1. Social Dashboards That Generate Yawns Not Insights

We all follow the business school maxim that what gets measured gets managed, but one area where measurement has been lacking is in social media performance. All of the investment and tool building efforts to date in social have been focused on social listening, or social content and experience performance. We hear from clients that the results generated in high level dashboards and in query results are not insightful, rarely actionable, and infrequently interesting to anyone outside of the social team.

Typical feedback includes:

• “The reports from our agency wind up in our inbox, and stay there.”
• “Who cares if we are 98% neutral.”
• “We already know that people don’t like our product return policy. This is not news.”

2. Social CRM and CMS Help the Community Manager

We have been able to help social teams better calibrate their performance in the adoption of social CMS and social CRM tools, using Radian 6, Spredfast, Sprinklr, and others to track performance of individual status updates and content sharing. Add a tool like Crimson Hexagon or download the raw data to crunch your own analysis; you’ll see that you can track how content cultivates conversations that connect and reinforce brand strategy. For example, a car manufacturer might find that “We planned to have conversations about our car company and innovation, and our innovation content outperformed all of our other efforts, with the largest and richest engagement across these three themes.” Content and topic analysis helps Community Managers and Content Planners plan, and gives them something to discuss with the CMO or VP; However, this effort is seen as hyper tactical, and CMOs do not yet see how these efforts move the needle for the brand.

3. Social Attribution and Conversion Metrics Reveal a Scale Problem

We have seen innovation in tool providers and known web analytics companies linking social behavior to attribution modeling, and cost per click analysis. Omniture, CoreMetrics, and Webtrends have made huge strides in working with Facebook to measure what was previously a black hole in measurement, providing a window into social’s performance within a web analytics framework. We’ve built ref codes into our Facebook apps and counted the referrals to shopping carts. We’ve seen the rise of social sites it Google Analytics rankings of last clicks. Having looked at 200 brands across 50+ categories, we can tell you that the most promising movement when social sites edge up as one of the top 10 referrers to a brand’s core website. But for the most part, at this still early stage in social adoption, social commerce efforts deliver minimal impact on a brand’s total health. A prediction based on the trends we’ve seen is that to achieve direct response conversion outcomes, nothing will beat traditional tools and tactics (SEO, SEM, etc) for driving response. Social as a method of driving SEO looks promising, but again this is a subset of an already effective marketing tactic. If you set up your social business objectives to drive direct response, or narrow SEO outcomes, you are missing the biggest opportunity for brand building since the creation of the printing press.

4. Social Performance Measurement Gets CMOs Excited

Enter the Social Business Index and Social Performance Monitor. The number one metric that senior management has traditionally cared about – from the early experimental days of social until now – has been the number of fans. Cluetrain-carrying social business directors and community managers fight against this instinct, claiming that engagement should be the primary metric. “After all,” they argue, “markets are conversations, so focus on the conversations, and you will build your tribe.”

But these same social business directors put their jobs at risk measuring engagement to the exclusion of scale. A familiar refrain has been “I don’t care about the engagement of 20,000 people when our market is 20% of all humans worldwide.” CMOs see what their social gurus do not – number of fans is really just a crude proxy for competitive brand relevance. So 2012 marketing plans are likely to still see fan growth as the number one strategic priority for social.

We know that both views are correct, and then some. Relative performance of a brand’s social efforts, measured through social data, is the most important metric a CMO needs to see. Relative performance tells you if your social efforts need more investment, and will also give insights for how all of your brand efforts are gaining traction. Insights gleaned from deeper understanding of the social data that drives social performance reveals opportunities not just for social campaigns and experiences, but for brand marketing, customer service operations, and product innovation.

Our Social Performance Monitor tools dives deeper into the components that make up relative performance: Brand Awareness, Brand Love, Brand Mindshare, and Brand Advocacy. We believe these will give marketers, digital marketers, and social business leaders the insight they need to make decisions about how to direct their social efforts – and their brand marketing efforts – to drive the highest outcomes. What do you think? How are you measuring social ROI? If you’re interested in a tool that will help you align your social efforts to your CMO’s worldview, comment below, ping me @jenvandermeer or give us a shout.

