Connie Bensen

Listening is one of those skills that takes practice. Organizations have an even harder time in pausing to listen to their customers. Over the past year and a half I have had the good fortune to be directly involved with helping brands and agencies improve their listening skills using social media monitoring. It is my day job. Yes, I do work for a social media monitoring vendor and I’m proud of it! We have evolved Alterian SM2 (Techrigy) based on our customers needs.

Yesterday, Jeremiah Owyang & Ray Wang of the consulting group, Altimeter, released a report on the use cases for Social Customer Relationship Management (social CRM). As Community Managers we all know that the customer is our first priority.Yesterday I presented a five hour workshop on the same topic in the UK. I have been sharing these use cases for quite awhile. I’m in the process of writing white papers on the ROI of social media monitoring. The first is available.

At Alterian we are also starting to quantify the value that advertisers are realizing on the social web. We used Alterian SM2 to measure the conversations around the Super Bowl advertisers and defined a Social Engagement Index that shows the reach and influence of the ads. And we also calculated the Social Sentiment Engagement Index which takes into account how people felt about the ads.

Jeremiah & Ray have put together an awesome report that consolidates interviews with vendors and experts. It’s a must read. They underline that the customers are leading the conversation.

Here’s the whole report. I totally appreciate their sharing their findings in the true spirit of social media. We are fortunate that such talented people (both were at Forrester) are willing to openly share their work! Where is your organization at in this scheme? Are you listening to your customers?

The report highlights:

1. Identifies 18 use cases for Social CRM
2. Captures the best practices of 100 customers in 18 use cases.  More to be added over time.

Everyone is putting their predictions out. Mine are always partially based on my work as well as the trends.

1. Companies will expect ROI from their Social Media efforts.

Social Media will shift from being experimental to mainstream. Larger organizations can’t justify embracing it without having it meeting their business objectives. It has to increase their bottom line. I have been working on an ROI series and that will kick off in January. It is possible to establish metrics around your efforts and measure progress! Can you afford not to? How will you grow your program and justify the resources if you’re not showing the progress & return? Olivier Blanchard has a great slide deck on Social Media ROI!

2. The Social Media Specialist (Community Manager) position will become mainstream.

Companies are going to quickly find that they need someone to guide their efforts externally and internally. Social efforts should be extended across the board.Jeremiah Owyang had a great post on how companies should plan a holistic approach and use social beyond marketing. My series will address that and it’s the foundation for my work at Alterian. My list of Responsibilities and Goals for a Community Manager continues to be my most read post.   

3. Cultural shift inside of companies.

This is going to be a challenge for many companies. In order to be successful in connecting with customers, organizations are going to have to have communications channels in place and the openness to utilize the information. I shared a diagram of how a community manager can increase sales & the many departments affected. Management is going to need to have a level of trust for their employees interacting online and understand that the risk can be mitigated by education & training.

4. Social Media Monitoring will be a necessary component

My colleague, John Tonini, made the prediction earlier this year that the market would shift from brands wondering if they should be monitoring social media to ‘What tool should we be using?’. 2010 will see a huge shift in the adoption rate of social media monitoring. January of 2009 kicked off a wave and I foresee that growth in the industry continuing. The tools are going to evolve quickly too. Our customers are driving that process.

5. Agencies and companies will hire data analysts

A new position is emerging. My favorite title is Social Media Metrician. Social Media monitoring tools don’t drive themselves. They need more than a human touch. They require people who enjoy digging into the analytics aspect, looking for patterns and trends. Web analytics people will be able to expand on their roles. Brands and agencies are going to need this new specialized position to drive their marketing intelligence. Marshall Sponder lists many predictions in regard to the role of the data analyst in 2010.

6. Integration of platforms and processes will be critical.

My job as Community Strategist at Alterian has me cognizant that marketing is going to be radically changing. My CEO listed our top 10 predictions at Alterian. One of them is:

There is a proliferation of things to monitor, measure and manage, making it very difficult and time consuming for marketers to pull together the overall picture for integrated campaigns. There will therefore be a move towards single integrated software platforms so that campaign planning and management are integrated with web and email.

Forrester is also looking towards the integration of platfroms too.

7. I will be meeting more of YOU in the new year!

The first six were very serious so I needed to lighten this up! The amount I traveled in the second half of 2009 made me quite aware that I no longer work with a startup! One of the exciting things about 2010 is that my calendar has me on the move! I love the TripIt feature in LinkedIn. It reminds me of who in my network live near my destination. And even more amazing, it shows the trips that coincide. I came close to meeting a friend from Spain when we were both in NYC! So if you use TripIt connect with me and I look forward to meeting you next year!

What would you add to my list?

Everyone wants to maximize the return on their efforts in social media. In my day job with Alterian SM2 (previously Techrigy). I have spent a lot of time working with agencies and brands in identifying how to maximize the most return on their monitoring efforts.

I shared that information last week in a webinar that covers best practices for social media monitoring & reporting.  I included:

• Common Applications of Social Media Monitoring
• Search Design
• Dealing with Noise and Spam
• Reports and Analysis
• Actions Based on Insights that Result in ROI

Here’s the slide deck and the recorded version of the webinar is available.

And you may also be interested in the webinar that Surresh Vital of Forrester presented on how social media monitoring is impacting marketing.

I have a growing library on SlideShare on the topics that I speak about (building community, monitoring, measurement, etc). Check out the widget on the right side of my blog.

Please ask if you have questions.

Michael Leander Nielson of Oslo  invited me to present a webinar on Business Objectives for Social Media Monitoring. It’s a popular topic and we had great attendance!

I covered the following:

• Which objectives to consider when defining your social media monitoring (SMM) strategy
• What types of tools are available
• How to make sense of the data that is gathered
• The ROI and benefits of social media monitoring

During the webinar it was interesting the exchange of Twitter usernames transition to  requesting to continue the conversation in a community. It underlined how people with a similar affinity will want to gather! Everyone is welcome to join our Community .

One of the challenges that I have in presenting webinars is that I feel like I’m talking to an empty space. But that wasn’t the case in this one. There was a lot of conversation happening in the chat box. I had 5 poll questions and that generated more conversation on the side as well making much more interactive. Here are the results:

Many of those that chose ‘Other’ posted their background in the chat.

I found this to be very interesting that the majority were B2B’s!

This explains why we’re so busy. Social Media monitoring isn’t mainstream yet. People are still learning.

Attendees were primarily from Europe, and there were a lot of questions about language capabilities.

It’s really important to know what your objective is for listening.

I will post a link to the recording of the webinar when it is available.