Having crossed the threshold between 2010 and 2011, this is an ideal time to reflect briefly on the the year that was, and the year that comes.

2011 brings the 10th anniversary of Converseon, making us the oldest pure-play social media consultancy. Over the years, our vision has remained largely consistent, and, although it evolved more slowly in 2001-2006, it has accelerated beyond our expectations in the last two years.

2010 was breakthrough at Converseon. We grew significantly and we also invested heavily into R&D, new talent and capabilities to further lay the foundation for our next evolution, which we are designed to fulfill in 2011. At one point in 2010, we actually slowed our new business efforts to focus on digesting and delivering on the work that was here.

As social media has matured, so have our capabilities. We remain on course to become the world’s leading social intelligence and social media consultancy, and we continue to believe that our organic, fast-moving, nimble approach is right for the market. Our success in 2010 bears out that our approach is indeed the right one for us and our clients, so far.

Social intelligence is clearly fueling business transformation and we are well positioned for leadership in this area. In fact, we expect 2011 to be the tipping point for business transformation driven by social media in the enterprise.

Some highlights:

• Continued Growth: We grew approximately 80% YOY and doubled our staff. We also formalized a new office in Detroit and added more leading brands to our client roster across industries, including automotive, financial services, consumer packaged goods, healthcare and more.
• Technology Leadership: Converseon was named category leader in the Forrester Q3 Wave on Listening Platforms, ahead of some solid and well-funded competition. As one industry observer (Marshall Sponder at Webmetricsguru) wrote, “this Forrester Wave establishes Converseon as one of the leaders in Social Listening Platforms – and last time, in January 2009, they weren’t even on the map – impressive!”.
• Twitter Partnership: In August, we announced a partnership with Twitter to incorporate their entire dataset into our Conversation Mining technologies in near real time. Converseon was the first company in the Forrester Wave with full Firehose access, which provides 100% of Twitter data, versus 5-15% from the public API. Forrester called this a “big step” in the social listening marketplace.
• Advanced R&D: Behind the scenes we are making very significant technical investments with internal and external Ph.D. teams working on natural language processing and machine learning for our listening platform, without sacrificing the critical insights that only human intelligence can provide. As a result, we expect to lead important industry advances, which you can expect to see in 2011.
• Evolved Consulting Capabilities: With the addition of Chris Boudreaux from Accenture, we solidified and evolved our management consulting capabilities to help brands harness the value of social intelligence across the enterprise through frameworks that extend across the organization. In 2010, we explicitly saw the increased need for transforming social media into an established business function and for business process redesign, and we expect that to accelerate in 2011.
• New Analytics Capabilities: In yet another industry first, we brought aboard Mark Kovscek – formerly of VivaKi, Starcom and PriceWaterHouseCoopers – to lead a new Enterprise Analytics practice. We recognized that clients have customer and business data inside and outside of their firewalls, and that integrating our social intelligence into other client datasets will enable a new generation of enterprise analytics solutions. Stay tuned for more in this area in 2011.
• Global Expansion: Social is clearly a global phenomena and Converseon grew globally in 2010. We announced a strategic partnership with CIC in the Fall to better integrate Chinese language social intelligence within our offerings, and we are launching an office in Copenhagen in early 2011. We now have strong native language capabilities in more than 15 languages and we expect this to grow significantly in 2011.
• Industry Awards: Converseon added to its already impressive list of awards a SAMMY for Best Socialized Business for our listening work on behalf of IBM.

So, what’s next? A lot. In several areas. All built along our listen, operationalize, activate and measure backbone. We recognize we need to be the industry’s best in each of these areas and, together, we can provide a unique, integrated, end-to-end social solution for the enterprise. Below is a sneak peak of a few areas we intend to advance in 2011:

• Accelerate Growth: Our plans include doubling revenues again in 2011, and we developed our infrastructure to support this.
• Product Release: Just this month, we will move our next-generation Conversation Miner Enterprise™ product out of beta to unify social media monitoring with deep levels of social intelligence and workflow. This major product launch addresses the feedback we heard from clients about wanting one solution that could provide the low end “monitoring” with the broadest data sets (including the Twitter Firehose) together with the deepest level of social intelligence (including that informed by human analysis) to fulfill multiple use cases. This is a major development that we’ll be announcing more details of in the very near future.
• More Technology: Expect to see more technology applications and offshoots coming out of Converseon based on our core technology. In effect, more, smarter and faster.
• More Alliances: As social intelligence matures, we will be bringing together more alliances and partnerships to scale our offering. While in 2010 we focused all our energies on internal development to digest and deliver on the tsunami of activity coming at us, our next generation products and services are highly scalable enabling us to develop more strategic win/win partnerships. We will of course keep our partnerships very selective though given our desire to iterate with clients and partners and ensuring we’re delivering the industry’s best solutions. Our focus on working with clients when they want to “get serious” about social will remain.
• Mature Consulting: We expect to be working even more deeply within the trenches of our clients to help them create unified approaches to take advantage of social intelligence and drive value across the enterprise. This will include customer care, R&D, compliance and more.
• Holistic Activation: Expect to see more socially-infused services (ranging from paid media to search marketing) that are differentiated and unique.
• Greater Talent: Converseon has long been a destination of some of the industry’s best and deepest talent. We believe our senior management team is the industry’s very best, bar none. This will continue in 2011. We also will be bringing on even more diverse talent from the social sciences (cultural anthropology, linguistics), technology/mathematics/linguistics (algorithmic geeks, feel free to apply), management consultants, agency/creative stars with the passion for social looking for a fast moving, deep thinking environment focused on helping to lead the social enterprise transformation. Interested? Send us your details.
• Continued Ethical Commitment: Converseon has already been well recognized for ethics, having been a member of WOMMA’s MEAP. In 2011, we will expand beyond that. Just recently, we were named to CASRO’s Social Media Research Task Force to help ensure that technical capabilities stay aligned with ethical practices. It’s important that the industry get ahead of this and we’re pleased to be a clear leader in this area.
• Global Expansion: Stay tuned. : )

At the dawn of 2011, we remain the only leading provider of Conversation Mining with robust consulting and activation capabilities. Throughout our history, we kept our nose to the grindstone and our independence, for several reasons: our ability to provide hands-on senior involvement to our clients; the ability to stay nimble and make decisions quickly; and to ensure we proceed with a moral compass and culture that lets us walk what we talk.

We know that social media success must come from the inside out. We can not help to elicit change without embracing that change ourselves. We have an ambitious vision and, because of our great clients and their support, we’ve been able to innovate with and for them, while remaining independent.

We also believe in the power of social to drive competitive advantage and to humanize brands. Organizations — including Converseon — can extend our morality and social purpose while also delivering business success. In fact, our humanized center of gravity and interest in social purpose have been critical to our success to date, and we will further explore the concept of social purpose more deeply in future posts.

Thank you, 2010 for the evolution that occurred here.

And welcome, 2011, for the inspiration and evolution we expect that we shall see.