Join our panel on Tuesday the 15th to hear a great conversation and engage the experts.

Brand Reputation: The Role of Privacy in Communications

•    Moderator: Barry Hurd (Linkedin), Managing Director, Epiphany Metrics @BarryHurd
•    Mary Ludloff (Linkedin), VP, Marketing, PatternBuilders @mludloff
•    Leigh Nakanishi (Linkedin), Privacy and Security Strategist, Edelman @LeighNakanishi
•    Mike Whitmore (Linkedin), President, Fresh Consulting @MikeWhitmore

* PII 2012 Schedule – Click Here *

Some of My Thoughts

This is a subject I’ve been involved in over the past decade. The evolution of the web has merged our concepts of having a digital identity and what other people perceive about us.

When two people meet for the first time, the chances of a person-to-person or a consumer-to-business interaction has already been affected by our perceptions of personal and professional brand.

As a society that is engulfed by smartphone technology, social media reviews, online visitor analytics, and big data “privacy” trading…. most of us really don’t know what other people know ((or think they know) about us.

In a recent Edelman research whitepaper titled ‘Privacy & Security: The New Drivers of Brand, Reputation and Action” it reveals 70% of people are more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago and 68% feel they have lost control over how their information is shared and used by businesses.

How does privacy affect my business?

One of our core services at Epiphany Metrics is  a detailed online competitive intelligence and influencer analysis.

We study the digital information that people share and use it to make better informed decisions, predict trends, safe guard assets, and identify evolving areas of risk/opportunity.

People from all walks of life love to share little pieces of information through search engine habits, tracking cookies, mobile phone usage, social media conversation, online profiles, real world purchases and more.

When you take these pieces of data and assemble them from groups of competitors, departmental teams, or consumer audiences you can begin to identify secrets that no one shared as an individual.

How does it affect my life?

I could be paranoid about it… or I could simply be educated about my choices.
(or perhaps a paranoid education?)

• Every time I take a photo or pick up my phone and make a call on my smartphone I know that I’m creating digital tracks.
• My phone has a GPS chip that records my movement. The cell tower records if my phone is within range.
• My social ‘check-ins’ tell people where I’ve been and what I like.

We’ll ask some tactical questions and some big ones too.

• How do corporations use this data?
• How does government impact it?
• As a consumer with friends and family, how do I keep my loved ones safe?
• Where do consumers and employees fall into the mix?

See you at PII 2012!

* PII 2012 Schedule – Click Here *

Related External Links

• The Unique Marketing Qualities of Social Media | Marketing …
• Ask the Brand: ARROJO | Plave 'Feed Your Fashion Blog'
• Generating Headlines
• Research and Markets: Kenya – Internet and Broadband Market …
• Personal Online Reputation Management | Reputation Management

I’ve been doing competitive research on “digitally savvy” companies; one of our basic process points is to review job openings at each company to examine where talent acquisition and business growth is occurring.

All I can really say is that my perception of most employers hiring social media and digital savvy personnel is like watching someone drive off a cliff.

This process has reminded me that human resources really doesn’t know what they don’t know.

What should they know?

As someone who has been innovating digital business models for over fifteen years I am often plagued by thoughts about how poor job descriptions are when it comes to digital innovation and evolving business models.

From a competitive intelligence standpoint a job description can be the detail of what is both right and wrong within an organization.

Human Resources should know how to write a job description, source candidates, and hire talent…

Good people = Good Business

Part of ‘being there, doing that’ has included attending and/or organizing hundreds of networking events centered around digital business.

These include social media clubs, web developer conferences, product launches, technology events, and executive strategy seminars.

 I’ve personally shaken thousands of hands,
many of them I’ve met multiple times over weeks, months, or years.

Some of them are pretty amazing people.
Others seem to change personality, profession, and ‘expertise’
every single time I talk to them.

Few of them realize I get several calls a week from different employer brands asking about them. At the end of the day I keep seeing extraordinary people get passed over for people who have less ethics about claiming a glorified result from a ‘big brand’ background and who have an incredibly hard time actually defining what they did in previous projects.

In the recruiting world these people would be referred to as resume stuffers with “an extraordinary ability to sell themselves.”

The mundane world would simply say they are full of hot air.

