Last Wednesday night at a fireside chat at the Vilna Shul, I had the pleasure of listening to Misiek Piskorski talk about his research of social networking behavior. Misiek is an Associate Professor of Strategy at Harvard Business  School where he teaches a second-year elective entitled "Competing with Social Networks". Misiek has been studying users interact in Facebook to identify their motivations and habits and he had some interesting observations — most notably, that 78% of users are active "stalkers". That’s right — most of us are just interested in looking at other people’s profiles, pictures, relationship status and conversations rather than producing our own content.

Overall, the main objective for users in social networks is to build relationships. But more broadly speaking, Misiek covered the motivations of users, how businesses can leverage this activity in their strategy development, and what in the way of technology is here and coming to help us in these interactions.

For those marketers that have experimented with social media for the last year and experienced some success and failure, they have learned that there is a value using social media and it resonates in many ways – better organic search results, increased web site referrals and activity, etc. For most, the best they can do is focus on episodic measures of success that include referrals, click-through and open rates. A few are honing in on more meaningful metrics that include returns on investment (ROIs), engagement value, and other more substantial metrics that align with existing channel data metrics.

In the beginning (somewhere between 2003 and 2005), lightning struck the primordial pool of social conversation and ignited the first evolutionary step towards understanding and the ability to measure.  

The Rise of Tactical Social Media Monitoring

From that primordial social pool, lurched a new species called Social Media Monitoring Platforms. These simple data aggregators execute searches and track mentions of user-selected key words.  While useful for tracking “operational metrics” (Forrester Wave Q1 ’09) like volume of mention, extent of reach, etc, the lack of advanced natural language processing limited their ability to provide true strategic insight.  As the demands of the environment increased (brands began to leverage monitoring capabilities), this tactical myopia set the stage for a more complex and evolved species. 

The Development of Strategic Social Media Listening

Forrester defines these platforms as “a technology and analytics infrastructure that mines traditional, online and social sources to extract and deliver insights to [help] shape strategy.”  The ability to integrate multiple classes of data, coupled with natural language processing, allowed users to range far from the tactical pool and deep into strategic forests.  However, the burden of manually inputting large portions of that data and the inability of these systems to automatically quantify performance with “hard” metrics limited a user’s ability to focus those wanderings on a clear destination or goal. 

The Dawn of Social Intelligence

Today companies are growing increasingly comfortable with the idea that the social conversation can be mined for valuable information.  As laggards begin to explore monitoring, yesterday’s early adopters are synthesizing information into strategy-driving insight where possible.   

The leaders of forward-thinking companies like Cisco and Coca Cola continue to set the bar for leveraging social media in new ways, even as the space becomes increasingly crowded with late adopters. These companies seem to understand that a top-down culture of protectionism and control actually inhibits a company’s ability to leverage the valuable and game-changing catalysts offered by open-source programming and social networking.

Often at odds with the antiquated corporate system of exclusion, open-source coding makes technology cheap and widely-accessible.  Companies who empower their communities to further develop, expand and improve on their ideas are more likely to find primed and receptive markets for those ideas. 

Coupling that effort with available Social Media tools makes it increasingly cost-effective to create an honest, open and engaging dialogue around those company-fostered ideas.  The rate and volume of information that can be published and shared in social networks, provides an unprecedented conduit for reaching new audiences and engaging them in deeper interactions. (See Chess Media's approach to the new socially driven business process.)

As we stated in our last post, Social Media Monitoring Provider Evaluation, we've surveyed the Social Media Monitoring and Listening category's entrants and experienced them either directly through test-drives or vicariously through the related experiences and research of individuals just like you.

During our research, 4 common and key needs, relative to the category's current offerings, rose to the surface.