0 Genoo and Act-On Software Add Social Marketing Features

Summary: Two low-cost demand generation systems, Genoo and Act-On Software, have added unusually advanced social marketing features.

A few weeks back, I wrote about social marketing features from consumer marketing automation vendors. Naturally our friends in the business marketing space have been adding such features as well. I got details from two of them last week.

- Genoo, which offers a solid demand generation system for a rock-bottom $199/month, has placed a particular focus on capturing contact information from social interactions. People who comment on a Genoo-hosted Web page or subscribe to a Genoo-originated RSS feed can be loaded into the system as contacts and these activities can factor into their lead score. I don’t recall seeing either feature in any other demand generation system, although I haven't checked carefully.

Genoo also offers “share to social” badges for messages delivered by its system. These embed a unique ID to link any resulting Web visits back to the original sharer. This feature is not unique – Genius.com and smartFocus do something similar – but it’s still pretty unusual. However, the value is so obvious that I expect many other vendors will soon follow. Genoo can also assign lead score points for social media sharing.

I expect to post a more comprehensive review of Genoo in the next week or two.

- Act-On Software is another low-cost system, starting at $500 per month. It has made several important enhancements since my review in March 2009, notably multi-step campaign sequences and bi-directional integration with Salesforce.com.

To the current topic, it has also added a “Twitter Prospector” to reduce the labor required to mine Twitter for leads. This lets users define multiple search queries and see each result in separate columns. To screen out marketing pitches, the system can exclude tweets with embedded links. Users can reply to selected tweets through corporate accounts, drawing on a library of standard messages. This reduces the risk of inappropriate replies. Users can also forward a tweet to someone else for review or comment.

Act-On will also string together related tweets to give a sense of the on-going dialog. Web site visits driven from Twitter are flagged in the activity history of individual leads and in general Web analytics reports, although Act-On does not tie them to the originator like Genoo. It does add the Twitter ID of known visitors to their lead profile when possible.

Providing a library of standard replies to Twitter messages is not unique (see my December 2009 review of Spredfast for something similar). But it’s an unusual feature for a demand generation system, which typically defers to CRM for managing interactions with individuals. Act-On originally developed the feature for its own use, so perhaps there's no deep significance to its choice. It's also worth considering that the next logical step -- fully automated replies to social messages -- would almost surely fall within the normal scope of marketing and demand generation. (I'm not sure automated responses are such a great idea, but they will ultimately be the only way to manage the volume of messages presented in social media. So it's more a question of how to do them effectively than whether to do them at all.) What we see here is still more blurring of the boundaries between the demand generation and CRM systems, a trend I fully expect to continue.

0 Matching Social Media to Your Needs and Resources

Summary: Marketers face so many choices that just deciding what to test is a major challenge in itself. Here are some ways to match social media to your business objectives and resources.

I’ll be giving a Webinar on March 23 (register here) with Neolane about cross channel marketing. At least that’s the official topic. In my mind, it’s really about helping marketers choose among the ever-increasing media options available today and in the future.

I won’t go into the details of the presentation, but thought I’d share this chart for selecting among social media.

The chart makes two major points:

- different social media meet different business objectives. I suppose this is self-evident, but it still helps to think about this systematically when you’re trying to decide which to explore. As the chart indicates, most social media can in fact serve more than one objective. Incidentally, the chart lists the objectives in roughly the sequence of the customer life cycle, starting with market preparation activities at the left and moving through purchase and post-purchase support, which further helps you visualize where a particular project fits into your larger customer treatment strategy. You may disagree with particular details on this chart, but that’s less the point than thinking about putting each medium into a larger context.

- media must be matched to your resources. This is also pretty obvious, but, again, it’s easy to ignore it when considering your options. It's also worth pointing out that resources include more than data, technology and experience. My list also includes public interest in your topic and media reach (i.e., your firm’s ability to attract attention to its program, largely by paid advertising). Both make possible social programs that would otherwise fail because no one would participate. It's worth noting that funding can make up for shortfalls in other areas and that strengths in other areas reduce the need for funds.

An Example

The table below gives a simple example of these ideas in action. It analyzes the situation of a hypothetical company facing a major product recall. Objectives in this case are “monitor and respond” to public opinion and provide “customer support” to previous buyers. Highlighting these shows that social networks, Twitter, message boards and Wikis are appropriate options. But let’s assume it’s a small company, with limited media reach and funding, and that it also lacks technology and experience for social networks and Wikis. This leaves Twitter and message boards as the best candidates -- Twitter because there's very little technology involved, and message boards because we assume that company has the necessary resources in place.



Although this example is limited to social media, the same approach can be applied to other media as well. Tune into the Webinar for more details.

0 Clarifying the Differences Between Database and Digital Marketing

Summary: Database and digital marketing are both data-driven. But they differ in plenty of other ways that make it hard for specialists in one to adapt smoothly to the other. Here's a detailed look at the differences.

Yesterday’s long (or merely long-winded?) post described the different mindsets of database and digital marketers but it was pretty short on differences between the two marketing methods themselves. Today I’ll try to be more concrete.

DB or Not DB

Database marketing is built around a marketing database that contains addressable, identifiable individuals. By “addressable”, I mean there is information such as a mailing address or phone number that lets the marketer contact the individual. By “identifiable”, I mean information is available to link data about the same individual from multiple sources. Addresses are the most common identifiable information, although there are also non-address identifiers such as Social Security Number. Addresses and identifiers are both required: a database without addresses couldn’t be used for most marketing, and a set of records that can’t be linked to other sources is just a list.

The consolidated database is the heart of the database marketing concept. Data from multiple sources lets database marketers make more effective predictions about the best treatments for each individual, and treatments across multiple channels are more effective when they are coordinated centrally. The marketing database contains attributes (age, income, location, etc.) and behaviors (promotion responses, purchases, customer service interactions, etc.). It can certainly include digital activities such as Web page views and social media comments, so long as these can be linked back to a known individual.

Digital marketing does not use a database of addressable, identifiable individuals. It may gather information from one source and even track it over time for the same entity. (Example: Web site behavior tied to a browser cookie.) But unless the entity can be linked to other sources through an identifier, the digital marketer can only make treatment decisions based on information captured in the source channel itself. This is far from useless – behavioral and contextual targeting can be quite powerful. But from a database marketing perspective, the data is frustratingly incomplete.

Addressable Media

Database marketing only works in addressable media: that is, where a message can sent to a specific individual. Addressable media include direct mail, email, outbound telemarketing, and customer service interactions. They can also include digital channels such as Web pages, mobile messages, kiosks and ATM machines, but ONLY where the recipient is known before a message is sent. Thus, a Web page that has identified me because I’ve registered and logged in (manually or via a cookie) is addressable; a Web page that I visit anonymously, even if it recognizes me as a previous visitor from a cookie, is not addressable.

Digital marketing includes many non-addressable media, including paid and organic search, Web banner advertising, social media, and anonymous forms of Web sites, kiosks, mobile (e.g., location-based messages), and the rest. These generate plenty of useful data, such as click through rates, search rankings, sentiment analysis, and page views. But this data and related analysis are quite different from what database marketers are used to.

Prediction vs Reaction

Database marketers have the rich information needed to accurately predict which offers are most appropriate for each customer. Combined with their access to customer addresses, this allows them to initiate effective outbound marketing campaigns and to define static rules for interactive dialogs. Note that in most addressable media (mail, email, outbound telemarketing), the offer must be selected before the customer is actually contacted, and making multiple offers often reduces response. So database marketers have strong reasons to work on making highly accurate predictions.

