There are 150 million active users on Facebook. 346 million people read blogs. 1 billion messages have been sent on Twitter. If social media is such an important part of our online culture, why is it so difficult for marketers to use it effectively?
This presentation will shine a light on how real brands are doing great things with social media and how you can too. Learn what you can do right now and how emerging technologies such as the semantic web (Web 3.0) are going to make things even easier
2. What is Social Media?
Social media is an umbrella term that
defines the various activities that integrate
technology, social interaction, and the
construction of
words, pictures, videos, and audio.
But that doesnât quite do itâŚ
6. ItâsâŚ
> 100,000,000 videos on YouTube
4,000,000 articles on Wikipedia
200 M blogs
1 billion tweets on twitter
> 200 M people on Facebook each month
FROM HONEYMOON TO
MARRIAGE
7. Social Media By The Numbers
346,000,000
number of people globally who read blogs
700,000,000
number of photos added to Facebook monthly
273.1 minutes
time on average spent watching online video each month
55%
internet users who have uploaded and shared photos
57%
internet users who have joined a social network
93%
Americans online expect companies to have a social media presence
8. But Itâs Not All Good NewsâŚ
Recent Headlines:
⢠Social Media Fatigue. Too much out there?
⢠Blogging is Dead, According to Wired.com
⢠Forrester Says Consumers Donât Trust Corporate Blogs
⢠Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites
⢠P&G marketing chief questions value of Facebook
⢠Half of 'social media campaigns' will flop
10. Social Media Challenge #1
Companies have to overcome their fear.
How do you learn to âlet goâ
â˘
Give control back to the consumer
â˘
Lose the limits imposed by legal
â˘
Reinvent PR⌠PR 2.0
â˘
But is the risk work the reward?
â˘
11. Social Media Challenge #2
This is a different kind of marketing.
Stop thinking âcampaignâ
â˘
Stop thinking âchannelâ
â˘
Beware of Business Week syndrome
â˘
Objectives need to come first
â˘
Itâs so much more than âmarketingâ
â˘
12. Social Media Challenge #3
It starts with the community inside.
Bringing community to the business silos
â˘
Socializing success is the key to success
â˘
Watch out for company ADD
â˘
End users can tell if your âfamilyâ is
â˘
dysfunctional
13. Social Media Challenge #4
Social media advocates are over-zealous.
Itâs not just brands who are challenged
â˘
The world wide echo chamber
â˘
Donât follow the âshiny objectâ
â˘
Bring brands in with baby steps
â˘
Prevent culture shock
â˘
14. Social Media Challenge #5
Consumers are suffering from fatigue.
Itâs a competition for consumer attention
â˘
They can afford to be picky
â˘
Human behavior is complex
â˘
But phony never flies
â˘
17. The Unhappy Customer
Comcastâs New Nightmare
23,000 subscribers
is how many TechCrunch's Michael Arrington told when
his Comcast service was down
1.3 million viewers
is how many saw the video a Comcast customer recorded
when a service technician fell asleep in his house
The customerâs voice has become a powerful weaponâŚ
18. The Happy Customer
Zappos.com / Powered by Service
Zappos.com doesnât sell shoes, they deliver âWOWâ
through service. The primary sources of the company's
rapid growth have been repeat customers and numerous
word of mouth recommendations. Free shipping both
ways, an always open call center, and 365 day return
policy are part of what sets Zappos apart.
quot;Hopefully, 10 years from now, people won't even realize
we started out selling shoes.quot; Tony Hsieh (CEO)
19.
20. How Do You Measure Success?
Active Participation:
438 Zappos employees are on Twitter
Instant Access to Your Customers:
47,104 Followers on of the top Twitter accounts
Extending Your Reach:
Increased traffic and search volume
More Efficient, More Effective:
Limit the amount of advertising by focusing on a customer
experience that will generate natural word of mouth
Increasing the Bottomline:
75% of Zappos sales come from repeat customers
$840 million in 2007, $1 billion (projected) in 2008
22. Take A Look Around
Blendtec Before âWill It Blendâ
A faceless company with expensive product
â˘
New marketing director means a set of new eyes
â˘
A charismatic CEO with some interesting habits
â˘
âExtreme blendingâ as a regular occurrence
â˘
23.
