Technology of any kind isn’t very useful to us unless it’s put to work. This is where one of the most interesting new parts of the social media landscape has been forming, namely in the new field of social business intelligence. This is the discipline of monitoring the whole of the social media world while continuously deriving insight from the aspects of it that matter to you, strategically or tactically, depending on your needs. I say aspects instead of conversations, because while analytics will give us useful metrics, it’s only until we apply the lens of business intelligence to the data itself can we clearly see the deeper and larger scale implications for our businesses.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of blur between social analytics and social business intelligence. They’re both relatively nascent fields that have plenty of overlap. So where social analytics is about the measurement and data mining of the social universe for any reason, social business intelligence is concerned with a more holistic process aimed at specific business outcomes, depicted conceptually in the visual below.

To be sure, there are many different flavors of social business intelligence just as there are many reasons why organizations will want to create business processes around the feedback loop that forms. Currently, many of the processes involved are manual and ad hoc as the industry has felt its way forward and learned how to engage more meaningfully with social media. A few companies on the leading edge have increasingly formal social business intelligence processes based on sets of capabilities they’ve acquired or built. Other firms have hardly any technology at all, other than perhaps some reports and spreadsheets.

They are all seeking the same thing however: To pinpoint the opportunities and identify the events that matter most to them so they can engage. The actual response to social business intelligence insights will vary entirely based on what is learned. It can be strategic and affect how the companies evolves its products and services or the way it engages in entirely new and innovative ways with customers. Or just as likely, it’s on-the-ground insight that drives individual interaction or collaboration with prospects, customers, business partners, and others whose current and past activities social media have been identified as important.

Developing your social business intelligence capability will be a journey that will have stages, like any other process of development. For most organizations, it’s just a set of experiments at the moment. But over time, with hard-won lessons learned, it will become more formal and institutionalized. Usually too soon, the question of centralization will come up, since it’s often one of the experiments in a particular corner of the organization or another that will have significant success. It almost certainly will be asked if it makes sense to share this best practice and locate it in the social business unit or other centralized social media management capability. For now, encouraging decentralized experimentation is more important than achieved the economies of scale, since local successes are rarely likely to meet the whole organization’s needs. What’s most important is making as many discoveries as possible about what works and what doesn’t.

Right now we are tracking a rapidly growing and expanding set of providers of social business intelligence. Products like Radian6, Kontagent, and SAS Social Media Analytics are just three examples out of many of social analytics tools that also provide some level of deeper social business intelligence features. Over the next few years, there will be numerous entrants into this space, as well as additions to existing social media services, as the industry as a whole learns the ways that companies can turn their social engagement with the world into real opportunity and value.

Often starting as a secondary requirement of early social media monitoring and listening efforts, for now, these are the leading drivers behind social business intelligence capabilities:

Drivers of Social Business Intelligence

• Marketing Optimization. Marketing has long been an early adopter of social media, and it’s no different with social business intelligence. Now instead of reports and dashboards that merely show the what, marketers can find out the why. With social business intelligence, companies can craft much more detailed yet fully integrated qualitative pictures of the inbound funnel, identify why engagement strategies are working or not, and organize systematic, yet mass-customized responses in scale.
• Capturing Ideas and Unmet Needs. Going beyond the trend analysis of analytics allows the processing and isolation of the deeper implications of social media activity. Social business intelligence can capture innovation, new ideas from the marketplace, identify customer wants and desires, and identify the gaps in your organization’s services.
• Situational Awareness. Identifying and tracking the top trends, understanding when critical situations arise to protect customer experience or brand, and much more. Going well beyond low-level analytics, social business intelligence can help make sense of more data than any manual or raw analytic process ever could.
• Customer Care Opportunities. Fully empowering Social CRM, social business intelligence can augment the interaction with customers in social media by improving the triage, prioritization, and resolution process of customer care.
• Sentiment Analysis. While social analytics can provide some basic insight into a customer’s state of mind, only more sophisticated methods can semantically process and assess the actual meaning of the social media conversations involving your company or its products in order to derive actionable insight.

