Posts by Rob Key
As the arteries of social media intelligence continue to grow and infuse across organizations, increasingly there is a recognition that most enterprises are not designed effectively to act quickly and with agility on that intelligence. It’s a moment many large enterprises who have engaged in listening have come to at some point – how do we redesign what we do to make this work? As one senior executive from a major automotive brand wrote to me: “this social media listening has unearthed many dysfunctions that we had happily buried away, but have now been surfaced.” This is positive transformation.
At Converseon, our Conversation Mining technologies are segueing rapidly into business process redesign. This is an important differentiation for us in this space. We are the only leading provider of Conversation Mining with robust management consulting and activation practices.
The Social Media Management practice has grown very rapidly under the tutelage of Mike Moran, Constantin Basturea and others. Today, we make a very important announcement that will significantly strengthen this practice – the addition of one of the leading thinkers and practitioners in this space, Chris Boudreaux.
All too often in the social media world, self styled “experts” are quick to throw around shallow commentary wrapped in the guise of knowledge. The social world is full of flashy largely meaningless commentary (see BusinessWeek’s Beware of Social Snake Oil) which simply muddies up the industry and distracts from the important work the leading practioners are doing.
That’s not Chris.
When I met him I was refreshed by his modesty. As I dug deeper over time, I discovered layer upon layer of depth of knowledge ranging from governance to management theory to data integration and business intelligence. His approach represents what we value most at Converseon: substance over style; modesty where our work (and clients) speak to our excellence; a focused intelligence about the deep meaning of what we do (ranging from the social sciences to computer science and beyond) and where we all work with great collaboration and respect towards the greater mission. Where we put clients needs above our own and we focus on the transformatory nature of our work.
We view business consulting melding closely into social intelligence strategies. It will become a key driver in business redesign. Our Social Media Management together with our listening technologies and activation practice, enable Converseon to provide a unique “end to end” solution designed to help brands fully leverage the power of social across the enterprise. This practice – which encompasses governance, policy, infrastructure, training and more – helps drive and facilitate internal transformation to make social listening actionable and help drive business results for our clients across the enterprise. Of course, this requires an “inside-out” approach encompassing deep expertise in change management, data integration strategies and more – the very skill set that Chris brings.
I met Chris through his work and reputation. And as I got to know him, I realized even more so that he brings a level of incredible substance and “get it done” attitude that is refreshing in the social business space. Like much Converseon’s evolution, our meeting was serendipitous. But it is serendipity of the kind that brings the best and brightest together to forge new solutions and help drive the industry forward.
Today, I welcome Chris to Day One of his new mission. Here’s our release announcing his appointment. And here’s a link to Social Media Governance – Chris’s site that I’m sure you will agree is an important contribution to the discussion on social media management.
Onward.
After most of his young professional adulthood at Converseon, we’re very proud that our own very Paull Young has taken the position as Director of Digital Strategy at charity: water, a cause that has been a passion of his for some time. In that position, Paull will be helping to utilize social media to generate support for their efforts to provide clean drinking water in impoverished areas around the world.
It’s a noble cause and one we’re enthusiastic to support.
At Converseon, we have always believed that what we do transcends who we actually are. We hope the causes we nurture, the ideas we help spread, our role in helping to transform and inspire go far beyond our walls. We believe in this era, social purpose matters on many different levels.
We take great satisfaction in our people going on to do great things, even as they remain part of our family. Paull will continue to be part of Converseon spiritually and physically (and not just because of the lunch crumbs he left on his desk 
). He has been named a Converseon Fellow, which is awarded to individuals who have made great contributions and represent the spirit and passion that we work hard to embody here and will continue to consult with us and clients.
We’re all quite excited for Paull since outside of Converseon (and the Australian Rugby League), charity: water is his great passion. I’m also proud that Converseon’s team can contribute to important causes greater than ourselves. His legacy of Australian slang, his passion for the business and to make a difference of the world is exactly the type of person we want at Converseon. And as Paull can attest, there’s great room here for the best and brightest to join the Converseon family and become a lifetime member of the tribe.
We are proud to announce that last night we were named the winner of ‘Best Social Media Agency’ at the first ever SAMMY Awards.
