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Archive for the ‘Digital Marketing’ Category

When EF Hutton Talks, People Listen; Today’s EF Huttons Are Talking On Social

Posted in Digital Marketing, social media, tagged , , , , on May 8, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Following up on my last post about how conversations have always been leading indicators of what is about to come, I remembered some great E.F. Hutton commercials in the late 1970′s, early 1980′s. Anyone who was around in the US during that time would remember that when “E.F. Hutton talks, people listen”. I still think that this was one of the best ad campaigns of all time.
E.F. Hutton, an American stock brokerage firm, eventually became part of Smith Barney (subsidiary of Citicorp) during the consolidation period of financial service companies before now having been merged into Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.
With social media data set, we can listen to many influencers such as E.F. Hutton. And shouldn’t all brands be listening to what these influencers are saying?
Here are some of my favorite E.F. Hutton commercials.

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A Simple Way to Look at Big Data

Posted in business, Digital Marketing, social media, tagged , , , on April 29, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Big Data, Big Data. Yes, we’re capturing more information than ever. The web, social media and large business applications are all capturing an unprecedented amount of information. BUT why is big data even a big deal? Well, if analyzed properly, the trends and insights revealed from Big Data can be extremely important in gaining a competitive advantage in business.
Let’s use the analogy of professional basketball. There was a time in the NBA when film study and scouting opponents were not overly complicated and most teams focused mainly on their own strengths to prepare for a game.
Now with an abundance of information, film study and effective scouting are critical to a team’s success. Coaches and scouts have thoroughly analyzed each player throughout the league looking at tendencies, strengths and weaknesses. They know that a certain player is 30% less likely to finish at the rim if you make him go to his left. Another player fake pumps a shot 80% of the time before crossing-over to his right. These types of insight are vital competitive advantage in the league.
A business landscape is much more complex with considerably more variables. Yet, not all businesses are good at “scouting” the marketplace. Better understanding the tendencies and motivators of existing and prospective customers can be the difference between success and failure of a strategic product launch. Big Data, especially through the social data set, also has the promise of showing predictive trends with conversations that can be leading indicators of what’s on the consumer minds.
Effective use of Big Data, however, is not just about the right technical software and hardware framework. Investing in new technologies is useless without a skilled and experienced team to properly utilize these tools to support strategic planning and action. Today, building such a capable team is a big challenge that is not being considered enough when architecting a Big Data solution.

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Relevance of Language in Social Intelligence

Posted in Digital Marketing, social media, tagged , , , , on May 27, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Visiting Singapore again was great after about five years. The food was bomb as I remembered it. Fusion of Malay, Indian and Chinese foods is a mouth-watering experience not soon forgotten. The government has done a good job of continuously attracting businesses here as well as some good entrepreneurs with progressive investment and tax policies.

Other than the responsive audiences from our SDL Social Intelligence roadshow events, one of my favorite parts was visiting SDL’s language services office there. SDL is a world leader in language translation services and software. The Singapore office houses translation services for five different South East Asian Languages. Talk about an international favor — the office had a great vibe.

For me, one of the most intriguing elements of the SDL acquisition of our Social Intelligence business was the potential of leveraging the language capabilities into our social intelligence platform. Relevance is very critical in social media and what is more relevant than language? We are working very closely with the machine translation as well and language services group to make sure that our Social Intelligence roadmap includes the integration with these capabilities.

More than 50% of social media data today is not in English and growing. The ability to translate and understand multiple languages from a social intelligence perspective will be a real differentiator in the near future, if not already.

Bhagwat Pant, General Manager – Singapore

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In Social Intelligence, Aim beyond Today’s Innovations

Posted in Digital Marketing, social media, tagged on February 29, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

In the fast pace world of digital marketing, changing with the times may not be enough. The target needs to be well beyond where the market leaders are today, but where the market is going tomorrow. Use the competitor’s investment in addressing today’s standard against them and aim for some target that leapfrog today’s innovations.

Too often, I hear various sales teams who want their product to catch up with the leaders in features and functionalities. The “me too” strategy of playing catch up with competitors is a difficult one unless you have more resources than anyone else.

If you can think ahead of how the market is being viewed today, and invest in strategies that address future demand and value, you can outflank your competitors with modest resources. In the world of social media intelligence, this is truly validating the social data set to give insight and foresight in compelling ways. Social Intelligence is just getting going. The value it can provide is far beyond today’s monitoring and listening platforms.

I’m excited to be sharing my views in this regard at SDL Innovate 2012 next week.

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Three Social Thunderstorms: George Colony of Forrester

Posted in Digital Marketing, social media, tagged , on December 11, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Forrester CEO George Colony predicts the end of the web and the emergence of “post social”. What do you think?

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Five Segments in Social Listening to Help Plan Your Move

Posted in business, Digital Marketing, entrepreneur, tagged , , , , , on December 8, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

I’m a big believer in the Social Media Listening space. I started a company in July, 2009 to provide reports and insights using social data and it has since changed its name three times through a merger and two acquisitions. Yet, the opportunities are just beginning. If you are an entrepreneur or an investor interested in the Social Listening Space, start by segmenting the opportunities into five overlapping but distinctive segments: Social Monitoring, Integrated Campaigns, Social Analytics, Social Consulting and Social CRM.

