Having an Impact

By Matthew Lees

I must admit that I’ve always liked the word “impact.” In just two short syllables it conveys significance and manages to be somewhat onomatopoetic. It both sounds like, and makes you think that, something important is happening.

Even when it’s used to describe something unpleasant, such as an automobile collision, the word brings an air of style. It’s much more refined than “crash,” and much more serious than fender-bender. (I’m speaking only of the noun; the adjective drops down more than a few levels in my book. While I’m fortunate, for example, never to have had an impacted molar, it doesn’t sound like a particularly delightful experience.)

In my role as an analyst and consultant, I use the word as part of the phrase “business impact,” to refer to the organizational benefits of online communities, social media, and social technologies. I’m not the only person who gravitates toward this term, of course but I have used it regularly and consistently over the years, much preferring it to the abbreviation “ROI” to help organizations focus on the bottom line. (While ROI is a perfectly valid and often necessary term, it tends to carry a bit of baggage.)

So when I first heard the name of Mike Rowland’s company, Impact Interactions, my ears perked up. I liked the sound of it from the get-go. It tersely and alliteratively says, “Let’s make a difference in the way you connect with others.” But there’s a large and vital difference between having an effective company name…and having an effective company. After getting to know Mike over the past few years, after having hearing him speak at conferences and other events, and after seeing him work to move the industry forward in a thoughtful, collaborative way, I quite resonate with his approach and his perspective. The company name fits.

I wouldn’t have taken this on otherwise. So it’s a great pleasure to have this opportunity to interact with you in this space. It’s a great responsibility, as well, to provide something of differentiated value amidst the depth and diversity of experience, knowledge, and opinions that pervade the blogosphere.

In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be writing about my observations on the interactions between people and technology, between business needs and customer goals, and between best practices and less effective methods, all as they relate to online communities and social media. I hope you’ll interact with me along the way – discussions are certainly more fun for participants and readers than monologues – supporting or questioning what you read here. That way, we can have an impact on each other.

~ Matthew

Welcome to our Special Guest Blogger Matthew Lees

I grew up watching television shows where each week there was a “Special Guest Star” on an episode each week. These guests provided a little extra to the show and usually were cool celebrities. Think of all the villains on Batman for example or the Brat Pack on “Vegas” or the vacationers on Fantasy Island…or for those of you a little younger, the guests on the Simpsons.

Following that idea, I’d like to introduce our Special Guest Blogger, independent analyst Matthew Lees.

Matthew is a well respected analyst in the Social Media and Online Community World (see his bio here). He is the author of reports through the Patricia Seybold Group such as:

1. Selecting An Online Community Platform
2. Best Practices In Crowdsourcing
3. Analyst Report: Lithium’s Social CRM Suite

After reading his research and reviews of his findings, I thought Matthew truly understood how to make social media technology work in an enterprise organization. So, like all good social media practitioners I followed him on Twitter (@mlees) and his blog. Matthew and I first met in person at one of Forum One’s Online Community Unconferences. We’d been reading each other’s blogs and reports and discovered that we come to the industry with the same high level focus… using these tools to improve business results. While Matthew focuses on the technology and its impact, we focus on the process and the users. Together, we cover the issues that all enterprises need to succeed in their social media projects.

We decided in late December over a crab cake lunch here in Maryland, that we should find a way to collaborate together. Our idea is to inform, educate, and drive the best practices we’ve developed to a broader audience with this blog and our twitter accounts. Matthew will be posting here over the next few months both independently and collaboratively with our team members.

If you have a suggested issue of topic for us to cover, please contact us by adding a comment on this entry or by using our contact form.

So, with that said welcome Matthew!

