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.

50% of professional bloggers and 25% of hobbyist bloggers say that they’ve been approached by at least one company to write about a brand or product, according to Technorati.

Even though content marketers have published thousands of articles with tips for blogger outreach, 64% of bloggers believe they are treated less professionally by brand representatives than they are by traditional media, and only 20% of bloggers characterize their interactions with brand representatives as positive.

The most influential bloggers receive requests every day. Gone are the days when bloggers starved for attention from brands or big media. As a result, brands can feel challenged to effectively engage influential writers and tweeters. Here are four tips for success:

1. Identify the right bloggers: Start by identifying the writers who are influential in your particular sector, and with your target audiences. As Andrew Chen explained in 2008, not everyone needs to target the early adopters. Some specialized products produce only a handful of online influencers. Know your audience, and know their influencers.
2. Use the right incentives: Understand the incentive that will pique the interest of their target blog most. For some, it’s pure compensation. They may already be earning steady income through paid placement or affiliate or performance based marketing. Others may want to increase readership. They may be willing to sponsor a giveaway or contest at no cost, just to keep their readers excited. Others want complete control and will allow you to submit a product for review – with no promises or editorial control.
3. Know each blogger’s value: Most bloggers know exactly what the real estate on their site is worth. They know what their readers want. They know the value of their site and the value of access to their readers.
4. Comply with FTC guides: 55% of bloggers and 70% of professional bloggers are aware of FTC disclosure requirements, and bloggers tend to say that they are offended by brands asking them to cross the line.

People often trust bloggers more than advertisements, so a product review or recommendation from a notable blogger can be more valuable than traditional online media placement. To be sure, blogger outreach can be an effective and measurable strategy for increasing awareness and driving traffic, but it can also tarnish your brand if not conducted professionally, intelligently and with integrity.

Know your goals, know your audience, and know their influencers.

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.

Social media listening tools today simply do not accurately report author location, even though they often say they do. Here’s why.

When you look at your social media dashboard — or listening tool, or river of news — most of the data you see in your tool was gathered or created in one of the two following ways:

But location data is different. In most tools, the physical location of the author is actually determined through a hybrid of the above approaches, as follows:

1. Website registration information: The tool might determine the location where the site is registered through a reverse lookup of the site’s registration information. Such an approach is not reliable when the property is registered to one entity and authored by another — or authored by several others, in the case of a group blog. Further, the vast majority of social media conversations occur within social networking domains and platforms, rather than on blogs registered to individual users.
2. Top-level domain: The domain “extension” that can indicate the country of registration, for example: “.ca” in Canada. First, many of the flaws in the above bullet also apply to this technique. In addition, a forum is hosted on a Canadian domain certainly will not restrict participation to Canadians only; even if they did, there is a vast difference between an author in Quebec and author in the northern reaches of the Yukon Territory.

As a result, automated author location analysis is not very reliable.

It’s understandable if buyers of social media monitoring services are a bit confused by all the numbers they hear in the market. I spent most of my career in text analytics, and I’ve been surprised at what I hear from monitoring companies about the accuracy of their text analytics.

It reminds me of Nigel Tufnel of the fictional rock group Spinal Tap, who “proved” that his heavy metal band was louder than others by pointing to the dials on their speakers, asserting, “The numbers all go to eleven” (which certainly beats all those other speakers that stop at 10). If you think that the accuracy claims of social media vendors sound a lot like “Ours go to eleven,” you may be right.

Let’s start by looking at what the problem is — or, rather, what the two problems are. After all, when you see the results in a social media dashboard, you need to evaluate two factors at once:

First, you are deciding whether this particular conversation is relevant — is it a conversation that actually talks about the issue that you are monitoring? Second, you want to know whether it is correctly identified as positive or negative. Your dashboard will truly be correct only if the vendor is right on both counts, and both of these problems can be very tricky in text analytics.

