• 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.

Integrating the teams and building for the future

Succession planning is a critical part of management that is often overlooked. Great leaders develop great teams. Some mistake charismatic people as naturally effective leaders. These people can be very effective in doing amazing things by themselves but often times over-shadow their team, not allowing others to grow around them.

If one thinks in terms of a succession plan, then it creates a context by which you know how to develop the next level of management. What would be the gaps if you were to leave? How can you get your team to be prepared to succeed without you? In that  context, you will properly develop your team – and eventually make your job much easier.

We have a great team of social media analysts in our Vietnam office. I would conjecture that they are one of the most knowledgable social monitoring and listening teams in the world. However, I was always a bit concerned about how to develop leaders within the group, as we currently have expats running the office. Succession planning has been a challenge that I’ve really pushed to the current managers.  Since my last visit, I can already see a huge difference in the confidence and willingness to lead by some of the local team members. They are willing to be accountable. This is a true credit to the current leaders there.

Now, I’m very confident that not only will we have amazing social analysts with world-class domain expertise, but we will have sustainable local leadership there in the near future to lead us forward.

What’s your succession plan? Don’t be afraid of it, embrace it!

Here are social media monitoring tools recently acquired by variety of industries (CRM, PR, Market Research, Retail):

- Techrigy

- Biz360

-Drillteam

-Stepchange

-Crayon

-Jitterjam

-Evolve24

-Sysomos

-Overtone

-Kosmix

-Radian6

How about these consultancies, which all focus on Social Media and were recently acquired?

-6 consulting

-Intrepid

-Powered

-Stuzo

-Archrival

-Xplane

What’s the play moving forward? There’s a race to figure that out. Exciting times! 

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.

We met at Wild Ginger for the first time in December, 2009. Misia Tramp and I talked about leveraging the available social media data for market research projects. She obviously knew her subject matter as she had been providing market research services through her company, Intrepid, for more than 11 years.

Misia had charisma that was further enhanced by her proper British accent. I was intrigued about the rigor of market research methods that could be used with social media data to gain truly useful insights. We left that lunch with just a promise to reconnect, but my mind was already racing ahead about the possibilities.

Lift9 had expertise around social media data and analytics. We had an improving team of cost-effective analysts at our research center in Ho Chi Minh. Intrepid had agro rhythms, methods and rigor from market research projects that could potentially be applied to social data. They had a bigger revenue base, but struggled with margins that would be improved with Lift9’s cost structure and focus on accessible digital information.

My first proposal was to merge Lift9 with only the US entity of Intrepid. In the end, however, we decided to merge both the UK and US operations of Intrepid with Lift9.  Misia’s business partner, Liz High, had been running Intrepid UK.

We put together an operations agreement in late January, 2010 to test whether we could merge the two companies’ products. Meanwhile, we concurrently kicked off the due diligence of the deal.

The signs were encouraging from the start. Misia was able to get more attention from her client base by incorporating social elements into her pitch. In many cases we were able to deliver faster, better and more cost-effective outputs right away.

The biggest challenges were at the speed we needed to improve our cash flow, which had been a deteriorating issue for Intrepid, and how to effectively merge the two different cultures into working cohesively together. We allowed some turnover of people in the beginning, and focused on driving sales and improving margins and cash flow.

On May 3, 2010, we finalized the merger with Lift9 taking controlling interest, but keeping the Intrepid brand. From there, the financial performance began to improve so dramatically, I started to think about raising capital to acquire additional boutique market research companies that had solid client bases. We now had tangible proof that combining social elements with traditional market research methods provided compelling insights that resulted in better sales traction and improved financial results.

The management team approved plans to raise money for acquisitions, which included up to 11 potential transactions within a three-year period.

Right about then, I received a call from an Alterian senior executive about a possible service partnering deal using its social media monitoring tool, SM2. When he asked to come visit us, I had an inkling our world was about to change yet again.

My advice to entrepreneurs is to keep improving your companies’ stories through different possibilities. Don’t get too stuck in just what you are trying to do with your current resources. Understand what’s happening in the market around you and find ways to improve your story within that context.

Everyone loved the idea conceptually, but securing client contracts was a whole another matter.

We started selling our social media solution in late October, 2009. This had given us time to set up and train our researchers in Vietnam. When presented with our sample Lift9 reports on social media, people in the industry seemed genuinely impressed. We secured a few quick contracts, making us extremely optimistic about our future.

The market was young and immature, and a lot of bad social media reports were being delivered by agencies, setting the bar low.

Our research center was getting better with each report. These researchers in Vietnam were smart and were able to apply new learning to each and every new report.

Then, we hit a slight wall. We had a stretch where the sales cycle seemed to take longer. We discovered the following problems:

1. We secured the “low-lying” fruit opportunities within our personal networks, which explains the initial success
2. We had trouble competing against agencies that were burying their social media monitoring cost into their retainers, thus making cost-savings a difficult benefit to sell
3. A lot of organizations didn’t appropriately budget for social media intelligence, so internal groups had a hard time securing money for such support
4. The insights in our reports were interesting to start, but we even had a difficult time articulating the value of such reports on an on-going month-to-month basis

The last point (#4), in particular, bothered us. My background was in Business Intelligence before Web Analytics. I knew that data could give invaluable insights if one KNEW which business questions to ask. We had been too focused on our cost-effective and speed-to-report competitive advantages. We needed more compelling insights than just the monthly change in the volume of a brand’s mentions on social media.

If we had better applications for social data, the potential truly would be tremendous. Lift9 was already getting a lot of attention just because we were in the hot space of social media. We now were looking for something more disruptive to the market than the general social media monitoring efforts. What would it be?