I had never heard of parkour – while I’m sure there are some American traceurs and traceuses (male and female parkour practitioners), I guess in the U.S., Sports Center is more focused on tennis, football and baseball.  In other words, this is not mainstream U.S. sports fare.  After watching one short video, I was intrigued to find out more about this beautiful sport and art.  “Parkour is an international discipline, sport and hobby that is best described as the art of forward motion in spite of obstacles, or to put it simply: the art of movement,” according to How Stuff Works. Wikipedia calls parkour “a method of movement focused on moving around obstacles with speed and efficiency.”

In our industry, we talk to brands about how to do business in a more social way, changing how they market to consumers as well as how they digest, communicate and disseminate information internally.  It becomes clearer with each passing day that resistance to these changes will leave your business behind.  Change is hard. People inside of brands and companies naturally resist it.  But in order to catapult our businesses forward, we must not resist these changes.  We’ve got to roll with the punches, try to not fear the new and unknown.  Traceurs go places they’ve never been before, like Doyle to Mardin, Turkey, and immerse themselves in the landscape all in an attempt to move forward in a fast, efficient and unpredictable way.  Doyle speaks about how he approaches a new landscape: “I have to pretend that I’ve already done it like ten times.” He uses mental strength to convince himself that all is OK, that he knows he can make the jumps and handle the unexpected by telling himself, “it’s alright…I’ve already done this” even when the fact is that he has never seen this particular landscape before.  Doyle’s mental strength is inspiring, and we can take a lesson from it when figuring out how to approach unfamiliar techniques and ever-changing landscapes in social business.

“Parkour’s chief aim is never to move backward but instead to overcome obstacles fluidly, with strength, originality and speed, ” states the How Stuff Works article.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could use those words to describe our forays into the new technologies and techniques of social business? Always move forward. Overcome obstacles fluidly, with strength, originality and speed.  Let’s do it.

Special thanks to Barney Loehnis for turning me on to this incredible Red Bull video via his weekly aggregation of interesting digital / social media articles and creative work from Asia-Pacific.  Find more of his aggregated articles and stories at www.asiadigitalmap.com.

1. Be real

The premise is simple: don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. A community manager should be selected because they’re a good fit for the community. Don’t select a community manager simply because they have community management or social media experience; make sure they also have a background that is relevant to the community or your brand. The community can tell if you’re insincere or clueless, and you run the threat of losing their trust.

Additionally, give your personality a chance to shine through. Community managers who are overly dry or technical might as well be robots. Community members appreciate the presence of a genuine personality with whom they feel a connection.

2. Listen

A good community manager makes time to check in on the community at least once a day. Depending upon the amount of activity on each community hub, you may want to check in three to five times a day. Reply to any questions people have asked, and let them know that you’re there for them.

Genuine interaction is a must. Take time to really read and understand what your community members need. Don’t try to make their questions fit into a formulaic category that can easily be answered with a stock response. This will frustrate them and make you lose credibility.

3. Share

When checking in, a community manager should post interesting material and encourage conversation in the community. Don’t feel like your posts have to strictly adhere to the theme of your community; feel free to post a funny video or cute picture when you see fit.

Encourage your community to share, too. When you post, always include a call to action to encourage responses. If you post a video of a puppy stuck on its back, ask your community members to share their favorite puppy videos in the comments. This creates a dynamic of mutual respect and open sharing, and keeps your community members interested.

4. Watch out for your friends

Every good community manager wears the hat of a moderator at some point in time. When a community member comes to you with an issue, do your best to respond and resolve it within one day. If a flame war erupts within your community, step in and take the necessary steps to restore peace. Moderation is an important part of community management, and your community will thank you for the support.

5. Pitch in during times of crisis

When there is unplanned downtime or unexpected technical difficulties, a community manager should do all they can to guide the community through the rough patch. It’s always a good idea to have a crisis response plan in place before it is needed so you can promptly escalate the issue up the proper chain of command and provide a swift resolution.

Radio silence from a community manager during times of uncertainty can lead to panic and frustration from community members. If possible, contact your community members via alternate methods such as email or other unaffected social outlets. If there is planned downtime on the horizon, make sure your community is aware of it at least two weeks in advance.

6. Give your friends space

There’s such a thing as oversharing in a community. Good community managers make sure to avoid posting too often or dominating conversations. Doing so will lead your community members to ignore you or even leave the community.

