Digital Influence Mapping Project

Social Business: Create a Content Activation Culture

CES 2011 is all tablets, wireless connectivity, Internet-enabled 3D TVs and Android-fueled smart phones. Look at the innocuous next generation Chumby2 - essentially a bite-sized internet-enabled tablet for the end table. Each represents the diversification of internet and content access.We are accessing content in more ways via more devices.  Add that to the established trend for people to spend time and get information via social networks. We are not spending significantly more time on brand web sites. And while TV-usage may be trending up in the US, I guarantee you much of that is multiplatform time (laptop open). Oh and don't forget that professional media companies from B2B trades to B2C multiplatforms are hungry for content. The time for brands to step into the role of their own media company is here. 

Content Activation = Create, Distribute, Promote and Measure

Today, the corporate marcom lead has plenty of reasons to see the value in developing a complete content strategy to reach corporate communication goals and to reach product brand marketing goals. Brands can build virtual engines to create a mix of multimedia and more spontaneous content that is designed to either be useful or entertaining.  This causes people to spend time and interact (i.e. "engage") or spread that content across their social graph (i.e. advocate). Brands must distribute that relevant content across an ever-changing ecosystem of owned, co-owned (e.g. Facebook), earned (e.g. bloggers, media) and paid platforms (e.g. all types of ads from advertorials to print ads to online display).  But feeding the fire hose with the right content is not enough. Brands must take responsibility for promoting content to get in the hands of people who will engage and advocate. Lastly, true content activation culture requires constant measurement to understand performance and the diagnostics or levers that can be pulled to improve impact and outcomes. 

Chief Content Officer vs. Process

There has been a lot of good discussion about the notion of a new C-suite position - Chief Content Officer. LinkedIn has a group dedicated to the concept (but where few members actually carry that or a related title.) I particularly like Greg Matusky's take on a job description:

"If you can write like a journalist, think like a marketer, and understand the vast and shifting seas of digital communications, Mega Global Corporation needs you to express our world view and communicate our value to financial and consumer markets, partners, and governments.

You must be able to manage a worldwide editorial staff, producing both written and visual communications, and must be able to deliver daily, even hourly, content that is fully optimized to gain visibility over digital pathways.

This individual will report directly to the CEO, but will have the strength of character to beat back corporate encroachment in favor of honest, accurate content that provides real value to worldwide audiences.

Most important, this individual must understand how to monetize this content throughout the enterprise, converting incoming interest into business opportunities for the organization as a whole. Compensation: Name your price if you can deliver on the seemingly impossible yet urgent responsibilities described here."

I am not convinced that centralization in the C-suite is the only way to go to create a culture of "content activation." Equally important is the right mix of teams and process to make it happen. 

 

Creating Responsive Content: Analytics Team

What are customers searching for and what are they saying in online conversations about the product, brand or important ideas that connect with them? This sympathetic intelligence fuels all of our best content strategy. We literally make content that has the words and ideas people are looking for. Of course that content must be useful or entertaining to customers and it must authentically represent our brand or products. This isn't about tricking people to consume content. It is all about relevance. 

Brands should establish or expand the role of existing groups to take responsibility for this intelligence. The Analytics Team is constantly sensing what customers need and want. That is feeding into creation and distribution strategies. There is a "geek factor" here that is best delivered across the enterprise form a single group. In other words its hard to get right and this type of foundational knowledge and insight should come from one place such that it cascades throughout the organization from a consistent center.  

Establishing Clear Brand Themes: Theme Development Process

In corporate communications we call it a message platform. Marketing teams think more in terms of 'brand story.' Internal communications think more in terms of values and principles. Our customers and employees are seeing both what corp comms delivers and what marketing publishes. They ought to be aligned. the disciplines ought to work together to establish a common and focused story platform. I will call it "theme" as it can sit above and drive individual stories (or campaigns). We don't need a single unified team but a process that brings marketing and communications together. Their goal should be to define three themes that can drive their work over a half year or longer. These themes can be revised from time to time yet ought to be consistent for long stretches as they are likely derivative of true culture and ought not to change like so much campaign "fashion" (i.e. constantly changing campaign messaging). Product brand stories can be written in alignment with these themes. Even short-lived campaign ideas can be derived from them. It's important to establish and communicate across the entire enterprise. 