……………………

……………………

An Honest Social Business Job Description

To help executive teams understand some of the broken elements surrounding why social business job descriptions are broken, I’ve written my own job description.

Job Title: Digital Innovation Architect

The Digital Innovation Architect works across our organization to discover, adapt, and implement new media technologies and trends. This person is responsible for understanding basic business drivers in multiple departmental units and for developing both short and long term projects that impact revenue categories. An ideal candidate will have a solid understanding of core business drivers, an exceptional talent in applying new models, and a track record of success.

The Social Business Architect will create and oversee implementation of plans to meet strategic objectives within an established budget and revenue target. They will be a
liaise and build relationships with both internal and external audiences.

Personality Type

• Avid learner with a passionate need to constantly interpret market shifts and take decisive action.
• Assertive personality, ability to negotiate with a variety of platform and service partners.
• Knows when to play well with others and when to kick them out of the conversation.

Includes a razor sharp ability to recognize things for what they are: if it smells like a duck, walks like a duck, and looks like a duck… you have the ability to instantly recognize it as being a useless attempt at marketing and sales.

Personality Tags: Competitive, innovative, honest, ethical, out-of-box, thought-provoking

Expertise

15+ years of experience planning and managing online campaigns that include market analysis, product integration, digital advertising, social media, hardware development, audience optimization, and continuing multivariate testing with cascading development cycles.

Has in-depth understanding of product strategy and core business modeling to create multiple touch points to existing business processes that can drive budget impacts across the organization. Has well-rounded understanding of business silos and knows how to effectively negotiate with internal and external decision makers to execute successful projects within budget and on time.

Expertise Tags: “A” Player, over-achiever, “go to person”

Budgetary Understanding

• Has ability to scale from ideation to globalization.
• Knows how to work with numbers from $1 to $1 billion.
• Understands core budgetary cogs that define project success/risk against market opportunities.

Budget Tags: budgetary responsibility, profit & loss, disruptive

 Management Skills

You know how to squeeze blood from rocks.

This is because one of your greatest strengths is the analysis of people.

• You don’t always try to squeeze blood from rocks and rely on a flexible understanding of why people want to be involved and where their cheese is.
• This involves understanding creative talent, technical developers, corporate partners, executive leaders, and budgetary decision makers.
• You have a likeable demeanor both in-person and over the phone, and have the experience to know when face-to-face time is needed.

Professional Network

Because you play well with others and you have an exceptional rolodex of professionals you can turn to that have expertise in specific niche fields.

• You  know how to apply individual and team expertise and talent categories against a project road map and delivery schedule.
• You know how to develop relationships that allow you to  scale projects and fill gaps in specific project teams.
• In addition to technical skills, you understand talent and career levels.

Industry Knowledge

This isn’t your first rodeo.

If this job was a game of Monopoly

• You could recite the differences between Atlantic Avenue and Park Place.
• You not only know who owns what, but what the impacts is of each piece on the board.
• You know who plays fair and who cheats. You know how to deal with either.
• When it’s your turn to roll the dice you can give accurate percentages for the chances of going to jail or winning the game.

Inside of the social business space this applies to a developed understanding of hardware manufacturers, social platforms, mobile carriers, data providers, legal issues, market trends, and business modeling.

Industry Tags: adaptive, connected

Technical Skills

You have a well-rounded knowledge and expertise.

You know all sorts of technical things because you love technology and what it does for people and for business.

You not only like buttons, but you like pushing them and asking why a button exists and how it affects multiple processes that are intangible to the casual observer.

• An ideal candidate would love things like wirelss HD video, interactive display technology, designing micro-drone quadcopters, or developing software tools.
• They would look at a typical mobile phone or tablet computer and be able to define core characteristics and capabilities of the device and how they affect usage, market adoption, and opportunity/risk.

Web Skills

You know all sorts of web jargon. Terms like SEO, PPC, Tweeting, Geocoding, and Microformats make you laugh because you’ve heard all the nerdy geek jokes already.

You realize that there are people like you who live and breathe this stuff and there is ‘everybody else’ – you know when to put on your nerdy science coat and debate the usefulness of different technologies and when you need to speak in common English so that your audience can understand the benefits.

• You understand the web is social.
• You know that social is about being human.
• You get businesses need to understand the web, to be social, to create products that rock, to make money.