By definition, digital marketers cannot target outbound campaigns at individuals. They do have opportunities to manage interactions, but often know only what has happened during the current interaction itself. This greatly reduces their ability to make predictions. Instead, they present multiple options and react as people respond. Happily, most digital media are inherently interactive, so this is a practical approach. Since rule-based decision flows are less viable as the number of options increases, digital marketers lean more heavily on self-adjusting automated decision engines.

Message Control

Database marketers directly control the messages they send to each customer. This is yet another factor that helps to justify the costs of building a comprehensive database, running sophisticated predictive models and precisely customizing each message.

Digital marketers have vastly less control over who sees what. Much of their messaging is blind to the audience who will see it, or can only be targeted on limited information about behavior or context. Indeed, some of the most effective and intriguing digital marketing techniques, such as viral campaigns and shareable widgets, rely on distribution that's totally beyond the marketer's control. Social media provide even less control, since the messages themselves are composed outside the company. The net result of all this is to reduce the degree of individual targeting that digital marketers can execute.

Response Measurement

Database marketers can typically capture response to a promotion directly, with a coupon, telephone call or Web click. Even when they can’t, their database still ultimately tells them who bought what, so they can correlate the promotions they’ve addressed to an individual with that individual’s subsequent behavior. The ability to do precise response measurement is yet another factor that lets database marketers fine-tune their programs.

Digital marketers can also measure who clicks on a Web ad, and sometimes can track that person further into the buying cycle. But they don’t know what other promotions or social media that person saw, what else they purchased, who else saw the same promotion but didn’t respond, or who responded through some other channel. All these uncertainties leave digital marketers reliant on indirect measures, such as consumer panels and surveys, which are more typical of conventional mass media. These are approaches that most database marketers would find almost laughably imprecise.

What’s It All Mean?

Database marketers and digital marketers both have plenty of data and the good ones are highly analytical. Both can apply advanced statistical techniques and rigorous testing methods. Both can work to integrate their data and their customer strategies across channels. To some extent, they even work with the same media: in particular, a Web site can support both digital (anonymous) and database-driven (addressable) marketing programs.

Yet despite these similarities and interactions, the two groups work in largely different media, use different techniques and have different priorities. Database marketing is inherently more controlled and precise; digital marketing is more fluid. Good marketers will learn to apply both. But individuals who have specialized in any one area will find it hard to adjust to the other. At a minimum, they’ll need to be conscious that the old rules don’t apply.

Adjustment is even harder for organizations, who will have invested in specialized systems, processes and people to support one technique or the other. This, in my opinion, is why the leading database marketing vendors have not been the leading digital marketing vendors. Which, if you’ll recall, was where I started this discussion.

One final point: there's no reason the same organization or individual can't master both database and digital marketing. That is, although there are major differences between the two, there is no fundamental conflict. My point in these articles is simply that it will take conscious effort to address the differences and fill the gaps that they imply.

0 Unica and Alterian Lead Database Marketers to the Digital Promised Land

Here are some quick thoughts on two items: Unica’s acquisition of paid search bid management system MakeMeTop (now mercifully renamed Unica Search) and Alterian’s recently-released and excellent annual marketing survey.

The connection is that these both support my feeling that many members of the old-line database marketing community have failed to adapt to the new world of digital marketing. I’ve been talking about this a lot with consulting clients but don’t think I’ve written about it at length in this blog.

The gist of the argument is that traditional direct marketing agencies, marketing automation software vendors and marketing services providers have mostly remained focused on outbound campaigns. They did move from direct mail to email, but those are pretty much the same thing. The really cool digital marketing stuff, including Web site development, Web advertising and most recently social media, has been executed by a different set of digital marketing agencies, specialist software vendors, and, ironically, media buyers at traditional ad agencies.

The fundamental reason is that the main skill of database marketers is building a customer database, while the core of digital marketing is responding to the behaviors of anonymous individuals. Of course I’m oversimplifying – much digital marketing does deal with people who have identified themselves – but there’s still a fundamental shift from targeting outbound campaigns at known individuals to managing interactions with anyone willing to engage.

Both Unica and Alterian have been exceptionally forward-thinking among marketing automation vendors in preparing for this transition. Unica’s latest acquisition is particularly interesting because search bid management has almost nothing to do with reaching known individuals. (I say “almost” only because Unica seems to intend to link search click-throughs to a traditional marketing database.) It follows Unica’s acquisition last month of email deliverability expert Pivotal Veracity, which I found less impressive because email is part of the old database marketing world.

Alterian has already made big bets in social media and Web content management, which are also well beyond the scope of traditional database marketing. Its survey provides strong support for the notion that marketers are “moving from a campaign-centric direct marketing model towards multi-channel customer engagement”: in fact, 51% said they were expending a fair or significant amount of effort on exactly that. Related factoids include:

- 61% of marketers do not integrate Web analytics with other customer data.

- 66% of respondents (which included quite a few agencies and marketing services providers, in addition to marketers) plan to invest in social media marketing in 2010

- 36% of respondents plan to invest in social media monitoring in 2010 (a discrepancy that Alterian finds “worrying”, although I’ve previously seen similar data. My take is that many marketers see social media as a way to generate business directly, and look at monitoring as a secondary aim.)

- 38% said coordinating digital and direct marketing agencies was somewhat or very difficult. No surprise there, although I don't necessarily agree with Alterian's contention that this will lead to a unification between the two sets of agencies.

- 35% of marketers expect to move more than 20% of their direct marketing budget into digital channels next year.

In short, the Alterian survey shows that marketers are eagerly moving from classic direct marketing to digital, interactive and social marketing, but still lack the skills and resources to do it effectively. Industry vendors who support them will thrive. Those who don't will quickly be left behind.

0 Spredfast Offers Systematic Management for Social Media Campaigns

Summary: Social Agency’s Spredfast helps marketers schedule social media campaigns the same way they schedule paid advertising. Cool.

It seems like common courtesy to listen to an existing conversation before jumping in with a comment. If social media worked the same way, companies would first buy a monitoring system to track what’s being said, followed by tools to respond to comments made by others. Only later would they initiate conversations and, eventually, provide tools to help their friends spread the word.

Silly me. I should have known that marketers talk first and listen later.

I’m not talking about personal style, although the decibel level at any marketing conference speaks for itself. But a recent eMarketer article B2B Marketers to Increase Social Spend cited two surveys that showed this is also a matter of policy.

Specifically, a study from Visible Technologies and SiriusDecisions found the most common use for social media was to “generate awareness” (25%), while another study in B2B Magazine found the top use for social networks was “thought leadership” (60%). True listening ranked fifth in the Visible Technologies/SiriusDecision survey (“monitor and respond” at 14%), and third in the B2B Magazine survey (“customer feedback” at 46%).

On reflection, this makes sense. Marketers are primarily interested in getting out their messages. Perhaps this is an old habit that will change in a customer-driven world. But I suspect that marketing results will always be driven by activity, and results are ultimately what matter. So I’ve now revised my expected sequence of social media activities to start with broadcast, only then followed by monitor, respond, initiate individual conversations and empower advocates.

Armed with this insight, I was much less surprised when Kenneth Cho of social marketing agency Social Agency told me that his new social media campaign tool Spredfast had been purchased immediately after release by major companies including AOL, IBM, HP, Cisco and Porter Novelli. Although I’ve seen plenty of “listening platforms” like Radian6, Alterian Techrigy and Scout Labs, I hadn't previously seen a system aimed primarily at managing outbound social messages. (Now that I'm looking, though, I find that ObjectiveMarketer seems to offer something similar.)