Mike Rowland, President

Social Media Monitoring Software – Welcome to the Emerald City

After four weeks of evaluating social media software vendors, we’ve come to some conclusions about the reality of these tools versus the hype that we heard along the way. Let’s just say that the parallels to the Wizard of Oz are pretty interesting…

Ever since I played the Wizard in third grade at Grant School,  I’ve really loved this movie, the books, and all things Oz in general. In fact, the head janitor at my town’s high school (Westfield HS in NJ) was one of the flying monkeys in the movie! But I digress…

Impact Interactions provides multiple types of social media services to our clients including consulting, moderation, and reporting. We’ve also been doing social media monitoring for several years for a couple of clients (although it was first called Brand Defense, then Reputation Management, and now Social Media Monitoring). It was a natural extension for our trained moderation teams to help clients. We’ve been looking for a good tool for our monitoring projects rather than relying on manual means of collection. We’ve spent several weeks talking with prospective clients for this service (and yes, it’s a service but more on that later). We’ve also been socializing ideas at conferences with other social media and online community folks to build our business case for adding this service.  So with all of that background, here is how the Wizard of Oz fits in…

I Am The Great And Powerful Oz!

In listening to people speak about social media monitoring tools, they believe that they are an all powerful tool for learning where all active conversations about their brand are being held online. The content is fresh, vibrant, and oh so relevant to their business objectives. Many believe that they’ll be able to manage the flow of information with this great tool, driving insights into their organizations effectively through the export of reports from these all powerful tools. Blogs- check. Twitter- check. Article comments- check. Communities- check. Sentiment analysis- check.

Unfortunately some of the hype around these tools has put vendors in the position of trying to meet these expectations with tools that look great, work smoothly, and export reports in a single click.

Ignore That Man Behind The Curtain!

Just as the Wizard was discovered to be a mere mortal, many customers are discovering that they had expectations that were far too high for the tools. What they are finding is that the tools take someone to work with them daily to review the delivered content, decide which nuggets of information are relevant, build the trends in content sentiment, and create the report.  Just as Dorothy and friends put all their faith in the wizard only to be disappointed when Toto pulled the curtain back, many companies are finding out that Social Media Monitoring requires more than a tool… it requires a team to review the content and deliver what is relevant.

I’m Not A Bad Person, Really.

The software vendors on the other hand must shake their heads when they hear the expectations for their tools. In our discussions with many of the top vendors (and some start ups too), we found them refreshingly honest about the capabilities of their tools. This was especially the case when the hot topics of Sentiment Analysis,  Twitter, and Online Community searches came up.

Sentiment analysis is an art form, not an absolute according to every single vendor we spoke with. The range of accuracy claimed by the vendors we spoke to ranged from a low of 30% to a high of 55%. In our B2B and B2C report testing, that range seems about right. Since most if not all vendors use a similar algorithm to categorize content, that would make sense.

In essence these tools work by analysing the 2-3 words prior and after the associated keyword to determine sentiment. As we can demonstrate, there are many false positives and negatives. To counter that, most allow the end user to rate or assign sentiment to content they find with the idea of strengthening the algorithm for future searches.

Twitter is another interesting discussion. Since Twitter is the social media du jour, everyone is interested in their Twitter buzz. The issue is that these tools use the Twitter search functionality rather than getting a full read into the Twitter Database of Tweets. (Say that five times fast!) So even the top tools are not much better than doing a Twitter search on your own. But as we were told, everyone of the vendors is working on this. According to Microsoft, Bing will have this capability soon. (Kara Swisher broke the news on this one.)

When the subject of online community content was discussed we received the same honest answers from everyone.  If the community has an RSS feed, they can get the information. If it doesn’t you are out of luck. We also learned that several vendors are working on a new tact to obtain the deepest of relationship content. One of those vendors is Boardreader. They are a company to watch if your interest is in content from communities.

The Good News – The Wizard Can Help!

Just as the Wizard offered to help Dorothy return to Kansas, many of the vendors in this space will offer to help clients to structure the searches for their project. But in the end, Toto runs off and Dorothy is still stuck in Oz. All the best intentions cannot overcome the single point that organizations need someone to run and make sense of the volumes of data these tools provide.

How Do We Get Back to Kansas Now?

Sometimes despite visiting a Wizard and killing a Witch or two along the way, you still need help to get where you want to go. That’s where we come in. At Impact Interactions, we recognize that Social Media Monitoring is a service. The choice of tools is important without a doubt, but it takes a person to effectively use the tool and report the results. We offer Social Media Monitoring as a service for clients.

