Continue reading ‘Forrester Wave Social Listening Reports, 2006-2014: A Look Back at Vendor Performance’ »]]> Forrester Research has just published its Enterprise Listening Platforms, Q1 2014 Forrester Wave report (free download), so it seems like a good time to look back at which vendors were included in this report since its inception in 2006, and at their performance. Here’s a chart summarizing that:

A few observations:

1. Vendors that have changed names due to acquisition have been represented just once:
   • Dow Jones acquired Factiva in 2006
   • J.D. Power & Associates acquired Umbria in 2008
   • Nielsen and McKinsey formed NM Incite in 2010
   • SDL aquired Alterian in 2012
   • For a complete view of the acquisition in the social listening space, please see Nathan Gilliat’s comprehensive list
2. None of the vendors included in the first Wave made it to the current one. Six out of 23 vendors were included for 3 or more consecutive years.
3. Oracle Social Cloud, Microsoft’s Netbreeze, and Adobe Social are not in the 2014 report. This will change next year, most likely
4. In Wave’s seven year history, only two vendors who are not listening vendors made the report: Lithium Technologies (as a Contender in 2012) and Sprinklr (as a Leader, in 2014)
5. Sprinklr’s strong entry in this year’s Wave could signal that engagement platform vendors are encroaching into listening vendors’ space
6. In February 2013, Forrester analysts Nate Elliott and Zach Hofer-Shall made a bold prediction — that the social listening category will die in the next 18-24 months (original research – free with registration here). For now, the last Wave includes the largest number of vendors so far (11). Let’s revisit this forecast in September 2014.
7. The name of the report has changed over years; same happened with the analysts covering the space (naturally). Since Forrester doesn’t have  a page for the reports, here’s their list (a simple Google search should help you find a free-with-registration download for each report):
   • Brand Monitoring, Q3 2006 – Peter Kim with Elana Anderson, Jennifer Joseph
   • Listening Platforms, Q1 2009 – Suresh Vittal with Zach Hofer-Shall, Christine Spivey Overby, Emily Bowen
   • Listening Platforms, Q3 2010 – Zach Hofer-Shall
   • Enterprise Listening Platforms, Q2 2012 – Zach Hofer-Shall with Suresh Vittal, Dave Frankland, Allison Smith
   • Enterprise Listening Platforms, Q1 2014 – Allison Smith with Shar VanBoskirk, Samantha Ngo

Continue reading ‘A To-Do List for Museum-Obsessed New Yorkers’ »]]> My recommendations for Fall-Winter 2013 (i.e., what I plan to see):

Source: The Whitney Museum Tumblr

• Through 10/6, Whitney. Hopper Drawing ü
• Through 1/26, MoMA. American Modern: Hopper to O’Keeffeü
• Ongoing at Whitney. American Legends: From Calder to O’Keefe ü
• 9/26-1/5, Whitney. Robert Indiana: Beyond Love
• 9/28-1/12, MoMA. Magrite: The Mistery of the Ordinary ü
• 10/3-2/10, Neue Galerie. Vasily Kandinsky: From Blaue Reiter to the Bauhaus
• 10/4-1/26, The Morgan Library. Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul
• 10/11-2/23, New York Historical Society. The Armory Show at 100: 1913. Modernism Hits New York
• 10/22-1/, The Frick Collection. Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring
• 12/6-2, Whitney. Steichen in the ’20s and ’30s: A Recent Acquisition ü

Source: (mostly) The New York Times. The New Season: Art

Continue reading ‘21 Stats & 5 Quotes from Social Data Week New York’ »]]> Stats & Facts

1. Social media now drives 30-40% of all website traffic – @datasift
2. Only 3% of F1000 companies report they’re getting value out of the social market space
3. We’ll see 9X growth in shared content in next 5 years
4. DataSift now analyzes more than 500M Tweets/Day
5. There are 1.1 million daily tweets about wine
6. The social economy – over 200 social networks with >1M users
7. $5-10B/year are now being spent on advertising on social networks
8. WSJ uses social data to decide which non-subscribing influencers to allow past the paywall
9. The NFL is using social data to determine how many jerseys to manufacture
10. 79% of Influential Moms visited Facebook in the past 30 days
11. Influential Moms are 71% more likely than all adults to spend 5+ hours on social media in an average day
12. Women drive 62% of all sharing actions on facebook
13. Women spend 40% more time on social media than men
14. 75% of consumers will not purchase without consulting an influencer first – @ears_delaney
15. 90% of #social engagement is created by 3% of brand fans – Social Chorus
16. 43 people drive 90% of the world’s #HarryPotter conversation
17. 70% of @Buzzfeed’s UVs come from social, especially @Facebook
18. How did @Buzzfeed get from 600K to 85M uniques? Machine learning, custom algorithms, social, & editors who hussle
19. Tumblr facts: it has >138M blogs, 350M uniques/mo (doubled since April), 90M post/day
20. About 95% of Tumblr blogs are reblogs; 1/3 happen more than 30 days after the original post
21. Tumblr has 325M MAUs; high percentage of US unique views (~33%)