The SAMMY Awards, hosted by DigiDay, were planned to reward “overall excellence and breakthrough achievement in Social Advertising, Media and Marketing”. The strength of competition at the awards was shown through our fellow finalists in the best agency category Buddy Media and 360i. We extend congratulations to them for their great work and to the other award winners including Pringles (for their creative banner ad), the New York Yankees, Kellogg Company, Oakley and Jim Beam.
It is a great validation for us to win this award because we’ve been conducting great work in this space since 2001 (before social was “social”).
Thank yous go out to our team and the Converseon supporters in this space. A very special thank you goes to all our clients – many of whom have been working with us for several years and taking the social media journey alongside us. We hope to further reward your continued partnership with us. We’d also like to thank the judges who recognized that we provide the only complete “end to end” social media solution, matching proprietary Conversation Mining technology with full organizational consulting and award winning engagement services.
We’ve seen the industry change a great deal in our near decade in this space and we know this is just another step in our evolution. Thanks to all who have helped us make this happen.
UPDATE 21 September: Here is a link to a media release announcing the news.
After 30 years at IBM, what does a Distinguished Engineer, a pioneer in search and content technologies, an author of best selling internet marketing books with a penchant for self-deprecating humor, do for an encore? If you’re Mike Moran, you join a social media agency (in this case Converseon) as Chief Strategist.
In a very important announcement, Mike has agreed to come on board starting September 1, 2008 to help oversee continuing build out of our Conversation Mining technology working with our already stellar team and help expand our capabilities in providing enterprise level search and social media to some of the world’s leading brands.
An engineer at a social media marketing and communications agency? Mike and I have known each other for quite some time and the more we talked, the more we realized how his experience and vision of the world aligns with ours. It goes back to a theory I have that if you are indeed on the right path, serendipity is your friend. Adding Mike to the agency is an exclamation point to our “mashup” approach. The agency of the future, which we are helping to pioneer, is indeed a mashup and Mike will soon be rubbing his Distinguished Engineer elbows with PR/reputation management folks, creative types, computer scientists, direct marketers, Aussie bloggers, linguistic analyzers and at least one Romanian professorial type. Hopefully, our willingness to leap into the unknown and push the edges of communications, will serve as a fertile environment for Mike to help apply his experience and learnings into this social media realm. We expect a moment of culture shock in a transition from IBM to a (slightly) smaller Converseon, but with our newfangled coffee machine, we hope he’ll feel at home.
With all due apology to political punditry, it’s indeed our hope to have Converseon be a shining agency on the hill, a beacon to those from the seemingly very diverse, far reaches of agencies and companies who are really passionate about transforming communications and are looking for the right place to make it happen. In this particular case, we’re glad Mike and Converseon found each other and look forward to great things ahead.
Please join us in welcoming him on board.
Our colleague, Paull Young, was quoted today in the Christian Science Monitor story ‘Who’s That Selling at Your (Online) Door‘ about ethics within social media and word of mouth marketing. Social media and word of mouth marketing are successful due to the trust they engender, but as more brands move budgets into this realm, the pressure to “bend the rules” will increase. Stealth marketing, astroturfing, fake blog (“flogs”) and other “dark art” tactics will simply destroy trust and, in the process, the effectiveness. And once trust is lost, it is all-so-difficult to regain.
Converseon is proud to be a governing member of WOMMA which has taken a lead in developing a set of ethical guidelines. Now it’s up to the industry to self regulate. We applaud organizations like DuPont who have formally adopted the WOMMA code of ethics.
At Converseon, all our work is in compliance. We find that this does not in any way limit effectiveness or creativity. There simply is no need to resort to unethical tactics. We also work closely with our clients to help adopt the ethical code, train them and also help set up compliance mechanisms. We recognize our role in helping this industry flourish and hope others hold themselves and their clients to the same standards. In a world where technology is helping to create new bonds through new communications tools and technologies, we, as an industry and a society, cannot afford to accept anything less.
Cymfony’s new social media study just reaffirms what we’ve already been seeing: Traditional marketers are struggling to come to terms with social media.
Converseon was founded nearly seven years ago based on the premise that traditional communication approaches, technologies and agency models were largely ill equipped to deal with the rise of social media. Clearly not much has changed.
The natural question we may collectively ask is, “why?” Our response is both simple and complex. The simple response is due to a truism of human nature: if one has a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Humans, and agencies, tend to do what they best understand and gravitate away from the new and complex. It has been argued by some that we’re just very good pattern matching machines and naturally are quick to arrange all things new into comfortable old categories.
