In Category: Converseon News

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.

Last week at the WOMMA conference, Converseon released a new white paper entitled “Listening 2.0:  Leveraging Social Intelligence to Meet Business Objectives.”    The report focuses on how basic monitoring services are giving way to deep level intelligence that can be infused across organizations to provide competitive advantage.  In short, the report, finds, social intelligence is growing up.
An excerpt:

As we enter 2011, social media is passing a tipping point in the enterprise. For many brands, social engagement is no longer seen as a set of small experiments on the fringe of the organization. They are becoming a core component of business strategy. As such, we are witnessing a rapid evolution from ad hoc and sponsored exploration to a desire for enterprise enablement, whereby social media and social intelligence become competitive advantage and help enables critical business performance.

For these organizations, they will need to address four important areas to help achieve business outcomes through social media:

1. Determining how and where listening can significantly impact business outcomes and objectives.
2. Understanding how to manage the vast rivers of data, find meaningful insights, and support business processes and use cases — for today and tomorrow.
3. Determining what should be automated and the role that people need to play; and determining the balance of internal versus external resources and capabilities.
4. Creating frameworks to infuse social intelligence into the far reaches of the organization and ensuring timely action with a systematic, best practice approach and measure impact.

Today we announced expansion of our social listening capabilities in China through a partnership with CIC. The full announcement is here.

The social media conversation is increasingly global.   And we at Converseon continue to expand our social listening so that brands can understand these conversations across regions and languages.   One of the most dynamic regions is China.

CIC is based in shanghai, independent, and is a leader in social listening in china, which is a very complex market with tremendous potential. For example:

• There are more people online in China than the entire population of the United States (420 million)….with room to grow. China’s population is 1.2 billion.
• While Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are all blocked in China, local equivalents exist in China for every online ““““social medium. These are more than just copies. In fact, they have localized and transformed social business. For example, Taobao (the ‘ebay’ killer) launched a ‘group purchase’ flash sale recently that sold 205 Mercedes Smart cars in 3.5 hours.
• There are almost as many people on social network sites in China (210 million on Facebook equivalents) as total people online in the US (220 million).
• Chinese netizens are creating 2x the volume of original online content per person, according to Forrester.

CIC is independent, like us, and they share a similar vision, methodology, etc.  In addition, we have enjoyed a successful working relationship to date.  This announcement builds on that relationship to bring their social listening into our global Conversation Mining solution, while CIC can now offer our consulting and multi-language solutions to their clients.

We look forward to growing and evolving our partnership as brands continue to evolve from basic monitoring to deeper global understanding of online conversations.

Converseon has long had a strong contingent in Detroit, including a core part of our development team.   Some of the DNA of our top executives trace back to the Michigan area.

After facing so many challenges, Detroit is, in our view, a great base for some amazing talent, and we’re proud to have brought on some of the best.

As part of our commitment and investment to the Detroit area, just last month, we upgraded our facilities with a new office in the Detroit suburb of Plymouth.

So please join us in welcoming Converseon Detroit.

IBM and listening partner Converseon recognized at the 2010 SAMMY Awards

Last week Converseon was pleased to have been recognized as a finalist for Social Agency of the year in the SAMMY Awards (we won the inaugural award for Best Social Media Agency last year, so were understandably underdogs to win it two years in a row).    It’s testament to our hard work to continue to evolve our solutions, fully integrating social listening, operational consulting and activation for an end to end social approach.   The recognition was in part due to our very rapid growth (110% YOY), addition of top clients, the evolution of our technologies (including leadership recognition in Listening Category), the maturation of our strategic management consulting and international expansion.

Of course, the real judgment is based on the company we keep and the results we deliver to clients.   Thus, we were especially pleased to win the SAMMY recognizing our work with IBM for Best Socialized Business.

“We thought that the SAMMY for Best Social Business should go to the most forward-thinking company that uses social media to build their company culture and brand, and make listening a core competency,” said Nick Friese, CEO and founder of DIGIDAY, the organizer of the SAMMY Awards. “IBM’s C.O.R.E. approach is an innovative and exemplary approach for social intelligence and this recognition demonstrates the importance of listening in social engagement.”

We thank IBM and our team for their dedicated hard work in making social intelligence actionable.   It’s one thing to provide pretty charts on what social strategies should look like in large enterprises, but quite another thing to actually be able to make it happen.  We are only as successful as our clients, so a recognition of effective social intelligence and media in action is the real reward.

Between now and the end of 2010, Converseon leaders will speak at the following social media conferences and events:

August 29 – September 1, 2010
Rob Key, Chris Boudreaux and Craig Daitch are attending OMMA’s Social Media Insider Summit beginning August 29 in Lake Tahoe, NV. Chris and Rob will speak at the event.
Twitter hastag: #mpsmis

September 12, 2010
Rob Key is speaking at iMedia’s Brand Summit on centers of social media excellence. The conference begins on September 12 in Coronado, CA. Chris Boudreaux is also attending.

September 14, 2010
Jasper Snyder is speaking at DigiDay Social on September 14 in New York City. Jasper’s talk is entitled Bridging the Divide: Measuring Online and Offline Word of Mouth.

September 19, 2010
On September 19, Chris Boudreaux is speaking at the E Source Forum in Denver, CO.

October 1, 2010
On October 1, Chris Boudreaux is keynoting the Social Media Forum at the University of Maryland in College Park, MD.

