July 2nd, 2009 by dnomura
Analysis of social web content is more than just monitoring and counting. Some enterprises might feel that they’re not ready for social media analytics, or that it’s foreign territory.
A better way to look at it is to consider social media a new, important and growing dataset. Regardless of what you as an enterprise do in terms of participating in social media, this data represents incredible value. Now.
Socia media data is valuable to the entire enterprise, not just PR, marketing or product development. Groups such as risk management, HR, investor relations, customer support, sales, finance, manufacturing, operations and more can all benefit from deep social media analytics.
Social media analytics about your brands/products/company/industry augments what you’re already doing. It doesn’t replace anything. It adds to your traditional market research, customer satisfaction survey results and focus group findings.
The difference is that this is content where people are talking about you, but not directly to you. They aren’t answering a specific set of questions or checking boxes. They aren’t under any survey bias or group pressure.
The unstructured nature and potentially huge volume of social web content might make some enterprises reluctant to embrace its analysis. But there’re valuable insights in this roiling sea of data and you need to take advantage. And true, posts are from online users and not a random cross-section or “people on the street.” However their growing ranks and influence cannot be denied.
Analysis of this enterprise-applicable data provides you with an additional set of measurements that can contribute to your business strategies and tactics. Integrate it with your financial analysis, manufacturing analysis, customer support metrics, etc. to make more informed business decisions.
July 2nd, 2009 by agoeldi
Most social media experts will tell you that we live in exciting times. Marketing is shifting from a broadcast model to two-way conversations, they say. Customer service is not about standardized, efficient processes anymore, but about a personal dialogue with real people, not anonymous call center agents.
That’s actually really great news — if you’re a small business.
Small businesses have always differentiated themselves from the big boys by providing superior, more personal customer service. That’s really not new. What is new is that social media tools like Twitter and blogs enable small businesses to provide personal service for geographically distributed customers, maybe even globally.
Unfortunately, this principle doesn’t really scale well for bigger companies. Sure, it would be nice if even huge corporations could suddenly provide service that is as personal as what you’re getting in the small shop around the corner. But you know what? Big companies are big because they are good at standardization. A big scale business — and the low prices for customers that it enables — is only possible through efficient, standardized systems and processes.
Now, the social media experts will tell you that we live in an entirely new era and that the Internet changes everything. Sure, it changes a lot. But how about the need for scalability?
Let’s look at the two companies that are probably the most successful Internet pure plays in history (so far): Amazon and Google. Both companies were tiny startups less than 15 years ago, so nobody can claim that they’re staid old corporations that simply “don’t get it”.
Now, Amazon certainly provides good customer service. The company is highly responsive, no matter what channel you contact it on. Sometimes you get a response within minutes after you send an e-mail request. But that’s because Amazon has huge customer service centers that use sophisticated software. They don’t enter into “conversations” with you, they handle support cases. The Amazon customer service reps don’t build a “relationship” with you, they answer your questions. It’s maybe faster, but not really less anonymous than what you will get at any large company. And that’s even more true with Google, which has an infamously opaque customer service process.
However, both companies provide a highly customized experience. I’ve found many interesting books and other products thanks to Amazon’s recommendations. And Google probably knows more about me than my mother.
But that’s not because they engage in a social relationship with me. It’s because they have scalable, sophisticated systems that collect tons of data about their customers and handle that information in a very efficient way. That’s generally good for both sides: Customers get a better experience, and the companies can count on increased customer loyalty.
This is exactly where social media marketing (and customer service) falls short today: As long as so much manual labor is involved in monitoring social media and engaging with customers through these channels, it is very hard to scale it. Social media is a tremendously important new channel. But bigger companies can only really benefit from it if it integrates with scalable, standardized processes.
That’s why we at Buzzient build scalable social media systems that can integrate with existing business processes and systems. Yes, social media is new and exciting. But to make it useful, it has to scale.
July 1st, 2009 by tbj
With recent outages in the news from Salesforce.com, Google, and most recently Rackspace, it’s a great time to define what we mean at Buzzient about “Enterprise-Class” social media analytics.
To us, having come up in Enterprise computing companies such as Ingres, Oracle, Sybase and others, working with Enterprise customers means we have to live to a higher standard. It’s not acceptable if the service is down, or data is corrupted; someone could lose their jobs or worse. So, we have to design in all sorts of expensive things like redundancy, fail-over, storage management, that end users don’t really ever see until they really need them.
“Enterprise-Class” means that the brains in the box are more important than the coating of wax on the veneer. As social media gains acceptance with corporations, executives need to think carefully about whether the flavor of the month product really meets their needs long term.