Web Tags: too many too list (see addendum on Wikipedia)

Presentation Skills

You have all the above stuff handled right?

Great… now you just need to be able to put yourself in front of a million different audiences and communicate things in way they can understand.

You may have to present ideas on the phone, in an executive boardroom, via webinar, or in a tradeshow panel. You may get blind-sided five minutes before the presentation, but we will still expect you to juggle the hand grenade and make our company look impressive.

• You may be talking about a physical widget or a completely intangible concept.
• You need to know how to take a punch to the face.
• You need amazing Kung-Fu skills.
• You may be pitching an idea to a departmental partner or our next multi-million dollar customer.

Presentation Tags: entertaining, informative, motivational

Project Management Skills

Prepares our projects like they are running a 5 star kitchen: they have process, know all the ingredients, coordinate staff to get prep done, and know how to listen to immediate guest feedback to make something ordinary into something extraordinary. They can research and study demographic and consumer profiles, compare vendor capabilities, and integrate on-going improvement cycles.

• Is fully prepared to be placed in a kitchen from Hell’s Kitchen or Restaurant Impossible.
• Knows what commitment is and shows up with a game face on.
• Works with the team, not against it.

Project Tags: reliable, on-time, under budget

The Conclusion

As an executive team or hiring manager, social business is about examining the corporate box, ranging from its contents to its environment.

A social business executive is responsible with researching new areas of opportunity and creating innovative applications within the market.

If you fall victim to writing traditional job descriptions or fail to talk about the reality of moving forward… your organization will slowly and surely bury itself in a pile of traditional ideas that don’t accelerate fast enough to live in today’s digital marketplace.

Related External Links

• International Development – Social Enterprise Assistant
• International Development – Microfinance Portfolio Manager
• International Development – Social Enterprise Officer
• Business Objects Contractor — All jobs (page 2)
• Director of Sales and Marketing at Human Capital Consultants in …

It talks about the fundamental flaws that inhibit organizations from utilizing talent that can do amazing things for your organization.

It can be a little bit like space exploration

If we gauged the NASA program by the number of successful launches we’ve had,

the metric would be not only meaningless, but fundamentally broken.

 Defining the Real Problems

Here are six problems you will find in most organizations trying to grasp social media and digital business trends.

#1 – The evolutionary need

Business is constantly evolving.

We know something is out there and we need to discover it.

At the end of the day I believe that most companies are in a crisis: they understand that change needs to happen within the organization but they are also inhibited by multiple layers of internal bureaucracy and a limited view of external perspectives that are compounded by poor recruiting processes, a limited availability of “A players”, and a fear of the unknown.

#2 – The artificial silos

This isn’t about exploring something for the sake of exploration: it is about applying unknown benefits to tactical and strategic initiatives.

On top of those core issues, many executive teams have attempting to place elements like social media and search optimization into the marketing silo because they do not understand how evolving digital elements tie into customer care, sales process, employee engagement, human resources, and executive leadership.

Social business elements may have specific business impacts in individual silos, but it is rare that any social business project truly resides within any one departmental silo.

#3 – Internal Politics

Who is really flying this thing?

Few people within the organization operate outside of the departmental silo.

Executives typically perceive social media/social business roles to lay within the marketing channel. When the role is delegated to a hiring authority with in a specific silo we are faced with a challenge to ‘the way it is done’ and in many cases the hiring authority finds themselves speaking to someone who has skills that exceed their ability to comprehend benefits at the departmental level.

#4 – Market shift

In many cases organizations are not accelerating at the same speed as the market they serve.

Digital trends often act as ignition points for lumbering marketplaces. This ignition point is just like a rocket being ignited: a massive amount of fuel and energy has been amassed over time and when the thing finally ignites, it often shoots off at break-neck speeds in a nearly uncontrollable manner (*most executives panic when confronted with the need to manage something that is is perceived as being inherently uncontrollable.)

#5 – Mission Control doesn’t know where it is heading

Imagine having to build a rocket, figure out how it will work, train a team to fly it, determine a destination, and do it all blind.

If we think about NASA, how impossible would it be to have a shuttle launch if the ground crew, communications center, and flight team all have different vocabulary?

For most organizations this is the first time they have tried to build a rocket. For the other 95% of the organizations they’ve been trying to claim success by launching rocks into the sky. The larger the organization gets the more likely it is that there are dozens of people involved in a process of failure simply because job security is on the line.

