Social Media Management Tools – Are they Ready for the Enterprise?

by Matthew Lees

Over the past 6-12 months a lot of companies and technology platforms have entered the market purporting to make it easier for individuals and organizations to participate throughout the social Web. If you’ve got accounts at one or more social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and LinkedIn, why, for example, should you have to log into each one? Wouldn’t it be much easier simply to log into one interface to organize, read, post, and search comments?

I’ve seen the phrase Social Media Management used as a catch-all for these types of tools. That sums things up as well as anything else.

To a basic degree, this is the idea behind Twitter-centric apps such as HootSuite, Seesmic, and TweetDeck. If you’re using Twitter on your own, these programs may meet your needs just fine. But the social Web stretches beyond Twitter and, if you’re responsible for social media at a large organization, you’ve got quite a few requirements beyond convenience. When the stakes are high, when there are more than one or two stakeholders involved, and when time – yours and your colleagues’ – is at a premium, many of these systems fall short.

What Makes Social Software Enterprise* Ready?
I see six main categories where enterprise social applications differentiate themselves from software that isn’t ready or appropriate for enterprise environments:

1. Security – We’ll start with what’s probably the most obvious item on the list. Enterprise social software adheres to high standards of security, both in terms of technology (i.e., secure protocols) and process (i.e., the ability to define access and keep audit trails; see below). How comfortable would you be sending your social security number to someone via a Twitter direct message?
2. Access, Accountability, and Auditing – These are the three As of enterprise social software. (Well, I just made that up…but it works well.) Social software for the enterprise lets system administrators set user permissions and access in a granular and effective way; it tracks activity and creates an audit trail, so you can determine who did what, when; and it allows for passwords to be recovered and/or changed as appropriate.
3. Content Management – Twitter is an example of a very rudimentary form of content management, which is pretty much based purely on a “push” model of publishing. Once you tweet, it’s out there…you can’t take it back and you can’t change it. Enterprise social software includes content management capabilities that let you save, undo, modify, and schedule for publishing at a later date. It also lets you adapt content to the particular channels you’re sending it to, and to choose which channels to send what (i.e., “I want this post to go to Twitter and Facebook, and I want that comment to go to our corporate blog).
4. Performance – This primarily encompasses speed, scalability, and reliability. For example, if Flickr or Facebook go down for a while, you’ve got little, if any, recourse. With enterprise social software, you should have support people to talk with and (usually) SLAs in place.
5. Integration Points – Enterprise social software will have hooks that allow for bi-directional integration, so data can come in from appropriate sources, and be sent out to other places (such as other applications, such as a CRM system, sites on the social Web, or your branded customer community). The architecture is important here, as ideally the platform’s engine is robust enough so that when the next new big social network crops up, it would be easy enough to configure its integration.
6. Analytics and Reporting – Social analytics providers are doing strong business helping organizations make sense of the social Web. Most social sites and tools provide woefully limited statistics. Of course, they weren’t designed with reporting in mind – particularly unified reporting, which lets you look at everything from one place — but if you’re using them for your business, you need to understand their effectiveness and impact. And that goes beyond counting how many Twitter followers and Facebook fans you have.

Note that many of these items translate into increased productivity. Social Management Tools, whether enterprise-ready or not, are largely, though not exclusively, about making it easier for individuals and organizations to do social media more efficiently and effectively.

Social Media Management Platforms
A few of the companies doing some interesting and promising things in the Social Media Management space are:
•    Socialize Your Stuff (Butterfly Publisher platform)
•    Regroup
•    Social Agency (Spredfast platform)
•    Spry Hive Industries

Community platform vendors are also thinking about how branded communities fit into all this, as well. On the leading edge of the trend toward connecting your customer communities to the social Web are:
•    Awareness
•    Lithium Technologies
•    LiveWorld
•    RightNow Technologies (Social Experience platform)
•    Pluck

Of course, the tools can only do so much. Technology platforms won’t get you where you want to go without a sound business strategy and a plan for engaging with your customers, members, readers, followers, prospects, etc.  But if you’re evaluating — or reevaluating – your social media strategy and presence, the six items above will play a central role.

———-

* What I Mean by “Enterprise”
“Enterprise” is one of those buzz words that means different things to different people. I’m using it here in a somewhat non-rigorous way to really mean a level of sophistication and maturity. Enterprise software is sturdy and full-featured, to meet the many and varied needs of professional organizations. In this way, it relates to the concept of enterprise architecture, particularly the definition from the MIT Center for Information Systems Research: “Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the firm’s operating model.”