As I pointed out recently, the focus of your social business intelligence efforts will be rooted deeply in business-specific motivations, thus these are just a small sample of the ways organizations will employ the capability. To give you a better sense of the possibilities I will explore specific examples of companies employing the strategies above successfully in upcoming posts.

What does all this mean for you now? In my opinion, it’s virtually certain at this point that social business intelligence will become a vital component of the way that companies derive bottom-line benefits from social media including revenue growth, innovation, cost reduction, and more successful line-of-business operations. So connect to the world, start your experiments, and start learning how to make it work for you.

There have been some good attempts recently to map the social business space into something more understandable. One of the most compelling is Jeremiah Owyang’s Social Business Stack for 2011. He likens the social business space to a “Cambrian explosion” of products and services, which is certainly true. But it’s also the case that some of the most critical aspects of social business aren’t products or services at all. While the vendor offerings in the social business landscape currently contain well over a thousand products, it’s just as important to have a deep understanding of the core elements that every social business effort must contain and deliver on successfully, products and otherwise.

The social business stack visual above articulates these core aspects of social business that should be the focus of any practitioner. In this view, people in social networks and the data they create and share form the first two vital layers. The delivery layer describes the physical mediation between social media and the real-world, usually the user experience (UX), though there are other ways of delivering social business experiences as well, such as with open APIs, which are just as important.

The next three layers are key enablers of social business but are less widely understood and/or mature, but are just as important. Aggregation drives efficiency in consumption and participation, while discovery and analytics makes the activities of people and the information they create much more useful over time. Management and security provide necessary abilities to govern and secure social business activities. And finally, with the business model layer, we focus on the desired outcomes, which means having a clear understanding of how your social business activities are creating value for the organization.

Note that this particular view of the social business stack is primarily one of nouns or things. There is another corresponding view of the activities of social business (the verbs), which are just as vital to the story and which I’ll post soon as well. In the next few weeks, I’ll explore the layers of the social business stack in more detail, exploring the strategic aspects and how they contribute to a healthy, vibrant, and highly enriching place to engage in high-value business activities via social media. In the meantime, I’d like to invite your commentary and contributions to expand and fill out what I’m hoping will be an authoritative view of the moving parts of social business.

The social business stack visual above has been placed in the Creative Commons. It also contains a current version number and I’ll update it periodically as we add to it the latest developments as they emerge, as well as any suggestions and criticism we receive.

In the long run information may want to be free – but in the near term it’s looking for funding via advertising and maybe a freemium business model. Content-based companies must fight to preserve value and most end up living and dying by a simple premise:

aggregate or be aggregated

This concept has roots in the portal wars of the mid-1990s.  At the time every internet company’s obsession was eyeballs.  AOL, Excite, Yahoo!, Lycos, et al. were busy fighting to become your browser’s default web page by aggregating the best content.

Then with the rise of e-commerce, comparison shopping engines like MySimon and Froogle fought for attention as one-stop product information aggregators.

These days, social networks have become presence and relationship aggregators. Most sites allow users to cross-publish content and status to other platforms; you can publish Twitter to blogs, blogs to LinkedIn, Foursquare to Facebook, and so on. I believe that while Google may currently be losing at “social” it still holds an envious position over other sites as master aggregator, given its lead in search.

The aggregation battle is shifting to tools, with news coming that Twitter will buy TweetDeck for $40+ million. Tools put aggregation into the hands of users, while providers gain more opportunities to monetize, e.g. place ads around content.

Aggregate or be aggregated. Keep this in mind as you encounter new opportunities to publish and collect your content – and consider how it’s being monetized by the company that’s helping you out.

In all these situations, which will be familiar to anyone who has ever worked at the social media collision point between audiences and organisations, very little of value is extracted from what can be a costly exercise, primarily because most “social platforms” have been built to pull in audiences and allow moderators to police user activity.

Whilst there is still a place for such propositions, particularly where calls to action can be closely aligned to the editorial or other content that is of value to the owners of that proposition, in many instances it makes sense to move away from moderation towards curation.