#6- It happens really fast.

Once you’ve hit the button, prepare to experience everything you didn’t plan for.

Once you’ve been selected for the pilot’s seat, no one else can take control without causing a catastrophic problem.

Even if you’ve flown before, imagine solving problems one thru five only to realize you need to do it again: in less time, in another direction, at a bigger scale, with a hundred another competitors trying to shoot you down.

Project teams often lose sight of the necessity that a working solution needs to have the fundamental ability to scale, change direction, be cannibalized for parts, or completely abandoned when conditions change.

Where do these do these problems lead?
The elusive search for Return on Investment.

The above factors form one huge problem:  a project (or social business professional) must succeed or fail based upon the “return on investment” within one silo.

This means that they are forced to prove success/failure with little understanding of other silos, restricted marketplace insight, and at incredibly demanding speeds.

This creates a recipe for disaster where no one within the organization really knows what lost opportunities existed and how much it really cost the company.

 Example: if we know a social business project has 40% value in marketing, 30% value in sales, 10% value in customer care, and %10 value in everything else- a marketing director would be incredibly hard pressed to establish an effective ROI result based on 40% of the benefit.

They would be forced to look at other marketing options that operate on a 1% to 15% margin of difference, where the social business asset is allowed to only be weighed at 40% of its true value to the company.

If you can only score 40% – how can we find ROI?

The simple truth is that you can’t.

Even if you could prove that a social business venture in marketing was worthwhile, you would also be proving an ability to ignore 60% of your overall project value.

If you are interested in proving the ROI, make sure you are considering the real scale of your project.

Related External Links

• Social Media Smasher | ClickForSEO Blog – Marketing Articles and …
• Search Engine Optimization Companies Are Helping Small …
• SEO Should Be Called Integrated Digital Marketing | ClickForSEO …
• Is Your Optimization Meaningful or Mechanical? | Small Business …
• 10 Compelling Numbers That Reveal the Power of Employee …

Whether you are the ‘real deal’ start-up with a half dozen people trying to take over the world or a corporate project team working on the next release, we all have different ‘start-up’ projects that need to get some extra love and attention online.

The following ten items will help you do just that!

10 Ways to Get More Online Visibility

1- Competitive Intelligence

Look at other market competitors to find SEO and SEM keywords to use on like-minded phrases. In many cases a larger competitor will be broadly addressing a market and a start-up can tactically pinpoint specific problem statements.

• Free tools to check out:
• SEObook.com
• Google Insight

2- Engage where your competitors are

Track all the accounts related to your industry conversation, including employees, vendors, and clients. Offer better and more relevant advice to the market whenever a conversation starts. In many cases traditional competitors won’t have the processes in place to respond to timely customer interactions. This is an opportunity to engage consumers with helpful advice, customer service, and goodwill.

• Recommended Reading
• Competitive Intelligence by Listening

3- Analyze client lists

if you find 5 to 20 employee accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, take a careful look at how followers/friends overlap. This usually details a handful of high-value and high-touch clients that you can go after.

• Free tools to check-out
•  WhoFollowsWhom
• MentionMap
• Foller.ME

4- Plan for Failure

When looking at your market, create a list of 15 to 20 businesses in it and write up a promotional campaign based upon them ‘dropping the ball.’ – you will typically see a monthly opportunity to capture low-hanging fruit. In many cases competitors will have monthly customer issues, project failures, or bankruptcies you can take advantage of.

Example: When CompUSA went bankrupt, the web savvy TigerDirect.com immediately launched into action and bought “CompUSA.com” to redirect thousands of relevant shoppers.

5- Understand analytics

The more your understand about social and digital analytics the easier it becomes to examine both internal and external digital data. Many ‘old school competitors’ are 2 to 5 years behind the digital curve. As a start-up don’t go after technically savvy leaders, but strategically go after laggards with no defenses.

• Free tools to check-out
• Woopra

6 – Activate your team (employees, family, friends) with social media

Compile a database with employees, family, and friends online and offline activity. List out Website, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Linkined, etc and stack rank people you have access to. Coordinate an incentive system for motivating 10+ of these people to spread the word on your behalf (also write down any groups they belong to in the real world.)