Walking out the Door with the Twitter Password: A Few Words on Social Media Maturity

by Matthew Lees

Mathematical Maturity
My high school calculus teacher often talked about “mathematical maturity.” It became a phrase we dreaded hearing, because, when he used it – usually in the negative (i.e., that someone wasn’t being mathematically mature) – it meant that person had tackled a math problem like an amateur; that they weren’t using all the information or tools at their disposal; that they were doing things the way a child would. Ouch.

But if you demonstrated your mathematical maturity, it meant you didn’t complain if a problem was particularly knotty; that you pulled different techniques out of your mathematical toolkit; and that you took things seriously.

Who’s Got the Twitter Password?
In three unrelated instances over the past few weeks, I heard three different people pose more or less the same question: “If the person at your company who manages your Twitter and Facebook accounts leaves the company, what do you do if they forgot to tell you the passwords?”

If you’re the one tasked with setting things straight, you’re definitely facing a challenge. Who wants to track down and call up a former colleague to recover a password? Sure, most people would be helpful (if, in fact, they actually remember the passwords). But there’s also the possibility for ex-employees to cause mischief.

The real problem, though, arose before the employee left the firm. The organizations in the scenario above never should have let it get to this point.

So why did it happen?

Largely, I think, because we’re still in the early stages of the social media phenomenon, and things are still being done on an ad hoc basis. Many organizations are seemingly OK with people setting up Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other accounts on their own. And they’re not thinking through the ramifications.

Social Media Maturity
To me, social media maturity means having the systems, processes, resources, and organizational mindset to get the most out of what social media has to offer. It means thinking things through and being prepared for different eventualities. More specifically, it means:

1. Knowing your business goals – There’s a lot already written about business goals and determining ROI (including several posts on this blog, including this one), so I won’t delve into it here, other than to say this should be the starting point in any social media or online community initiative.

2. Clearly defining roles and responsibilities – It’s essential to set expectations and know who’s responsible for what (including passwords).

3. Creating sensible and effective processes – Here’s where the organizations above really dropped the ball. IT departments know how to set up new network and email accounts when an employee is hired, and they know what to do when someone leaves. They also know how to manage network access, and how to recover and/or reset passwords as warranted. You should have similar procedures in place for all social sites.

Don’t Forget Consultants and Agencies
Everyone on your team and in your project sphere should walk the social media walk. So if you work with consulting firms, agencies, and others on your social media programs, you’ll want to be confident that they’re not going to walk out the door with any passwords, either. Make sure they bring and display a high degree of social media maturity, too.

Do you know who’s got your organization’s Twitter password?

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 – The Global Story

The world is adopting social media at higher and higher levels according to a recent Neilsen Report.  According to the research by Neilsen, global time spent on social media sites increased by 82% in December 2009 when compared with December 2008. Pretty large increase especially if you look into the footnotes and understand that this research is based upon only U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. No China, no India, no Russia, nor are there any Nordic countries listed.

But this growth coincides with what we’re seeing here at Impact Interactions. We’ve helped develop and launch multiple communities in countries such as China, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Poland, and elsewhere over the past several years. And while clients are still interested in their communities in the U.S. their focus is shifting. We are seeing more interest in companies asking us to help them launch communities and social media plans in countries ranging from Japan to Russia to Brazil to Mexico.

The growth in third party applications such as Twitter and Facebook have helped companies to understand the potential reach of the medium, but it is the local language social networks like StudiVZ (German) which have helped in-country marketing teams decide that they must be engaged with their customers using social tools. So even as Facebook moves past these local social media/networks, the smart marketer understands that it’s not the tool so much as it’s the growth that matters in deciding whether social media is a good tactic in a particular market.

In our experience leading a social media workshop in Innsbruck, Austria at the prestigious Management Center of Innsbruck it was clear that our non-US audience were more engaged on local language social media tools including blogs and social networks than on the U.S. offerings. (In fact, it was there that I learned more about StudiVZ and other offerings.)

That doesn’t mean that non-U.S. members are not on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. But it does mean that for the savvy global marketer the research and identification of which sites or applications to use is a bit more difficult. While the strategy remains the same, each Internet culture requires a clear focus on localized tactics. That means a cookie cutter approach using the same tools like Twitter, Facebook, or other application across multiple markets will not deliver the results you desire.

Watch the growth, it’s here to stay. But also look for the smaller sites that can deliever more value to your organization when using social media globally. As the old adage goes “All marketing is local.” The same applies to social media.

-Mike Rowland, President

Misleading Indicators – Followers & Friends

Saw this on my twitter feed yesterday:

What immediately struck me was the implied assumption that the number of followers you have infers a level of influence. In our opinion that’s a risky assumption to make especially if you are going to make a business decision using this as a key metric.

Here is what I sent back to Jeremiah via DM:

Let me translate my Twitterese….