24. How Do You Measure Success?
Millions of Eyes and Ears:
65 million YouTube views, 120 million WillItBlend.com views
Dominate the Search Results:
Turn search buzzwords (âChuck Norrisâ, âiPhoneâ) into video traffic
More Efficient, More Effective:
Theyâve received national media coverage (TV appearances, awards)
that is equivalent to millions of dollars in advertising
Increasing the Bottomline:
Total Blender retail sales grew 700% in the past two years
Making the World a Better Place:
Blendtec auctioned the blended iPhone on Ebay which sold for
$1,000 and proceeds were donated to a childrenâs hospital
26. Change The Conversation
The Trouble Ford Was In
Consumers donât trust corporations
â˘
Trust needs a face and a name
â˘
Enter the automotive crisis
â˘
Ford put into an interesting position
â˘
Can a bad situation be a brand defining moment?
â˘
27.
28. How Do You Measure Success?
Get Your Content Out There:
Traffic increased 100% in past 4 months to thefordstory.com
âFord Storyâ CEO YouTube video has received 53,354 views
A Strong Leading Man:
Scott Monty has 14265 followers on Twitter and conducts almost
daily interviews with blogs, news sites, and television
Be the Brand Everyone Is Talking About:
#12 in AdAgeâs most social brands of 2008, next to
Disney, Sony, Dell and Apple
Owning Your Story, Before It Owns You:
Ford effectively changed the conversation around the automotive
bailout to position themselves in a different light than the others
30. The Inconvenient Truth
There are no best practices.
⢠Every project is a custom fit.
⢠You learn as you go.
What are the best practices for a conversation?
What about for a relationship?
You can read books, attend seminars, but it all comes back to
who you are and who they are.
There is one best practice to which there is no exceptionâŚ
BE REAL
31. An Approach to Being Real
Understand Act Evolve
You need to understand You need to act To evolve, you must
⢠Who they are ⢠Accordingly ⢠Always be learning
⢠Who you are ⢠Transparently ⢠Always be teaching
⢠What you can handle ⢠Honestly ⢠Always be improving
32. How to UNDERSTAND
Understand Act Evolve
1. First and foremost, listen
2. Define the problem
3. Match the problem to project objectives
4. Find the community inside your company
5. Understand the community outside
34. Understand
Tools You Can Use
Social Media Buzz Monitoring
1. Free Alert Systems
2. Paid Analysis Dashboard
3. Full Service Insights Partners
35. Understand
What Ford HeardâŚ
âIf we all bought American, where would the competition and innovation be?
Have you seen the junk on wheels they sell? The Big 3 haven't been
selling what people want, but the foreign car companies have.â
Why are American cars still so unreliable?
Nobody buys American anymore!!
Six in 10 oppose auto bailoutâŚ
37. Understand
Define the Problem
It all comes down to a problem in communicationâŚ
⢠Our customer thinks of us as _____ instead of _____
⢠People donât know the facts about our brand
⢠We donât know what our customers think about us
⢠Our marketing message isnât resonating with our customers
Fordâs big communication problemâŚ
⢠Big faceless corporation
⢠American people against the bail out
⢠Ford lumped in with misinformation and bad press
38. Understand
Determine Your Objectives
Social media project objectives mustâŚ
⢠Directly solve your communication problems
⢠Have a clear way to benchmark before and after
Fordâs objectivesâŚ
⢠Put a face forward, humanize the brand
⢠Combat misinformation
⢠Tell your story, get others to tell it for you
⢠Change opinion around the brand
40. Understand
The Community Inside
Questions you need to askâŚ
⢠What is (who owns) our corporate culture?
⢠Who is allowed to talk on behalf of the brand now?
⢠What assets are we or could we be creating?
â Events, content extras, internal superstars
How they did itâŚ
⢠Blendtec picked up on internal meme and decided to share it
with the world wide web
⢠Zappos looked at their core values, commitment to
culture, and ways employees were already talking online
42. Understand
The Community Outside
Questions you need to askâŚ
⢠What the types of people exist out there already?
⢠Should we build or join a community?
⢠What does the community need?
â Should we support, energize, or embrace them?
How they did itâŚ
⢠Blendtec understood the tone people looking for and
embraced their requests for content
⢠Zappos continues to find and actively follow people that
mention their brand
43. How to ACT
Understand Act Evolve
1. Create a pilot program with core influencers
2. Ignite conversation and engage your audience
3. Donât forget to share results, content, and
plans, be transparent and giving
4. Be a great party host by connecting community
members together
44. Act
Create A Pilot Program
⢠Start with creators and influencers.