• Recommended reading:
• Enabling Employee Social Media
• Creating an online sales pipeline

7 -Understand Twitter Conversations

In many cases it is difficult to create a Twitter conversation that stands out from all the other noise, but there is a huge amount of value in sifting through the noise and getting actionable intelligence from it. Take some time to use the following tools to sort, sift, categorize, and archive a few relevant Twitter conversations.

• Free Tools to Checkout
• SocialCollider -
• Cloud.li -
• PostPost
• TweetSheet (visualize hashtag clusters)

8 – Do some written interviews

Use human nature in your own favor. Instead of trying to sell your product, review social profiles of people in your market and ask them honest questions that allow them to demonstrate expertise. Experts often like to share a little ‘ego driven’ insight and it opens up an opportunity to return the favor in a two way conversation.

• Recommended Reading
• Partner Outreach in Ten Steps

9 – Do some video interviews

While written interviews are great, video interviews have the side effect of ranking incredibly well for search engine keywords that are important to you. Simply by interviewing the people on your team and answering frequently asked questions you can typically get top results for a handful of very important keywords that will drive great exposure for you.

• Recommended reading
• Online Video Training
• Video Editing Tools on a Budget
• HD Mobile Video Kit

10- Detail the influencers

Almost all of the steps above are magnified if you understand some of the key factors of who influences what, why, where, and when. As you think about the word ‘influencer’ make sure you don’t get caught up in the hype about top 10 lists that are mostly vanity/ego lists. Create some tangible business requirements when detail who your influencers are.

• Recommended Reading
• Gaming Klout
• Tools for Finding Influencers

Good Luck on the Next Project!

This article is going to detail a fundamental insight to using Twitter analysis to create sets of priceless data that can be used for marketing, sales, product development, and future strategy.

Imagine This Scenario

Your competitor has 100 employees on Twitter.

The average number of followers each person has is 250.

The average number of people they each follow is is 250.

Basic math says that equals

• 25000 people following them
• 25000 people they are following

Basic Math is Wrong

The reality is that

• 12500 people are cross-following them
• 12500 people they are  cross-following

It is radically important to realize that within any given population of audience members that a significant number of people will follow and friend like-minded people.

Why Cross-Followers are Important

If we look at 100 employees and the people they follow there will be several segment of users that have a high number of ‘cross followers.’

These individuals usually fall into these categories

• Other Employees
• Team Leaders
• Special Project Interests
• Clients
• Prospects

Benefits of Understanding Cross-Follower Segments

Other Employees: by understanding how employees in competitive businesses behave, you can track customer issues, employee challenges, or even recruit top-talent.

Team Leaders: watching team leaders is an easy way to identify where they are looking on a daily basis. This provides insight to forward-looking project plans and for accidental exposure of critical information.

Special Project Interests: knowing what five people out of a hundred are focused on a specific departmental project allows you to tactical plan around them. This can be critical for hiring away talent or understanding when a project is going live.

Clients: by monitoring the ten sales people you can see what prospects they are engaging with today. This could represent priceless marketing dollars that can be used to create a lead list you didn’t have to pay for.

Prospects: ever tracked hashtags or mentions for competitive webinars, trade shows, or brand mentions? This list of people who are considering a competitor begs for a creative marketing strategy.

Build a Process & Tracking Dashboard

Once you’ve wrapped your head around the concept of getting some useful data from Twitter, you need to think about how you can track it through a dashboard for your team.

Some helpful articles on those subjects:

• 40+ Social Media Dashboard Tools for Tracking Stuff
• Creating a Free Social Media Dashboard
• Social Media Dashboard Design
• Creating Social Media Dashboards

The Business Case

One of the biggest problems with corporate social media is that departmental teams fail to think outside the project box they are looking at.

This often means that they are trying to force a square cog (social media)  into a round hole (the immediate project requirements.)

The core issue with this is that we are not dealing with square cogs and round holes.

We are dealing with a conversation about the way dozens of different pieces plug into a limitless number of business scenarios.
The simple reality is that most people don’t have a deep understanding of available solutions and force the incorrect assumptions into place.

While we want to categorize social media into something we can either adopt or dismiss, we need to think about how the term ‘social media’ is has been used to improperly label innovation within the corporate structure. Most of us like to think of social media as a ‘digital marketing’ channel and as a ‘buzz’ phrase connecting to PR and word-of-mouth. In many cases  we compound the issue by grouping it with web design, graphic arts, and online advertising.