Impact Interactions - A One Stop Shop for Social Media Monitoring

Impact Interactions has a great social media team using a top notch tool to provide social media insight reports for our clients. We understand that you are interested in seeing where the conversations are happening, but don’t have the time to review 1,000 blog posts, 400 tweets, and 500 comments each day. By hiring Impact Interactions, you can concentrate on your strategy while our team provides your Ruby Slippers. And you don’t even have to drop a house on us to get them.

But we don’t stop there! Our team’s experience in online communities is deep. Our social media associates can help you respond to bloggers, commenters, and Twitterers too. We believe that a social media monitoring project should be integrated into your communication efforts. Our team can help you execute that strategy at a reasonable cost.

Want to learn more? Please contact us or give us a call at (410) 604-3304 to discuss how your organization and team can get the most out of social media monitoring services.

2009 Trends — It’s Not All Doom & Gloom

It has been a very busy summer here at Impact Interactions. We’ve added more work with our existing clients like Cisco and SAP, added new clients, added more staff, launched a new small business service (Impact Social Media), and have received many more calls about our services. Taking a step back from the activity to analyze the social media/online community industry, we’re seeing the following trends emerge:

1. While enterprise level organizations are being very careful about spending money, there is a lot of interest in the social media area. We are seeing budgets freeing up, new projects starting and excitement about using social media to market products and services.
2. Enterprise online communities continue to launch at an amazing rate. We haven’t seen this type of growth in corporate sponsored B2B communities since 2000 when the concept was very new. The difference is that now there are third party sites like Twitter and YouTube to integrate into the communities.
3. Every one wants to avoid making mistakes, placing real best practices at a premium for enterprise companies. While there is always some learning by mistakes made in any venture, the companies we are dealing with always tell us that they want to avoid making the basic mistakes that others have made.
4. Analytics are at a premium, but not understood very well by some marketers running communities. We continue to see interest in base level metrics around traffic and basic engagement, but less understanding of value. Part of this is due to the over-reliance on Google Analytics as the main tool instead of a more powerful solution like Omniture. Google Analytics is a basic tool not a true enterprise level analytics tool in our opinion and experience.
5. In conjunction with number 4, we also see clients and prospects changing platforms in part due to poor reporting and administrative control pages. Many vendors seem to put reporting and analytics into their platform as an afterthought. Platform providers moving sharply ahead of the field in providing reporting and analytics for their software are Telligent, Lithium, and Jive to a certain degree.
6. Outsourced providers of social media expertise and management in areas such as moderation, social media monitoring, reporting, and integration are gaining more interest among enterprise level companies. With headcounts frozen or worse, organizations are looking outside their company for experienced help at an reasonable cost.
7. Lastly, the social media consulting industry remains very fractured. There are simply too many small businesses, individual consultants, and former software personnel chasing deals resulting in lower pricing and no concentration of expertise in a meaningful way. In other words, this industry is ripe for a consolidation play. This is what Jeff Dachis of the Dachis Corporation in Austin is slowly building towards. We think that there are multiple opportunities for consolidation and are actively looking for non-software companies to acquire or align with to gain a larger share of this growing market. (It’s only a matter of time before the big guys like Accenture, IBM, or big advertising agencies buy up the industry’s expertise to consolidate their market share.)

So far, 2009 has been far from the doom and gloom year that most were predicting in our industry. Certainly there has been some shakeout, but overall 2009 is shaping up as a really good year overall for social media and online community service companies.

Do you agree with these trends we’re seeing? What else are you seeing in our industry? Please share your comments below.

Mike Rowland, President

Social Media Monitoring – Man vs. Machine

I’ve been reading several tweets and blog posts about how social media tools such as Radian6 and Scout Labs are gaining traction in the enterprise. That’s not a surprise given the interest in protecting your brand online and uncovering loyal enthusiasts.