The second part of that answer is a little more complex. Social media strategies require a view of the world (and a skill set) that transcends traditional marketing disciplines. Speaking from experience, within larger, traditional agency environments, I’ve found that the infrastructure is often so firmly cemented that it can’t effectively accommodate innovation. Compound that with the emphasis on “making numbers” in a public company environment, there is a natural bias towards pushing services with proven revenue streams rather pushing forward with the new and innovative. How many agencies truly have an R&D budget? Some of the larger agencies have created new groups to experiment with innovation. The challenge of infusing it back into the parent though still remains.
When Converseon was first formed, a leading member of the board of a holding company (who I’ll leave nameless) said to us that the unfortunate truth was that it was easier to let a company spin out, be successful and then acquire them, than to innovate from within. The challenges of established, larger organizations collaborating across marketing disciplines, across separate P&L structures, added to the natural inertia of organizations and the fear of the unknown makes it difficult to evolve. For far too many, a new piece of business sets off a wrangling for budgets where the most influential groups (i.e. “more established”) often emerge dusty but triumphant.
So while agencies are increasingly using the right social media words, and issuing press releases about new social media capabilities, there clearly is often far more style than substance. While size and heft is useful when negotiating large media buys, it is something of a hindrance in the more nimble world of social media.
As in biological evolution, different species form in the presence of changing environments. Adaptation occurs through the development of new species rather than trying to morph old species into new ones (although indeed have common ancestors).
At the risk of making Stephen Jay Gould turn in his grave, the advent of social media to communications and marketing is akin of changing of transformation of the Toyonian to the Cambrian period (and the resultant explosion of new forms of life).
And in those periods, it is hard for organisms and organizations to adapt. Even today, there is very little cross pollination across marketing disciplines. PR folks tend to go to PR conferences for example. Direct marketers tend to gravitate to the DMA. Advertising talks to advertising. We’ve created mini, marketing discipline specific echo chambers.
The result is that the disciplines tend to view social media from the biased lens of their discipline. This means 30 second spots on YouTube, or an extension of media relations to blogger relations. These are just incremental extensions of current core competencies. It does not get to the heart of what true social media is: community. The result is some traditional agencies awkwardly positioning themselves as something that they’re not quite. Little pieces strewn together awkwardly that may give the appearance of social media adeptness, but look more like the assemblage of incompatible parts upon closer scrutiny: what we call the Frankenagency.
This is not to say that there isn’t interesting work coming from traditional agencies: indeed there is. And there are some very smart people. However, as the survey and our own experience shows, truly effective social media strategies requires new entities with new skills, technologies, infrastructures and cultures designed specifically for this new environment. It is not simply an “add on” to existing services.
Social media clearly is a different. It isn’t just a new channel or a new technology. It requires new cultures with new skill sets and a break with the traditional command and control marketing structures that have governed traditional agencies over the last generation. Some of our most sophisticated clients understand this. They have an advertising agency, a PR agency and a social media agency. They understand the differences.
These new social media entities, like evolutionary biology, do have common, but diverse, ancestors. Converseon has grown in part because of the alchemy that occurs when bringing together search, public relations, computer scientists, direct marketers, advertising creatives, issues management experts, independent film makers, and more. Out of this combination of the diverse comes mutation; and, from mutation, evolution.
And of course, as brands become more immersed in social media, we are seeing a second law of evolution kicks in: that of natural selection. For as long as brands select and cultivate these new entities, they will grow and evolve and be reflective and natural residents of the new social media world.
Image Dr Frankenstein and his Monster, uploaded by DuneChaser
Today Aberdeen Group released its Social Media Measurement and Monitoring Report.
As a leading company providing social media monitoring and measurement services Converseon agreed to help sponsor the report earlier this year to help educate the industry. To find out more about our Conversation Mining and eResponder social media monitoring technology, visit our site here. We will be providing a review of the research in the coming days; however, on an initial glance it appears to have some interesting findings, such as:
- It found that Best-in-Class organizations are over 680% more likely than Laggards to improve their ability to predict customer behavior through the use of social media monitoring and analysis tools.