Social media is the  generalized term for ‘all things belonging to the web’ ….

We need to first agree on what social media is and is not.

We need a process for clarity…

What matters is that you can sit down with a project team and agree what is and is not in the scope of your project.

The Visual Solution

Imagine your team has fifty different components it needs to consider for you net project. These components can range from business process points including customer service and product design, to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Each one of these components is going to be placed into a circle on a basic diagram.

The sample below demonstrates 50+ items that could go into a conversation about launching a new product.

The idea behind the process is fairly simple: while the sample has 50+ components we could be dealing with anywhere from two to a hundred items.

Identifying Categories

While we may have brainstormed 50+ items for our project team, we can easily group together like-minded items that belong to the same general niche within the project.

By taking the above items I’ve broken out some groupings for a conversation about my next social project.

• Social Media Content Types
• Social Media Platforms
• Search Engines
• Location Based Elements
• Technology / IT issues
• Business Unit Considerations
• Business Validation 
• Market Intelligence

What Social Media Is and Is Not

One of the most important steps of having this information on one sheet of paper is to identify what is and is not included in the current business conversation. It is critical to purposely remove an item from the conversation instead of assuming it is not included.

• Removing it means everyone knows about it.
• Assuming it means someone may not know it even exists.

Simply take your conversation map out and cross off any topics that are not involved in the current project scope. Before any item is removed from the conversation it should be confirmed that everyone in the decision making team actually knows what it is!

Exercise #1 – Discovering Areas of Impact

Once you have 3-4 categories established, print out a few copies of the circles on paper and cut them apart.

During your group conversation you should practice moving through several areas of forced ideation:

• randomly pull three to five circles and detail how the five elements interact.
• take the same three to five circles and detail best case scenario and worse case scenario
• take three to five circles and detail employee, management, and executive perspective
• take three to five circles and detail internal (sales, marketing, HR) vs external (customer, prospect, market) perspective

Exercise #2 – Identifying Areas of Education

Pull out a pen and rate each circle from 1 to 5 based upon the expertise and understanding of the people within the decision making conversation.

1. limited knowledge, no practical hands-on experience
2. casual understanding, basic understanding
3. recurring monthly experience, familiarity with daily usage
4. can recite best practices to others, strong understanding of topic
5. expert understanding, forward looking perspective, can relate topic to business impacts

During the rating process you should maintain a heavy bias towards any decision that is made using a sphere of expertise that uses a 1,2, or 3 rating.  A rating of 1 to 3 means that your group has a restricted view of the topics being affected and you are making a blind decision about the risks, benefits, and revenue impacts.

On-going Tests

While the two sample exercises above only introduce some of the basic areas of conversation you need to engage in, the basic framework above helps to identify your strengths and weaknesses concerning digital projects.

By understanding what topics overlap and what your core knowledge is surrounding those elements you can seek out and recruit subject matter experts to assist in making the right decisions.

When you develop you understanding of critical elements your understanding of social media and new technology being adopted into your business will quickly touch on hundreds of areas that have substantial business impacts. This will highlight where your corporate social media training initiatives can help reach tactical battles and strategic initiatives.

This article walks through the process to create a straight-forward social media dashboard that can be used as a daily social media training and social business engagement tool. Your social media dashboard will help you monitor profiles and keywords on services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

With a few of these working in your favor, you will always have insight to the most recent topics covering your business.

Suggested uses for creating your first social media dashboard:

• Topic Based: create an insight to your current work project
• Education Based: track future topics to stay up-to-date
• Team Based: share info to help project expertise and market changes
• Competitive Based: monitor companies, executives, or work teams

Getting Started: Understanding Paper.li

Paper.li is a platform that collects social data from popular social sites. It is entirely web based and provides a decent set of tools for prioritizing your information into proper categories. It has a built-in algorithm that ranks how popular each piece of content is and a layout format that presents everything in an easy to browse format.

Paper.li is entirely free. You can create up to 10 different social media dashboards using built-in Facebook and Twitter integration.

Step One: What is your topic?

This is pretty simple. Choose a few top speakers, keywords, product names or #hashtags.