Train on Technique: Content Optimization Process

There is quite a bit of technical and process know-how needed from meta-information creation to advanced techniques in search optimization to really succeed with content activation. But most groups who create content can get it. I am arguing against a centralized 'content factory' responsible for all content creation and optimization.  I just don't think that is realistic. Too many disciplines within the enterprise have an interest and need in content creation. It is possible to think of the content factory as a federation of distributed groups. Let's simply establish a common process for making all content work as hard as it can. Let's train our teams in this highly valuable optimization process. 

Always Be Assessing Progress: Measurement Team

Every week, brands should be looking at a dashboard of performance. That must have the simplified view of key performance indicators as well as enough diagnostic data to know which levers to pull to improve things. This is best left to a Measurement Team both cause its geeky but also because senior leadership will trust the numbers from an independent group. The only generalization that I can make about what these measure should include is that the ought to report both on whatever KPIs describe the action you want from people and those that reflect increased advocacy.

Teams and Process

Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of the Chief Content Officer. But this lucky guy or gal will still have to establish the teams and process I have described to actually implement a content activation culture in today's business enterprise. The benefits of this approach include:

• More people talking about the brand in relevant ways
• Input into how your brand is talked about
• Increased brand presence in search engines
• Alignment of internal and external communications
• More customers and prospects spending time and interacting with the brand via content
• Treating employees like the advocates they are
• Moving beyond a campaign marketing cadence into an always-on relationship 
• What else?

Which Half of the Ad Spend is Wasted?

Who even said the famous "half of advertising" quote anyhow? Was it John Wanamaker or was it William Hesketh Lever as my UK colleagues insist? Regardless, it speaks to an era where we counted on simple models of paid or earned media effectiveness. With "digital" came the promise that because we could meausre everything, we might now know which half of advertising worked.  

Instead, we ended up in a rut that Manu Mathew, CEO of Visual IQ, calls "last click metrics" in a recent article. That's when we put all our eggs on the last click that drives a user to some type of valuable "conversion" point. Its time to flex our measurement muscles harder to understand what he calls cross-channel attribution. 

"By conducting research into data across our customer base, we used cross-channel attribution to determine that, in general, online display, direct mail, and email channels serve as the most effective touch points to introduce a consumer to a brand or product, while social media and mobile ads continue to influence users toward action. Normally, search or affiliate channels are the last point of contact prior to a customer taking action, and hence, drive the last-click-based credits. If we ignore the introductory and influencer channels and look only at the last clicks, we are ignoring more than 94 percent of all touch points -- proving, once again, why last-click metrics are ineffective in today's informed marketing world."

We have spent a lot of energy understanding the performance of social media programs. We have also developed a disciplined approach to designing and measuring marketing programs. Marrying Neo@Ogilvy's approach to "performance marketing" and our approach to social media measurement reveals the compound effect of social (earned) and complex paid media programs that may include social ad targeting, behavioral display media, search marketing, advertorial and more. We need to further. 

Now, more than ever before, we need to understand the combined influence of all types of earned media and paid media to increasing consideration, preference and a key buying action. If I hear another crm marketer complain that social doesn't have better ROI metrics that a crm email campaign, I will vomit. That is too simplistic and a case of "last click metrics." It ignores the role that social and other communications can have on a conversion. 

Most worthwhile social media is some form of earned media and it can be high highly influential to a sale (or a vote, or an opinion shift).

Consider this:

• Consumers exposed to “influenced social media” were:50% more likely to click on paid search
• 280% more likely to search for a brand’s products, compared to those exposed only to paid search
• 240% more likely to click on an organic search result

(GroupM study 10/09)

And this: 

• Social networking saw a 10% increase in CTR from last year and makes up for the largest percentage of CTR in SocialTwist's 2010 "State of Sharing" report (admittedly, they use their own Tell A Friend feature for the data but I still find it directionally relevant)
• While Facebook is the preferred "sharing platform" (when people chosse to "Tell a Friend" they choose Faceook 78% of the time); Facebook has a 287% CTR and Twitter has a 1907% CTR!