October 11, 2010
Rob Key is speaking at the Council of American Survey Research Organizations, (CASRO) Annual Conference on October 11 in San Diego, CA.

October 27, 2010
At Social Media Bootcamp: Social Media For Research and Marketing at ARF University, hosted by the Advertising Research Foundation, Chris Boudreaux will present best practices for using social media as a research and marketing tool.

October 28, 2010
Several Converseon-ites are attending Forrester’s Consumer Forum, beginning October 28 in Chicago, IL. Rob Key is speaking.

November 11, 2010
On November 11, David Parmet is speaking at Social Media University in Orlando, FL.

If you attend any of these conferences, please say, ‘Hi.’ And if you aren’t able to attend, you can always follow the action through our Twitter accounts:

Rob Key – CEO
Chris Boudreaux – SVP of Management Consulting
Craig Daitch – SVP of Activation
Converseon

We always look forward to meeting friends and fellow travelers.

On August 16 Converseon  announced an important partnership with Twitter to infuse the Firehose – all 80+ million daily tweets – real time in to our Conversation Mining platform. You can read the release here.

It’s a significant advance, and a big commitment. But it is also critical:  if you care about social CRM or near real time social engagement, you simply cannot operate without access to the full Firehose. As Forrester Research said in response to the announcement, “ultimately, this is a big step in the listening platform market…”.

And indeed it is a big step.  In our experience, general API Twitter data represents only a fraction of tweets (those limited to “high velocity) and Twitter is continuing to limit that data stream.  Just last week, reports surfaced that Twitter is limiting historical searches to four days. The plain truth is that there are currently significant blind spaces abound even for those companies who may be using paid listening services if they don’t have Firehose access.

At Converseon, we take pride in bringing a healthy skepticism to new platforms and technologies. In the early days, we too were a little skeptical about the growth potential of Twitter.  However, it indeed has evolved into the heartbeat of social conversation.  As author and technology observer Steven Johnson wrote recently in Time Magazine, “Twitter is looking more and more like plumbing (of the web), and plumbing is eternal.”

We’re proud today to plug this plumbing into our Conversation Mining solutions to finding meaning and insights – and action – in the immense stream of data to help brands harness the power of social across the enterprise. Effectively managing the vast amount of data is one challenge since in addition to Firehose we mine blogs, newsgroups, and more. Finding meaning in the data is the other.  This requires a lot of technical horsepower, advanced text analytics and human intelligence.

But we’ve been preparing ourselves for this for quite some time.  And the benefits to brands are myriad; they include demand/lead generation, customer service, real time social engagement, and, ultimately, using active listening as an engine to transform brands into social organizations with real time intelligence flowing across the organization for action and competitive advantage.

Let the Firehose begin.

In an industry where it is more and more difficult for brands to separate fact from fiction and understand the differences between Listening platforms, Forrester Research, led by Zach Hofer-Shall, recently published their review of Listening Platforms: “Forrester Wave™: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010″, and you can download a complimentary copy from Converseon.

In order to identify the category leaders, Forrester evaluated offerings from nine companies according to 76 criteria, including data sources, textual analysis, functionality, consulting and analysis services, strength of management team, and corporate and product strategy.

Based on performance across these dimensions, the companies were then grouped into four categories: Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders and Risky Bets (see image above).

Converseon, we are pleased to report, was recognized in the Leaders category as one of three vendors that “combine the best offering and go-to-market strategy.” Also, Converseon scored highest for text analysis and the second highest for its consulting and analysis services, strength of management team and corporate strategy. A free copy of the report can be downloaded from our website.

According to Forrester, “Converseon offers a leading product with its “customized for your needs” mentality. There is no standard Converson installation, (Converson) builds a tailored dashboard for its enterprise installation and offers professional services around every step of the Social Intelligence process. Converseon’s model of starting with technology and adding human analysis makes for highly effective data quality, leading custom reports and strong functionality.”

We are especially proud to be one of the very few listening platform providers to remain independent. Our approach enables us to iterate quickly, partner deeply with our clients, and move fast to meet marketplace needs.

We understand the category is still quite young, and that leading brands are looking for solutions not just for today, but for the next years as Social Intelligence evolves and becomes more deeply integrated into the DNA of enterprises. This is an area where Converseon excels.

We focus on designing listening solutions (beyond simple “tools”) to help infuse listening across organizations, for multiple use cases, and to help large enterprises redesign business processes to make the intelligence actionable. This includes governance, policy, infrastructure, training and more.

Perhaps most profoundly, we believe that social media listening is the first step in effective business redesign. All too often, once social intelligence is flowing through an organization, there is a moment of realization: “These are great insights and intelligence but we’re simply aren’t designed to act on this.”

Real-time intelligence requires business process redesign to enable agile movement for competitive advantage. That’s why Converseon remains the only leading provider of Conversation Mining with robust management consulting and activation practices.

Of course, we see others in the industry moving into this space too via joint partnership or rollup/acquisition, and we believe that our strength lies in organic evolution. We are proud that our team is rapidly evolving and our solutions growing. I am also quite excited because some of the most interesting technology and solutions have yet to emerge from our R&D work.

We appreciate the industry recognition for our work, but won’t for a moment rest on our laurels. We have a 24-hour rule here: even with good news, we allow only 24 hours to pass before moving on. And we agree with the general observation of the industry: the best is yet to come.

You can obtain additional information from Forrester.

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.