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.

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.