with it.  Yahoo! just  created a workflow around the information that gives users a way to seamlessly move from their initial search to the action they want to take.

I'll be looking for more nifty announcements to follow - I can't wait to see how developers use this.

Social Media and Social Revolt

Recently I've been hearing and seeing a lot of examples of people taking power into their own hands and using social media to create change - whether it's Clay Shirkey's example of the airline bill of rights or Dell's support of Linux based on customer demand through their IdeaStorm site.

I think this trend is wondrous and amazing - we finally have a way to listen to more voices and get input from a much wider collection of people than ever before.  However, this week I was disturbed by the Twitter revolt of the Sarah Lacy interview of Mark Zuckerberg. I'm not disturbed that there was a great deal of criticism of the interview - that is completely fair.  What I am very disturbed by is that the audience aggressively heckled Sarah during her interview....based on the social validation they got through Twitter to do so.  Ironically in this case, social media is enabling people to be extremely disrespectful and anti-social.  If people didn't like the interview, why didn't they quietly leave?

Sometimes revolutions are called for...over the lack of civil liberties, economic freedoms, fair wages.  But not over a poor interview.  We all need to remember that what makes for good social experiences is a little respect - for everyone.

Social Networking and the Geeks and Freaks

While the popular girls definitely have something to teach us about social networking...so do the high school freaks, geeks, nerds, punks, and wallflowers. For the lucky ones, being unique feels special even if validation from high school classmates is not forthcoming.

Online - or  in a big enough network - being unique separates individuals from the pack and makes it much easier to find others with similar interests. While the popular kids may be universally envied because they are widely recognized, it doesn't necessarily follow that those kids can find real friends any easier than those kids that were socially marginalized in high school. In fact, it is easy to see how it would quite possibly be much harder to develop deep friendships.

Indeed, punks for example, do an excellent job of marketing themselves to the population about which they most care and can very quickly identify like-minded friends. Online this translates into being about to form sub-networks really easily.

Enterprises should watch these kids as well because they understand marketing so well.  It may not be marketing to a broad base but they can very quickly consolidate their 'target market' and form deep ties.  While their networks may be smaller they are quite possible more stable.  Being all things to all people is a great way to be popular - and works if you are a toothpaste manufacturer - but the closer your brand comes to being used to express a consumer's personality, the more necessary it becomes to have a unique image rather than broad appeal.