The number of followers is not a direct measure of influence. Too many ‘experts’ in the social media field believe that it is and continue to sell this notion. I can quickly and easily increase the number of my followers using hashtags and keywords that are popular. Yet that doesn’t necessarily mean that I am a stronger influencer than I was with a lower number of followers.

Those folks with a larger number of followers should not necessarily receive special treatment from brands. The number of followers or friends a person has on Twitter or Facebook really has minimal bearing on their actual influence. (I know that’s a bit heretical, but I’ll get to the why in a little bit.)

• How many people have used the various advertised services to build their followers rather than organically growing their followers by posting relevant content and ideas?
• How many people send an invite/friend request/twitter follow to every email address they have expecting the ‘polite’ return linking/friending/following behavior?
• How many of the top people in terms of followers have a large brand behind them, providing follower building support? (Example, if you only tweet about HP or Oreo Cookies you’ll develop following due to the power of the brand not necessarily because you are a thought leader in the space.)

Because these numbers can be manipulated, they are not to be trusted as a direct metrics proxy for influence.

The example that I use in our social media workshops uses a metric that everyone thought was a useful metric way back when in 2000-2003: Hits. The logic at the time was that the more hits there were in a given period of time, the better the site was in meeting its goals. But alas, this metric could be easily manipulated. Want more hits? Add more banner ads, objects, photos, etc. to the page. Voila! Higher counts so more success, right? Well, not really.

Follower counts are the same as hit counts. Look at some of the top people on Twitter with 5,000+ followers. If they are focused on a single topic, they probably do have influence. But most people are not that focused, tweeting about business, sports teams, their family, current events, pets, politics, etc. Do these folks really have a sphere of influence that marketers can embrace and attempt to cultivate through the Twitter Celebrity? Hard to tell.

The idea of identifying influencers in an easy to understand and quick manner has been a search for the holy grail since online communities started becoming more popular in 2000. At Participate.com, we hired smart people to analyze metrics and activities to develop relevant networked connections that indicated a level of influence within the community.  We used the new techniques of social mapping as well as relationship metrics of interactions. The work was never easy and it never gave a true understanding of influence. What did give some insight into influence, was looking to see how others interacted with the individual, not how many individuals read his or her content.

For marketers, a better way to measure influence is to analyze the content being added on Twitter in conjunction with analyzing who the person’s followers are. This is a tough, manual project. But in the end, you’ll have a much better understanding of whether or not a particular individual with a high following is actually an influencer.

As much as we want one, sometimes there is no holy grail. Using simple metrics as proxies is not a substitute for the hard work that data analysis takes to prove a hypothesis. Don’t fall for the trap of taking the easy way out.

Have a different opinion? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments’ section.

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.

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.

Hey! Who’s driving this thing?: Online Community Unconference East 2009

At the Online Community Unconference East, there was a broad range of conversations from ROI and community benchmarks to the psychology behind using online communities. Throughout these sessions I noticed a common theme brought up several times was super user engagement and incentive programs. That in itself is a topic that I was not surprised to hear about. Engaging and encouraging your hyper-affiliated members to contribute regularly drives better content, activity, and engagement throughout the community. Asking these members for feedback, to help out other users when they can, and highlighting them as role models for community behavior is a standard best practice. Where this conversation ventured off path was when I heard the question (I’m paraphrasing here) “My team does not have the time to deal with all of the violations in our community and in this economic climate we just can’t bring more staff on board. Can I get my super users to take on this responsibility?” Simple answer to this one. No.

Giving members of the community the ability to flag content and users that violate the community rules is a valuable tool that allows moderators to identify problems and act more quickly. This is a function that is built in to the majority of community platforms today. But giving members the administrative power to make actionable decisions on the behalf of your organization begins to border on the edges of shirking your own responsibilities and will inevitably leave you asking yourself “Hey, who’s driving this thing?”

No matter how much your members love your product, your brand, your cause; they are not there for your company. They have their own reason for participating in your online community and that reason is often not to uphold all rules and requirements set out by the sponsoring organization. You will find some volunteers that have a great helper mentality and want to do all that they can for the community but can you risk your brand reputation on hoping that one of these members won’t steer the company into oncoming traffic? Remember that these highly active users already have a tremendous sway over the conversation in your community because they are very visible and have built up a reputation to where other members will follow their lead. Handing over administrative tools will only amplify this power.

The level of freedom that you give your members will obviously depend on the type of community and the audience but the ultimate responsibility for running the community needs to lie in the hands of the organization. Volunteer super users cannot take the place of a dedicated and objective moderation team. In our experience of moderating an online community with over 50,000 users and many members that have been deeply involved with the organization online for over 10 years, we find many members that are active in reporting objectionable activities. Despite this, we still see that on average 75% of the terms of service violations are being reported by our moderation team where only 25% of violations are noted by members.

