Buzzgain » Events

The 5 biggest challenges of social media and enterprise adoption

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:39:59 +0000

Yesterday we tracked SAP TechEd08 using BuzzGain and had a very interesting set of discussions on twitter that were spawned. I mentioned clearly that social media is more than Twitter and the main reason I did not discuss the other metrics was due to the length of the post. Still, there are a series of questions that our metrics did bring up that raised new questions about enterprise adoption of social media. Here are the biggest challenges that I foree in any social media monitoring solution.1. Tracking the right people: It is about the people not keywords (stating the obvious). Most social media solutions track “keywords” which are not ideal. Why? There were about 15 other people in the SAP conference who did not talk about SAP TechED, SAP, or any other keyword you’d normally associate with the conference. The ideal solution would track key individuals (pre determined) who are the “market makers” and can be counted on to influence opinion regardless of their use of key words and phrases. We missed a few (MonkChips or James Governor for one) who is a very key analyst, he was tweeting, but not on either the hashtags or keywords. I am sure we missed several others.

2. The firewall issue: Our (unofficial) metrics track 4-7% of enterprise employees blog. In the Fortune 1000 itself, there are only ~70 companies with external blogs. The rest are behind firewalls. To give you a magnitude of that number, the F1000, employs 935,000 employees. so there are about 50,000 bloggers at the minimum and over 100,000 behind the firewall, which we will never be able to track. I think this is a low estimate BTW.

3. Tracking the wrong keywords: We already talked about this, but if you choose the wrong keywords or ones that are too broad, or too narrow, you get limited, narrow and inconsistent results. The better approach is to follow thought leaders or influencers in the space, but the current approaches (white-listed blogs or heavy traffic blogs) fall way short in identifying up and comers or selective influencers.

4. Perception (and reality) of the time-sink: I heard from 3 folks via email that their company considers their participation in social media (twitter, delicious, etc.) as a massive distraction. They get no credit or brownie points for them. So many shy away from sharing their copious notes taken on their laptop.

5. Broadband or lack of it during events: The major constitent theme I have heard from the last 10 conferences we have tracked is – the bandwidth is limited. So people tend to use their iPhone or blackberry more. Which a) is limiting and b) makes it a pain to share in a social way quickly.

I know we are working on (1) and (3). Jeremiah points out that you need a GPS rather than a dashboard for social media. I am not sure I can give a better analogy right now, but something about the GPS makes it insufficient in describing what’s needed. I cant place my finger on it, but if you can please help me out.

Cartoon credit. Geek and Poke.

What else do you think I a missing? thanks to Lee, Mike and Marilyn for ideas about this post.

Enterprise use of Social Media is largely non existent – SAP TechEd 08 BuzzGain

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:08:36 +0000

Much as the technology industry is claimed to be an early adopter of all things social, Web 2.0 and community, its not making as quick progress as people think it is.

SAP TechEd08 is the annual SAP developer conference, is currently taking place in Berlin. Our good friend Mike Prosceno (who authors a good blog in his own right BTW) is there and so are many of the other SAP folks we know. I dont believe its for lack of trying. They have a TechEd Blog, a full time twitter account just for the event and forums for discussion. Over 16,000 people attend the show worldwide and a good number (over 30%) just in Berlin. So we should expect a lot of sharing, blogging, twitter, etc. Right?

1. Tweet volume (# tweets) over the last few days barely broke 300 (Just to give you a comparison, BlogWorldExpo broke 3000+ tweets daily).

2. By the hour tracking shows tweeting was more frequent in the afternoon (very counterintuitive) than in the morning. This was again very different from BlogWorldExpo.

3. The people LOVED the show though, so SAP’s gotta be happy. Positive sentiments showed up overwhelmingly which is again very different from BlogWorldExpo (where it was at 55% positive).

4. The number of unique people that did twitter was less than 0.01%. That’s very low compared to the 43-55% for BlogWorldExpo. Maybe the SAP guys are just not the chatty types.

5. Here is the best chart. Who were the influencers? The top 7: SAPTechEd, Mike Prosceno, Mike Stopforth, IdaRose Sylvester, Vuk Trifkovic, Phillip Pott, Dennis Howlett.

I do have all the data on blog posts, delicious and the rest of social media to give you a comprehensive perspective, but this post is already too long.

Summary: Few people did share and talk, and the ones that did absolutely loved it.

Questions:

1. If even a technology company with leading edge early adopters (developers) is not very socially engaged, is the market still early? Or is social media just getting acceptance? What stage do you think we are?

2. What other questions would you want to have me address from a social media perspective (what reports do you wish to see) on SAP TechEd so we can get a more comprehensive perspective?

# Update: We were primarily tracking SAPTechEd, SAPTechEd08, TechEd as the keywords. Mike and Tom Raftery emailed me saying they are seeing a lot more twitter and delicious folks, who are using no associated words to describe the event.

The future of technology tradeshows, 2009 and beyond

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:54:36 +0000

Over 3500 people who attended tradeshows last year were asked “Why do you go to a trade show?”

The top 3 reasons they gave were: a) To keep up with industry trends b) Learn about new products / companies / technologies and c) Network

When asked why they would not attend one in 2009, I was half expecting a) Economy b) Lack of budget and c) All of the above.

Instead we heard: a) Lack of networking opportunities b) Ability to follow the show “remotely” without going there (leveraging Twitter / Ustream.tv, etc) and c) Not a good ROI on time investment.

So what’s changing with technology trade shows?

1. Smaller more focused shows: Clearly Macworld, CES, Comdex and others are under transition. From the one size fits all environment, we are moving towards conferences around a specific niche – usually driven by the passion of one individual OR Bar Camp style open format highly interactive sessions. In 2009 we suspect shows like Web 2.0 Expo will see fewer folks attending and more likely the show being split into multiple niche shows. The exception is SXSW which is more like a

2. Networking: Many conferences and tradeshows now offer networking opportunities leveraging Facebook fan pages or event pages for attendees to network before and after the show. Which helps, but the hallway conversations are where relationships are built, which makes the case for more BarCamp style unconferences.

3. Learning moves to the web: Waiting for one day in the year to learn about the latest and greatest in the industry in an era of bloggers, Twitter and viral videos is just not feasible. Expect more “How to” and “Success Stories” or “How we did that” type sessions in these conferences and fewer “Here’s the next big thing” or the “State of the industry” type sessions.

So then what are the implications?

1. Local tax revenue drops: This is an obvious one. While conferences generate good sized (100 – 1000) type crowds, local tax revenues at convention sites will drop significantly thanks to the drop in # of 10,000+ attendee trade shows. Local bars and pubs should still do okay, but hotels and convention sites will probably be in for a rough time. SXSW has a $110M impact on Austin. That’s bound to get a reset.

2. Rise in speaking engagements opportunities: There will be a lot more opportunities for speakers with experience “doing” something as opposed to “preaching” something to do. Expect fewer of the Gartner, Forrester analysts heading sessions, unless they have practical industry experience and working experience.

3. Rise of the show built around a narrow niche (like blog networks): Related bloggers and blogs will network together to host an event around a specific niche. Its more viable now and more profitable with smaller audiences and better networking opportunities.

Do you think we got the main implications right? What else do you see happening?