⢠Find renegades and evangelists.
⢠Be interesting.
How they did itâŚ
⢠Microsoft put together Channel 9 to show behind-the-scenes
interviews with developers and even executives. On the first
day, word of mouth had drawn 100,000 viewers. Half a year
later, traffic was up to 1.2 million unique visitors a month.
46. Act
Engage Your Audience
Ignite conversation.
â˘
Develop community activities.
â˘
Build a content calendar.
â˘
Be social.
â˘
How they did itâŚ
⢠Chrysler engages business units on a weekly basis for
discussion topics to put up for their Customer Advisory Board
and finds executives to participate in online monthly chats.
47. Act
Donât Forget to Share
⢠Be honest. Be giving.
⢠Be transparent, esp. when you are wrong.
⢠Let the community own the community.
How they did itâŚ
⢠When Corkâd was recently hacked, the very first thing Gary
Vaynerchuk did was post a video comment on TechCrunch
to apologize and inform
⢠What not to do⌠When AMC first found out that fans were
Twittering posed as characters from the hit show Mad
Men, they asked that the accounts be shut down
49. Act
Connect the Community
⢠Be a great party host.
⢠Encourage member interaction.
⢠Drive exploration.
How they did itâŚ
⢠Mr. Tweet takes a look at which Twitter users you should be
following based on your personal interests
⢠CCS, the College of Creative Studies, uses Facebook to match
potential students to counselors and current students who can
answer important questions
50. How to EVOLVE
Understand Act Evolve
1. Empower your advocates through reward and
recognition
2. Cross-pollinate and extend into other programs
3. Measure, report, share, and improve
4. Learn what works and what doesnât
51. Evolve
Empower Your Advocates
⢠Reward and recognize.
⢠Give them the tools.
How they did itâŚ
⢠Yahoo! Answers gives users different privileges based on
how many questions they have answered
⢠At Dell IdeaStorm, community members suggest and vote
on ideas for how Dell can improve their business.
⢠Lego Factory allows users to create 3D lego bricks. The
community can vote on the best creations and some of the
winning creations end up at local toy stores.
53. Evolve
Extend into Other Programs
Integrate.
â˘
Cross-pollinate.
â˘
Widgetize.
â˘
Meet up in the real world.
â˘
How they did itâŚ
⢠The Barnes and Noble community is a lively brand loyalty
community supported by the Lithium platform. Hot topic
threads are featured on the e-commerce site.
⢠ArtShare is an application developed by the Brooklyn
Museum to share the Museum's collection on Facebook.
Rather than expect users to come to the website to learn about
the collection, they engage people in their own social space.
54. Evolve
Measure, Measure, Measure
⢠Match metrics to your objectives.
⢠Report, share, improve.
How they did itâŚ
⢠Many brands use buzz monitoring software such as Radian6
or Sysomos to measure fluctuations in volume of
conversation compared to competitors.
⢠CCS, the College of Creative Studies, uses the metrics
provided by Facebookâs Insight tool to measure increased
traffic, photo views, and wall posts.
55.
56. What Do We Want From Them?
Track, quantify, and analyze
conversations around a
To talk about the brand
brand, their competitors, and their
BRAND MONITORING
industry through out the entire
online space
Determine the spread and velocity
(how far, how fast) of branded
To spread our content
CONTENT TRACKING syndicated content
(video, widget, article)
Qualify and analyze social interaction
To engage us directly within a defined channel in order
COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT to determine community
health, sentiment, and engagement
levels
57.
58. Evolve
Learn + Adapt
⢠Go with the flow.
⢠Catalog what works and what doesnât.
⢠Rethink often.
How they did itâŚ
⢠Community platforms such as Lithium and SalesForce
(which runs Dell Ideastorm and MyStarbucksIdea) have
implemented âidea managementâ features which help brands
manage insights collected from the community and measure
and learn from user engagement.
⢠Get Satisfaction is feedback widget that can get integrated
into websites to provides real-time, dynamic customer
support content that leverages the wisdom of crowds.