When the internal resources in an organization are stretched too thin to bear the brunt of moderating their communities, contracted moderation services become a viable and cost effective alternative to the expense of hiring additional staff.

If your organization needs help handling the moderation load or are looking for proven moderation best practices, leave us a comment here or Contact Us.

Jen Graziani

Will Social Media Survive the Recession?

What constitutes a bubble? What constitutes a true business tool?

This was the type of question that those of us running Web 1.0 businesses in 2001-2003 were asking ourselves as we evaluated our prospects for the not to distant future. In our case, it was all about online communities and their ability to help both B2B and B2C companies increase sales, build brand loyalty, and market their products and services more efficiently. We had case studies that showed that online community members on average purchased more frequently, bought more items, and generated more profits than non-community members. We proved that online community could produce a return on investment of more than 100% (in some cases higher than 200%).

Yet for all the research and our expertise, many companies pulled the plug on their communities. The list is long: Transora (Multiple CPG companies), OurHouse (Ace Hardware), MuniGroup (Goldman Sachs), Quote.com, SoapCity (Sony), and many others.

Each company had its own reasons, but in the autopsies we performed several issues came out over and over. They were:

1. Budget taken away from community projects due to over staffing on the client side
2. Executive sponsorship changed due to layoffs
3. Software company providing hosting and platform went out of business
4. Movement of marketing dollars to “proven” traditional marketing methods like direct mail

Remember this was back in the day when for chat clients used eShare or iChat, for message boards they used Web Crossing or eShare, blogs were not widely accepted, wikis were non-existent, video was not used online except for B2B, and most community members were using dial-up connections. The overall conclusion that came back time and time again was that while communities were cool, they were a ’soft’ application in the eyes of senior executives. These executives did not see value in kids chatting about irrelevant issues or fans cheering on their favorite television show or prospects engaging with customers independently.

Now shift to today.

Look at our social media space. We have seen blogs go mainstream, social networks competing with online communities (yes they are very different), broadband adoption bringing video and photos to the masses. Yet we also have the feeling of a bubble again as the world enters another recession. The movement towards cool applications like Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace & Facebook widgets, and others are viewed as fun to use. However, in practical terms they are all in danger of the same fate that hit many online communities in 2002-2003.

As budgets tighten, will money dry up for experimenting with social media? It’s possible. Remember that many of the same decision makers who turned off communities are still in the position to do so again. If you are running a community or social network, you need to start building a case for why your project must remain funded.

In a member survey completed in June of 2008, the online community research network published that 57% of all respondents stated that their communities contributed no revenues, less than 2% of revenues, or did not know how much the community contributed. 33% of respondents had budgets for community projects in excess of $100,000 per year (18% over $500,000). The average number of staff working on the community was 6.6 FTEs! But here is the astonishing fact from the report: 67% reported that they had no strategy for their online communities.

Will these communities survive a budget cut? Probably not. The respondents did not know how to prove the value as Alan Warms used to preach. The issue of ROI becomes much more important as the economy gets tighter. While we all know that intuitively communities help the hosting organization, intuition doesn’t get funded.

Community and social network management teams must get comfortable with metrics and with building an ROI Case for their project. Hard data is difficult to deny… soft data of conversations is easy to dismiss…

Want to learn more about how to prove the value of your community or social network? Learn more about our consulting services, experience, and then contact us with your questions. Or leave us a comment.

Thinking Beyond the Community Website – Oglivy 360 Digital

Rohit Bhargava SVP of Digital Strategy for Ogilvy gave a presentation using a couple of cases studies.

Case Study One Winelibrary.tv:

Dynamic community to watch his videos. Build additional growth by providing members with outside features such as Twitter where he provides promotions for discounts on wine or other merchandise. He has another community called corked to interact in more traditional community features like message boards, and is promoting his book about wine. His irreverence towards the wine snobs is helping members to enjoy their wine.

Case Study Two: Personality Not Included

Rohit has written a book and is using community to promote it. He is not restricting his activities to his own branded site, but is using third party sites like FaceBook and Twitter. He invited visitors to submit questions to him expecting 5-10 in a single day. He received 50. He then promoted the blog of the top member by questions asked and set up a marketing campaign contest. The top member comes back 5 times a day and continues to add content.

So, you don’t have to go big to get results, you just have to target your ideas in an appropriate way to meet the needs of your customers.

4/22/08 UPDATE: There is a nice summary of Rohit’s findings in this week’s eWeek Magazine (digital copy here).