(Socialtwist Sharing Trends 2010)

And this:

• Ninety percent or consumers surveyed noted that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trusted consumer opinions posted online.

(Nielsen 2009 Study)

 

Combine the influence of more trusted third party sources for information, the compound effect of social media on the performance of highly measurable and targeted paid media and the increasing performance of social as a preferred referral engine, and the strengths of social to drive preference and action are irrefutable. 

Lets design a series of studies that examine the complex ecosystem of content, user behaviors, earned, owned and paid media to give marketers a reliable weighting system for influence. I know, its a lot harder than that. But avoiding the issue - the power of social content - is an even bigger problem.   

The Bloody Edge of Influence Planning: Neuromarketing

Watching a brain on marketing is fascinating. Pop us in an MRI and prod us with an emotive TV ad or friendly Twitter exchange and watch colors bloom amidst the grey matter. Adam Penenberg from Fast Company researched and wrote a great article focusing on one "neuroeconomist," Dr. Paul Zak, and his research around Oxytocin. Billed as the natural hormone that stimulates empathy, generosity and trust, it only makes sense that marketers pay attention. No, not to "dose" people with Oxytocin in the hopes that they like our ad just a bit better, but simply to understand how we are influenced. 

I believe this and other neuro-marketing research will lead to innovations in marketing. For now, it falls on that category of emerging science that always reminds me of The Heath Brothers' qualifier for all things interesting but not yet applicable: "true but useless."  

Neuromarketing will give us actionable insights. Here are some examples of research and application: 

• Neuromarketing: the hope and hype of neuroimaging in business
• Campbell Soup’s Labels Redesigned Using Neuromarketing
• Neuromarketing Hope and Hype: 5 Brands Conducting Brain Research

The Nugget

One takeaway nugget? Adam's experiment (with Dr. Zak) while he tweeted that showed the Oxytocin generated and stress reduced while tweeting confirmed that the virtual interpersonal exchange appears as solid and good-for-you as interacting in person. Love that part. Must post and tweet now.... 

Build This Listening Post Please

We have done a lot of work around listening to consumer generated media in multiple markets around the world. We use a lot of different technologies and fit them all into our 3-part approach to Listening Posts. 

• Conversation Criteria - determine the topics and keywords that you will "listen" for. This requires strong brand and product knowledge as well as a strategic eye to what conversations might intersect with the brand in some way.

  
  

• Listening Technology - there are hundreds of choices across all of the language markets in the world. Many have particular strengths and we select them based on those strengths and our need

  
  

• Action Reports - in this day and age, a voluminous report with no action recommendations is next to useless. Those recommendations can only come from an experienced strategist who knows the brand (yes, of course that is us)

  
  

5 Uses for Listening Posts 

Okay, this is all well and good. Now, consider what Listening Posts are good for: 

• Marcom insight to guide strategy and content development - what people say can inform our overall marcom strategy (not just 'social') and the words they use can be integrated into our content and taxonomy

• Crisis monitoring - listening and responding during a hot and heavy brand crisis

• Customer service intervention - assign response across customer service

• Product development insight - inform update to products and services

• Media planning - find relevant social sites for media buys

• Rapid response - story correction, customer intervention outside customer service, crisis early detection, finding opportunities

Better System for Rapid Response 

There is a weak link in the last one: rapid response. If you want to have the proverbial ear-to-the-ground to catch a crisis before it blossoms or want to intervene when a customer blurts online that your servers are not designed to support complex CRM when they really are designed for just that, you either need ot have an always-on team scanning the Radian6 dashboard (or Visible or SM2 or whatever....) or you are likely relying on some Google alert + Twitter search feed. The first one can work but can become unwieldy when you factor in all the topics and brands a big enterprise or FMCG needs to follow. It can get costly. And it can teach your brand marketers to rely on someone else to "listen."