For this example I’m going to describe how I made my “Competitive Intelligence Report”

Paper.li has the ability to sort content from these fields:

• Single Twitter User
• You and the People You Follow
• Twitter Lists
• Twitter #hashtags
• Keywords on Twitter
• Keywords on Facebook
• RSS Feeds
• Single Goolge+ User
• Keywords on Google+

It is important to note that you can use multiple sets, so for the example of my ‘Competitive Intelligence Report’ I have used three different Twitter profiles, a Twitter list, a Twitter Hashtag, keywords on both Twitter and Facebook, and several keywords on Google+

Most of the choices also offer the ability to filter the information using Boolean search parameters

• include all of these keywords
• this exact phrase
• any of these words
• none of these words

Step Two: Who is going to read it?

When you are creating your profile and keyword lists for item one, keep in mind that you have an audience wants to consume and share the information.

As time goes on you will want to consider who/what/when/where/why these individuals are reading it.

Step Three: Where am I going to display it?

Most of my Paper.li social media dashboards are shared on Twitter. Because I know my readers are active on certain keywords I can relate to important #hashtags in the titles of Tweets that reference my dashboard. In my Competitive Intelligence Report #BI, I know #BI is a key hashtag for business intelligence professionals.

Paper.li gives you some simple choices for display content, the most useful are

• auto-publish the updates on a daily or weekly basis to your Twitter followers
• embed your new social media dashboard on a public or private webpage (see example below)

Step Four: Stats and Usage =  Adaptation

The key of  ‘is it useful’ can be seen in the stats.

As of 4/9/12 the Competitive Intelligence Today #BI report has been Tweeted 69k times, and shared 230 times on Linkedin.

I’ve gone back several times into Step One to revisit my lists, keywords, and Boolean search operators.

Step Five: Create a few, share with colleagues

I have a few fairly popular social media dashboards created with Paper.li

Trade Show Social Media

Social Business Analytics

Embedded Example of The Competitive Intelligence Daily, updated weekly

By arming yourself with some of the right strategic questions about each set of data you can help yourself draw where different market opportunities are for your organization as well as avoid some potential pitfalls.

In the social media infographic below about mobile media adoption in the U.K. we have some insight to how our oversea counterparts consume data. These trends become more meaningful when we examine what differences there are in our demographics and our industry niches.

We also have to keep in mind that we don’t want to think about a certian element in an isolated silo. We need to consider things like our own local mobile trends, how tablets are being adopted at work, and how our workforce uses mobile.

By using a holistic knowledge of the ‘big picture’ the tactical highlights become easier to take advantage of.

What insights do you find when you look at this data?

A mistake that I repeatedly see is when an organization implements a flashy thingamijig expecting that a wondrous variety of displays and lights are going to provide valuable business results.

Think about the basic design

One of the most common types of information displays we are all familiar with is the instrument panel in our car.

We typically have a few basic indicators:

RPM - a clear indication of how hard our engine is working. We can immediately see when we are pushing the vehicle too far ‘into the red.’

Spedometer - pretty simple, from 0 to 130. In most cars this is the largest display because it is important that we take into consideration the ‘legal variable’ of the speed limit.

Engine Temp – most of us know that this is a pretty critical measurement. If it goes into the red we have a serious issue.

Most importantly a Gas Light Indicator:  no gas, no go.

1- Keep It Simple

When designing your social media dashboard it is important to remember that different types of users require different levels of understanding.

The key word is understanding.

If an operator doesn’t know what the blinking light represents…
the blinking light is nearly useless.

We have all had our car dashboard display a new light and thought to ourselves
“what in the world does that mean???”

The resulting confusion is a critical issue in using a social media dashboard.
We have to think about the speed of the information we are tracking and how quickly we can change directions in our business.

If we know it takes days or weeks to make a turn; we need dashboard indicators that give us insight before we pass the point of no return.

2- Understand the Point of No Return.

If our business is on a collision course with disaster we need to know how to maneuver around danger and capture nearby opportunities.

We also need to know when our social media dashboard is telling us about a metric that can sometimes be ignored (the speed limit) and when it is alerting us to a critical failure (no gas.)