Of course, the listening platforms can also post social media messages, as can the social media features now found in many marketing automation systems. What distinguishes Spredfast is that marketers can schedule their posts through the life of a social media campaign, rather than simply replying or initiating conversations on demand. Spredfast supports on-demand posting too.

Another key feature is that Spredfast supports multiple “voices” of actual or constructed individuals, each having accounts in multiple channels (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.). The campaign calendar lays out of scheduled events by all voices over time, and is color-coded to show whether a particular event has already been delivered, is ready to go, or still needs approved content. This looks strikingly similar to the media plan for a flight of broadcast ads and serves very much the same purpose.

Users can drill into an event to add the content itself including bit.ly links that allow the system to track the click-through. One particularly nice feature is that when users assign the same content to multiple events, the system will automatically create different bit.ly links for each event. This makes it easy to track results for each event independently.

Spredfast's developers also recognized that large companies will have many different people working on different aspects of a project. Users can be assigned rights to specific campaigns, voices and events, with precise control over who can view, edit and approve content. Pricing is based on the number of campaigns, not users, so large organizations can incorporate as many people as needed.

As the bit.ly tags suggest, Spredfast also pays substantial attention to measurement. It provides three major summary metrics:

- activity (how much content the system is publishing),
- reach (the number of views, friends, followers, subscribers, etc.), and
- engagement (numbers of comments, retweets, likes, etc.).

Top-level reports summarize these by campaign and let users drill down to see detailed statistics by channel and voice and, ultimately, the actual content such as comments or reviews.

The system archives content and responses so they remain available even after they are dropped from the social media platforms that originally carried them. In addition to cumulative statistics, Spredfast displays daily statistics for the past seven days, giving a sense of trends.

Perhaps wisely, Spredfast's developers drew the line at reporting the raw numbers for its metrics. Users who want more elaborate scoring, perhaps applying different weights to different kinds of activities, can export the raw data and calculate outside the system. Similarly, Spredfast makes no attempt at relating social media programs to business results such as leads or revenue.

The system does provide what Cho called a “minimalist” listening platform, which can automatically search across public listening tools (Google, Google Blog Search, Social Mention, Twitter, Boardreader, Bing) for key words, and present any results so users can review and republish or reply to them. It also provides an RSS reader for feeds selected by the user, as well as a site indexer that can show the frequency of different terms in user-specified blogs as a word cloud. This helps users tailor their posts to encourage coverage.

Spredfast began its public beta in mid-November. The system is a vendor-hosted service. It is available in a free version with limited functionality; a $50 per month standard version with one campaign, no collaboration and no metrics after the first month; and $250 per month enterprise version supporting all features for up to three campaigns.

0 Survey Suggests Marketers Are Moving from Paid to Social Media

Summary: a new survey suggests that marketers are less focused on lead generation than on final sales, growing current customers and building online communities. I’m not sure I trust the data, but it’s a pretty picture nevertheless.

I don’t know quite what to make of the 2009 Survey on Marketing, Media and Measurement released earlier this month by custom content company King Fish Media.

- On one hand, it’s a rare opportunity to see data from business, rather than consumer, marketers. (Of the 230 respondents, 52% were pure B2B and another 36% were mixed B2B and business-to-consumer.) So I'd really like to believe it.

- But on the other hand, the sample seems dangerously unrepresentative: 44% said their organization’s primary industry was “publishing/media/advertising/marketing”, which is vastly higher than the real-world proportion. Presumably this was the result of the survey method – an online survey based on email invitations to the lists of King Fish and co-sponsors HubSpot, Junta42 and Upshot Institute. In addition to the industry skew, this probably reached a group that’s much more online-oriented than marketers as a whole.

The best I can do is to treat the results very carefully: assuming that this group shares some characteristics of the broader universe, but keeping in mind that some answers might reflect its atypical composition. Here goes.

1. Marketing Measurement Practices

The group reported using three broad types of marketing success measurements:

- 91% measured new customers acquired or leads generated.
- 63% measured customer retention or sales from current customers or lapsed customers.
- 54% measured brand-marketing-style metrics such as awareness, perception or intent.

Directionally, this seems about right: more marketers focus on new business than on existing customers, and brand-style measurements are less common than business results. The figures for existing-customer measurements are higher than I would expect, but perhaps that’s because publishing marketers are more directly responsible for renewals than business marketers in general.

Another oddity was that more people report measuring new customers (77%) than leads (73%). An optimist would treat this as evidence that marketers are adopting an end-to-end vision (as they should) rather than ending their responsibility when a lead is handed over to sales. But think the more likely cause is that marketers in publishing are more likely to sell directly (i.e., without a sales force) than in other industries.

Incidentally, the survey also found that 73% of respondents had guidelines in place to measure marketing success, but just 50% said their company requires a measurement plan as part of its program approval process. Treat this as you wish: is it impressive that 73% have measurement guidelines or frightening that 27% do not? Also bear in mind that 91% were at least using measurement on acquisition programs (some, apparently, without standard guidelines). So I think we can conclude that basic measurement is widespread, although its quality and consistency are questionable.

2. Spending on Acquisition vs. Existing Customers

Media spending by purpose was distributed:

- 56% for new leads
- 33% for retention
- 10% for other

This is interesting because I don’t recall seeing other data showing this split. The actual numbers show much more spending on retention than I would have expected. As with the measurement figures, this probably reflects the business of the survey responders.

3. Media Preferences

The main thrust of the survey was how marketers view different media. Marketers were asked to rate "the most effective way to communicate with customers and prospects", with separate answers for each. Here are the results:

	for prospects/leads	for current customers
corporate Web site	75%	70%
social media	73%	72%
custom content and media	70%	77%
face-to-face events	69%	62%
white papers / e-books	67%	52%
Webcasts and virtual trade shows	64%	51%
e-mail marketing	58%	78%
online advertising	42%	13%
direct mail promotions	33%	34%
print advertising	33%	17%
broadcast advertising	10%	11%

If there’s a pattern here, it’s that awareness-generating media (e-mail, direct mail and online/print/broadcast advertising) rank shockingly low, especially for prospecting. Apart from using email for customer communications, the respondents gave their highest rankings to the corporate Web site, social media, and custom content.

But how, exactly, can they attract traffic for the Web site, social media message and custom content if they don’t reach out to new audiences? I can think of (at least) two answers:

- they can’t, and the answers just reflect an infatuation with online media. I’m not saying the respondents are poor marketers: chances are they really do use the low-ranked media, but don’t consider them terribly effective. (Other answers in the survey suggest the same thing, showing that budgets are moving away from the low-ranking media to the high-ranked categories.)

- they can, by using social media and custom media in the awareness- and traffic-building roles previously handled by paid advertising. Put another way, the traditional first steps of generating awareness and interest are handled by the community rather than by marketers themselves. In this world, marketing’s role becomes to nurture communities of enthusiasts and evangelists, and then to meet the needs of prospects attracted by the community. This is what I meant in my September 23 post about community-centric marketing replacing customer centricity. (Can I coin CBM as a new acronym for Community Based Marketing?)

Obviously the second possibility is more intriguing. It’s surely correct to some degree, although the Big Question is how quickly and how far marketers’ role will shift. Given my concerns about this survey, I wouldn’t treat its results as definitive answers. But they're still tasty food for thoughts.