A good rule of thumb is to not post more than three times a day. Additionally, allow your community members to interact with one another and create organic conversations around a central topic. Quite often, community members’ questions are answered by other members before you get a chance to respond. This builds a strong community based on mutual respect, and makes the community manager’s job a lot more pleasant.

After many shifts in the social landscape during the fourth quarter, Q1 proved active but provided few monumental changes. Let’s take some time to look back at what the last three months have brought to the social media space.

January

• Facebook Deals Internationally – On the last day of January, Facebook launched deals in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK, exposing the feature to more than 114.6 million new users. For the Canada launch, a number of top Facebook brands premiered Deals nationwide, including Indigo, H&M, Dynamite, Garage, Joe Fresh, Town Shoes, and TELUS. Places and Deals have a symbiotic relationship, as Deals is dependent on Places, and Places is made more compelling by Deals; the greater the penetration of Deals among brands, the more active users will become with Places.
• Foursquare Ambassador Program – Late in 2010, foursquare launched a beta initiative called the Ambassador Program where super users could sign their favorite businesses up for specials using the free Merchant Platform. The response from users was enormous, and in January, foursquare expanded the Ambassador Program, opening registration to all users. Something for brands to keep in mind while they formulate their social strategy is that while Facebook Places & Deals and foursquare Venues & Specials operate similarly on the front end for users, the processes that businesses must go through to register their locations and set up consumer-facing incentives is drastically different.

February

• Facebook iFrames – In February, Facebook made a fundamental structural change when it decided to no longer support FBML, and instead move exclusively to iFrame. This change gives Facebook developers much more flexibility and the users a much more streamlined experience when engaging with custom engagements within a Facebook Page. Landing views can now be customized based on the user’s location, views can be dynamically updated based on the content that is being accessed, and flash elements can now load without activation (while any auto-play functionality is still against Facebook policy).
• Enhanced Facebook Page UI – With the shift to iFrame, Facebook also enhanced other elements of the Page front-end, while enabling a number of new features on the back-end. When visiting a Page, the tab structure was eliminated in favor of a left navigation, and while logged into Facebook as a Page administrator, users could now interact with other users and Pages as that Page that they administer. Admins can also opt to receive notifications when other users engage with their Page, and some basic Wall moderation using keyword filters was also added into the mix.
• Twitter Translation Center – Since 2009, Twitter had crowdsourced translation in one fashion or another, but in February, they launched the Translation Center, which enables users to sign up to be a translator and begin localizing immediately. While these users aren’t translating tweets, just the Twitter product itself, this streamlined process will enable Twitter to launch in more languages even more quickly than it has over the last twelve months.

March

• Revamped Foursquare Specials – With the release of foursquare v3, the entire back-end for creating and managing Specials received an overhaul. There are now different types of Specials ( in a similar vein to the four types of Facebook Deals): Flash, Friends, Swarm, and Newbie Specials join Checkin, Frequency, Loyalty, and Mayor Specials for a total of 8 distinct breeds. The creation of Specials was further streamlined, and it’s now easier than ever to get set up – and, of course, the process is still free. More compelling Specials mean more engaged users.
• Facebook Questions – At the tail end of March, Facebook took Questions out of beta, and released it to the general public, receiving a mixed reception. The feature has a very low barrier to entry – once a question pops up in your newsfeed, you simply click a radio button to answer – and Questions can become extremely viral because if I ask a Question, and you answer, the Question/Answer get published out to your social graph. Questions are also flexible in scope, in that they can be for close-ended mass polling (e.g. “Mac vs. PC?”), or for more focused, relevant analysis (e.g. “What’s the best restaurant in Center City Philadelphia?”)

Team Insights

Did we miss any? Post other changes that you saw impacting the social space below in the comments!

It’s a question we get a lot as we help clients design social business strategies. In our experience, there are few companies that aren’t trying to connect the dots between their social efforts and results. It’s not 2008 anymore where marketers can secure budget for social initiatives because “everyone else is doing it,” or “but, we’ll be left in dust!” CMOs want to know exactly what return they are getting for their media spend, just as they do after any other media buy.

