Posts by Rob Key
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:
On November 9, Converseon’s lead scientist keynoted the Sentiment Analysis Symposium in San Francisco. It was my first Symposium event organized by Seth Grimes, and I was impressed with the quality of speakers and content. It was one of those that effectively bridged academia with practical business applications.
While we talk a lot about how to make social media drive business results in our communications and white papers, we have not often dwelled deeply into the science behind our social intelligence technology, Conversation Miner. Behind the scenes we have had a team of PHDs, including Dr Resnik, when he’s not attending to his professorial duties at the University of Maryland working hard on these problems.
As a wide range of academics, researchers and forward leaning brands discussed at the conference, the challenge of how to understand this vast unstructured social conversation to finding meaning and insight is one of the great technical challenges of our time. It is also perhaps one of the most profound. The implications of not just capturing — but understanding — this conversation for brand management, advertising, customer service, R&D and more is only now starting to become realized.
You can be assured that when industry analysts focus on a category, it’s driven largely by brands looking for clarity and answers within a complex and confusing environment.
Nowhere is this more true than within the social space. Over the last couple of weeks, we have seen a flurry of new, insightful research designed to help brands separate fact from fiction, and make better decisions about vendors and solutions. We applaud these groups for providing much needed, independent, informed perspective to the world.
We, at Converseon, were very pleased about how we fared, especially given the robust and detailed methodologies that the analysts used to come to their conclusions — including, in many instances, user feedback.
Here is a run-down of the three most recent reports, in chronological order:
1. Gartner Group Magic Quadrant for Social CRM
July 25, 2011
Social CRM is hot, with Gartner expecting that it will become at billion dollar business soon. The market clearly understands the opportunity in this space, underscored by the value of some recent valuations in the space. As Gartner says, ”
“Hype around social applications by sales, marketing and customer service departments has exploded during the past two years as companies implemented social applications mostly as experiments or for tactical purposes. Actual use cases are still diverse, narrow in scope and unevenly diffused across companies, with experimentation that, most times, forgoes measuring business benefits…Successful social CRM vendors will provide clear benefits for companies and communities, with multiple use cases for sales, marketing and customer service processes.”
Gartner further noted that, in 2010, spending on social software for marketing, customer service and sales increased by 40 percent, but social CRM remains less than 5 percent of the total CRM application market. Gartner expects the social CRM market to reach over $1 billion in revenue by year-end 2012, up from approximately $625 million in 2010.
Forrester’s excellent new report, “Five Ways Interactive Marketers Should Use Social Data,” is a must read for brands interesting in effectively integrating social media intelligence into their organization. Translating social intelligence into action is pehaps the largest impediment to widespread enterprise adoption of social media. But we’re working hard to change that.
One item that caught our eye — and is dear to our heart — was this:
Most listening platforms are ill-equipped to inform marketing strategy. While many listening vendors promote their ability to assist marketers, most simply don’t know how to translate social data into effective marketing programs. In fact, we found that just two of the nine best-in-class vendors in our most recent Forrester Wave™ evaluation of listening platforms were able to provide deep strategic marketing insight.
The full report is here.
How Converseon Turns Social Data into Action
As an increasing number of brands are finding, simply having social data pumping through a dashboard to a few analysts simply cannot drive the real value of social intelligence across the organization for competitive advantage. The next generation of social intelligence is fusing deep levels of intelligence with business knowledge and experience to unearth those game-changing insights and get them deeply embedded into the parts of the organization that can take action on them. That is why we say social intelligence is increasingly becoming the impetus for redesigning business processes.
So how does Converseon so effectively translate listening into effective marketing programs? WIth five not-so-secret ingredients:
I just finished participating in a Digiday panel on big data management in beautiful Deer Valley, UT where I warned about an over-infatuation with technology, to the exclusions of people. Indeed, many conversations today make it seem as if humans are simply a tangental voyeur to the vast processing intelligence of our evolving algorithms.
That is far from the truth.
Machines and technology do some things wonderfully well. They churn through vast amounts of data — searching for anomalies and patterns — and machines help to filter the signals from the noise. But the signals have to be interpreted by humans to spark the insights that can change a business. No machine has yet developed much of a creative streak.
We see this every day in our Conversation Mining technology. Instead of using algorithms to interpret the meaning of human conversation on the web, we use machines for what they do best: to find and identify the obvious conversations, and look for patterns of meaning that go beyond what humans can generally perceive.
Social CRM – the use of social media monitoring together with customer care outreach – has become big business. Gartner group projects it will be a $1 billion industry in 2010. And with good reason. Increasingly, consumers are taking to their social networks to express dissatisfaction with brand customer care experiences. Brands ranging from Comcast to Dell, Delta and others are being increasingly deluged with customer complaints, questions and concerns. No longer are complaints kept within the communication corridors of customer to brand channels, but are being broadcast and reposted/retweeted across the social media landscape. At times these can turn into search engine results, damaging significantly a brand reputation.
The response? Brands have increasingly been putting PR and Communications staff into positions to reach out and address concerns on the premise it’s better to defuse early. But all too often the PR and Comms staff are outnumbered by the volume and, perhaps more critically, they’re not in a situation to address the root cause of the problem. Instead they’re put in position of apologist.
