A Framework for Social Analytics

Jermiah Owyang wrote a post about a new report from Altimeter about social media analytics. As a marketing impact measurement researcher, I always think that social media ROI should be a priority. The businesses are realizing this as well. You can download or read this report below

Social Business Forecast 2011

Earlier I had shared a report by Altimeter’s Jeremiah Owyang. Below is the presentation from the same report. It will help you in understanding the key points if you don’t have time to read through the entire report. My students should look at slides 19 and 20 carefully where the priorities in social media domain are depicted. Not surprisingly ROI calculation is the most critical issue.

After the spring break, we are going to spend time in understanding social media and web analytics. The students will be setting up dashboards to monitor and evaluate the performance of their social media campaigns. Personally I am quite excited about this because performance metrics is my research area!

 

2011 for Social Media

I found this nice interview of Jeremiah Owyang on NBC. I couldn’t embed it here in the blog and therefore it is available from my website. I will try to embed it here again later [Update: See the video below].

Because the interview is about 9 minutes, I will summarize the important points here -

1. Although the social media adoption among consumers is growing exponentially, the corporates are still very slow in matching the spending on social media strategies. The spending is going up in single digits.

2. Just because someone is young and fresh out of the college doesn’t make that person a good hire for social media strategist’s job! What matters is the business orientation and not the age.

3. There are several social media “experts” or “consultants” in the silicon valley. Many joined the bandwagon just because it is a booming area or they lost the jobs in the recession. There will be a possible backlash against these quacks.

4. Many social media consultants realize that they will be rendered useless once the social media permeates through all the organization. Therefore they have an incentive to not let that happen.

5. Many corporates still don’t get social media. They place their advertisements passively in the space rather than engaging the consumers with interactive form of advertising. Twitter is currently the most preferred platform for such conversational advertising.

6. Facebook valuation is difficult to believe when the growth in corporate social media spending is so small. However, Facebook is building itself as a platform where their revenue is coming from multiple sources such as advertising, games, etc.

Update:  I could find a way to embed this video in WordPress!

How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Budgets

In the last two classes we discussed how social media will change the corporate culture. Of course the issue of reverse causality is nagging–it is perhaps the more open corporations that adopt social media better! But I sidestep it for the time being in this post.

Altimeter has released a new report on social media budget allocation. A critical finding is–

Novice programs must focus on getting their internal teams in order; Intermediate programs must scale customer-facing initiatives; and Advanced programs must integrate social business throughout the enterprise.

This is a nice roadmap for the organizational change! It is important to note that rather than focusing on setting up Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, blogs, creating widgets, making smartphone apps, etc., novice programs should first hire and train the staff to manage social media. The shift in the corporate culture will be visible for the advanced programs.

The great news for my students is that corporates are gearing up hiring of staff to manage social media!

Want to be a Corporate Social Strategist?

Altimeter Group recently released a report (below) on the career path of corporate social strategists. Since many of you are interested in a possible career in social media, I thought that you will find this report helpful.

The Corporate Social Strategist is the business decision maker for social media programs – who provides leadership, roadmap definition, and governance; and directly influences the spending on technology
vendors and service agencies.

A critical insight from the report is that the social strategists took the initiative to implement social media programs in their organizations. This confirms my belief that at this point the firms that have successfully deployed social strategies have entrepreneurial spirit. The report warns that career path may just end up in a reactive role behind the “social media help desk!”

I will write more about the background of a typical social strategist. Not surprisingly many of them have marketing background.