However, according to a study conducted last year by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, 84% of global marketers aren’t measuring the return on their investment. Of that same group of marketers, 90% weren’t sure they even had the technology to measure a hard return on investment. That’s not to say brands aren’t trying. A few months ago, McDonald’s announced that they saw a 33% increase in foot traffic in conjunction with their Foursquare Day promotion. Aha! A brand that figured out how to do it! Only, a couple of days later, McDonald’s admitted that what they actually experienced was a 33% increase in Foursquare checkins, not foot traffic. Oops.

The confusion isn’t surprising. A lot of companies are unclear on what metrics they should be measuring and what those measurements are telling them about the success or failure of their endeavors. There are near infinite measurement possibilities; buzz, share of voice, influence of consumers reached, clicks, likes, growth rate of fans/followers/subscribers, sentiment, traffic. The list goes on and on. Measurement dashboards that come with every new tool or platform don’t make it any easier to determine what should be evaluated. They provide reports on every metric than can be measured, though not necessarily what should be measured. Therein, lies the real issue: frequently, what’s being measured isn’t what really matters.

So, that brings me back to the question, “How should you measure success?” Here are some helpful guidelines.

Determine what success means to you (and be realistic). Figure out what you want the return on your investment to be. Is it sales? You will have a hard time tying a feel-good campaign with no call-to-action to increased sales. Period. So, if sales are your ultimate objective, design your campaign or initiative in a way that makes sense and will help you achieve that goal. @DellOutlet is a perfect example. Stefanie at Dell started tweeting in June of 2007. A few months in, she decided she wanted to do more and developed a strategy for using Twitter for driving sales. (They’ve seen over $7 million in directly-attributable sales since).

Choose relevant metrics. Once objectives have been set, determine what can be measured, and eliminate superfluous metrics from your criteria. Again, if your goal is driving sales, then the number of YouTube channel views is probably not the most useful metric. Measure what should be measured. Earlier this year, we did a social servicing project with TurboTax. Their goal was to surprise and delight customers and gain recognition as a customer-focused support organization. They knew they wouldn’t be able to sufficiently gauge customer satisfaction with pre-existing metrics, so they created feedback surveys that were sent to every user serviced. As it turned out, the survey informed them that their customers were 71% more likely to recommend TurboTax because of their interactions with the company on Twitter.

Analyze, evolve, and track. Once the campaign is in full swing and data is available, ascertain that the right campaign metrics have been chosen. If they have, begin to track the data on a regular basis. However, if you aren’t able to confirm success or failure with the metrics you’ve selected, evolve them. Identify another method for evaluating the initiative’s value. Gatorade’s Mission Control Command Center does just this. The marketing team monitors online discussions, sports trends, media performance and general sports buzz in order to determine their relevancy in the sports beverage market (with the ultimate goal of reversing a 3-year slip in sales by increasing real-time participation and top-of-mind awareness). Gatorade, in addition to monitoring the data daily, regularly evolves and tracks the trended data and correlates it with other relevant information (sales, for example) to determine whether or not they’re measuring the right thing.

The key takeaway here is that brands should measure what matters and will help them to achieve their specific objectives. When businesses only pave the cowpath instead of reinventing their measurement models around social, then they will only see incremental results at best. Social is a whole new way of doing business. Just as strategies and processes will need to adapt, so will metrics.

As my colleague Kate Rush Sheehy pointed out recently, forming a company’s social business strategy and resources requires speed and scale — and for some organizations these two qualities don’t come naturally. Many employees fear the departmental silos they don’t understand. The complex processes that don’t always work. And the colleagues they don’t know — constantly concerned these people will object to their ideas, plans, or points of view. This sometimes irrational worry can frustrate employees, but inactivity typically persists within their organizations anyway.  Some companies refuse to let these concerns constrain them, and are trying to do things a little differently.

One example is a social business center of excellence (SBCE); an organizational structure that exposes each of these fears. The people you work with, how you communicate, and perhaps even your role are different. It’s exciting and jarring all at the same time, but slowly each member of this group comes to the same realization. The people you work with share your motivation for creating resources, educating the organization, and innovating to reach business goals.

But herein lies the problem: How do you shift from discussing the ideas you have to executing on them?