61. The Information Portal
Web 1.0
⢠information exclusivity, be the first to own the content
⢠dividing the world wide web into usable directories
⢠everyone has their personal own little corner in the cyberspace
The web became STATIC + LONELY
It lacked:
⢠community
⢠interaction
⢠scalability
62. The Social Platform
Web 2.0
⢠focus on the power of the community to create and validate
⢠the power of a seemingly freer form of organization (âtagsâ)
⢠setting up âhooksâ for future integration (RSS, API)
The web became NOISY + OVERWHELMING
It lacked:
⢠personalization
⢠true portability
⢠meaning
63. We Broke Dunbarâs Number
Dunbar's number is the supposed cognitive limit to the
number of individuals with whom any one person can
maintain stable social relationships
And here are
Thereâs me
all my friends
And their
Myspace, Flickr, Yelp, YouT
ube, LinkedIn,
Thereâs my
Facebook, Last.fmâŚ
Myspace, Flickr, Yelp,
YouTube, LinkedIn,
Facebook, Last.fmâŚ
And their friends
with their content
65. Introducing Web 3.0
What does it mean?
The 3rd decade of the Web (2010â2020), when simultaneous and
complementary technology trends will finally reach maturity:
a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories creating
â˘
more seamless interoperability between connected devices
data anywhere anytime via broadband adoption, mobile Internet
â˘
access, software-as-a-service, and cloud computing
true data portability via open identity (OpenID), APIs and data formats
â˘
a consistent web language via RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, etc.
â˘
intelligent agents, natural language processing, and machine learning
â˘
Web 3.0 is The Relevant Web
66. Improving How We Listen
Social Monitoring 2.0
⢠Monitoring based on keywords makes it hard to distinguish brand
conversation (âjaguarâ the car vs âjaguarâ the animal)
⢠Sentiment changes based on the context (ie âlemonâ)
⢠Too much reliance on manual adjustments and interpretation
Social Monitoring 3.0
⢠Smarter aggregation, mapping conversation trends
⢠Conversation tracking beyond keywords
67. Better Customer Acquisition
Online Advertising 2.0
⢠Contextual ads can be inaccurate and unsafe for brands
⢠Behavioral ads donât account for multiple users
⢠Consumers trust each other more than corporations, brands, and
their advertising messages.
Online Advertising 3.0
⢠Deliver relevant ads to the right consumers
⢠Make content easier to discover by interested users
68. Better Community Management
Community Management 2.0
⢠Shear number of social networks with disconnected profiles makes it
difficult to find the most valuable people to connect with
⢠Hard to distribute the conversation beyond your blog or community
⢠No relevant social information when you need it most
Community Management 3.0
⢠Finding the influencers across the social web
⢠Extending the conversation beyond the networks
69. Improving How We Measure
Measuring Success 2.0
⢠Limited amount that we can measure: reach, exposure, volume of
conversation
⢠Social networks are âwalled gardensâ with inconsistent metrics
⢠No algorithms to measure that a community has been built
Measuring Success 3.0
⢠Better sentiment analysis than âpositive, neutral, negativeâ
⢠Social graph analysis, conversation connections
Social media is easily misunderstood. Traditional marketing bred a language where you âlaunch a campaignâ and you put your message out on âchannelsâ. Without proper education, companies often resort to mimicking their competitors or adopting what Business Week says is popular. They choose a channel before defining their objectives.
A successful campaign must be supported by a community both inside and outside of the company walls. In a traditionally siloed business culture, there is a huge communication obstacle to overcome. Unless results are socialized, business units will quickly loose interest in the project. And unless the community is properly supported internally, the end user will loose interest entirely.
Itâs easy to get excited about the power of social media. But sometimes, the experts can suffer from âshiny objectâ syndrome too, forgetting the importance of baby steps. Too much social media too fast can be a culture shock for some businesses, and without brand involvement, the program will fail.
There is more and more vying for the consumerâs attention these days. They have become a choosy bunch, whose behavior is increasingly hard to guess. One thing is for sure, the phony message never flies.It sounds daunting, like the odds are stacked against this unlikely couple, but many brands and consumers have not only found a way to make it workâŚ
But to do it well, to make customers happy, to create awesome content, and to return on investment (the ever sought ROI in social media)âŚThings that would not have happened otherwise. So letâs take a look at a few of those case studies.
Letâs take a look at a company called Zappos, and how they used social media to reinvent customer service.But before I get to the happy endingâŚ
Letâs talk about customer service in this new age, and what brands are up against.It used to be that an unhappy customer would tell ten of their friendsâŚThe customer voice has become a powerful weapon⌠more than ever before.
So letâs talk about happy customers and a brand built upon them.Zappos is a company who knows WOM and repeat customers are key to success.By offering services their competitors wonât they have set themselves apartâŚ.Good products have become a commodity, in fact good service has become a commodity as well.In todayâs culture, itâs all about experience, the culture of the brand.