Next Gen 'Brand Intelligence Dashboard' 

We designed and built a pretty robust listening post-lite with NetVibes. We use it everyday as do some clients. Now I need the next version and here is what I would suggest:

Top level requirements

We need a feed or display that everyone inside a brand organization can use and look at live throughout everyday. The goal is not to specialize listening into one research group but rather equip marcom team members with the capacity to listen and take action

To be always on, it must be a simple display for any device - PC, Smartphone - and it must deliver daily email summaries

We need a dead-simple administrative interface that trades complexity and power for simplicity

It should combine sources that feature brand mentions - Google, Twitter, YouTube, white-label collection of blogs & forums

It should provide a separate feed that combines topical mentions that might represent opportunities for the brand but no mention of the brand (e.g. Ralph Lauren would want to know if actual polo clubs were popping up in conversations as they might have an opportunity to productively connect with those people.)

The display of the information should be embeddable in a corporate intranet

It must be easy to connect to a corporate LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) that authenticates users (manages passwords)

The iPhone app should have an alert function if certain words are seen together (this may be unrealistic in practice but an alert like my AP and CNN app could be helpful)

Each mention would feature simple tagging and forwarding so that I could assign it for follow up by forwarding to someone in my address book and/or tag it to sort later

Just Make It

This is a bit more sophisticated that Google Alerts and yet not as overwrought as engaging the simplest listening technology for $100K+ a year plus the cost of the team to watch and interpret. We all want to engage our brand marketers and communicators. But right now, we are just teaching them that listening to their customers everyday is someone else's job, someone with a budget and technology and "magic ears." 

Build me this next tool and you will engage thousands of brand managers to listen and respond to their customers. You should probably still spring for the fancy enterprise listen and respond platform. But at least you will  push your marcom team to do their own listening. 

Simple Measurement Formulas for Social Media

As we work on the next version of our own measurement model, Conversation Impact, I am noticing some really good thinking in pockets of the marketplace on disciplined measurement. Jeremiah Owyang and John Lovett have a couple of white papers and a preso that offers up some pretty good formulas to follow for different types of business initiatives (e.g. advocacy vs. customer support). 

Check out the papers and presos here and this slide serves as a summary of their formulas (along with some tracking of technology vendors whose tools enable different tracking. I would argue that "Foster Dialog" is not a true business objective but I believe I am arguing semantics on top of a pretty good analysis. 

 

"Twitter is a neurological heroin"

Shoot me up, Scotty. 

Okay, I couldn't resist on the title which is lifted from the BusinessWeek review of Nicholas Carr's new book, The Shallows. This book was also just reviewed in the NYTimes. The premise is clear enough. Our digital habits are sapping our ability to pay attention long enough to digest or understand many things, possibly have empathy of other human beings and as for retaining facts...forget about it.Oh, and did I mention that its causing us to read fewer books? Slightly ironic as I have not read The Shallows and feel I have a built-in excuse. 

It has a compelling argument. Although I am not convinced as Carr is reported to be that this may be a devolution of the species.  Rather that we, as individuals, will learn habits that cut down on the multi-tasking spiral that actually cuts down on productivity. I can completely identify with Peter Burrows comment that "it becomes harder to concentrate the longer you spend browsing the Web." And that is why I take breaks and walk away from the glowing box. Its also why I schedule my time and resist the temptation to return to email every 5 minutes. I know the firehose flow of information and the link-anywhere structure of my Netvibes dashboard are slutty Sirens beckoning me on to the rocky shoals of 'keep busy but don't think." (too much?)

But I learned not to watch TV for more than an hour. After a few years at Annenberg at Penn, I knew how insidiously impairing all that advertising guilt and TV show-violence was for me.

Still, I feel the effects. I can get lost on a desperate set of clicks across the Web not dissimilar from driving lost,  thinking that perfect diner must be around the bend...okay, next bend..... Also, names don't come as easily anymore. You might argue that I have some natural brain hardening at work due to age but I am convinced it's Internet-induced. After all, I can always Google to get the name (or check Facebook or my robust Inbox). 