• Focus on specific  goals — and how and when you will attain them. Even the best ideas are left inactive without a realistic plan to achieve them. Typically SBCE involvement rests outside of an employee’s regular responsibilities. A clear roadmap marked with a relevant timeline, defined activities, and targeted accountability will decide how many tangible outcomes this group achieves.

• Resist gaining consensus on decisions. Agreement creates comfort no matter what decision you’re making. But this same process can dilute ideas and decrease how quickly the work gets done. For projects that require multiple rounds of input, assign a lead contributor whose job is to facilitate and incorporate group feedback — and communicate the final product back to the team. This way you can protect the group’s progress and ensure the openness initially created stays intact.

• Address member hesitancy early. While information flows within SBCE meetings, members’ contributions stem from the role they perform every day. This inability to see the bigger picture can sometimes cause uncertainty. Combat this feeling early by fully explaining the facts that support your perspective. Sharing provides clarity and gives members fodder to ask questions, ones they might not have felt comfortable asking otherwise.

What do you want to know about centers of excellence as they relate to social business?

Leave your questions and thoughts in the comments and we’ll incorporate them into our SXSWi 2011 panel on this very topic: Social Business Zen: Finding Your Company’s Social Center.

In the Social Media Marketing channel we were wooed by the new viral celebrity Isaiah Mustafa (@isaiahmustafa) in the role of Old Spice Man (@oldspice) delivered in the Old Spice brand campaign. This campaign bridged the connection to us in the social webs by connecting social media celebrities and influencers to the Old Spice brand. Brands are popular in social media but celebrities are HOT. Celebrities in social media share personality, are personal and thus popular – Musicians and Actors top the Facebook Pages rankings over brands. The Old Spice Man brought that personality to the campaign through near real-time YouTube video and Twitter replies to the questions that he invited us to ask. Engaging the community is the aspiration of all brands. Engaging with the community with personality is a rarer capability. The Old Spice campaign delivered on the brand promise through the well integrated creative, social and marketing teams to create, listen and respond to both social celebrities, influencers and the masses.

Brand Lessons Learned:

• Collaboration is essential to campaign and community management. Does your Social Media Servicing team have a view into your Social Media Marketing or Communications calendars? Are you anticipating responses to your messaging? Do you have a knowledge map of your organization to workflow your community communication?
• Community is forever, campaigns are transient. An integrated social media team is essential to deliver on both. Do your teams have access to the tools and information necessary to make decisions? Do they have the ability to listen, respond and measure?

In the Social Media Servicing channel we learned about the career transition of Frank Eliason (@FrankEliason) from Comcast. Frank and the cast on the Customer Service Team that emerged under the Twitter handle @ComcastCares. Over the past three years Frank and team have earned top mention on every Social Media Servicing case study. He and this passionate crew innovated the Social Media Servicing model by adding Twitter to their customer listening toolbox. Under this decentralized social media servicing model emerged @ComcastBill, @ComcastSteve, @ComcastDete, @ComcastMelissa, @ComcastBonnie, @ComcastSherri. These personalities were able to attract in some cases, larger Twitter followings than the brand they work for @Comcast. The service relationship they earned with the communities they interacted with are largely to attribute to this elective community behavior. In contrast, my experience as a Social Media Marketing Manager and Community Manager (@CocaCola), our community engagement was centralized. We engaged the community as the Coke bottle and with a tease of attribution to our personality through our CoTags or ^PF. This tweet signature helped to humanize the interaction with our community while maintaining brand identity and growing a centralized community. Brands that engaged and mature in social media face the challenge of social media identity management. As social media teams and channels grow so do the decisions brands must make to balance their identity and personalities that support them.

Identity Lessons Learned:

• Centralized communities build larger communities. Have you enabled an enterprise social media publishing and community management capability to support this approach? How are you able to publish, listen and respond with a large social media service team?
• Decentralized communities enable your brand knowledge to independently scale. Do you have a social media policy, certification and identity guidelines to support your social workforce? Can you aggregate your distributed conversations to facilitate a common social brand channel?

Managing your social media brand, supporting personalities and policy for social media identity are lessons being learned first by the largest brands and communities. As your Social Media Marketing and Servicing channels mature with resources and community expectations, so must your approach to the medium to find the balance right for your brand.

http://softwarewiki.dachisgroup.com/

A big part of our work here at Dachis Group is to maintain an understanding of what sort of tools and platforms are available to our customers that can support their Social Business Design initiatives.