The problem is three fold:
1) Scaling social media into the customer service infrastructure is difficult. Most of the time the social conversation data is not integrated withother customer profile data. In the vast majority of cases, the social listening data is segregated from critical customer data that would help resolve an issue. The promise of social data integrating into a single customer profile database is still a hazy mirage on the horizon. So brands are often focused on the perceived influence of a complainer – using tools such a Klout scores. The problem with this is clear: your best customers may not have high – if any – klout scores. In fact, most senior executives – for example, are probably spending more time doing business deals than tweeting their lunch plans.
It’s been an exciting two weeks for Converseon. We’ve had the opportunity to speak at conferences, meet partners, and talk to major brands from Indonesia to Singapore to Copenhagen.
At the iBrand Summit, Asia, we met with a wide range of leading brands who are looking to get serious about social media, while speaking about the “Brutal Truth of Social Media.” There we met folks from Microsoft, Nokia APAC, Indonesian social properties, and more.
Then, just this week, we launched Converseon Nordics to expand our offerings in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland while keynoting the FDIH conference with the topic of Scaling Social Across the Enterprise.
Throughout it all, I was struck by how similar and substantial the conversations we had were, whether it was with Asian telecoms or Scandinavian insurance companies. Across all these markets there was a clear and evident thirst to strongly embrace frameworks that scale social across the enterprise to drive competitive advantage. The conversations were quite sophisticated; diving deep into issues like governance, and policies, infrastructure, advanced social intelligence and the best social strategic approaches across multiple use cases. It’s become quite clear, not only is social conversation a global phenomena with broad adoption, but following close behind is the desire for brands to “do it right,” from APAC to Europe, and a recognition that it takes some new thinking and capabilities to do so.
Today’s acquisition by Salesforce of Radian6 for an estimated $326 million is a strong statement to the power of social intelligence.
Congrats to the Radian6 team.
Converseon is now the only remaining independent leader in Forrester Wave’s Q3 2010 Listening Platforms report. We continue to believe we remain at the front end of what we expect to be profound growth for the social intelligence space moving forward. The intersection of “big data,” sentiment analysis and analytics is powerful and is not only becoming the impetus for business redesign, but also a plethora of new products, services and applications. We’re just scraping the surface.
While social CRM is one important use case, our focus will remain on unifying real time monitoring with the deepest level of intelligence together with robust consulting and service offerings to make social data intelligent and actionable across multiple use cases. These investments help drive even more attention and interest to the category. As we say, a rising tide raises all boats.
We’re proud of our industry leadership and of our industry. Congrats again to all involved.
Converseon at the ARF Re:think Conference
Converseon will again be supporting, presenting and attending the Advertising Research Foundation’s Re:think conference on March 20-23. For 75 years,the ARF has been a strong driver of innovation and ethics. Over the last three years, they have been especially focused on social and social intelligence, and an important advocate for transformation of the industry.
This ARF Re:think conference will convene the largest gathering of insights and research executives in the history of the industry.
Converseon will be participating throughout:
- On Sunday March 20, Converseon (along with Harris Interactive) will be participating in a private workshop on “Learning by Not Asking: Listening to Social Media Conversations” with Steve Rappaport, Knowledge Solutions Director at ARF and author of the forthcoming book, “Listen First.” This hands-on session will provide a balance of strategic perspective on social listening, its impact on market research transformation and some hands-on, practical applications. Copies of his books will be handed to attendees. If you’re interested in attending, some spots remain, just visit http://rethink.thearf.org/talks/17265
- On Monday and Tuesday, Converseon will be active in The ARF Insights Zone, which features learning sessions, product demonstrations, book signings and valuable networking opportunities. We will have a booth and demonstrating our industry leading Conversation Mining social intelligence technologies and solutions. Please come by. You can register for the Listening Zone here http://rethink.thearf.org/pages/register
- On Monday afternoon at 2:30–3:30pm, Converseon will be presenting on “Overcoming Social Media Paralysis.”
Austin during SXSW can feel a little unreal. Music, culture, technology and parties, all in that Texan landscape, can make one feel a little transported.
So it is apropos to those looking to reconnect with the real world that on Sunday, March 13 our Lead Scientist, Dr. Philip Resnick, will be speaking on a panel on “Using Text Analytics to Predict the Real World.” Text analytics is one component of how Converseon tackles the next generation of Social Intelligence — finding deep levels of meaning and insight in socially-driven conversation. Here is the description of Dr. Resnick’s session:
How can we use text to tell us what is happening in the real world? Text-driven forecasting is the challenge of making concrete, testable predictions about future events and trends from publicly available text data. Text-based modeling methods make it possible to discover the agendas and attitudes behind the words people use. In this panel, we consider some recent success stories that use various kinds of text (expert-written analysis, blog posts, tweets) to tell us interesting things about the future and about the people behind the texts in various domains (finance, political discourse, and public opinion polls). Session co-organized by the McCombs School of Business and the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce (CREC).
For a deeper discourse on our view of the evolution of Social Intelligence, you can read my interview published recently by Digiday Data.