For relevance, you might be lucky. If you work for T-Mobile, it’s likely that every mention of “T-Mobile” is actually relevant, so algorithm-based text analytics software can do a good job at that. But if you have the same job at Sprint, you aren’t so lucky because many occurrences of the word “sprint” have nothing to do with phones. For example, such discussions might pertain to a high school track meet.

You might think that the algorithmic software could just look for a capital “S” in “Sprint” to find the right ones, but that doesn’t work very well, for lots of reasons. For example, people often skip proper capitalization when writing in social media, especially from mobile devices.

There is no social without some SEO, and you’re really missing the boat if your SEO strategy does not include social media.   Even so, SEO and Social Media practitioners rarely connect, and, as Ted says in his recent post to WebMasterWorld, “… many old time technical SEO people wish that Twitter would just go away.”

But that is all about to change.

Ted Ulle, our senior search strategist, recently described how SEO and social media are coming together on WebMasterWorld.

Ted has been referred to by some as the “Babe Ruth” of SEO, as he spends his nights pouring over new Google patents to glean insights into algorithmic changes. The SEO tribe follows his insights closely as he moderates webmasterworld, where he has posted over 20,000 times.

This week the iMedia Breakthrough Summit brought together a mix of marketers from agencies, brands and startups to discuss the future of digital marketing, and the trends shaping our industry today.  The mix of backgrounds creates a great environment to share ideas and combine different viewpoints around the future of marketing.

As expected a large portion of the event was dedicated towards social and mobile media.  However, a recurring statement I heard from many participants was that we’re finally past the “Year of Social” and the “Year of Mobile,” those ubiquitous milestones that have become catch phrases.  Rather than pointing to any specific event, these watershed moments have happened upon us quietly or not-so-quietly, leading to a sort of collective sigh: We’re here.  The future is now.  It’s time to get to work.

Rewards, Recognition and Game Mechanics

A common theme throughout many of this year’s sessions spoke about the advantages of Rewards, Recognition and Game Mechanics.  Caroline Giegerich from Initiative talked about the check-in platforms from Four Square and GoWalla, to newer ones like Scavenger and GetGlue.  An interesting point she made was the real-world laboratory experiment of Four Square and GoWalla: each launched at SXSW over a year ago to much fanfare, yet one is six times larger today.  The difference maker?  The overwhelming popularity of the mayorships and badges that Four Square uses.

BBDO also spoke about their current iAds compaign with AT&T.  They unveiled flashy commercial quality video with original music, high concept narrative and professional actors.  But the feature that had the highest engagement?  An interactive iAd that functioned like a game, and allowed consumers to calculate how much data they needed based on their internet browsing, texting and email habits.

With the Wall Street Journal reporting the questionable practices of some social listening and research providers, here are five questions you can ask your listening provider to ensure that your brand doesn’t get accused of unethical or questionable social listening.

Questions to Ask Your Listening Provider

4. Relationships: When harvesting from web sites, do they mask their IP address, or do they allow site owners to see that they are being harvested, and work to maintain positive relationships with site owners?

5. Leadership: To what extent do they participate in or support the development of ethical standard in social media, such as the WOMMA Ethics Committee?

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.

Jeff Zabin, formerly of Aberdeen, and someone who we have always thought had strong insight into the social media category has issued a new comprehensive 21 page industry report from his new venture, Gleanster, with some profiles of key social media monitoring vendors including Converseon.   Sections include reasons to implement, value drivers, performance metrics and more.

The report is available here.

As Jeff says,

Social media is an ongoing conversation where consumers spontaneously talk about their likes and dislikes, frustrations or great experiences with brands and companies, and swap opinions about which products are great and which fail to live up to expectations. But capturing this vast content, identifying relevant posts, and extracting useful insights requires more than just a good search engine.

We couldn’t agree more.

Congrats to Jeff on his new venture and for helping to educate the market on the evolution of social media and social intelligence.