Buzzgain » social media analysis

State of the Union: social media monitoring market – Vendors & strategies

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:28:44 +0000

As a participant in the Social media monitoring or Social Media analysis market I took some time to check out the competitors and get a lay of the land. There are many social media monitoring companies. In fact we track about 42 companies ranging from those that have raised over $40+ Million to a single developer providing some free solutions.

Here are some high level observations:

1. Over the last year data collection and reporting have become table stakes or “commodity”. Everyone does a simple listen dashboard or a total number of mentions and basic sentiment analysis. Since the data is all available freely (or at very little cost) over the net, its value is appropriately priced – free.

2. There are 3 basic areas of differentiation for vendors – Text analysis, Signal to Noise intelligence and CRM integration. All thes products have a basic “tag cloud” and keywords. Everyone also has some form of authority or ranking which is proprietary and in most cases rudimentary. Finally the CRM integration is only being done by a few vendors. These are areas that lend themselves to differentiation. From our customers we have heard that Radian 6 is doing a great job at the CRM integration and Collective Intellect has done a good job in the text analysis.

3. Finally dashboards and representation. As you can imagine every vendor has their view of the perfect dashboard needed by the client. This is another area where it can easily become commodity so putting effort here while “table stakes” is not going to result in a huge differentiation. Of the lot we have heard both BuzzLogic and Visible Technologies are doing a good job here.

Lastly business metrics that matter such as # customers, revenues, profitability etc. are still important. The grand total of # of customers of all vendors (paying customers that is) is still about 100-200 per vendor. We are at little over 1000+ customers paying so we are among the largest in terms of # of customers, but working our way towards profitability and certainly not the largest in terms of revenue.

See related post by Max Kalehoff and an older Forrester report.

What Twitter tells us about Social Media experts and consultants

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:14:44 +0000

Marshall Kirkpatrickidentified 7 social media consultantsthat deliver tangible value. There are some great folks in the list and for sure, there are several more that do add tangible value to their clients. In fact according to ourTwitter analytics on BuzzGain, there about 1.2 Million user accounts.

This includes accounts that have been registered, and have at least 1 friend on Twitter. Of these there are about 14,533 that have the word social in their bio of those about 5,212 that blog about social media, social networking and web 2.0 in general. This list includes people that have an overall marketing (SEO, SEM, brand marketing, etc.) focus, but have an interest in social media.

So in a list of about 5,000 picking 7 is difficult or so you would think. But our initial analysis only rounds up about 25 bloggers who are the experts in social media and related areas. So then again, its a wide ocean, but a few big fish.

Can Social Media Marketing scale is the wrong question to ask

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:06:37 +0000

I was intrigued by the question Peter Kim asked on his blog a few weeks ago, paraphrasing – “Does social media marketing matter? If it does, can it scale?”. (Side note: that tells you how much I have to think to come up with a halfway good response, since it requires a lot of thinking).

Even with accidental examples of viral success and social media examples abound, I could not come up with them because “conversation marketing” involves engaging with people as opposed to talking at them, and a big part of social media is having conversations.

If you are a marketing professional there are multiple modes of getting to customers – (which is the point of marketing anyway) including advertising, sponsorships, newsletters, public relations, your corporate website, events (seminars, conferences, webinars), search optimization, direct mail etc. For a more comprehensive list check out Brian’s multimodal lead generation webinar.

The persistent lack of resources in marketing (or high leverage ratio) requires that most marketing folks spend time on highly scalable opportunities – Why? The pipeline conversion ratio (or how many suspects turn into prospects, and how many prospects turn into customers) is something they take for granted as an “industry best practice”.

The amazing part is that several of the above mentioned marketing vehicles are “high touch” or not very scalable. So does that mean you should give up regional conferences, breakfast sessions or executive briefings? I took Brian’s top list of lead generation and put them on a 2X2 matrix showing scalability and effectiveness. All comments and criticism welcome on which quadrant each of the vehicles reside. The point of that graphic is that not everything marketers do is scalable and effective.

So why do we do them?

Easy: Its what a segment of your customers want. Period.

As a good marketer you have to be where your customers are, do what your customers want and do it while managing to your budget.

There are 2 more main reasons:

1. Be cost effective: Francois interviewed Paula Drum, the VP of marketing for H&R Block and here’s the comment that struck a chord:

Based on her experience that traditional marketing program are more capital intensive, and social media marketing programs are more labor intensive – she recommends that you move some of the people resources which are going to free up because of the budget reductions to social media marketing programs.

Social media is labor intensive not capital intensive so in some ways its more capital effective. During a downturn you want more capital effective means of marketing.

2. Use the right marketing vehicle for the right stage of your customer acquisition pipeline. For someone with a hammer, they say, everything looks like a nail. If you position social media as the solution to all evils, then it wont scale, wont be cost effective and will not add value. BTW check out the video link in this paragraph, its HILARIOUS and very topical.

So what’s the right question to ask?

What are the MOST effective (cost, conversion and stage of customer acquisition) uses for social media?