Goal setting can be different depending on the stage of your life. It is good to constantly review and reset your goals. It just happens that as you get older you eventually rename your goals to a “bucket list”.

Mine is pretty simple and best shown in a mindmap format. I hope this gets many of you to start thinking about one as well. Remember openly sharing your goals with friends and others increases the chances that you will achieve them.

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This is an exciting time because of the tremendous assets that SDL has within its family.

At Alterian Social, we’ve evolved our Social Media solutions beyond just social monitoring and listening to encompass analytics and insights. We’ve been on the leading edge of social monitoring and engagement by integrating social insights to answer critical business questions for our customers. We’ve validated the inherent advantages of the social data set – its authenticity, near real-time access, its predictive nature, its scalability and much more.

Now, we can integrate further with SDL’s world-class language translation capabilities with our social media solutions. We can now offer better insights and intelligence globally across cultures and languages. In addition, we will now be able to provide a Social Intelligence Framework that will allow analysis of social, campaign management, email and other data sets in one business intelligence environment. Eventually, I can see that within this environment the opportunity to truly link customer information from these different data sets to offer better customer experience to consumers.

SDL wants  to provide relevant content when and where people want them. Social Intelligence obviously fits well into that.

At new beginnings, we are all allowed to dream. But certain beginnings allow for bigger dreams. My dream is to be a disruptive force in traditional markets (i.e. BI, Market Research), and we’re better armed now than ever to make that a reality.

Most successful and well-adjusted people understand how to progress each day toward one’s overall life goals or “calling” – and they know how to enjoy the journey. This doesn’t mean doing something spectacular each day, but rather being able to appreciate that the small steps are critical parts to making impact on one’s personal life or the workplace.

For example, a Sunday afternoon nap that completely rejuvenates me can be a big step for a productive week ahead. Therefore, that nap should be enjoyed and appreciated, rather than being considered an unproductive guilty pleasure. Playing cards with a grandmother for hours is core to building one’s character and gaining insight on life, and not a waste of time.

You can make the most of each and everyday. It is sustainable with the right perspective and clear overarching goals for your life.

Continuous calibration of our self-perception, therefore, is important, especially for those involved in leadership positions. Still, knowing one’s  strengths and weaknesses is only the first step toward self-improvement. How we react with that knowledge is even more important.

Remember that awareness is a  key step in changing the effect we can have on a team. But we also have to remember that we really can’t change who we are at the core. Many people at a point of self-realization try to transform themselves into someone completely different, which usually leads to a disappointing or disingenuous result. If you are not detailed-oriented, it is unlikely you can make that a personal strength. You, however, can try to lessen the effect of that weakness by acknowledging it and putting people in place to compensate for that weakness – as well as making a better attempt at the details. There are other traits that are more “fixable”, such as impatience, but again, it will be difficult to really change oneself at the core.

Play off of your strengths. Recognize and acknowledge your weaknesses, and be willing to compensate for it from a team perspective, rather than trying to transform yourself into someone you are not.

We are not unique in today’s corporate environment. Most executives and senior managers focus primarily on their own teams and do not make the same commitment to making the leadership team better. The truth is that without a committed, cohesive leadership team, there can be a lot of politics, dysfunctions and inefficiencies throughout a oragnization. The leadership team needs to be the top priority of all its members – only then, can the leaders provide the type of foundation to be able to effectively lead their own teams.

• 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.