Zappos has put culture first by launching twitter.zappos, com, a site that pulls in live feeds of all their employees who are on Twitter and of anyone who mentions Zappos on Twitter.Itâs a constantly evolving conversation, a patchwork that represents their culture, but itâs also a completely transparent way to show how they are communicating with their customers⌠not just a company providing a service, but human to human conversation.Within a month of starting his Twitter account, the CEO has been sharing what he is up to personally, professionally. He has providing behind the scenes information about working at Zappos. He has crowdsourced rewriting Zappos confirmation emails. Itâs customer service, itâs brand building, itâs awareness, and itâs idea development.But⌠what does that do for the bottomline?
Here is the definition I likeâŚ
So we talked about how social media can increase efficiency and customer loyalty through improved service. But how about attracting new customers through increased awareness? What was Blendtec before âwill it blendââŚ
Blendtec was a faceless company that manufactured blenders; their consumer grade blenders run around $400. The Will It Blend story begins shortly after George Wright began working for the company. He was walking around the factory and stumbled upon Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson. Dickson was testing the new bearings in a blender by blending a 2 X4. The companyâs employees went on with their work unphased, apparently the practice of âextreme blendingâ was a regular occurrence there at the factory.
Blendtec took a part of their corporate culture and made it public, and on top of that made it entertainingâŚ. They simply unveiled the face that the company had all along. Upon launch, the videos were distributed online and Blentec employees reached out to their personal networks to let them know.Word spread and âWill It Blendâ became a viral phenomenon, garnering of 100 million views in total. Blendtecâs marketing now serves as a profit center for the company, the videos have made over $50,000 in ad revenue. In every successful viral campaign thereâs at least an ounce or two of luck, but there is a moral to this story⌠Social tools like blogs, messaging services and community sites have broken down barriers between brands and consumers. âWill It Blendâ story comes from a place of authenticity, it lends a face to Blendtec and makes them approachable.
There is also some tangible numbers to authenticityâŚ
Zappos and Blendtec are some favorite stoires we tell, because they are social media darlings. But beyond rising from obscurity, what challenges did they really have? They were crafting their own story as they wentâŚItâs a lot harder to CHANGE the conversation that is already going on.
Brand trust studies show it, consumers donât trust corporations or companies. Who they trust is people like them, people with a face and a name. After banks made the corporate world look even less trustworthy, enter the automotive crisis. Ford was immediately pegged as another big faceless corporation about to go to the government to ask for help. With all eyes and ears turned to what the Big 3 were going to do, how could they turn a bad situation into a brand defining momentâŚ
Scott Monty is Ford's social media guy. He accepted the position, leaving a job at the successful digital agency Crayon. Ford had a pretty good idea of what they wanted, and were prepared to wait until they found the right person who would fit that job. Since then⌠Scott has acted as the corporate online (and, often offline) face of Ford Motor Company, their social network hub, legal liaison and lay interpreter, public relations mouthpiece, arbiter, friend, dadâin short, the Fortune 500 social media field agent archetype.He has promoted content, engaged a community, and prevented PR disasters.
So how can you take the stories of Ford, Zappos, Blendtec and apply them to what you do for your business or for your own clients? What is the secret sauce?
I will give you some suggestions of how to do social media right, but there is no formula⌠only common senseYou have to be true to yourself, your clients, and your customers. That is the only hard rule.
So how do you âbe realâ? I see there being three things that have to happen all at once⌠itâs not really a linear process, or a cycle that repeats, but something simultaneous. Every brand needs to UNDERSTAND, ACT, and EVOLVEâŚ
How do you listen?Well, it depends on your budget and staff⌠remember those #s, the amount of blogs, videos, articles, it is a noisy world out there.Listening is hard but technology is making it easier.
The next step is defining the communication problemâŚIs the customer misunderstanding your business, how you operate, what you stand for?Are you not hearing them, who they are, how they think?
So what was Fordâs problem, they were associated with something very negative by a public who had many misconceptions about them and the automotive industry.
Can the public name anyone at Ford, someone that speaks to themWhat is the % spread of facts vs untruthsWe can use social monitoring to track sentiment and volume of conversation
How else do we understand?Take a look around, you canât have a two-way dialogue unless there is someone inside the brand talking.
Who can start this conversation and how are you going to keep it fueled?What are the rules to engagement?
