I recently accepted an invitation to meet with the CMO of an Internet analytics firm for a briefing and demo of her company’s flagship dashboard product. It was interesting, but the demo and presentation flow had flaws that overshadowed promising aspects of the product. I immediately started providing feedback, including some unexpected and blunt criticism.

I emailed her back later that day and thanked her for sharing her product and company story, and underscored my feedback was offered with only the best intentions (to help). She quickly replied that my comments were valuable and to the point, and they surfaced shortcomings that were preventing her team from realizing their vision. And then she asked if she could follow up with me during her next New York trip to provide an update and collect more feedback. I enthusiastically replied “of course!”

I can be a tough critic, so I admire this CMO for her thick skin and receptivity to my unvarnished response. It opened the door for rapid improvement and ongoing collaboration. It’s important to remember that constructive feedback is a gift, even if abrasive. And exchanging it usually takes courage from both the giver and the receiver. And any hesitance on one side can ruin it for both.

Too often people don’t provide honest feedback because they’re worried the person receiving it will react defensively. Worse, they don’t provide feedback because they’re afraid the person receiving it will be offended. Those are bad outcomes.

In my case, I’m satisfied we achieved the optimal outcome.

(Photo credit: Matt Hamm)

It’s been about two years since I left the social media measurement space as startup marketing guy at the company most consider the pioneer and leader. While now immersed in the search-technology world, I enjoy keeping up with social media measurement for several reasons: It’s fascinating. It produces insights that surface the human condition. It’s slowly creeping into major business processes, including at my own current startup and the search industry. I also remain close friends with former colleagues and smart people in the social media industry (and only five years ago we didn’t even call it an industry).

Because of my personal history and ongoing interest, I frequently get pitched by emerging measurement providers – not for my business, but for feedback, advice and coverage on this blog. In fact, I had four such encounters in the past eight weeks.

I’m too far removed to offer meaningful feedback on detailed features and functionality of individual social media measurement companies. Besides, there are others who specialize in those sorts of ratings and bake-offs. However, I can provide some macro observations and trends. In fact, I believe my time away, working at a search-technology startup, has helped me better understand this burgeoning space.

Caveat: my observations are not necessarily true of every single measurement company, but probably most. So here are my big ones…

Connecting Data To Action

I’m hopeful for emerging players with strong technology and innovative approaches that connect the dots from data to business action with measurable impact. This void remains a great opportunity (and sometimes sore thumb) in the social media measurement field, and is indicative of the segment’s infancy. Despite gradual technology advancements, most meaningful social media measurement contributions tend to rely heavily on bruit-force human analysis, interpretation and recommendations.

Product Versus Service Agendas

For nearly every measurement player, the dichotomy of living out as both a product and a services company is both prominent and a curse – yet unrealized, and not scrutinized by anyone. Merging these approaches often seems natural and necessary, but ultimately they conflict. Product strategies seek scale and mass production to pool innovation resources into a world-class offering, otherwise unattainable. Conversely, professional services strategies prioritize customization and consulting to solve complex problems with high client-specific value.

The conflict of agendas between product and service philosophies ends up sacrificing optimal resource and investment in either. This results in conservative growth and a retreat to technology-empowered service businesses. There’s nothing wrong with this latter scenario, but it rarely results in a business with a game-changing market impact and massive scale.

The mandate? If you’re going to be a product company, be the best product company and build and sell to the services companies and marketing departments that need your products. If you’re going to be a services company, be the best services company and apply the best products to your service. There are hybrid product-service successes in the technology sector, but they are few.

Product Strategy Most Lucrative, But Most Risky

The social media measurement companies pursuing a purer product strategy have picked the most challenging path. But that strategy is potentially the most lucrative – if they can actually pull it off. In recent demos of social media measurement products, it seems all contenders suffer from at least three common shortcomings. To break from the pack, it will be critical to address these as soon as possible:

• Pragmatic Product Strategy. Perhaps most fundamental, nearly every pure productized tool attempts to report many disparate data, but without the discipline of a solid business goal and ROI in mind. Without clear goals or problems to guide development, everything else becomes trivial and cloudy. This is why I believe the most successful social media measurement products will be focused mini-apps that solve very specific business problems – not boil-the-ocean dashboards that inflict featuritis on users, who then are expected to derive value from complexity.
• User Experience. Extensive backend data processing lags, confusing navigation, complicated taxonomies and cryptic terminology make most interfaces difficult to use. Additionally, as described above, most offerings fail to seamlessly transition user experience to other existing business processes. These shortcomings create frictions that hinder measurement companies’ sales efforts and customer deployment. These shortcomings also make tedious and expensive training necessary for success. This phenomenon partly explains why free tools designed for everyday consumers are commonly used, even when fancy paid tools are readily available and paid for. The free ones don’t solve all or most problems, but they’re often the most accessible and practical. People gravitate toward simplicity.
• Visual Design. Most social media measurement dashboards I’ve seen suffer from poorly designed, amateur Web interfaces and reporting. And I’ve yet to see a post-login welcome screen that is truly a friendly landing page designed to make me feel empowered. Aesthetic is not a nice-to-have; it’s a critical link in the value delivery chain. Poor visual design on otherwise nice technology is like a supermodel with a giant, oozing zit: promising but ultimately a failure. Because customers are human, visual design usually is the first thing to prompt them to engage or shut off.

