2011 was a whirlwind here at Converseon. After more than doubling in size in 2010, our mission in 2011 was to focus on stabilizing and evolving new “socially-intelligent” solutions — products and services — that will come to market in 2012. In fact, we nearly doubled our technology spend in 2011 purposefully to build the robust infrastructure and technologies needed to help brands leverage social media to meet business objectives. Some of these are now in beta and others will be coming soon. On the services side, we doubled down on our talent and solutions — and expanded our offerings especially in the area of creative and social CRM consulting. In short, it was a time of great metamorphosis as we again challenged ourselves to evolve ahead of the marketplace and meet the needs of market as we move into 2012.

In fact, while we celebrated our ten year anniversary — and was cited by Shel Israel as the industry’s first pure play social media agency — we believe 2011 represented some of our most significant evolution internally. We did so because we see 2012 as the year of “social rigor” and have evolved our technologies and solutions in a manner to uniquely meet these market demands.

What is “social rigor?” In our experience, 2007-2011 represented a time significant experimentation at brands in social. The approach was often to seed the garden, see what took root, and let it grow, pilot, evolve and do so again. The result for some is messy gardens and far too unclear, in many cases, impact on business outcomes. This isn’t surprising, as it mirrors very much the earlier days of digital. But those days are coming to an end, quickly.

As we move into 2012 though, we predict brands will adopt an approach that applies social with much more rigor. This approach will be characterized by:

• Weeding the Garden: According to Jeremiah Owang at Altimeter Group study, large brands have an average of 178 social media accounts. While some of those accounts are effective, many are not. In fact, in our experience, many large brands simply don’t know what accounts exist, where they are, whose managing them or how effective they are. This is what we call Social Sprawl. We predict brands will necessarily need to map their social footprint, clearly understand what’s working and what’s not, prune and weed the garden of the deadwood and nurture those that are. This is a significant project and an area we are focusing on at Converseon through some proprietary tools and solutions. You simply need to know what you have before you know where and how to get there.
• Nurture the Performing: As the garden is weeded, attention and nurturing will be applied to those that are working or have promise. This includes new ways to best manage company overall social footprints and help align social engagers at brands with appropriate content and better measure their performance — and in some cases align bonuses to that performance. This also includes organizing and managing a company’s social presence more effectively to better understand what’s working, and what’s not.
• Measuring the Impact: Social media will become more data-driven. Social analytics will take ascendency to truly understand ROI. We developed a Social Scorecarding product in 2011 that is clearly answering the ROI question and allowing near real time optimization of programs, initiatives and campaigns. Currently, research from Chief Marketer found that two in five marketers have little confidence in the effectiveness of their ability to measure social media campaigns. The fact is, we’re almost surprised it’s only 2 and 5. But 2012 will help change that through some new approaches and technologies.
• Moving from Monitoring to Insight: Along with this, we are seeing a clear movement from “social monitoring” to “social insights.” The former worked fine to answer the question: “What are people saying about me now?” but is ineffectual at answering more core business questions — I.e. “What is it about my product that makes moms angry?” We see social insights on the ascendency as brands using social monitoring tools hit the end of their capabilities and are looking to “get serious” about finding social insights. This requires deeper levels of intelligence in the meta-data — better sentiment (including sarcasm, implicit, etc.), emotion, custom influence and more. Of course, brands then need the agility to move rapidly enough to engage in these real time insights and real time conversation ecosystem. And that’s where we are able to help.

To help our clients apply this Social Rigor and to expand our offerings, we invested significantly in 2011. Below are some of the highlights:

• Raised Social IQ: We doubled down on “social data intelligence” through increased investment in a system that doesn’t just try to replace humans in the conversation analysis; but scales their intelligence via technology. Our lead scientist, Dr. Philip Resnik, keynoted the Sentiment Symposium in San Francisco on November 9 and outlined our “semi-supervised” approach to this. We made deep investments into a scaled solution that works across languages that gets to more effective meta-data, much deeper intelligence leading to better and more rapid insights that answer key business questions. A white paper on this approach is on our website. Even Gartner Group weighed in on this in its Magic Quadrant on Social CRM by saying, “Converseon puts a greater emphasis on human resources, as opposed to technology, for analysis for error correction, and machine learning to improve its analytics. This gives superior quality of insight for customers…” What you can expect: the industry’s deepest social media intelligence that delves deeply into emotion, intensity and other key meta data that will be offered both as a data product (via API) in the Spring as well through our future Conversation Miner release (date tbd).
• Focused on Global Citizentry: We continued to expand our offerings internationally. In April, we launched Converseon Nordics through an office in Copenhagen and have continued to grow our footprint there. The market is rapidly maturing there and looking for more sophisticated solutions that have been historically offered in that market. Our Conversation Mining data is also being expanded into multiple languages (with 9 on dock for integration). We also have been conducting more social media research for large brands across geographies, including China, Russia, India, Brazil and more. BRIC is big. What you can expect: More expansion in the EU, as well as Asia and Brazil. The social media adoption in Indonesia and Brazil is quite profound and we are actively looking to scale in these regions.
• Evolved From Product to Products: With Conversation Mining “intelligent” data as a core platform, we have launched several new products in beta with key clients and will soon push those out more broadly. The mission is to provide a complete layer of technology along with our services that helps brands Listen, Operationalize, Engage and Measure. These include:
  • Open Graph Management – Converseon acquired a technology in September called Social Graphiti, it is used to both measure and activate (through retargeting) consumer’s “like” behavior on a brand’s eCommerce sites. We are marrying social conversations with social commerce. The product is going through rebuild and will relaunched in Q2 (and selectively in beta in Q1).
  • Social Scorecard – Measures the business impact that social media has on the brand. The scorecard combines public metrics (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) along with internal brand metrics (web analytics, sales conversion data, media spend) to show a complete picture of the actions taken by the brand and the business impact and outcomes achieved. Scorecard is both a measurement tool and facilitates process and program changes.
  • Conversation Manager – This solution enables large brands to manage and track performance of their multiple social media accounts in a single location. Currently in beta with expected Q2 broader rollout.