Are we "evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest?" Or are we just learning to cope with the next innovation just as we learned how to use 500 TV channels. Anyhow, that's enough of a blog post. I can't pay attention anymore. I am off to read a book...on my iPhone, 

Influence Planning Requires New Discipline: Part 2 Tools & Skills

This is Part 2. Part 1 is here.

Any good planning discipline develops tools and methods to make planning more effective. Influence planning is no different. Over the past five years or so, we have been creating tools and processes that help us deliver a more predictive result. Instead of relying on publishers and broadcasters self-reporting on audience demographics or independent databases to then place messages as in most media planning, we are looking directly at what people are thinking, saying and doing and then engaging with them around ideas, tasks and ambitions that are important to them.

Influence planning is on the rise as a complete discipline and serves as an alternate or companion to media planning. This latter function has dominated marketing budgets and therefore has become a self-fulfilling practice where all innovation is some form of paid media. "Iinfluence" is more complex than that. People's hunger for transparency from the brands they do business with and the advice of their more trusted peers calls for a different marketing model.

Here's a quick survey of tools and skills for influence planning. This Part 2 in a series that started with a new  research focus. 

Listening for insights
Clearly "listening" serves research. It goes beyond what we usually think about when we plan research, though. It is more than that preliminary step you take once or even periodically to inform your messaging. Today, listening is its own discipline that can constantly pay attention to what people are saying and searching for across the Web. This 'always-on' practice pays dividends everyday by delivering consumer feedback and trends that can guide not just messaging but overall strategy. When we started noticing how one of CNN's twitter handles vastly outperformed all fo the traditional media outlets jumping on Twitter last year, we added simple @andersoncooper(for example) outreach to our own efforts to keep these folks informed and fuel the significant retweeting from that handle. That's an example fo a simple action taken from ongoing listening. Marketing has done a form of this for years via direct response marketing. You put messages and offers into the marketplace, see what people respond to and then adjust.

The analogy in communications and PR is typical crisis management where you manage a live listening post for media and consumer generated media (cgm) and make adjustments on a daily or even hourly basis. Does it pay to apply this same intense listening to brands not in crisis?

For a typical brand with 3-4 relevant topics and a collection of 20-30 keyword combinations, a weekly report complete with action steps can be drafted and delivered in about 3-5 hours.If your effort the following week gains in effectiveness it is likely worthwhile.

We do the same thing with search. Consumer Intent Modeling has been fine-tuned by our search group, GSI. They know how to quickly analyze what people are searching for and we can then use that information to fuel our strategy and content development.

Influencer mapping & segmentation
There are a lot of schemes for analyzing the most influential voices online and rank that influence. Some are good. Some are suspect. Some are just plain silly. Many of the syndicated listening tool and service providers - Visible, Radian6, SM2 - have some type of proprietary rank for "influence." My only suggestion is to always unpack the recipe they and others use. If you don't understand and respect it, don't use it.

We create Influencer Maps. We look at 5 data points to tell us that an online influencer is, well, influential. We look at another 4 to determine how relevant theyare for our brand or project. We have fine-tuned this model a few times over the years as new behaviors and platforms have come online. It will always be evolving like Google's algorithm.

So much of what we do is contingent on great matchmaking between brands and influential people online that we have gone to great lengths to adjust and improve our approach. We put influencer public datainto our database and the net result is that we have developed a substantial directory of great bloggers, Twitterers, forum participants and more. They are segmented based upon their stated affinities (design aficionados, green enthusiasts, parents, etc...) Our database is another tool-of-the-trade.

Engagement planning
What 'creative' is to media planning, 'engagement' is to influence planning. Figuring out what influencers and grassroots consumers will find attention-grabbing and worth their investment of time is hugely creative. It is also where there is as much art as science. 

Are we simply inviting people to experience our product? If so, how does it arrive? What is that out-of-the-box experience that contributes to the talkable moment? Have we created the world's largest tweet-up? Are crowdsourcing a movie for dad's day of "one thing my dad taught me"? The sky is the limit. the guiding principle is always how we can deliver value to the end user.