  • Social Monitoring is how it all began. It started mostly with those within the PR function tracking brand mentions that eventually evolved into customer engagement strategies and technological extensions. Currently, there are more than 400 Social Listening and Monitoring tools in the market that range from free (hopeless business plan) to enterprise pricing models. These tools will need to integrate with one or more of the other segments or become much more vertically focused to remain relevant in the future.
  • As always, brands will spend a lot of money on campaigns/ads. Social is fast being accepted as not only a legitimate but an effective platform for ad spends. Marketers must now think about an integrated campaign that includes social as part of the strategy. With all the “purchase intents” being tweeted and focused “segments” that are available on social platforms (Facebook, Linkedin), there will be a lot more opportunities moving ahead.
  • Social Analytics will disrupt some very large existing markets, such as market research and business intelligence. The more complex and useful application of the social data set to derive insights will change these worlds as we know it. The reason that insights have always been so expensive is because access to relevant data was so limited and difficult. Now, social platforms provide access to an authentic and abundant data set at very low cost in near real-time.  Think about that. The biggest application of social data won’t really be for the current “social” buyers (PR). It will be for those who are focused on answering critical business questions. It just so happens that the social data set will provide the best and most cost-effective insights, if applied correctly. At Alterian Social , we provide predictive analytics.
  • Social Consulting will be one of the fastest growing segments for years to come. With the incredible speed and impact of Social to all brands, they will look outside the traditional agencies for specialized help. Thus, there will be great growth of companies like Dachis Group, Altimeter, among many others that are about to take advantage of this growing service demand. For entrepreneurs, this may be the safest startup idea given the relatively low start-up costs and easy path to positive cashflow of service companies. Whatever brands spend on technology platforms in Social Listening, they will eventually spend twice as much on services if not more.
  • Social CRM should be the biggest bet and the most exciting. Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Radian6 (at a high premium) was with the vision of Social CRM. The problem is that Social CRM means different things to different people. The trust is, however, the idea of a 360 degree view of customers including their social activities may just be too ambitious. The path to Social CRM will start with baby steps and the market will settle for something much less the ideal promise. Take your chances at your own risk here.

As an entrepeneur, follow your passion and your tolerance for risk. As an investor, I would recommend picking 3-5, or 5-7 startups within one of these segments rather than investing across the segments. That should offer the best chance at success in this crazy, disruptive force called Social Listening.

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Social Intelligence Will Provide Compelling Insights & Foresight

Posted in business, Digital Marketing, digital media, social media, tagged , , on June 24, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Social media is changing the way we interface with the web. Rather than searching (i.e. Google) for content, we are starting to read more and more content distributed from our social networks. As this trend continues, social intelligence will become increasingly important. This isn’t about just tracking brand mentions and daily volumes. Social intelligence will be leveraging social data for compelling insights and foresight as not yet common.

Social data has many unique elements that lend itself to insights.

  • Highly Responsive: Can collect & respond to any timescale
  • Specific: Can relate to specific activities to conversations at a defined point in time
  • Highly Predictive: Social conversations are leading indicators
  • Longitudinal: We can look back & track forward
  • In Context: Feedback is pure & customer generated (not contrived)
  • Provides unique access to competitor activity
  • Can provide a 360 degree view of a customer (not just about their relationship to your brand)
  • Highly Scalable: Provides access to high volumes of data & a global dataset

The immediate evolution of social intelligence will be about finding compelling insights and foresight within the social dataset. That is why different industries have been acquiring small social monitoring tools companies. They want ”access to the data” to come up with these insights that is relevant in their industry. In the end, the successful social monitoring tools will mature to offer not just the data but also a framework that  visualizes these insights and foresight in meaningful ways. When industry consolidation happens at that point, these companies will be at a much higher valuation.

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Vietnam Office Wins Over Visitors

Posted in business, Digital Marketing, travel, tagged , on April 29, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Now it’s almost become routine. Work visitors from all over the world coming through the Alterian Vietnam office in Ho Chi Minh City, leaving with warm memories and a real affinity for the team.

This past week we had 10 visitors in the office. One group was there to launch projects for a wonderful new client, who has really created a partnership model with us as his company’s social media vendor. The team worked hard and endeared themselves to him with real insights, dedication and warm hospitality.

Our Vietnam team members have an authentic culture of enthusiasm and collectivism that just draws visitors in. They love doing things together. They think about activities from a group perspective, rather than from an individual perspective. They are instinctively inclusive. They don’t act entitled, but thankful for each day together.

I think our client knows he will get great work and effort from the team. He also now knows he has a group of people who really are interested in him as a person and cares about his success.

A second visiting group was there for our quarterly leadership meeting. We started scheduling these meetings in Vietnam because of the cost savings of hosting them there. However, now it could cause a mini-revolt if I tried to move the meetings to other cities. They say the positive energy and gracious hospitality of the Vietnam staff creates the best environment for these off-site meetings. Not to mention most of them are addicted to the Vietnamese coffee.

To date, every visiting person has been complimentary about their experience with the Vietnam office. That’s real credit to the team and its leadership.

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Social Media Market Opportunities Moving Forward

Posted in business, Digital Marketing, entrepreneur, tagged , , , , on April 10, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

It’s been a whirlwind of a week here in the UK. After the resignation of Alterian’s CEO, David Eldridge, I arrived to share my ideas about moving our ‘Social’ line of business forward in the upcoming fiscal year.

The opportunity ahead remains tremendous. With Radian6 being acquired by Salesforce.com a couple of weeks ago and then Kana buying social media company, Overtone, the social media monitoring and listening tools space is red hot, yet still fragmented with an increasing power vacuum. Some may question the viability of these tools as a stand alone play. My thought is that there is such a play but not the way these companies are positioned currently.

Social media monitoring has to be about worthwhile insights moving forward. Social consulting companies now are becoming more popular as brands realize insights come from smart people observing the social data. Eventually, even these types of insights will become more commoditized and will need to be less of a manual effort. That means the social media tools themselves will have to become smarter, which is how they will be able to survive and then thrive as a stand-alone play.

There is a way a better way to collect, organize and interpret social data than what is being done today. So, success will not necessarily be doing what is currently being done better, but doing things differently overall. The market remains exciting and I look forward to its continuing maturity.

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