0 RightNow Adds Social Community Capabilities (But Don't Expect Support Costs to Fall as a Result)

Summary: RightNow has extended its social media footprint by purchasing HiveLive, which lets companies build public and private communities. It also released a benchmark survey showing that online channels (email, chat, Web self-service) don't do much to reduce customer service telephone calls.

In keeping with my recent posts about broader utilization of social media, I had a chat earlier this week with on-demand CRM vendor RightNow , who updated me on their recent purchase of HiveLive. HiveLive provides a social community platform, which means it lets companies build their own discussion groups, forums and such. HiveLive has many features to support business communities, both in terms of engaging with customers over issues such as product features and bugs, and in terms of building internal communities such as project teams.

HiveLive fits with RightNow’s vision of giving customers a seamless flow between community applications and a company’s traditional service systems. For example, if a question posted to a forum goes unanswered for a specified time, it can be escalated into a service system as a case to be handled by the company’s support group. If I understood correctly, RightNow and HiveLive can do this already.

We discussed deeper sharing, such as having answers developed in a public forum become part of a company’s internal customer service knowledgebase. That’s something RightNow may add in the future.

Our discussion veered onto other topics, and in particular how seriously companies really take the goal of improving the customer experience. RightNow shared a copy of its recent RightNow Multi-Channel Contact Center Benchmark Report, which was interesting in its own right.

One tidbit I found particularly intriguing was how few telephone service calls are “deflected” into email, chat and Web self-service channels. In the survey, most companies reported that fewer than 10% of customers in those channels would otherwise have made a phone call.

You could see this as bad news for the theory that having alternate channels available will reduce the need for call center agents. Or you could consider it good news that customers have more choices to pick the interaction method they find most congenial.

Another interesting item was that 55% of companies have some mechanism to gather feedback from customers, but just 10% of those use an IVR survey, which I personally consider the most effective way to gain broad participation. Again, you can treat this as good news (at least half the companies are trying) or bad news (just 5% of the total are doing it effectively). Either way, it’s food for thought.

0 Acxiom Uses Social Media Data to Segment Email Lists

Summary: Acxiom's new social media marketing tool gathers public data about social media links and uses it to segment email lists. It's a different, and arguably more practical, approach to helping marketers take advantage of social media.

Acxiom last week released a new “social media marketing” solution called Relevance-X Social.

The press release is frustratingly vague (“With the ability to engage socially active customers and prospects in their preferred networks, marketers can link that knowledge to relevant communications that ignite conversations on behalf of the brand.”) But, on talking to the company, it turns out there is a pretty interesting product here. (Disclosure: I am a consultant to Acxiom, although I had nothing to do with this product).

What Acxiom has done – and this is so Acxiom – is to ignore the content posted in people’s social media comments or profiles, and just capture the “hard” information about links between people and membership in groups. Apparently (and I’m taking Acxiom’s word on this), this data is publicly available from most social networks (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo and some more specialized ones) once you know someone’s email address. So Acxiom has taken its own database of more than 500 million email addresses and found the connections for each.

Relevance-X then accepts a marketer’s own email list – presumably its customers or prospects – and returns information from its own database about the matching names. This avoids at least some privacy and spam issues, since marketers are only given information about people they already have some type of relationship with.

The main application of this information is sending targeted emails. Thus, a bank might send one message to customers who belonged to a financial planning group, and a different message to customers who don’t. Other segmentation might be based on the total number of connections, membership in the company's own fan group, or information the company already knows from other sources.

The key point here is that Acxiom is using social media to execute traditional database marketing. This is quite different from most social media marketing products, which boil down to monitoring for posts on specified topics, responding to individuals, or to publishing messages to groups through the network itself. In a way, it seems rather old-fashioned to use social media data as a basis for outbound marketing. But for marketers struggling to find a practical use for social media, it's better than many alternatives.

(As Ed Park points out in a comment below, other vendors including RapLeaf and Unbound Technology also build similar databases by capturing social media links.)

Relevance-X includes two other components. One is the ability to tag the content it publishes – such as links within emails or messages posted to group pages – so marketers can track response. This is done with standard page tags and browser cookies, so what’s important here is not the technology but the ability to measure results. Again, this is something that traditional database marketers consider essential – and that other social media products sometimes struggle to accomplish.

The other component is a separate social media monitoring service that tracks keyword mentions, sentiments and trends, but on an aggregate basis rather than by tracking individuals. Acxiom is using a third party product for this. The goal is to supplement the direct response tracking with a more general measure of marketing program impacts.

Pricing for Relevance-x Social is based on the number of relationships (typically email addresses) researched and on the number, size and complexity of the campaigns being managed. It can be purchased on a campaign-by-campaign basis or annual subscription. Pricing for a basic campaign could start at around $25,000.

0 A Heartwarming Story of Social Media, Family and QlikView

My son works as a sports researcher at a cable television network. His job seems mainly to be looking things up in online databases and, on broadcast days, watching several games simultaneously. It's nice work if you can get it.

In terms of technology, Microsoft Word and Excel meet most of his needs. But I did introduce him to QlikView several years back, and he learned enough to analyze statistics for his college basketball team. When QlikView introduced its free Personal Edition, he decided to use it at work to track a database of college recruiting prospects. Despite (or because of) his lack of technical background, and without any formal QlikView training, he created a very nice system to find prospects based on different characteristics and create ad hoc statistical summaries.

The centerpiece is a map that displays the number of recruits by state. Because this is QlikView, the map is automatically redrawn each time he makes a selection: so he can see recruits for a certain position, or going to a particular school, or whatever. This is the sort of thing that gets sports people excited. In fact, his colleagues were so pleased that there’s talk of using a version of the map on-air.

The only fly in this ointment was that neither he nor I could find a way to get the map to show the numbers for all the states simultaneously. We could get different sized bubbles reflecting the state counts, and we could see the actual figure for each state by hovering over it. Recognizing my own limits as a QlikView developer, I asked for help on the QlikView user forum and from friend on the QlikView consulting staff. The consultant didn't think it was possible, so we let the matter drop.

Fast-forward one month, to yesterday, when I received a notification that someone had responded to my forum query with a solution. It took a couple of tries, and some additional help from forum members, to get it to work on my son’s map. But you can imagine how pleased we were when we finally saw the map as originally envisioned.

This story illustrates quite a bit about QlikView. Building the original map was easy – my son was able to do it with little help, even though QlikView was doing some very sophisticated processing under the hood. (Specifically, on-the-fly data aggregation along user-defined calculated dimensions, without touching the underlying database). But getting the system to do exactly what he needed did take some special knowledge. (He had to use the number of students by state as his primary dimension, not the X/Y map coordinates.) The adjustment took just a few minutes, but only a QlikView expert would realize that’s how you do it.

To generalize a bit more broadly, then, QlikView really does enable non-technical users to do amazing things, and it really is as powerful as its advocates (myself included) like to claim. But users do need some training to be effective – something that advocates are sometimes reluctant to admit.

The story also illustrates the value of social media. QlikView’s forum is an amazing source of help for users of all skill levels. It works because QlikView has a community of highly engaged advocates who are both expert in the product and willing to help each other.

The forum provides several strategic benefits for QlikView: it helps users become successful (thus driving wider adoption); it lets users succeed even if they don’t receive proper training (which many will not, particularly among users of the free Personal Edition); it reduces the need for paid support staff; and it provides a window into common problems and requirements. It also reinforces the commitment of the engaged users themselves, by publicly rewarding their contributions. Although I’ve never discussed the forum with QlikView management, they obviously understand these benefits well enough to justify their continued investments in it.