Semantics

I believe semantics and taxonomies do matter because they influence the internal development of individual companies and their larger industries. Social media measurement still is undergoing growing pains as people jockey over what to call it. Prominent executives, analysts and industry groups have called it multiple things over the years, like:

• consumer generated media measurement and analysis
• user generated media measurement and analysis
• user generated content measurement and analysis
• word of mouth measurement and analysis
• brand monitoring

“Listening platforms” is the latest buzzword, but I still stick to social media measurement. All these definitions, including the one I use, are too inclusive and general. But I’m sure nomenclature will fix itself when the endgame arrives.

The Endgame

Ten years from now? Social media measurement will be big, but different than how we think about it today. It will find its greatest success by subtly integrating into the morphing DNA of numerous business and decision-making processes.

That’s my take. What’s yours?

(Photo Credit: John Kannenberg)

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Tetris, perhaps the simplest, and most addictive and ubiquitous computer game of all time. Journalists, academics, bloggers and fans of computer gaming, media and pop culture have exploited the celebration with an abundance of coverage and interviews with the game’s inventor, Russian mathematician Alexey Pajitnov. (You could say I’m guilty as well.)

Why is Tetris so addictive? Players must position blocks to fill a grid without leaving spaces in between. Successfully completed sections disappear. The more sections the player completes without reaching the top, the higher the score. Pajitnov told CNN:

First of all, it’s a very simple game and it has a really strong creative spirit in it. So instead of destroying something, you kind of build up the profile out of those small pieces and enjoy doing it. And that’s probably the very important addictive factor.

One of the most innovative and addictive aspects of Tetris is the perpetual, intensifying stream of bricks the player must align without spaces. In fact, this very element foreshadowed how we now consume most news content and personal status updates on the Web: in reverse chronological streams. Tetris’s layers of bricks fall with greater speed and complexity as you master the ability to arrange them in straight, crumbling rows. That is not unlike news feeds and status updates that funnel into your desktop and mobile interfaces, intensifying as your ability to sort and digest them increases. Indeed, there are classical elements of game mechanics in both examples.

Similar to Tetris, I wonder if there is a meaningful endgame as the human race’s ability to sort and digest news and status streams improves. I don’t think Tetris has one, but I’m hopeful there will be one with news and status. Like it or not, we’re only at the beginning of a sweeping adoption of data streams.

What do you think of Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine? I just completed a seven-day test of Bing as my default search engine. I was impressed, and will continue to use it for image search and occasional product research. I’ll also continue to check back over time to see how the Bing team innovates and improves following its big June launch. But for now I’m sticking with Google as the default engine in my Firefox toolbar (which is where I execute most of my search queries). Here are the primary reasons I’m sticking with Google:

1. I know how to use Google and know what to expect. Moving to Bing requires too much learning and behavioral change — with questionable gain, I simply don’t have time or patience right now.
2. A key requirement of search is comprehensiveness and timeliness, including fresh content from news sites and social media. Google’s far from perfect, but it’s the best there is at bringing news and social media content together with other Web content. I rely on Google Alerts as well, which I subscribe to via my Google Reader.
3. I work in the search industry where the majority of consumer behavior and commerce takes place over Google. I believe it’s important to be highly sensitive to Google’s performance and mechanical changes, minute-by-minute. There’s no better way to do this than to make it your default search engine.

Despite keeping Google as my default search engine, I’m encouraged to see continued investment and innovation in search, from the likes of Bing and others. Indeed, I believe search is in a prehistoric phase. In another tens years, I’m sure it will be much different and better than it is today. Moreover, the Internet’s performance and reliability can only benefit with more choice. What do you think?

Finally, I encourage you to check out Clickable’s gritty analysis of Bing.

Related articles by Zemanta

• My Week With Bing (avc.com)
• Changing Search Behavior on the World Wild Web (cacm.acm.org)
• comScore Study: Bing Is Off To A Very Good Start (techcrunch.com)

(Photo Credit: Marketing Post)

I recently had breakfast with David Churbuck, a wise friend, who’s the head of digital marketing at a large computer and electronics manufacturer. He left me with a zinger quote that stuck to my brain like Super Glue. To paraphrase David and protect the guilty:

Details and presentation matter. I just sat through a crowded public presentation from a senior brand manager at XYZ company. But you know, for all the glory and savvy of XYZ company, one of the world’s largest data-driven marketers, the glaring typo on one of his slides made him look sloppy — like a supermodel with a giant, oozing zit.

Ouch! You can do your best to be tight with your presentation at every customer touch point. But as this example shows, just the smallest oversight, the smallest imperfection, can be significant. This is especially true within experiences that are otherwise stellar, or ones that have high expectations. You can be perfect 99% of the time, but the 1% you’re not can have a hugely disproportionate impact. So be careful of that 1%.

Sure, high presentation and experience standards are critical — they will make or break you. But the real lesson here is about intentions and expectations management. First, it’s only acceptable to have good intentions, 100% of the time. However, it’s equally important to acknowledge that you’re not perfect 100% of the time. Good intentions and humility win forgiveness, respect and trust — from your colleagues, investors, customers, partners and other stakeholders. Good intentions coupled with humility breed culture and karma that manifest in experimentation, collaboration and innovation. Importantly, good intentions and humility prevent you from becoming that supermodel with the giant, oozing zit

At our startup, we call this the 7:1 rule. That means we expect one another to do extraordinarily more good than bad. However, there are times when we’re not perfect, and it’s OK — because we acknowledge it, fix the shortcoming, learn from it, and quickly move on to achieving our larger goal. This balance of intention and humility is an incredible competitive advantage.

(This essay also ran as a column at MediaPost.)