And the there are those people outside your brandâŚWho are they? Whoâs already talking and why?Do you know what they want, what they expect?
Itâs not just about technologies. Itâs not just about conversation.Itâs about how the digital connections create something that would have never been possible otherwise.And where is the proof of thisâŚ
There is a great set of Forrester reports I recommend everyone reads. There is the book Groundswell which details the different ways that people engage⌠are they critics? Are they creators? There is a report on what type of considerations you need to make on whether you build a community or join the conversation that is already going on. And then there is another report on the types of communities you can create⌠one that focuses on customer loyalty, on support, or on product development.
So how does one ACT? How do you start and how do you keep âactingâ after launch?
MEASURE THE MESSAGESemantic technology is able to pull together connections between words and phrases. Measurement tools will be moving away from the tag cloud, and more towards the trends of thereal conversation, not just the keyword of the day. BooRahis RottenTomatoes meets ZAGAT. It takes a large pull of reviews from Yahoo, CitySearch, Yelp, etc. and aggregates them smartly into a single score and a single consensus. The idea is that BooRah tracks positive and negative reviews of food, service and ambiance at restaurants across hundreds of online review sites. The service monitors trends toward negative and positive reviews, pulls out key quotes from users and offers other value adds based on its technology. BooRah also announced last month the availability of an API that will allow other web sites and businesses to offer online reviews and ratings from BooRah to their customers. Conversation Digest You donât need to read all 4,000 new posts of the week to get a sense of whatâs going on. We summarize the most buzz-worthy stories for you and call out whatâs hot and whatâs new so that you can tune in early.
BETTER AD TARGETINGPeer 39 uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence to interpret word meaning and sentiment. It relies on synonyms and concepts, rather than keyword scanning. BETTER AD CONTENTDapper MashupAds can dynamically pull in relevant content from a database, as well as scanning social content sites like Yelp and Flickr for the newest (positive) reviews and photo. Itâs the power of your brand message only promoted by your consumers. The idea is that publishers can tell Dapper: this is the place on my web page where the title of a movie will appear, now serve up a banner ad that's related to whatever movie this page happens to be about. The company believes that its new ad network will provide monetary incentive for publishers to have their websites marked up semantically.BETTER FINDABILITYPowersetis a search engine that focuses on natural language processing, not simply on keywords alone. It tries to understand the search phrase as a whole. And the more search queries and intent are understood, the more relevant ads on search results can be. In its own statement, Microsoft stressed how useful Powerset's technology will be for improving Microsoft's own search products and to \"take Search to the next level.\"BETTER DISCOVERYHeadupis a social browsing extension for Firefox that integrates with data from Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, and Friendfeed and then cross-references the data with your browsing experienceSearchMonkey allows developers to build applications on top of Yahoo! search, including allowing site owners to share structured data with Yahoo!, using semantic markup (microformats, RDF), standardized XML feeds, APIs (OpenSearch or other web services), and page extraction.
MEASURE THE CONNECTIONSChatminemeasures the connections between community members and between people and concepts. By looking at both friending and popular dialogue, they can tell you if your brand has enabled passionate conversation.Glue is a Firefox extension that creates a decentralized social network right in your browser. Friends can see each otherâs likes and dislikes on music, movies, wine, books, etc and share messages about common interests. Glue is a more social networking oriented version of BlueOrganizer - it connects you to your friends based around things like books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants, and more.Zemanta is a blogging tool which harnesses semantic technology to add relevant content to your posts. While it didn't make either of our 'Semantic Apps to Watch' lists in November, a number of commenters pointed it out as something they use. In September we covered a major upgrade to Zemanta's service, allowing users to specify the sources they want to see in the suggestions list that Zemanta provides. Users can now incorporate their own social networks, RSS feeds, and photos into their blog posts. As we noted, this makes Zemanta a lot more appealing to established bloggers who are in less need of suggestions and more in need of automation.Microformats (hCard, hResume) are designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. LinkedInOur concentration is on making the users data easily available and useful. To that end, we use a variety of microformats including hCard, hResume, hEvent, and hReview. We are also implementing the XFN microformat (XHTML friends network), which is one of the cornerstones of the Google Social Graph API.Maryland-based Lotameâs technology is called Crowd Control. It âharnesses user interests and actions, locating the âinfluencersâ in social media,â their site explains. Crowd Control examines user actions such as uploading, blogging, and commenting. This data is layered with interests, and is factored with anonymous data points such as age, gender, recency and frequency. The resulting profiles are used by brands to directly target their messages to individuals, not just sites.Lotame Solutions is teaming up with Amplify and Vizu to measure the value of advertising on social media networks in parameters other than the âclick.â This combined package analyzes the connection between time spent, brand lift and consumer sentiment. Amplify can use its detailed understanding of actual page content to further embellish user profiles in existing behavioural targeting systems, and also uniquely identify key purchase triggers and buying intent - flagging real-time advertising opportunities to the ad server. Hapaxâs Amplify linguistic technology assesses blog post conversation tone that is responding to brands and campaigns. The platform uses word meaning to identify topics, brands, people, emotions and actions. Vizuâs Ad Catalyst measures impact of viewer perception of key brand attributes. The brand building metric âBrand liftâ is superior to click-through rate (CTR) counting due to measuring the effectiveness of ad units, Web sites and key messages. Because of Brand lift, advertising dollars are optimized.