This isn’t to say that social media would provide the same value to everyone. QlikView fits several specific conditions – enthusiastic expert users, problems that can be solved fairly easily, etc. – that won’t always apply. But as an example what social media can sometimes accomplish, QlikView is a great case study waiting to be written.

0 Why Social Media Really Matters

Summary: marketing has shifted steadily over time from passive to active consumer engagement. Social media is the latest stage in this evolution. Marketers need to master new skills at each stage; as they do, advertising budgets will shift to take advantage of the new medium's increased effectiveness.

Of all that research I mentioned last week, two pairs of facts stood out. One was the disparity between the time people spend on online activities (20% to 30% of total media time) and the share of advertising expenditures spent online (10% to 15%). Although some difference may be justified by the differences in media effectiveness, this still suggests to me that ad spending will continue to shift into online media until the spending is roughly proportional.

The other disparity was that search accounts for 5% of online time but 60% of online ad spending. Some of this may be due to the fact that it’s much easier to buy search advertising (think Google AdWords) than other types of online ads. But I think the primary reason is that search serves as a gateway to other Internet activity—so marketers wishing to drive traffic to their own Web sites need search advertising to make this happen.

The final, related factoid is that social media have grown from virtually nothing to nearly 20% of online time over the past few years. This matters because social media are an alternative gateway to finding Web content: instead of doing a search, I can ask my online community for information or recommendations. Thus, social media present a major threat to search advertising revenues. Although social media currently gather under 3% of online advertising, this will surely change as marketers work to find ways to exploit its potential. If you’ve been wondering why Google should be concerned about Twitter and Facebook, that’s your answer.

These shifts from offline to online advertising and from search to social media suggest a progression through four stages:

1. mass media, or broadcasting: this began in the late 19th century with the emergence of national brands and national print media. Today it is represented primarily by television. You can date TV-dominated era from, say, 1950 to 1985.

2. database marketing, or, more poetically, narrowcasting. This is about direct contact with segmented groups of customers. Date it from 1985 to 1997.

3. search marketing. This is characterized by use of search engines to drive traffic to Web sites. I’m being arbitrary but let's date it from 1998 to 2007.

4. social marketing. This is use of social media to connect with consumers. I’ll date it from 2008, although effective marketing uses of social media are just starting to emerge.

As each new medium has emerged over years, some portion of advertising dollars has shifted from the preexisting media. Of course, the old media don’t go away completely. Indeed, traditional mass media (including radio and print as well as TV) still account for the largest share of advertising spend.

The four media differ along several dimensions. These include:

- consumer engagement. Broadcast is the most passive medium; essentially, it’s yelling at people who may or may not be interested in the message. The audience in database marketing is still passive, but it's targeted at segments that marketers have some reason to believe are interested. With search marketing, the consumer takes a somewhat active role in deciding what to look for, even though the ads themselves are still placed by marketers. With social marketing, control is directly in the hands of consumers, who decide which messages they will receive.

- authority. I find this an intriguing concept. Basically it has to do with how consumers decide which messages they should believe. In the mass media, authority is essentially conferred – people believe things because they are "seen on TV" or have the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval". With database marketing, the medium (typically direct mail, more recently email or telephone) doesn’t itself confer much authority, so the message itself must command attention because it’s relevant to the consumer’s needs of the moment. This relevance motivates the recipient to actively explore the marketing offer and assess whether its source is credible.

In search marketing, the source of authority is implicitly based on the group itself: Google PageRank is largely determined by the number of links to a Web site – a version of “wisdom of the crowd”. With social marketing, group-based authority is explicit: consumers can see the number of followers, recommendations, reviews and other ratings provided by group members and decide whether to trust them.

- post-sale relationship. This defines the relationship between the marketer and consumer after the initial purchase. In the mass media world, the relationship barely exists: customers use the product and, hopefully, like it enough to buy it again. At most they ask for service if there’s a problem. With database marketing, post-sales contacts become important for cross-sell, upsell and retention. Indeed, this is where database marketing truly shines because it’s where rich data is available for targeting and relationship building.

Search marketing reaches a new level of engagement because customers can interact directly with the company Web site. This lets them initiate transactions, send messages, and in some cases actually change product configurations such as setting telephone features. With social marketing, consumers take direct control, initiating engagement themselves and, even more important, publicly sharing their engagements with other community members.

- marketing focus. This shows the critical task that marketers must master. With mass media, the primary marketing goal is selecting a message that builds a successful brand. For database marketers, the key skill is effective segmentation. Search marketing is primarily focused on developing content, both to attract traffic via organic search and to meet consumer needs once they appear at the site. For social marketing, the ultimate goal is convincing consumers to become brand advocates. Content is still important, of course, but its nature shifts from information that visitors consume to tools like widgets that empower them to share their enthusiasm with others.

The following table summarizes these dimensions.

medium	consumer engagement	authority	post-sale relationship	marketing focus
mass media (broadcasting)	passively exposed	conferred	service / support	brand message
database marketing (narrowcasting)	targeted	relevance-based	cross sell / upsell / retention	segmentation
search marketing	activity-triggered	implicit group	Web self-service	content
social marketing	consumer-controlled	explicit group	public engagement	empowerment

At the risk of stating the obvious, the table shows a steady increase in consumer empowerment from the passive receipt of mass marketing message to active control in social media. Because this is a fundamental change from traditional mass media marketing, it has several important implications:

- for each new medium, marketers must learn new skills.

- as marketers learn new skills, they will use the new medium more effectively.

- as marketers use the new medium more effectively, it will receive increasing portions of their ad budgets.

- since social media is very new, its share of advertising budgets will continue to grow for some time.

In short, social media matters not because it's cool, but because it offers marketers a new and more effective way to reach their consumers. Marketers who fail to master the required skills will fall behind marketers who do.

0 Show Me the Numbers: Hard Data on Internet Use and Media Spend

Summary: Here are links to about twenty studies with statistics on online media consumption and advertising spend. Many are contradictory, but it's clear that marketers need to invest in social media, which might eventually replace search as the primary way that customers find them.

I’m sitting on a panel next week that will discuss long-term marketing trends. Naturally I have plenty of opinions on the topic, but just for fun I decided to scare up a few facts to reinforce them. This led to a highly entertaining, though uncompensated, scavenger hunt through the Web.

You won’t be surprised that there’s plenty of data out there. But I thought I’d share some of sources I found for answers to my basic questions, and perhaps a couple of insights I hadn’t quite considered before.

1. How are people actually spending their time online? And, in particular, are social media as important as industry gurus claim they are?

Probably the most comprehensive study along these lines was Global Faces and Networked Places, released by Neilsen in March 2009. This showed that as of December 2008, search was still the most common Internet activity (used by 85.9% of the online population), compared with just 65.1% for email. Social networks and blogs are the fastest growing application, now exceeding email with a participation rate of 66.8%.

Digging a little deeper within the social media category, the women’s blogger community BlogHer reported in its 2009 Women and Social Media Study that as of March 2009, 75% of women participated in social networks, compared with 55% who read blogs, 40% read message boards or forums, and 16% update status on platforms like Twitter. (The Twitter figures are surely much higher by now.) Nineteen percent actually publish their own blog while 29% comment on blogs. This reinforces (at least for women) the sense that social networks are rapidly emerging as the dominant Web activity.