We provide a comprehensive set of technology research services including: software landscape mapping, feature analysis, security analysis, vendor analysis and tool selection.  We also develop alliances with vendors who we find we are recommending regularly, and finally, we are often engaged to manage the implementation of these tools directly.

Through all of this, we have assembled a list of tools that we believe are relevant to Social Business Design initiatives.

We thought it would be a good idea to share some high level results in the Dachis Group Social Software Resource Wiki to provide a resource for those exploring social technology tools and to ask for help in making it a better resource.

If you are considering deploying collaboration, community, listening, or other social tools inside your organization, we have several hundred companies and products listed.  We’d appreciate your help in curating this list by providing more details and submitting additional cases.

For more resources: Stay on top of the most current thinking on Social Business Design and subscribe to our Collaboratory feed.  To learn more about Social Business Design, download our Social Business Design white paper free of charge.

Find out how Dachis Group can help your business worldwide send email to moc.puorgsihcad@seiriuqni, or download our fact sheet and contact us.

Despite the interesting discussion at the conference and evidence of progress being made through groups like The 2.0 Adoption Council, we are seeing many companies struggle with focusing their organizations and positioning themselves for success in today’s networked economy. They inherently see the opportunities, but are confronting issues both big and small, bumping into problems with what to do and how to get it done.

• Defining a comprehensive plan addressing culture change, process change, and technology implementation.
• Approaching customer participation and engagement in a strategic way by integrating it into existing work flows while shifting to a more participatory company culture.
• Making workforce collaboration a reality by defining a change management program, choosing and integrating the right technology, and migrating to more fluid, agile business processes.

Businesses struggle with how to define and measure the results that enable them to get commitment for resources to execute.

This isn’t easy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.

Often, problems aren’t due to a lack of technology, but arise due to a lack of comprehensive strategy needed to address the cultural and business process implications while implementing the right technology solution.

Sometimes it is as simple as delivering a workshop on guiding policy and governance or developing a social business metrics measurement strategy.  Often, its more complex.

Let us know your thoughts, we’d be happy to help.

If you’re from a marketing or communications background, you likely refer to “Social Media Marketing.” At Forrester, we named this space “Social Computing” in February 2006, originating out of the Devices, Media, and Marketing research group.

If you’re from an IT background, you likely refer to “Enterprise 2.0″ originally defined by Harvard Associate Professor Andrew McAfee in May 2006, while researching IT for business use.

There’s nothing wrong with these terms. In fact, they speak clearly to the roles they have served for over three years. Social Media Marketing works best as part of integrated communications strategy, along with other forms of media: tradigital, direct, broadcast, out of home, guerilla, et al. Enterprise 2.0 helps technologists focus on new approaches to infrastructure.

Recently, thought leaders have been calling for an elevated focal point: social business. This evolution is natural – and fully anticipated. You see, on their own, social media marketing and enterprise 2.0 are means of building a better mousetrap, of working smarter not harder…and very sisyphean, waiting to repeat the process with “semantic media marketing” and “enterprise 3.0.”

In contrast, social business is a theoretical target for transformation…but the catch phrase alone doesn’t help companies get anywhere.

This is why Social Business Design matters, allowing companies to:

• Articulate the approach to creating a social business: “intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture.”
• Utilize a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive framework for analyzing the current state of business via four archetypes: ecosystem, hivemind, dynamic signal, and metafilter.
• Outline how functions can apply social business principles within their areas of practice: customer participation, workforce collaboration, and business partner optimization.

Within these practice areas, social media marketing lives as a subset of customer participation. Enterprise 2.0 provides infrastructure support within workforce collaboration and partner optimization. They are complemented by additional people, process, and technology considerations within Social Business Design – which encompasses ALL organizational functions as well as broader industry and value chain perspectives.

It’s time for us to straighten out the terminology we use when describing this space. Social media marketing and Enterprise 2.0 have their value within their respective niches and should still be used to refer to functional niches. Social Business may be trending today but cannot stand on its own – it’s only a theory. Social Business Design drives holistic focus on corporate system change, the responsibility of executive management and the overarching goal for business functions.