In our early Web 1.0 days, we used to do this manually for SAP. Back in 2003, we monitored  competitor communities for SAP related content. In 2004 when blogs started to catch on, we found information on several blogs where we could help SAP extend its online reputation.

Now in the wide open Web 2.0+ days, many folks believe that there are too many sources for an individual to keep up with from a monitoring perspective. Many attendees of the recent Online Community Unconference held in June asked our team for our thoughts on sentiment analysis, brand monitoring software, and on brand defense issues.

Our thoughts? Simple, the tools are still evolving and are not quite there yet. For example, the leading criticism of these tools that we have is that they cannot account for context in their analysis of sentiment. Sarcasm is missed. (Of course, no one is really sarcastic in their social media posting are they?)

That’s why you need someone who understands your business to help manage the sentiment analysis and the content it identifies. Social media monitoring is still a bit of an art form. The tools are and will continue to get better, but human interactions require human analysis too. This is something that all brand managers should be doing on a regular basis, even daily for larger brands.

Want to get started with social media monitoring? It’s easy and it’s free. Use Google Alerts, Technorati, Keotag, and BoardTrackerto start. These are all free applications that do a very good job in getting you the content you need to analyze.  But analyze it you must (in Yoda-speak) because it still takes a human to understand the content.

If you’d like to learn more, leave us a comment or contact us. We’re happy to help.

B2B Communities – What Works

We gave a presentation at last week’s Online Community Unconference (site is open to the public as of June 19th per Forum One) in Mountain View, CA on B2B Communities. We weren’t surprised by the number of attendees looking to learn more about the best practices for running a B2B Community, but were surprised a little bit by some of the misperceptions on managing them.

Top Best Practices for B2B Communities:

1. B2B Community Members have higher expectations than B2C members. You must engage with them as they want to engage with your company just as much as they want to engage with their peers.
2. B2B Communities require internal SMEs to engage early and remain committed to meeting member needs until external SMEs can compliment the internal SME efforts.
3. Third party applications like Twitter and Facebook should not be used as external competitive communities, but rather should be utilized as beacons to drive traffic to your community and key information.
4. You can measure the ROI for B2B communities, but you cannot get there by using only community software metrics and/or web analytics packages like Omniture or Google Analytics. None of these provide true value metrics that have an economic value associated with them. To get to ROI, you must build relationships within your organization so you can obtain real data on customers, leads, ecommerce transactions, etc.
5. When budgeting for B2B communities, be realistic. For example, no single vendor of software or web design or implementation services will ever come in exactly where they quote when you want additional features or customization. So build a small cushion into your budget to be safe.
6. To attract business decision makers, you must focus on how they will use the site… not how you want to market to them.
7. The higher the level within an organization your potential members have attained, the lower the amount of time they will have to spend on your site. So don’t waste their time!

In short, B2B communities can deliver impressive results when managed properly with a focus on those segments who deliver the value to your organization. Don’t be all things to all people, that strategy is doomed to fail. To learn more about the best practices for B2B communities, please download our presentation , ask questions in the comments area below, or contact us.

The New Reality – What It Takes To Get Hired In Social Media

The economy is tough, but social media keeps growing. Impact Interactions is growing this year and once again is adding staff. We’re also trying to help those impacted by the economy and those coming right out of school to understand what working in social media is really like.

From our experience, here is what it takes to get hired:

• A focus on business skills like written communications, presentations, and statistics
• Understanding of how businesses operate from a financial perspective
• A basic understanding of Marketing, eCommerce, Advertising, and Sales
• Experience as a team member who’s used the power of collaboration to help everyone succeed
• A positive attitude
• A “relaxed” professional appearance (you know what business casual means)

Did you expect that?

Notice what’s missing?

That’s right, you do not have to be a Facebook addict or have 2,000 followers on Twitter or 500 connections on LinkedIn. You don’t have to know how to build a widget to update a user for when the top 20 members are on the site. If you use Tweetdeck, great. If you have no idea what it is, no problem.