Netpop Research reinforces this point in Media Shifts to Social, which found that as of September and October 2008, communications (including email, instant messaging, blogs and photo sharing) had risen to 32% of online time from 27% in 2006. Entertainment (games, videos, and “accessing Web sites for fun”) dropped from 49% to 20% in the same period. Sadly, the public materials don’t tell us where the rest of the time went. Netpop agreed with BlogHer’s general participation figures, reporting that 76% of American broadband users participate in social media (105 million of 133 million total).

By contrast, the Pew Internet & American Life Project Survey in December 2008 found only 35% of adult online Americans had a social media profile. Based on the other studies, this seems low – although a social media profile is a more restrictive requirement than the other definitions apply. Pew did find that 65% of American teens had profiles.

One drawback with these studies is that they only look whether people participate in different activities, not how much time they spend. The Online Publishers Association has tracked time since 2003 in conjunction with Nielsen. Its most recent report shows that in the past year, time spent on “community” applications like Facebook and Myspace has more than doubled from 8.8% to 18.5% of the total. (Blogs are also apparently part of “community”, although this isn't stated explicitly.) Since total time online has also expanded, time per visitor has grown even more.

Despite the growth of community, the OPA still shows content (40.6%) and communications (25.2) asl the dominant uses. Commerce (11.0%) and search (4.7%) account for the rest.

Looking at older OPA figures, which are available on MarketingCharts, the biggest change is the reduction in communications, which had a 46% share back in 2003. At that time, social networks were lumped into content, which had a 34% share. Today, the combination of content and community accounts for 59% of users’ time.

The position of blogs is ambiguous because most reports lump them in with other social media. Forrester’s just-published The Broad Reach Of Social Technologies contains a table, available in Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell blog, shows that social media “joiners” rose from 25% to 51% of the online population in the past two years, while content “spectators” (which includes blog readers) grow from 48% to 73%. But that’s pretty much the opposite of the BlogHer ratios mentioned earlier (55% blog readers vs. 75% social media participation). So the jury is still out.

Summary: What does it all mean? Here are my main observations:

- social media are indeed booming, but still account for a minority of online time. So even though marketers need to find ways to use social media for business purposes, they still have time to figure it out.

- everybody uses search, but they don’t spend much time on it. Search still earns the bulk of online advertising fees because it's a gateway to other content, and perhaps because it's the easiest Web advertising to buy and optimize. But its share may erode as social media provide alternative paths to desired content.

- blogs are probably growing more slowly than other social media, but they still account for a substantial portion of online activity. Marketers might be investing in blogs than they are really worth.

2. How does consumption of online media compare with consumption of other media?

Council for Research Excellence’s Video Consumer Mapping Study found more than five hours of TV watching per day (43% of total media time), vs. 80 minutes of Internet usage (10.7%). The Internet figure seems low, but this was a very careful and sophisticated study. These figures may only include the time when a medium had the consumer's primary attention -- so just having an instant message window open on your desktop wouldn't count.

Magazine Publishers Association reported the share of time with different media, although you have to read the table carefully because it reports minutes spent by of “users” of each medium rather than the average across all consumers. But the MPA also points to a study from MRI MediaDay (again published on Marketing Charts) showing the percentage of consumers using each medium. The combined figures show an average consumer spends about four and a half hours of TV per day (47.5% of total time) but only one and half hours of Internet (15.2% of total).

Incidentally, the MPA also argues that time alone isn’t the best measure of advertising value, since some media are more influential with their consumers than others. This is a point worth considering. The MPA bases this on Deloitte's State of the Media Democracy Survey, which unfortunately I couldn't find posted. The MPA provides other, related data in its 92-page guide Magazines: The Medium of Action.

A Forrester chart, posted on CNET shows five years of data on time spent per week with major media. The chart shows that Internet has more than doubled since 2004 and nearly caught up with TV. It reports about two hours per day with TV, accounting for about 34% of total time vs. 33% for Internet.

The Media Audit gives yet another set of statistics on time by medium. It also finds that TV is just slightly ahead of online, at 33% vs. 29% of time respectively. But it pegs TV viewing around three and a half hours per day.

Summary: These are serious conflicts, which I see no way to reconcile. Two studies show TV and Internet each accounting for about one-third of media time, while the other two show TV accounting for about 45% and Internet for 10-15%. The wide variations in estimated total time are also, um, noteworthy.

3. What is the share of ad spending for different media?

PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Wilkofsky Gruen Associates report in their Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2009-2013 (via eMarketer) that ad spending will total $170 billion this year, including $62 billion (36%) for TV and $25 billion (15%) for Internet and mobile.

Zenith Optimedia pretty much agrees: its October 2008 report shows U.S. spending at $179 billion for 2008, with a worldwide share of 37.5% for TV and 10.2% for the Internet.

On the other hand, the Direct Marketing Association shows spending at $339 billion total in 2008 including $75.9 billion (22.4%) for TV and $39.4 billion (11.6)%) for “new media and other”, which presumably includes Internet. The DMA also breaks out the portion of each medium used for direct response. It must have a pretty generous definition, since it puts 52.1% of the total in that category.

WPP’s groupm estimates in its Interaction: Addressable, Searchable, Social and Mobile study (via MarketingCharts) that interactive media’s share of total advertising is 14% in North America and 13% worldwide for 2008.

Summary: it’s hard to compare these figures, but everyone agrees that online spending is somewhere between 10-15% of the total, while TV gets 30% or more. Assuming that consumers spend about the same amount of time with both, and that advertising on both is equally effective, online media should get a larger share of ad budgets.

4. Where are marketers moving their budgets?

Forrester and Marketing Profs report B-to-B Marketing in 2009 shows that business marketers most commonly use their company Web site, email, public relations and trade shows. Another table from the same study, referenced by The Event Marketing Insider, shows marketers plan their greatest increases for the company Web site, search marketing, online video and Webinars.

A Forrester chart posted on Mashable shows interactive marketing spend by category, projected from 2009 to 2014. Search marketing accounts for about $15 billion of $25 billion total today and will grow 15% per year vs. 17% for the total. Mobile marketing and social media will grow faster, but will only expand from 4.4% in 2009 to 8% in 2014. Email marketing and display advertising account for the balance.

Online Marketing Blog surveyed marketers about their planned digital marketing channels in 2009. The top three were: blogging (34%), microblogging (Twitter) (29%) and Search engine optimization (28%).

Summary: marketers are moving their budgets online, primarily into the traditional channels (blogging, Web site, search).

4. Which media most affect purchase decisions?

Marketing Sherpa found buyers making complex purchases were relying more heavily on virtual events (Webinars, trade shows), search engines and Web sites, and less heavily on email, face-to-face trade shows, video programming and advertising.

Forrester (via ReadWriteWeb) found emails from friends, consumer reviews and search engines were the most trusted information sources, while personal blogs, company social networking profiles, and company blogs are least trusted.

TNS Media Intelligence in Digital World, Digital Life (via eMarketer) found that recommendations by friends, online news, newspapers and TV news were the most trusted information sources, while user forums, company brochures, free newspapers and private blogs were least trusted. Product comparison sites, industry Web sites and company Web sites were in the middle.

Summary: Marketers may be overspending on blogs and search. Social media could be a better investment -- if we could find a way to use them effectively.

0 Pedowitz Group's Sweet Suite Builds the Missing Link between Social Media and Marketing Automation

Summary: Pedowitz Group’s Sweet Suite captures social media comments and forwards them to a company’s primary marketing automation system. It’s a small but critical step towards integrating social media with other marketing programs.