- Best-in-Class companies are nurturing technology implementation with key organizational processes and capabilities, such as a formalized process for monitoring consumer-generated content (65%), dedicated personnel devoted to social media monitoring (52%), and an “early warning system” for detecting potential threats to the brand (42%).
- As a result of strong organizational support, Best-in-Class companies are 5 times more likely than Laggards to be “extremely satisfied” with the number of actionable insights derived from social media monitoring and analysis.
The report is an important contribution to other research of the industry that has been growing, including Peter Kim’s industry report (The Forrester Wave™: Brand Monitoring, Q3 2006) and Nathan Gilliat’s comprehensive Guide to Social Media Analysis.
Access to the report is free until March 31 (just requires a registration) and please click here to download your copy.
We hope you find it interesting and of use and look forward to feedback.
October 16-17 marks Danny Sullivan‘s SMX Social Media Conference in New York. Danny, as you probably know, used to chair SES and is one of the most respected minds in the business. He’s done amazing work in terms of raising the education of the industry and organizing conferences that deliver top level content. Having spoken as SES several times, i can speak firsthand about his attention to content quality and detail. I’m excited to see SMX grow and evolve.
I’ll be speaking about the role of the marketer in Social Media Marketing. It’s an issue near and dear to our hearts. We caution brands that they need to culturally sophisticated and respectful approach to online communities. Each community has its own norms and values, and respecting and participating in those environments appropriately is critical for acceptance. After all, many of these environments were created by consumers for other consumers. Brands haven’t necessarily been invited. The concept of participation without the expectation of immediate ROI (at least in the traditional sense) may be new territory for many marketers. Altruism must become a core part of social media programs. The topic:
Evangelist – The Marketer’s Role in SMM
Want to be really successful in social media marketing? You need to be an evangelist and activity participate in communities, forums and blogging. Leave this session knowing how to evolve from community observer to community participant and influencer.
The following week i’ll be attending the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Summit (in between client meetings) before returning back to the East coast for a panel entitled “PR and Social Media: What Every Practitioner Needs to Know” at the PRSA International Conference in Philly (October 20-23). If our paths are crossing and you care to connect, don’t hesitate to contact us.
I had the pleasure of participating in the OMMA panel last Monday adeptly moderated by Max Kalehoff with David Dunn of Edelman and Keith O’Brien providing some solid insight. MediaPost provided full coverage of the session. The consensus was, i believe, that in this world of subversive content creation and virality, brands are not quite ready to defend their brand through new and emerging tools.
Of course, I’ve always felt the best defense is a good offense, as indeed if we don’t define ourselves, others will happily define us. With a standing room crowd, the topic is clearly on the minds of many. I predicted that by next year, if the session is done again, that there will be more “directors of social media” in attendance as brands continue to create these internal positions to transcend the traditional marketing siloes that inhibit effective brand defense. We’ll see if the prognostication is accurate over time.
Converseon had the pleasure of receiving the OMMA Award on Tuesday night for the “Best Use of Virtual Worlds.” Hosted by our building brethren Mediapost, the event recognized the best and most breakthrough creative in online advertising and media.
Our Second Chance Trees project beat out some formidable competition, specifically Coca-Cola’s Virtual Thirst Project and Pontiac’s Motorati island. I admire both of those programs because they begin to tap into what we see as the real value of current virtual worlds — an open source platform to allow users to experiment, co-create and innovate in collaboration with brands.
The Second Chance Trees project was a bit more modest in scope (and likely budget), but fully dipped into what we see as among the most fertile areas for breakthrough innovation in social media – utilizing virtual worlds to impact the real world, and vice versa. In our view, virtual worlds are not meant to exist in isolation, but as an extension of our own world, albeit in a dimension where we can poke through to innovate, experiment and experience with tools and environments that extend beyond our mortal powers. We intend to dig more deeply into exploring the virtual-to-real world potential and, of course, continuing to utilize SCT to promote tree reforestation around the world. So more to come on that over time.
We would, of course, like to thank all our avatar and RL friends who have supported the effort including Andy Beal, Lee Odden, Peter Himler, Stephen Davies, Lee Hopkins, Luke Armour and Amalthea Blanc.
If you would like to learn more about the Second Chance Trees project and our approach to virtual worlds, please take a listen to the attached audio file of a presentation I delivered at WOMMA’s Learn It, Do It event in New York city last week. As always, your comments and questions are welcome.