A simple enough idea, in practice curation of external and social content has been relatively difficult for media brands and other organisations to put themselves at the centre of the flow of information and content around them. That, at least, was my experience at the BBC where, for more than seven years, I (and others) tried to come up with a solution to this problem, culminating in the well received but ultimately unsustainable, at least within the (non)budgetary confines in which it existed, BBC Manchester Blog.

A few months ago, one of our technology partners, eVectors, introduced me to a tool they’d created which, with the right editorial strategy wrapped around it, can make the job of finding, curating, editorialising and socialising content far more efficient – and interesting – than I’ve seen before.

So, with our friends Paolo and Cristian at eVectors, Nick, myself and several others here at Headshift created a demonstration which we call ClimatePulse. As we say on the site:

“Climate Pulse tracks a wide range of source for information, comment and content about the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (COP15). It’s different from mere aggregation services because there is an editorial layer and a social layer. The editorial layer allows curators to highlight specific pieces of content. The Social layer gets users involved in tagging and categorising content. In the near future, you’ll even be able to take away a widget containing the flow from Climate Pulse – a widget that lets your friends, contacts or audience to not only consume but to contribute their own content, straight from your site, back into that flow.”

In plain English, Climate Pulse basically monitors and aggregates blog posts, news websites, twitter tweets and a wide range of other sources we’ve configured in the backend. An editor can then curate this content and display it as they wish – for example letting the flow appear as a raw feed, tagging or geo-tagging content, featuring the best stuff, etc. Here’s a diagramme showing the flow of content into the system, the editorial and tagging layer, and the social layer:

For the social layer, in this instance we’ve asked users to declare an interest based upon work based affiliation – energy business, business, government, environmental NGO or journalist. As can be seen in the screenshot below, users then determine whether pieces of content describe a problem or a solution, and add free tags to describe, in their own language, why:

All content is tagged, either by the original author, the editor, users, or by the system scraping the content for key words. When visitors click on a tag, say “nuclear energy”, they get a graph showing how each of the five categories of users voted. Using this example, it’s likely that government and energy business will see nuclear energy as a solution and, because of they’ve tagged the content, we can see that they feel it’s clean, brings jobs, is future proof, etc. Environmentalists, however, area likely to see nuclear energy as a problem because, again based on likely tags, disposal of spent fuel, mining, accidents, etc. Here’s a few possible use cases:

• If the UN, which is organising the Copenhagen Climate conference, or an environmental NGO was using Climate Pulse, they’d be able to see, at a glance, what issues people agree upon and why, and could push delegates to spend time negotiating on topics where it’s necessary to do so.

• Businesses wanting to send the message, “we know you care about this issue, we’re doing what we can understand your views, and we want to be part of the solution” could use a proposition like this to do exactly that.

• A media organisation, wanting to provide coverage and analysis of a range of viewpoints, based upon content from a wide range of sources, could use a tool like this to create a compelling editorial proposition that feeds content to journalists.

One last feature, which would help exposure to the proposition spread virally, is that we can easily build widgets of the flow from the page, and enable site owners interested in a particular issue, for example deforestation, to create a widget that displays, on their own site, that content. Social features could then be made available, meaning that the audience on third party sites could participate on the sites they choose to visit, rather than visiting Climate Pulse itself, and that participation, likely to be ranking, voting or comments, could feed back into the general flow to be highlighted and editorialised by the site curator.

It’s been, and I hope will continue to be, an interesting example of how Headshift, working with technology partners, can help implement exciting and useful propositions that extract real value from audience participation, wherever that participation takes place. It is, to me, a giant leap in the direction of resolving the issue many have grappled with in the past, which is how to find and reflect the content and opinions of a wide range of participants, without being overwhelmed, as is so often the case, by the flood of content and rising moderation costs.

The model here is a nice example of the social business archetypes that my colleague Lee Bryant described in this earlier post and it’s easy to see how we could use the ideas here not just for climate change but any topic or event, such as an election, a popular television programme, a brand, or the research or strategic work being done by an organisation.

You can see the alpha release of Climate Pulse at http://www.climatepulse.org