Marketers and the vendors who support them are working feverishly to harvest the opportunities created by social media. The result has been a profusion of single-function products that provide one part of a comprehensive solution. Probably the most common are products that make it easier to post comments or share links via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other public forums. Many demand generation vendors now offer something along those lines.

But social media are for interactions, not broadcasts. Products to monitor different communities for mentions of a particular topic provide the first step towards starting a dialog. These too are increasingly common, although most still operate outside of the marketing automation suites. Many of the monitoring systems also help users post responses to the messages they find.

But truly integrating social media with other marketing activities requires considerably more. Social media events must be logged within the core marketing system, linked in that system to other information about the same individual, and responded to through standard marketing system campaigns. In other words, social media must be managed like any other marketing medium.*

Sweet Suite, a product from the Pedowitz Group, addresses precisely this need. The system scans Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for mentions and can make automated replies when it finds something. It can also generate a “social media score” for each individual, using whatever formula the marketer specifies, and provides a dashboard to track over-all social media results.

But what's really important is that Sweet Suite reads the public profile of the mentioner, extracts key information such as name and number of followers, and sends the data to a demand generation system. From that point, the demand generation system can use the data like any other input, for lead scoring and campaign selections. Thus, the critical connection between social media and "normal" marketing processes is complete.

Sweet Suite currently connects with Eloqua via an API, and is likely to connect with other systems in the future. The Eloqua interface also tries to link the commenter to existing records in the demand generation database, generally by looking for a match on the social media username. Sweet Suite can also match on an email address if it’s captured in a social media form.

Sweet Suite can also receive, parse and reply to text messages, and of course send the resulting data to the demand generation system. Pedowitz is working on a spider to scan blogs and other Web sites and add their data as input.

Suite Sweet is still technically in beta, but the product is in production at four clients. Current pricing is set at $1,000 per month regardless of number of users or data volume. The system is sold as a hosted service.

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*Or perhaps not: some social media evangelists might argue that social media is so radically different from everything else that it can’t be managed in the same way. But while I do think that the details of the treatments will differ, I see no reason they can’t be brought into the standard marketing infrastructure. The advantage of this integration is that the information gleaned from the social media interactions becomes available to guide messaging in all other channels, and vice versa.

Thinking a bit more deeply about social media integration, the closest existing analogy is probably the telephone call center. Like social media interactions, telephone calls currently must be handled by human agents rather than automated replies. This suggests that tools used to enhance phone agents’ effectiveness, such as context-sensitive recommendations and standardized scripts, can also help to guide social media agents.

Social media interactions are somewhat more structured than telephone calls, so it may eventually be easier to automate them fully. But even if human agents remain involved, both the social media system and other channels will benefit from having all their data in the central system—just as today’s marketing systems benefit from incorporating call center histories.

0 Genius.com Adds Short URLs to Capture Social Media Replies

Summary: Genius.com is adding a URL shortener that will tie social media responses into the regular flow of demand generation and lead management. It’s a small but important step towards making social media a standard business tool.

I saw a quick demonstration today of a new social media feature that Genius.com will release at the end of September. It generates short URLs that directly connect social media responses with Genius.com’s standard marketing and sales support features. Here’s the press release.

As I wrote in my February post on Genius, the system creates links to a proxy server that can track Web site visitors within the demand generation system without actually modifying the Web site. (Typically, such tracking requires a landing page built in the demand generation system or a tracking script embedded in the regular site pages.) The Genius link can either point to a landing page created by the salesperson or marketer in Genius or pass the visitor directly to the existing Web page. These links are typically placed in an email created by a salesperson or marketer. The new feature is a desktop widget that creates short versions of such links so they can be added to social media responses such as a Twitter post, Facebook page or blog comment.

This both is and isn’t a big deal. From the technical and end-user standpoint, Genius has simply made it easier to access its existing technology. That’s a very small step. But from the business standpoint, inserting Genius URLs (inevitably if painfully shortened to “GURLs”) means that links in a social media post can now be tracked like other online responses: that is, the visitor can be tied to the original source, assigned a tracking cookie, shown special messages and added to normal lead processing streams. In Genius’s case, this means that visitors can be associated with a company via their IP address, offered an online chat and scored on their activities and form responses, while salespeople can be alerted to important events, find related data or leads in JigSaw or LinkedIn, replay the Web site visit and access the full activity history.

In other words, Genius has taken a major step towards integrating social media with the standard sales and marketing toolkit. Companies must still find effective ways to monitor and respond to social media events. But once that happens, the new Genius feature will let them manage all further interactions with the same tools and processes as leads from any other source. This is major progress, and a capability that I haven’t yet seen from other demand generation or CRM vendors.

That said, there’s a business strategy question of whether this product will give Genius.com a significant competitive advantage. I suspect other vendors could easily create the short URLs themselves and distribute them on a desktop widget. It would be harder to match Genius.com's technology for letting salespeople and other non-marketing users add their own landing pages. But I suspect most companies will want social media users to rely on a standard set of company-approved links. So that particular part of Genius.com's technology may not really matter.

However, I think the real use case is people pointing to ANY page on a company Web site* that happens to answer a specific social media query. In that case, what matters is the ability to create a short URL that activates the demand generation tracking features. This fits perfectly with the Genius.com proxy server. I don't know how difficult it would be for other vendors.

It's also true that Genius.com has a general advantage in dealing with non-marketing users because its original product was aimed at salespeople. But other demand generation vendors are already working hard to extend in that direction so I don't know how long Genius.com's lead will persist.

Whether or not Genius.com gains a long-term advantage, they certainly deserve credit for being the first (so as I know) to deploy this extremely creative and valuable idea. But the great thing about competition is that if a new feature is really valuable, other vendors will copy it—and then everyone benefits. To me, that’s the best outcome of all.

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* Genius.com only lets users link to pages the user's email domain, or others site for which they have explicit permission. This prevents them from intercepting links meant for someone else.

0 Alterian Pushes Into Social Media Management with Techrigy Acquisition

Summary: Alterian's purchase of Techrigy marks the first integration of serious social media management with marketing automation. Others are sure to follow.

Marketing automation vendor Alterian yesterday announced its acquisition of social media monitoring company Techrigy. Even though the Techgrity deal is the first direct acquisition I recall of a social media monitoring system by a marketing automation vendor, it strikes me as an obvious step. Marketers have been scratching their collective heads for years over how to integrate social media, and marketing automation vendors are very aware of their needs.

I’m not even totally surprised that Alterian was the first to jump into this pool. Although other marketing automation vendors like Unica and SAS are generally more expansive, Alterian has been particularly aggressive about integrated customer management. Previous acquisitions include Web content management (MediaSurface, 2008), contact optimisation (Campaign Calculus 2.0, 2007), email (Dynamics Direct, 2006), marketing resource management (Nvigorate, 2006), and hosted analytics services (MarkIT, 2005).

In fact, according to Alterian’s very interesting FAQ about the Techrigy acquisition, “Engagement marketing” is the core of their current corporate vision. Although I’m generally allergic to sweeping vision statements, I think Alterian has earned the right to use that one. Sparingly.

What really impresses me is that Techrigy is a serious social media monitoring solution. This isn’t about making it easy to react to comments on Twitter, add friends on Facebook, or research prospects on LinkedIn, which is how most marketing automation vendors are approaching social media. Instead (or in addition) Techrigy supports sophisticated searches, categorization, sentiment analysis, influence measurement, author tracking, and case management.