  What you can expect: These products will be made available and rolled out more broadly in 2012.

• Merged our Social Business Consulting and Engagement Services: We recognized that social business consulting — which focuses largely on the business process redesigns required for brands to have “social agility” and fully leverage the value of social across the organization — and our social engagement services were two faces of the same coin. The former focused largely on internal transformation while the latter focused on transforming the conversation. We now have a holistic approach that can address both dimensions as needed and otherwise helped ensure that our services solutions remain industry best. We also grew our social media optimization/SEO, creative and mobile applications. In fact, we were named digital AOR for several brands who recognized that social is indeed at the heart of all digital marketing. We expect that trend to continue in 2012. What you can expect: New and innovative service solutions that can be effectively scaled out across large brands and geographies. We recognize that many effective solutions for brands — such as Social CRM — are all about people, processes and technologies (with an emphasis on the first two).
• Added Senior Talent: We have continued to attract and bring on some of the industry’s best leaders. This included the addition of Neil Beam who led social CRM at AT&T. Our consulting services continue to grow and evolve and are providing deep and sophisticated solutions for a range of leading brands. We also added Vidar Brekke as our first Chief Product Officer. We have also staffed up in analytics, market research, community management, mobile, creative and more. What you can expect: We will continue to invest in more talent in 2012, especially with individuals who have made social work in the trenches of large complex organizations. We understand how important it is to have first hand experience making social work at large brands so that we just don’t talk theoretically but can do the hard work of implementation.
• Grew Client Relationships (and Added a Few More): We are proud to continue to work with our very first client — Hilton Hotels — (now in its tenth year) and to partner more deeply with all our clients. We continue to believe in a hands on senior level approach to clients and our product of our work with Walmart, Kohler, Integramed and others (some of whom can’t be named due to confidentiality). We have built true partnerships with our key clients, which is critical given the need to “co-innovate” with clients in an industry that moves so rapidly. What you can expect: After all the internal investments, we will scale our services rapidly across verticals and regions. This includes CPG, Pharma, Automotive, B2B, technology, financial services and more.
• New Recognitions: It was flattering — and satisfying — that our work continued to get noticed by key analysts and others. We were finalist for Social Media Agency of the Year at iMedia, our work with Walmart won the SAMMY Award for Best Social Listening Strategy, our client Integramed won the SAMMY for Best Social Business (mid-sized), and our CEO was named to the board of directors at WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) beginning in 2012, as well as being named a Social Media Allstar by the Social Media Society. Gartner Group and Gleanster (another industry analyst) also recognized our industry leadership with Gartner including us in the Magic Quadrant and saying, “Converseon has a broad understanding of how to use social media monitoring and analysis to effect change across marketing, customer service and sales departments. The company knows how to measure success and impact the key KPIs in those departments and how to tie into more traditional CRM transformation approaches. This is due to the CRM consulting and academic backgrounds of Converseon’s executives and consultants, and their consulting-driven delivery model.” What you can expect: our success is hinged to our client success. We will simply focus on doing great work and let the industry speak for itself. We do expect more full service digital agency recognition though as more and more brands move towards a social-centric approach to their digital efforts.
• Independence: We did all of this while remaining independent. After the Radian6 acquisition by Salesforce earlier this year, we were recognized as the last independent category “Leader” in social listening, per the Forrester Wave Q3 2010. This, as you might imagine, had our phones ringing with potential investors and partners. We are treading quite carefully here as we are dedicated to our mission and strategy of providing the highest level of social intelligence through a true social insights platform. We believe that space is much in demand and we have invested in the components to clearly capture that position. The results of these investments will be rolling out over 2012. We of course are always evaluating the best way to scale effectively and globally, but are pleased that we’re the position that we can thoughtfully choose how best to proceed. What you can expect: We will scale more rapidly either through select strategic investment, partnerships or more. For the first time, we have been talking this way with potential partners. We continue to push towards a 50/50 services/technology approach as we think that is the optimal approach to drive value to clients and rapidly evolve technologies based on real client feedback. We truly remain a consulting/technology/services hybrid and believe this approach truly is the model for agency of the future.

As you can see, 2011 truly was evolutionary here. But we’re not done. We are primed and ready to assist our clients adopt to Social Rigor across the organization heading into 2012. The good news too is that we are not — as is sometimes thought — an “all or nothing solution.” Our consulting can work with any third party tools or solutions to make data more intelligent and actionable. In fact, we see our technologies as a layer on top of traditional social monitoring to make it more insightful and useful. And brands can work with us either just from a technology perspective, or from a services side, or both. We have a “best alone, better together” philosophy. We believe we have competitive advantage in each of the areas we compete, but the solution works even better if used together. But that does not mean we can’t adapt to client needs and requirements.

We wish everyone a healthy, happy and “rigorous” 2012 and look forward to hopefully seeing you in the new year.