Yet, when we give career talks, advice to job seekers, and interview our own candidates they focus on their Facebook or MySpace skill, the number of followers they have on Twitter, or what online community they use. What are we focused on? Simple, can the candidate learn our business while building strong relationships with our clients? Can the candidate make the client look good while understanding that he or she will be in the background?

Afterall, Social Media for all its wonderful claims of revolutionizing the world is really just another set of tools to increase the efficiency of business in meeting their goals. Direct mail, robo-calls, telemarketing, advertorials, infomercials, email campaigns, listservs, click-to-chat, click-to-call, and other marketing tactics helped businesses gain efficiency in their marketing efforts. Social Media is doing the same thing. The underlying principle is to use the correct tool set to engage your customers in a way that benefits both sides of the relationship. (It really is that simple.)

But you have to understand and like business for business sake. Because Social Media is not all about playing with the latest cool technology, it’s about getting results. No results equals no budget.

The great push right now is to find employees who can help companies understand social media and measure the results of their efforts. Think about every online community, web 2.0, or social media conference you’ve attended or read about… what is the one area that is always a topic of interest? Measurement and monetization.

Success in Social Media requires a focus on results, thinking strategically and executing tactics that achieve tangible results like additional sales, reduced marketing costs, faster velocity of sales, reduced lead generation costs, reduced support costs, etc. There are so many people who want to work in Social Media today, but few are willing to demonstrate their business acumen to get the position. We saw this in the late 1990s in the online community world, again in around 2003 with the blogosphere, and yet again in 2005 with the early social network companies. And here we are almost ten years later with the same issues.

So do you want to work in Social Media? My advice to you is brush up on your business skills first. Worry about your number of followers on Twitter later.

What do you think? What skills do you think it takes to work in Social Media?

Mike

Twitter for Small Business = Great Tactic

Over the past several days, we’ve seen more news on Twitter for small business come out in the press and blogosphere. For example, there’s the AdAge article “Twitter Proves Its Worth as a Killer App for Local Businesses” which has several success stories of how small businesses have won customers using Twitter. Even Twitter themselves are contemplating how to help small businesses use their platform to grow. While they are focused on analytics rather than advertising ( a good sign), Twitter is doing a great job of trying to understand and reach an important segment which will help them grow.

We see the use of Twitter with our large clients like Cisco and NetApp continuing to grow. But we are also getting more inquiries from smaller companies who don’t want to host a community, but want to use social media effectively to achieve their goals. In our discussions, we suggest using applications like Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, MySpace and others to start building their online brand and reputation. The response we get in many cases is:

“Okay, that makes sense but I don’t have anyone to run this.”

We’ve seen a small market emerge in technology to monitor social media and brand reputation (keotag &  boardtracker come to mind). But there also needs to be a new service to help small businesses use social media effectively at a price that works…and that seems to be the missing piece of the puzzle to gaining wider adoption of these tools.

It’s an issue that we’ll be working on in the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

Impact Interactions Goes to Online Community Unconference East

Impact Interactions will be attending the Online Community Unconference East tomorrow, Feb. 11th in New York City. Hosted by Forum One, the unconference will be a great chance to find out what other online community professionals are thinking about the direction of the industry and how they’re applying it in real life. I expect that there will be many informative presentations and some great conversation surrounding the future of online community and social media in this economic downturn.

Sure, it’s useful to find a general consensus on social media topics by simply scanning through blog posts and comments in your feed reader but it’s another thing to collaborate and share experiences in person. I think that those of us who interact in online communities and through social media on a daily basis have will welcome the opportunity to actually meet that person that you follow on Twitter or someone who left a comment on your blog.

The real gem of the Online Community Unconference East will be in the knowledge exchange. Social Media is still evolving and many organizations are just now getting into it. There is a lot that can be learned by listening to others tell their stories on successes and failures with social media. Impact Interactions has 9 years of experience in helping organizations like AARP, Cisco, and SAP to build and execute community strategy, manage online interactions, and provide measureable business results. I look forward to using my experiences at Impact Interactions to collaborate on fresh online community and social media ideas and provide insights where I can.

Jen Graziani