This set of features means that Techrigy is really built more for corporate PR departments and marketing agencies than one-on-one customer management. But that makes the acquisition still more intriguing. I expect Alterian to extend the product to monitor and manage individual relationships, thereby integrating social media with other aspects of customer management.

This would be a major step beyond using aggregate social media data as a way to measure marketing performance – although even such measurement would be itself a great leap forward for most companies today.

It’s by no means certain that Techrigy can actually scale up to manage this many individual relationships. Current users probably track just a small number of individuals and cases, such as key bloggers and specific complaints that must be resolved. Ramping from that to tracking millions of individuals is likely to uncover serious bottlenecks. But even if the system can’t do this today, Alterian should eventually be able to rework it to overcome any obstacles. This sort of processing is a good fit for Alterian’s columnar database engine, which is the core of its business.

I spent some time playing with Techrigy yesterday, using the free version available on their Web site. This allows only 1,000 search results, which is far too few for any real business purpose. But it did give a good flavor for the system.

On the whole, I liked Techrigy very much. Per my previous comment, I was particularly impressed with the scope of the functions.

These start with searching for articles to analyze. The search interface allows advanced logic, complete with Boolean statements, local and global exclusions, and rules to assign the articles to categories for later analysis.

The searches run against articles assembled by Techrigy in a database that stretches back for two years and includes 1.5 billion entries. Sources include blogs, social networks (publicly-accessible sections of Facebook, MySpace, etc.), microblogs (Twitter, Friendfeed, etc.), message boards/forums (such as LinkedIn discussions), wikis (such as Wikipedia), video and photo sharing sites (Flickr, YouTube), and some mainstream media blogs (The New York Times, Wall Street Journal). Querying this database is where the Alterian database engine should shine – yesterday, running even my simple searches took longer than I’d like.

Users can also add their own feeds to search. This could not only capture specialized sources that are too small for Techrigy to monitor, but might include private sources such as a company’s user forums. This opens up a range of important applications beyond public social media tracking.

Searches can run on command, continuously, or on a regular schedule. Results can be streamed to an external viewer as an RSS feed or presented in standard reports. The most basic report shows daily volumes with trends over time. Results can be categorized and filtered based on author popularity (a 0-10 score based on audience), author demographics (age and gender, where known), domains, sources, and keywords. Additional reports show word clouds with themes, which can be derived from keywords or more advanced semantic analysis. There's even a Google Maps mash-up to show author locations. The semantic engine can also tag posts with positive or negative brand sentiment, content tone and emotions.

Users can dig into these reports to view the underlying articles. The system starts with a list of article summaries, similar to a set of Google search results. Users can then select an article and drill into its details, including extracted Web site information and traffic rank, content analysis showing sources of the system-applied tags, the full article itself, and links to Alexa, Technorati, Compete and Quantcast information about the article source.

Users can also delete the entry, mark it as spam, adjust the system-assigned tags, and edit information about the author. This author tracking is what could ultimately be expanded into tracking of individual customers.

Finally, users can assign the article to a user for review or action. This engages the workflow system, which can notify the assigned user and keep track of the article’s status, notes and priority. Here the system moves from social media monitoring into actual relationshipship management.

Techrigy’s user interface is generally okay, although I sometimes had a hard time finding functions such as how to rerun a report. This would presumably go away after a bit of experience. Response time was a little slower than I’d like for tasks such as a applying a filter or presenting an article list. However, this might not be typical: the Alterian acquisition has attracted a lot of attention and generated more than 400 new trial users (per a Twitter post). In any case, this is where the Alterian engine should help.

As for the semantic engine itself – I was underwhelmed by the accuracy of the results. I especially enjoyed the Twitter post “Twitter for B2B Marketing - Marketo: Sin Descripción http://tinyurl.com/mfuh3n” being tagged as negative, religious, and – wait for it -- written in Danish.

A more serious problem is articles like “Ten Mistakes Marketers Make” being tagged as a strongly negative brand reference. But this is probably an issue with most semantic engines (I had a similar problem with ScoutLabs). Presumably Techrigy’s accuracy will improve over time. But even if it doesn’t, users will adjust to what it can do. In practice, you’d expect a company to review all entries tagged as negative, which would then be reclassified or dealt with as appropriate.

Current pricing for Techrigy starts at $600 per month for 20,000 stored search results. Of course, pricing could change under the new ownership.

In sum, Techrigy is an interesting product on its own, but the real story here is the potential for merging social media with other marketing systems. Although this was clearly inevitable, it’s exciting to see Alterian start to make it happen. We can expect other marketing automation vendors to follow quite quickly.

0 Demand Generation Vendors Offer Few Social Media Applications

Summary: marketing vendors offer several types of social media applications. But none truly automates social media management, which is what's ultimately needed.

Social media is this month’s Trend of the Year. But no one knows how best to use it, which has led to a wide range of offerings under the social media label. Here’s a quick and surely incomplete run-down of those I’ve seen recently. They provide three basic functions:

- send messages via social media. Treehouse Interactive just introduced a “talk it up” feature that embeds “share this” buttons in Treehouse-generated Web pages and emails. This lets people easily send a Tweet, post to a Facebook wall or create a LinkedIn article that points to the original content. CRM vendor RightNow offers something similar under the label of Cloud Links.

- add social media data to prospect profiles. InsideView is gaining the most attention for this at the moment. It lets marketers or sales people specify companies and individuals to monitor, and then scans media including social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook), public forums (blogs, wikis, Diggs, Twitter), paid sources (D&B, Zoom, Jigsaw,) and Web pages for information about those entities. It analyzes the results to identify key events and to build consolidated profiles with its best guess at the correct current information. These can be loaded into sales and CRM systems to make them easily accessible. InsideView is already integrated with major CRM vendors and with the Marketbright demand generation system.

Broadlook offers somewhat similar functions, although it is largely limited to Internet searches to gather the data it examines. The company’s main product, Profiler, extracts names, titles, email addresses and telephone numbers from a specified Web site. It can also search other Web sites for email addresses containing the targeted domain. An enhancement released last month, Profiler X, will also incorporate data from Hoovers. Other products include Eclipse, which scans online directories that require user log-in, and Diver, which scans the results of a Google search one page at a time. Results can be imported to sales automation and CRM files to update and enhance their profiles.

Many other vendors let a user automatically jump to the LinkedIn or Jigsaw profiles of the prospect they are reviewing. Ones I know about include Pardot, LoopFuse , TrueInfluence , Salesforce.com and ACT! by Sage This is a crude sort of integration – the data is simply presented in a window on the screen, not actually loaded into the demand generation or sales automation database. But it does save a few keystrokes.

- scan for social media mentions. Specialized systems like ScoutLabs, Crimson Hexagon and BoardTracker have been available to track social media mentions for some time. Just last week, RightNow announced Cloud Monitor, which integrates such tracking with the ability to respond with its sales and customer service features. This will surely be a standard CRM feature before long, and will probably migrate to demand generation systems soon after.

All told, I'm rather disappointed at what I see in this list. InsideView and RightNow have the most important applications, but neither is a demand generation system. Treehouse Interactive is the only demand generation vendor to offer anything beyond a simple LinkedIn integration, and even Treehouse is only making it easier to use social media as a broadcast medium. No one seems to be executing meaningful dialogs through social media, even though that is marketers’ truly pressing need because doing it manually is so expensive.

Of course, this ties into the larger need for automated personalized dialogs that I have previously identified the future of demand generation. I’ve now believed this for almost two full weeks, so it must be true.