Quotes

1. News flash: marketing got f*ing hard – @garyvee
2. We have math and we have creative. The magic is in the middle – @garyvee
3. We’re creating a “Magical river of Internet awesome”- Danielle Strle, Tumblr
4. Men are from stats and women are from feelings – @bklynstacy
5. We started with tablets (stone) and we’re back to tablets – @ears_delaney

Notes:

• Sources: tweets from the #sdwk13 stream. If you posted it, it’s yours.
• Resources: socialdataweek.com, @socialdataweek

Continue reading ‘The Socially-Enabled Enterprise: a work in progress’ »]]> My takeaways from yesterday’s Socially Enabled Enterprise panel at the Social Shake-Up conference:

1. It doesn’t matter if we label Social a “channel” or not. In Chris Boudreaux‘s words, “It’s OK to call it [Social Media] a channel [or not], no one is going to lose an arm.” What it means: if calling Social a “channel” helps you, do it; if not, don’t. Don’t get bogged down in semantics and ideology; think about Social in whatever way helps you think about your organization and your customers.
2. Organizations need to go beyond the Center of Excellence approach. (Chris, again): The Center of Excellence approach to social governance in the enterprise is fading away. Social needs to align itself with existing functions. Instead of a CoE, think about which social capabilities live in which parts of the organization, and how do those parts work together. More about how to do it in this Accenture whitepaper: Empowerment with Accountability: Enabling Business Growth through Social Media Governance.
   • Chris clarifies:
     • I’d like to clarify that Centers of Excellence are not necessarily fading for all organizations. CoEs are a natural and valuable evolution for many organizations. Some will continue to use them for a while — especially organizations that do not engage significantly in social media, which can be the case for a number of reasons.But organizations who seek to embed social capabilities throughout their organization — for customer care, selling, marketing, customer insight, supplier collaboration, etc. centralization quickly encounters obstacles that require a different org model.Like so many issues in modern organizations, there is no absolute answer for all firms.
3. Enterprise social adoption is still a work in progress. Don Bulmer (Shell): “Just because you have the recipe, it doesn’t mean you know how to cook.” What it means: We know that social can deliver business value, but companies are still struggling on how that applies to them.

Resources:

• The Social Enabled Enterprise study – research brief on Slideshare
• Sign up here to receive the full study

Continue reading ‘Two important PR history articles now available online’ »]]> I’m thrilled to see that Dr. Karen Miller Russell has made available online one of my favorite articles, “U.S. Public Relations History: Knowledge and Limitations“!

With this, my modest role in the PR history is secured, and I can get back to work :)

Karen, please let me know if you have any project I can help with. All I’m asking :) is a follow-up to your article, “Public Relations in Film and Fiction: 1930 to 1995.” (Anyone who was shocked, shocked to see/read CBS’s Andrew Cohen’s take on the PR industry should read this article, available online -see the link below- via a USC Annenberg’s project, The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture.)

If you are a PR student or practitioner, do yourself a favor: download both articles, and read them; they’re well worth your time.

Karen S. Miller (2000)
U.S. Public Relations History: Knowledge and Limitations (PDF)
In Michael E. Roloff (Ed.), Communication Yearbook, vol. 23 (pp. 381-420), Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publication
This analysis of the literature on public relations history indicates that the field has been dominated by a business history approach. Most scholars have studied public relations in its corporate context, and most have utilized business history’s dominant paradigm, which calls for a general theory of PR history based on the review of a large number of case histories. But the business history frame is both flawed and inadequate for a complete understanding of public relations history. Political and social histories show that public relations was emerging and apparently would have emerged even if big business had not. In reality, these histories are intertwined. No single strand of PR history can be understood except in relation to the others, and none should be given a privileged position in public relations historiography.

Karen S. Miller (1999)
Public relations in film and fiction, 1930 to 1995 (PDF)
Journal of Public Relations Research 11 (1), 3-28
In this article, I examine depictions of PR and its practitioners in film and fiction in the United States from 1930 to 1995. The analysis indicates the representations of PR are woefully inadequate in terms of explaining who practitioners are and what they do, and it shows that writers dislike PR’s apparent effectiveness. Perhaps most significant is the extent to which the portrayals have remained the same over many decades. This study reveals misconceptions about and stereotypes of PR that are relayed to the public through the media, setting the stage for scholarship on what members of the general public think, for the enduring quality of representations suggests that the media may well have cultivated negative attitudes toward PR and its practitioners.