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.

Converseon recently launched a collaborative research project with comScore, the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), Communispace, and Firefly Millward Brown to explore the roles of social media in the purchase process.  The project brings together a range of research techniques to understand how and when people turn to social media as they make purchase decisions.

Converseon will provide insights based on social intelligence for the project, helping the ARF to establish an expanded understanding of online conversations around purchase decisions for items in the CPG and other categories.  Converseon analysis will uncover where in the purchase process social media conversation is taking place, who is taking part in that discussion and where it’s happening.

Our research will include psychographic and demographic analysis, in addition to a range of other metrics based on Converseon’ unique technology + human methodology, giving the ARF the opportunity to cross-tab the analysis and extract the most meaningful information to support its research goals.

We all look forward to the results of the joint project.

• May 14: Converseon’s CEO Rob Key will speak at Mashable Connect on Scaling Social Across the Enterprise
• May 16: Rob Key will speak on trends in social media at a panel discussion for top communication experts in the insurance industry, as part of the IPRC Annual Meeting, organized in New York
• May 16: Senior Strategist Mike Moran will speak at Philadelphia’s MENG Chapter meeting on why Digital Marketing is Direct Marketing
• June 9: Mike Kovscek, SVP of Enterprise Analytics, will speak at New York OMMA Social on a panel discussing how to link social media to ROI

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.

While the markets obviously differ in some ways – culturally, different platforms, varied states of economic development, etc. – the advanced social frameworks we have developed and shared with were strongly embraced. And perhaps not surprisingly; our social media approach is steeped in the evolution of human communication (which is evolving in similar ways everywhere), and our frameworks have proven flexible and adaptable to all types of enterprises no matter where they are in the social media maturity cycle.

Clearly, there is a strong movement afoot by brands around the world to move away from fringe experimentation of social to the serious enterprise adoption of social; and there is a clear recognition that the advanced frameworks and technologies that we helped pioneer in North America can be readily exported and adapted to new and emerging markets. It felt very welcoming. I’d like to thank everyone I met for the inspiring conversations and ideas during our around the world tour.

As a result of these global needs, Converseon will be accelerating its expansion to new markets. Converseon Nordics is just the first step in the EU. BRIC, APAC and more are on the agenda. We look forward to sharing news with you as we do so. After all, the social conversation is a global conversation.

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.”
• To harness the value of social media, brands must overcome an all too familiar syndrome – social media paralysis. You may have experienced the symptoms: real-time social intelligence flows through the arteries of the enterprise, but the organization is not agile enough to capitalize on opportunities. For many, it has become increasingly clear that effective ROI from social media cannot happen without an accompanying enterprise environment designed to leverage, scale and act on the intelligence. This session will focus on best practices to overcome this social media paralysis through the next generation of social intelligence and emerging frameworks.

We hope to see you there.

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.

Social listening is a hot topic, but despite the large volume of information and chatter about it we find that many companies are still not really sure what is it, how it is done, how it is used and where it’s going. That’s why we are happy to support the Advertising Research Foundation in its effort to provide research-based answers to these questions and equip business leaders to use listening better or become listening champions in their own companies.

This comprehensive webinar series is presented by Stephen Rappaport, author of Listen First! Turning Social Media Conversations into Business Advantage, and is held over 10 weeks. Any or all sessions can be attended; they’re short and to the point, 30-minutes each from start to finish, including Q&A. This series is designed to “teach, learn and apply,” not merely “tell and sell.”

The webinar schedule is outlined below. To register for this series please head over to http://my.thearf.org and log in with your credentials. If you don’t have them yet, you can register for free on the site.

Webinar Schedule (webinars scheduled for 12 pm ET)
Part 1 – What is Listening and How is it Done

• February 28: Listening – What it is and it’s strategic value.
• March 7: Listening Tools: The 4 Types
• March14: How to plan and run a listening initiative
• March 28: Creating Organizational Frameworks to Scale Social Intelligence (Converseon co-presentation)

Part 2 – How Listening Helps Brands Achieve Marketing Objectives

• April 1: Listening: It’s not just for insights and customer service
• April 11: Identifying Customers and Detecting Market Shifts
• April 18: Creating and Improving Products, and their Marketing and Communications
• April 25: Caring for Customers

Part 3 – Where Listening is Headed: Cutting Edge Applications and Strategy

• May 2: Listening-lead Marketing, Media and Advertising
• May 9: Listening’s Frontiers

Social intelligence and digital media metrics are becoming more and more critical to the success of any marketing strategy — not just something to measure at the end of a campaign. In fact, the right metrics can help a brand to define when and where to start planning, who to target and even the messages and conversations that will have the best chance of resonating over time.

Last week, Converseon hosted a panel during Social Media Week, wherein our SVP of Enterprise Analytics, Mark Kovscek explained that many marketers use social media analytics to measure the very basics of social media programs, such as Facebook fan counts or the volume of brand mentions across the social graph.

Instead, brands should understand that significantly more meaningful and actionable metrics are available to inform social media strategies and to optimize marketing performance.

Take the example of Hennessy Cognac, presented by Steve Rappaport of ARF Knowledge Solutions. “Hennessy was able to revamp their entire marketing strategy based on the insights provided to them through basic SEO analysis.”

Years ago, it was SEO that taught the CEO of Hennessy the brand’s old fashioned French values and branding was not transcending the American Market. They saw that their website traffic in the US was suddenly originating from urban music websites and communities. The American customer was very different. That finding sparked more research and eventually an entire rebranding effort for the American market.

While most brands are are only scratching the surface of social analytics, Converseon is helping clients begin to use social media data to predict the intentions of customers, and, in the near future, the growth of their companies.

This post summarizes a discussion by the following experts at the Converseon offices during Social Media Week in New York:

• Mark Kovscek, SVP of Enterprise Analytics, Converseon (@kovscek)
• Steve Rappaport, Director, ARF Knowledge Solutions (@SteveRappaport)
• Yaakov Kimelfeld, SVP of Digital Research and Analytics, MediaVest