Tools we use:

• To help plan, we have developed "value exchange" criteria to understand if we are delivering enough value
• We have adapted Emanuel Rosen's drivers of WOM to use as a checklist for activation (will our program drive influencers to share, participate and recommend?)
• Conversation Calendars plan our a la editorial calendars what we plan to release to our followers and influencers that they will find valuable enough to pass along or otherwise participate with.

Conversation management

This is really a form of engagement. I call it out here as it has evolved considerably with the emergence of Facebook and Twitter. Brands now have the opportunity to manage an ongoing relationship with customers and constituents. This is not necessarily about diehard fans. Nor is it quite the same as serving a distinct few by stewarding a community.  Both of those efforts can be hugely worthwhile.

Conversation management is that "everydayengagement" most easily recognized in Facebook walls and great email CRM programs. The Conversation Calendar mentioned above is a staple tool. Two others include the actual role of theConversation Manager and the social content management system (social CMS), we use to make publishing across platforms more efficient.

Next up: Measurement

Is Twitter Usage Always Meaningful

During the SuperBowl, @kevinweil and the others on the Twitter analytics team tracked SuperBowl and Brand tweets to create the seeminmgly insightful graph below. I love graphs and infographics.If I had my way, half our R&D budget would go against visualizations.

But what does this one actually tell us?

Communal Chatter

It is one thing when Twitter helps us see a grand (and terrible) event like the Mumbai attacks from many perspectives or when it allows us each to share a personal pov or experience that others may find useful or relatable. It is another when we are all watching the same edited TV broadcast. Sure the polling function of how many folks liked the Google ad is kind of interesting.

As Kevin shares:

"The second half began with a bang as @TheSaints recovered a surprise onside kick, and for the next minute 44% of all worldwide tweets were about football. Chatter around brands had meanwhile dropped to much lower levels until @Google's Parisian Love commercial sparked viewers once more. Excitement around the game grew steadily with large peaks following scores and turnovers up until the final moments. As the game ended, one out of every two tweets on Twitter was about the Super Bowl!"

I was much more active on Twitter during the game last year. This year, I knew there woudl be a broad community of Twitter users commenting on game highlights and commercials but it just didn't seem that interesting to tweet, "I liked the Google advert - clever and with a lot of heart..." even though I did.

Still, I love a good graph.

Radical Listening: The Communications Pro of the Future - Part 2

"The Communications pro of the future must be a master of three important disciplines: Radical Listening, Social Influence, and Perpetual Beta. Within each are new practical skills that will define the true PR master – the next generation ‘”trusted advisor.” "

 

The following is the second in a series on the skills of the communications professional circa 2010:

 

 

With all of the conversation we are sharing via Twitter, forums, blogs and all of the self-expression embedded in videos, Flickr galleries and audio shows, consumers are telling us what they care about in plain sight. They are talking about the brands that matter to them and more importantly about the things that vex them and excite their passions. They are telling us what is relevant to them. We need more than active listening. We need radical listening. And let’s face it, the public relations field has always been better at talking than listening.

 

Here are the practical skills that add up to ‘Radical Listening’

 

1. Set up and operate live 'listening posts' online and offline to listen and respond
   Whether setting up a fast Twitter search via your TweetDeck or a more comprehensive monitoring consumer generated media (cgm)program, the Communications pro needs to know how to quickly tap into what people are saying across Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums and opinions sites. This drives marcom insight and our ability to manage a rapid response effort to what people are saying now.
2. Develop "messages" based upon social behavior
   Instead of developing a message platform purely based upon the strengths and ambitions of a brand (how we want to be seen), we can now listen to what is important to customers and constituents via Listening Posts and search engine behavior to ensure our platform is relevant to their stated needs.
3. Identify and engage new influencers, online and offline, niche and mass-follower
   It’s not enough to get a mention in a might-reach blog just as you might in a newspaper. We live in the world of the Long Tail where there are millions of new influencers with relevant audiences in the hundreds. Assessing who is actually both relevant and influential - bloggers, Twitterers, Facebook group-owners, message board-mavens – is critical to achieving business goals today.
4. Participate in conversations, not just 'messaging'
   When someone bashes your brand on Twitter, how will you respond? Chances are you are more apt to jump into a back and forth conversation with customers and influencers today than ten years ago. That means having a keen ear for conversation and feeling confident that you can support your brands position without resorting to recitation of a press release.
5. Be a champion of WOMM best practices especially ethics
   Word of mouth marketing is social media. It relies on open and transparent exchange with others online and offline. We have a new imperative around ethics and best practices. This much is made clear by the FTC’s new Guidelines around Endorsement. We need to lead the way in ethical and productive use of social media to have impact and protect reputation.