MEASURE THE VELOCITYHow far is my message traveling and how fast? Semantic technology builds on meaning. And so it doesn't matter if your followers say âDodge muscle car\" or âthe new Challenger\", semantic buzz tools will tie the conversation together.MEASURE THE TONEThe next generation of sentiment analysis will look at the entirety of a comment or an article, who it came from and who it was directed to. It will use natural language and relationship analysis to sift the \"good\" comments from \"bad\". Cogito Monitor generates an unprecedented precision and an unrivalled level of detail, thanks to the use of semantic technology that recognizes, reads and automatically understands the opinions expressed by users as they relate to companies, competitors, products, and services.  In short, Cogito Monitor is able to measure, tally and graph customersâ feedback about your companiesâ products and services â from millions of web pages and blogs. The depth of understanding and insight provided by Monitor is equivalent to more traditional focus groups and surveys but without the time and expense.Sentiment detection Assigns each comment automatically to one of five levels according to the sentiment expressed.What makes Sentimine the best-of-breed sentiment analysis tool?Our âsecret sauceâ combines human insight with sophisticated algorithms. Together, these powerful approaches deliver a higher level of accuracy and speed at a lower cost than our competitors. If you are using Twitter, you probably have a few contacts (= people you follow). Probably more than just a few. If you live a liberal following policy (= if another user follows you, you follow back), then the network of your contact does not have any deeper meaning. But there is a smaller, much more meaningful network hidden behind your total web of followers: the relevant net. TwitterFriends helps you to find the users that are meaningful for you and keep in touch with them. Those could be users you are talking to on a regular basis or who are feeding you great links all the time. FOAF (an acronym of Friend of a Friend) is a machine-readableontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe him or herself. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database.Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project (SIOC - pronounced \"shock\") is a Semantic Web technology. SIOC provides methods for interconnecting discussion methods such as blogs, forums and mailing lists to each other. It consists of the SIOC ontology, an open-standard machine readable format for expressing the information contained both explicitly and implicitly in Internet discussion methods, of SIOC metadata producers for a number of popular blogging platforms and content management systems, and of storage and browsing/searching systems for leveraging this SIOC data.The FOAF vocabulary allows us to represent people and their social networks, providing the social network component of data portability. It can be used in a combination with the theOpenID identity system. The SIOC vocabulary is an open format for expressing information about user-generated content in an interoperable way. It provides the content object component of data portability. The SIOC Types module can be used to further specify different types of Social Web / Web2.0 objects that we may want to describe.
The proof is in the sheer number and growth of all these social artifacts.
But itâs also in the saturation⌠the number and percent of people involved.One especially to note is the amount of online Americans who expect companies to have a social media presence.These people are already socially involved, and the figure doesnât say they want or like brands to be involved, but the EXPECT it.And Iâm not going to give you a âjoin the conversationâ speech. Honestly, many have joined the conversation prematurelyâŚ
So if consumers are using social media, if they expect companies to be thereâŚWhy is leveraging social media so hard for brands?It seemed so promising at first, but now you are finding out what people really think, and what they expect of you.
This is the marriage, and there are some real challenges to overcomeâŚAnd if we donât overcome them, this is going to be a really short marriage.
Building a âbrandâ is an expensive and intense process, and now social media experts are telling companies to âlet goâ and give some control back to the consumer. In an environment where communications are traditionally routed through legal teams and PR firms, where there are limits put on who can talk directly with the customer and how, companies need reassurance that the reward is work the risk.