This requires that we apply a reasonable framework to our social media dashboard that includes velocity, mass, traction, and acceleration factors. Each of these factors has multiple sample questions:

• Velocity = how fast are we traveling? Does our business model shift in minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, or years?
• Mass = how big are we? When we are trying to apply force to alter our course, are we capable of affecting the entire organization or do we need to move individual parts?
• Traction = what is the maximum amount of force we can apply to change our business? When we apply too much force too quickly, do we cause collateral damage to our assets?
• Acceleration = once we have changed direction, what price have we paid for losing velocity and how long will it take to get back to full speed?

3- Understand the Universe

Many of the social media dashboard services on the web focus too much on examining qualities about our own organizations instead of examining strategic factors about competitors, partners, and the marketplaces.

Core Issue: looking at ourselves in the mirror is a vanity play.

In a car you dashboard is a tool that is surrounded by a windshield and multiple mirrors to see our environment. These additional viewpoints are the factors that define how valuable our dashboard metrics are at any given time.

If we don’t compare ourselves with the marketplace and consider our share of voice, we probably don’t have a full comprehension of competitive velocity, mass, traction, and acceleration. By knowing the marketplace and where are competitors are heading we can plan strategic routes that allow us to capture obvious low-hanging fruit and plan for strategic missions that take a long-term and committed route to places our competitors don’t know about.

4- Understand the Game

In car race we have dozens of other vehicles on the track.

We need to understand all sorts of ‘game mechanics’ to avoid collisions and maintain our lead against the right competitors.

Certain assets build upon each other and make it impossible for competitors to effectively move around the track.

The more we understand about the way the game changes, the easier it is to know when our vehicle and team can tactically gain an advantage going into a sharp corner.

Conclusion

The rules of social media are bound to how we communicate and respond to market conditions as people. This means that both internal and external audiences can shift in a matter of minutes and rewrite the ‘rules’ of the game.

We need to be ready for the next flat tire or unforeseen mishap.

• Keep It Simple
• Understand Your Point of No Return
• Understand the Universe
• Understand the Game

Bonus Tip: always double-check your tire pressure.
Teams always perform at an optimal level of pressure.

While I have written hundreds of pages on social media analytics in the past, I’m still troubled by the focus of social media being directed/controlled/managed within the marketing silo.

I’m hoping the trend of social business (instead of social marketing) will continue in the direction it is heading, but I fear that the core issues of properly identifying analytics that count are still outside the reach of 99.9% of marketing executives (and outside 99.99% of business executives in general.)

The #1 Problem of Social Media Analytics

According to the survey, the number one obstacle of measuring ROI of marketing is lack of sharing data across the organizagtion.

While I agree with the #1 problem: it isn’t limited to marketing ROI.

It encompasses the ROI of the entire business.

If we don’t examine other business silos that have inherent ties to social data and streamlined knowledge management, we fail to realize ROI in PR, product development, customer retention, talent acquisition, process refinement, and executive leadership.

Any one of those ROI areas could be the ‘magic bullet’ that defines an organization as a market leader or as an unknowing victim of business evolution.

Problem #2 – The Shelf Life of Data

If you are nimble and fast moving, social media analytics and real time data can be amazing.

The problem with that statement is the requirement that you are nimble and fast moving.

In most enterprise organizations it days weeks or months to make simple direction changes. This makes real-time data collected in the past hour nearly worthless…. sure you know that an iceburg is right in front of you, but you simply can’t turn fast enough to avoid it.

Problem #3 – It isn’t ‘big data’ ; it is ‘evolving data’

In addition to thinking about social media analytics from a marketing perspective, current definition of the social data silos revolving around the term of ‘big data’ are contaminated in my opinion.

Examining the answers from the survey: we no longer have demographic, customer, social media, and mobile phone data.

All we have is ‘evolving data’

Mobile data = Social data = Customer data = Demographic data

We have a constant pipeline of new data points that are injecting thousands of invaluable data assets into our current business processes from hundreds of sources.

The End Crisis – Analysis Paralysis

The massive injection of data is completely disrupting most executives ability to take actionable decisions.

We have executives who are simply looking at a Web 3.0 chessboard and they are trying to interpret the market they are playing in by traditional rules of chess. They don’t realize (and or accept) that the rules are changing on a daily basis and that entirely new pieces are being played.

When we combine analysis paralysis with marketing isolation (problem #1), slow reaction time (problem #2), and changing market data (problem #3) we end up with an interesting business dilemna.

What other problems are social media analytics facing?