Useful "listening" resources:

5 Steps to Choosing the Right Listening Post Solution

The Trends in Next Generation Listening Posts (and Looking Glass)

Links for Listening (2008)

WOMMA Ethics Code

Social IRM - Influencer Relationship Management Pt 1

 

The Trends in Next Generation Listening Posts (and Looking Glass)

We have reviewed and worked with many of the leading technology companies curently providing consumer generated media (cgm) monitoring solutions for brands. After having done two enterprise-level evaluations for global brands - each with different geographic focus - it is clear that the market is shifting.

We just went through a deep-dive on Microsoft's Looking Glass which points to a further evolution of the market towards in-house and integrated solutions. Is that defiance of the SaS model or are they accurately anticipating where big brands need to go in the future?  

Before I get to Looking Glass, Here are a few of the trends I am seeing:

1. the early lead of service providers who do everything from the technology to the insights is falling away. In its place are dashboard technology providers that put the tools in the hands of brands and agencies - the folks that know the brand business. Even Nielsen has a simple dashboard solution.

2. technologies are focusing on 1-2 of the 7 major purposes of Listening Posts. They are slowly focusing their strengths in certain areas and being more open about admitting what their solution or organization cannot support

3. there is a whole new set of technology providers who are building a flexible framework to be applied to multiple language markets. Once you broaden your view to identifying technologies that work across 4 or 5 language and geographic markets, you suddenly see a whole new set of providers like eCairn, Attentio, Brandwatch and others popup.

4. automated sentiment rating continues to be a holy grail (solutions with 60% accuracy are near-useless) except amongst a very few who have made progress notably Crimson Hexagon and Collective Intellect.

5. brands are splitting between those that want simple and fast and those that want tailored and highly relevant. Radian6 smartly stepped into the simple and fast space and continues to excel there even as others launch comparable "monitoring-only" solutions. A few brands have buy-in to invest the time and money for more tailored solutions. Which brings us to:

Microsoft's Looking Glass

We recently met with the development team at Microsoft responsible for their monitoring/listening solution dubbed Looking Glass. The solution is a 3 server-based model and sits on top of or integrates with Silverlight for the display layer, SQL server and Sharepoint. It is a work in progress and has some significant advantages over other solutions depending on which of the 7 reasons you need a Listening Post and what other Microsoft investments you have made.   

Here are 4 reasons that Looking Glass may be great for enterprise listening:

1. It uses Bing for blog and Web search. That engine will likely provide a strong heart for teh service for years to come.

2. Its real power is in the customizability down to its ability to pull in new data feeds. That means that enterprise can combine data feeds that are most relevant to them (the future of Social IRM is in the integration with CRM databases. This platform will handle that.

3. The Silverlight-powered display is good-looking. Don't underestimate the power of great information design to make listening solutions usable.

4. Like Visible Tech it features task-delegation functions. If you want to assign someone to respond to a Tweet or a post, you can do that within the system and track those responses.

This is meant for the more advanced enterprise willing to invest the integration and customization hours never mind the hosting/serving of it. As we move towards more advanced models of integrating cgm listening into the enterprise like the Social IRM model, the Looking Glass model may be a strong solution. Everyone awaits the debut of the next Google Labs experiment where they deliver the 30 ton megaton bomb on teh listening market with their own solution. I only presume that is somewhere inside their skunkworks....