It was around this time in December that I was introduced to Misia Tramp, President of Intrepid US.

We had gotten to near break-even business relatively quickly because of our low-cost model. It would have been easy to just focus on getting to a good cash flow business, but we wanted to build something bigger than that. Such perspective forced us be extremely honest with ourselves and realistic about our situation.  It kept us motivated to find that “disruption” factor, and would not let us be content with our initial progress.

My advice to entrepreneurs (or businessmen) is to be honest with your situation and realistic about what still needs to be done.  Acknowledge the challenges ahead so they become less daunting and you and your team can prepare to overcome them. A lot of people at this stage tend to bury their heads in the sand.

It was shortly after we signed on as a customer of Techrigy’s SM2 last year that we heard about Alterian’s acquisition of the social media tools company.

Now, our company, Intrepid, has just been acquired by Alterian as well. Obviously, I applaud Alterian’s vision. Together, we will be able to provide a very compelling solution around social media intelligence.

The growth in the adoption of social media has been astounding, yet we’re still just in the beginning stages. Social data is growing exponentially, and buried in it are gold mines of insights. I believe getting at them properly requires both a robust platform as well as good human effort.

Alterian offers a world-class integrated marketing platform. Intrepid offers services that provide insights around social data. Together, we extend each other’s reach and complement one another’s strengths. Alterian customers and partners now will have accessible support around how to use social data.  Our analysts can do the digging of the data that uncovers the gold mine of actionable insights.

As part of our integrated launch plan, Alterian has prepared service packages that will immediately add value to those deploying Atlerian’s SM2.  Once customers and partners understand what and how to ask compelling marketing and research questions around social data, the platform will become much more valuable. I’m confident that our social media expertise will be a welcomed augmentation to Alterian’s marketing platform for both customers and partners.

For Intrepid, we now have a solid marketing platform behind us. This allows us to be a legitimate player in coming up with over-arching social intelligence solutions that are more efficient and eloquent.  Alterian’s global reach really offers a tremendous opportunity for all of us to push thought-leadership in social data solutions across different markets.

It’s still a brave new world in terms of social media intelligence. And I’m very excited to have joined forces with Alterian to make our impact.

Here is a link to our video about the acquisition:

http://www.yourbusinesschannel.com/vip/9a55f630-8afa-4703-8f4b-0ab2842a001a/bf4469d8-4da4-45bc-9ab0-43d153257422/540

Done deal. David Eldridge, CEO Alterian

We as humans walked and ran for majority of our history. Then, the invention of wheels disrupted our lifestyle and allowed us to be much more mobile. The Mongols disrupted the world by using horses in warfare. The US became a connected nation through the disruptive force of rail roads.

In modern commercial context, everyone now understands how disruptive the iPhone has been to the mobile industry. It changed the positioning of mobile carriers upside down. Another obvious example is the internet. The world wide web, which started as a place to put your company brochure on a web site, has changed how retail, customer support, and almost every aspect of businesses are run. That’s disruption.

In business, we constantly look for those disruptions. They represent opportunities for innovative, smaller companies to take market share. For forward-thinking entrepreneurs, these times are fertile ground to create something big. Too often entrepreneurs look for opportunities just to fill the void within the inefficiencies of large, bureaucratic organizations. Building a company during a disruptive period in any industry provides greater, richer opportunities.

Intrepid is building a company within the social media space, which is a disruptive force in of itself. Right now, I see great opportunities to apply social media data into the rigor of academic market research. Others obviously understand this as well. Forrester just came out with a report on integrating social media to research. The disruption in this space is being validated.

As a person interested in company building, such opportunity is all you can ask for. Now, we just need to out-execute competitors who see the same opportunity. That, my friends, is the game that makes everyday so much fun.

Since we were little kids, we learned to project different persona’s depending on the situation, environment or the company around us. I know I certainly projected myself differently in church than I did around my jock friends in a locker room — and still more differently around girls whom I liked. That’s part of being human. We project ourselves differently depending on the environment and one personal persona doesn’t have to be any more real than another.

Think about how that translates to the social media platforms. They allow us to have various persona’s. I tried once to consolidate my persona’s and have standard status updates. Failed. It bothered me to compromise one persona for another. I felt more unauthentic trying to standardize my persona’s than when I really had differing ones.

Here are my current standard social media persona’s:

Facebook (Friend) Persona: A friend. A family person. Share personal characteristic as a guy’s guy who is a bit of bully, fun-loving, thrash-talking but genuinely engaged with friends and family.

Twitter (Tribe) Persona: An entrepreneur. A social media enthusiast in Seattle. Want to give personality to my company and its work environment. Share thoughts and information about digital marketing, especially around social media. Share thoughts on company-building and leading people. Those interested are my tribesmen.

Blog (Kool Uncle) Persona: Meet John Song, your uncle, big brother or your boss. Mentor. Story teller. Like to give advice. Interpret my experiences. A discussion over coffee or a drink.

LinkedIn (Resume) Persona: An Executive Networking. Work history and recommendations. Updates relate to the progress of my company or insights around my work, or to recruit talented people.

Foursquare (Food Critic) Persona: An urbanite who loves getting together for happy hours and after hour hot spots. You should almost hear my laughter with friends. I must admit this is relatively new platform for me.

Xbox Live (12-year-old) Persona: PES2010. Madden2009. Thrash-talker who CANNOT back up all the talk with his game. Silly, but competitive.

What are your persona’s? You need more than one. When you are comfortable with that, you will enjoy social media (and yourself) much more.