This was a long week and the insights keep piling up - in this case, Jeremiah Owyang's latest matrix on Brand Monitoring, Social Analytics, Social Insights was posted today and had some pretty perceptive comments in what it said and what left out.
I suspect Altimeter Group does a bit more than create matrix diagrams like the one on Brand Monitoring, as I find matrices both satisfying yet limiting, especially if that's all we ever get to see publicly (as an unpaid client). A presentation by Christina Stahler of the Consumer Insights group at Sony Electronics, a Altimeter client how I heard at the Corporate Social Media Summit last week suggests the matrix diagrams we see are very basic compared to what Sony actually gets from Altimeter.
I suspect Altimeter had a lot to do with the strategy of the Customer Insights case study presented last week - but that is just my guess.
Anyway, the Matrix diagram suggests that Brand Monitoring as an application by itself doesn't cut it anymore and is a commodity - and vendors need to move up the food chain to Social CRM to survive within the next 12-18 months - that's what the matrix says to me.
I disagree with some of the examples - Alterian bought Techrigy last year but hasn't added any noticeably new features to the platform while their competitors are constantly improving their offerings every few months. Buying a platform like Techrigy and fitting it into a larger Alterian Schema does not necessarily lead to any better results for Alterian clients unless Alterian provides hooks from Techrigy into it's other platforms, and it doesn't. Still, I like Techrigy as a platform - I just happen to notice every so often they haven't really added anything new, just fixed bugs in the original platform they bought last year.
Plus the matrix below is more interesting for companies it left out like Radian6 and Sysomos - companies that are among those rapidly reinventing themselves. Is Jeremiah implying both companies are among the Brand Monitoring Solutions that are becoming so commonplace as to be a commodity? I don't think so - I think this is a limitation of how the matrix was created and a lot was left out that should have been included.
Category | Description and Example | Current State | What no one tells you |
Brand Monitoring | Aware. Simple aggregation and reporting -without any real intelligence. These technologies scrape and aggregate what's being discussed by a topic, channel, or group and derive alerts and workflows. | Commodity technology. I started a list in 2006, yet now there are over 145 indexed by E&Y employees. These technologies do not provide intelligence, or predictive behavior modeling. | The smart brand monitoring companies have already started their integration plans. They don't want to end up being trilobites and have become part of a larger system: Recent acquisitions include Scoutlabs+Lithium(community), Filtrbox+Jive(Community), Techrigy+Alterian(WCM) and others. |
Social Analytics | Intelligent. Derive meaning what social data means. These companies provide intelligence and answer "Why are 500 people a week tweeting about goat milk?" Companies who derive intelligence from social data like Crowd Factory, Crimson Hexagon. | Emerging features are coming around. These tools help true data analysts derive meaning from patterns, and how it influences large scale commerce. | This space is still evolving, and expect that the business intelligence software vendors like IBM Cognos, SAS, Qlikview, Oracle, and beyond to start acquiring data streams in the social space and coupling with their engines within the next 12-18 months. Even analyst Esteban Kolsky agrees |
Social Insights | Predictive. These companies can predict what consumers will do based upon social data. I've seen early examples from community platform Lithium who's able to predict within 45 minutes if a community will be successful based on comparing to historical data, but for the most part, that's limited to community data -not the whole social web. | Not here, yet. Right now, systems are just aggregating content to make meaning out of it, yet there's no clear set of companies that are able to truly provide predictive recommendations. | Look for companies who have data across a value network. What's that? Data in multiple companies from manufactured, supplier, retailer, to consumer. Expect companies like Bazaarvoice to be able to yield insights as they collect data from multiple manufactures like HP, Dell and are used on retailer sites like BestBuy |
Getting onto the web journal - I think it's ironic that Apple's iOS 4 And iPhone 4 One-Up The iPad considering how much the iPad has been hyped. I wonder if the iPad is all hype anyway (even though I want one) - my friend Sebastian Wenzel says he can't do anything useful on his and is thinking of selling it. On the other hand I hear people swearing by the iPad - I guess it's all in how your expect to use it.
And - consider Google & Twitter Fight for Your Right to Break the News First so our problems might go well beyond the tablet and back to the content we have to work with.
Consider buying behavior on the web - did you realize Woman buy most of the brand related stuff online - see 85% of All Brand Purchases are Made by Women - Says Unicast Report?
And then there's a post and video by SeoMOZ that says buying paid links work - but it's possible that if things go wrong it might be better off not going down that path as Google is policing and it could get information from a number of different avenues. I personally think SEOMoz and much of the rest of the brood is afraid of angering Google - so they say Paid Links work, then go back and praise Google for catching those who transgress. In this sense, Google acts as the KGB or Gestapo - putting offenders in the Gulag and tossing out the key so once having offended a site can sit in Google prison for an eternity.
And my friends at Clickable are now working to consolidate paid search campaigns SearchManager Consolidates Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, & Facebook Ad Campaigns.
When we think about Social Media Monitoring - mostly it's about a brand monitoring itself or a person monitoring their reputation - but it's also, increasingly, the Government monitoring you and me - monitoring all of us - The Devil Is In The Details: DHS Monitoring Web & "Wrong" Words - and the truth is the Government - and in fact, many Governments are already monitoring citizens and have been for some time. What do you think the CIA's investment in Visible Technologies was for? Some legitimate reasons to monitor are terrorism - but it probably doesn't stop there - the IRS and state governments are monitoring too based on what I have read in the recent past.
Are we all in segmented lists governments are keeping on us? Probably. Let's hope the systems they're using to identify threats are much better than what we're seeing commercially now - else we're all screwed.
But on a more positive note - those who survive the DHS spying on us online (which you have to admit is pretty easy for the Government to do) - if you want to build a Facebook app then KickApps make it much easier to do - see KickApps Launches Facebook App Development Suite
White label social networking startup KickApps has launched a new development suite that aims to simplify the Facebook app development for marketers, brand managers and developers. The KickApps App Studio now allows anyone, including non-programmers, to create rich media Facebook applications.The suite's ease of use is obtained through drag and drop functionality, allowing users to create and deploy custom video players, social widgets and rich media ad units. Applications can serve as a Facebook fan page or as a tab on a Facebook page.
That's all for now - there might have been more to put into this post - had to draw the line somewhere though.