I gave my basic predictions for 2011 in a post a few weeks ago but as the year ends I want to add one more, as I promised, mostly based on conversations with SocialCoco, BrandTology and Collective Intellect over the last days.

There is  a movement in 2011 towards integration of social listening with the ability to take action; companies that invested in technology intelligently, developed the lexicon, methodologies and visualization skills to intelligently employ  improvements in semantic technologies are now fully  leveraged to take advantage of the far more powerful capabilities now coming on the market and maturing.

Those who have not invested are not focusing on the right things will fall behind, possibly perish – that is my final prediction this year for 2011.

How do you recognize elements of the right investments in process and technologies?  (this is my opinion only)

- Automated abilities to build Social Brand Maps with the ability to scan massive amounts of social profiles

- models for audience acquisition and content development

- Technologies and Intelligence around Geo-Location and Checkins

- Next level of Theme Clustering and Dimension Mapping

-Automated Categorization  merged with Social CRM and automated routing/action engine

There’s a real battle in MarCom as well, many, well … way to many, failed to recognize the power and true assets lie in the Data  with Quant Analysis, and ultimately, with the Analysts …. they are in for several rude awakenings in 2011.

Been meaning to post all week though I am so busy tying up my initial manuscript for Social Media Analytics there is little left for me to write blog posts with (all of my angst and insights are going into the chapters of the book, and that would be OK but I had an insight building up over the last 6 days I need to share; and after all, I am an artist,  self expression is a key part of what makes me want to write, draw and paint).   Actually, what I’m trying to describe is a thought process for which there isn’t an exact analogy – by writing it down I’m trying to visualize and communicate it at the same time.

Here goes.

Tired of being part of lousy analytics reporting, Social Media Monitoring and otherwise, I see it too often and also feel locked into patterns and methodologies that do not work well.   I want to replace what I take to be a bad approach with one that is better, more personal, but workable, at least for me (and maybe for you).  I’m starting with a story:

The Empire State Building

When I left the subway several days ago,  immediately looked up and saw the Empire State Building and knew where I was,  in New York (obviously).   But it’s quite possible, that without the context of seeing a familiar site, something so much a part of New York City (like the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building) I could have been in almost any large city in the United States, Canada or Europe.

I started thinking about that on the way up to Providence, RI, where I’m editing and finishing up my manuscript this week.

It dawned on me  Social Media Analytics, Monitoring and Insights (vs. Reporting)  need the same things that I, visually, need, in order to know where I am located, namely a reference point and the context of  the relationships between what surrounds a reference point and the reference point, itself (thinking visually now).

Kinda hard to get that sort of thing in Analytics … how do I translate a model of visual thinking into something so different, namely, a bunch of platforms that crawl the web using boolean equations and attempt to represent it in a bunch of pie charts, line graphs and word clouds along with a pretty standard “news ticker”.   I think it’s possible, indulge me a little bit more here.

I don’t think it’s enough to listen for dominant conversions, communities, channels, influencers (which might be able to be automated at some point in the future, anyway, should the profiles and searches were set up well enough and platforms become more intelligent than they are today) because they is missing two important things, reference points and  context.

Going back to visual, somehow, I know the Empire State Building below isn’t in New York City.

A lot of the same elements are in both pictures  but the relationships, context, are all off in the second image, almost as if it is a dream of New York, taken from someone’s mind, and thrown all together (almost like a listening report – ha!).   Not sure how much of New York City anyone learns from a diorama of it in Las Vegas (but there sure is a lot of screaming going on, at least in the Vegas version of NYC).

Going back towards Listening Platforms, the kind of stuff I’m writing about in my book, reminds me of when a patient goes to see a doctor, there is usually some issue to discuss (illness, checkup, drugs, etc) and the first thing a doctor does is listen to the patient along with taking some blood tests (at least, if they are a good physician).

Once the listening and tests are compared, along with the doctor’s own knowledge of health and disease, along with the patient (history) and what they see and hear, they can make a diagnosis and provide insight (to the patient). It’s the relationship of all the information, verbal, visual, tests and inner knowledge that are synthesized together to form a diagnosis.

If the “clients” of a set of deliverables is thought of as the “patient(s)”  what would be the reference points and context – what does that translate into for a Social Media listening report?

The nearest correlation I can come up with is something to do with the brand, of what is being monitored.  Say, it’s a over the counter drug, a movie, or an action hero, a situation, a disease or even a food item, there is some landmark, something that is recognizable, a reference point, beyond the name or keyword phrases.

Nearest thing I’ve seen to my mental imagery is not anything I got out of a listening system, rather it came from Gary Angel’s blog in a post that is 3 years old on modeling traffic.  The chart above shows a synthesis of 4 other charts presented earlier in the post, but it wasn’t just the relationships that mattered, it was the application of knowledge through a new chart Gary created that embodied in an analytic model.   Well, read the post including the last few lines…

To get the same intelligence from any non-model based report set would take big chunk of work and a fair amount of knowledge about web analytics. The two things that a good report set is supposed to make unnecessary!

The more I work on reporting, the more I think that the distinction between analysis and reporting is meaningless. Because unless you embody good analysis in your reporting, you’ll never deliver a good report set.

By “embody” analysis in your reporting ….. the diagram above says it all – that diagram is far superior to the four that preceded it because it embodied the relationships of that information.

I have yet to see any Social Media Reporting, outside Semphonic’s own dashboards (see embedded presentation below (from Monitoring Social Media San Francisco last October #msm10) that does anything close to what the modeling chart does/did.

At least Gary Angel’s approach gets me a lot closer to the where the real work of Social Media Analytics should be.

- Context:  look at Slide 9 of the presentation (above)

In order to get context for a listening report we need to have  business objectives connected to the listening report in mind before us.

- Point of Reference(s): look at Slide 16 of the presentation, it would be, in this case, a specific website.

The problem is, a lot of listening reports aren’t about a specific website or even a specific set of websites, rather, they are about a brand and how it the online audience interacts with it.

Again, I haven’t figured out the entire parallels between reference points, context and listening though the information I pulled together so far gets part of the way there.   One more thing might be that the reference point (what I call a “motif” thought it may be the wrong term) needs to be interesting.

Look at this picture immediately below – there’s nothing interesting to look at, nothing to draw attention to it, nothing to catch the eye – its just a boring landscape (at least to me – since “boring” is a subjective term – what is boring to me might be interesting to someone else … but still, it’s a stretch to call this landscape “interesting”).

On the other hand, the picture below is much more interesting because the eye has something to look at.

If my analogies hold true, we need something interesting to listen for.  I have maintained we need to know “what” to listen for and we also need, according to Gary Angel, a good deal of classification of data in order to make “interesting” relationships that provide some real insight and tell a story.

And here’s a little hint from my book on Social Media Analytics – just a glimpse of what you’ll see next summer

The classifications above are meant to be additional and should  be mixed and superimposed with the classifications below, which are the basic ones you can cull out of Radian6, but  whichare, alone, not sufficient to tell a story (btw, you will probably want to muck around, try some stuff out while creating a listening report before you decide what “the story” your trying to tell, “is”).

I asked Gary Angel to produce a chart of “keyword groupings” – the kind of groupings you would set up in a “topic profile” in a platform such as Radian6, with specific industries – here’s the first two (see chart with “financial services” of several you’ll see in chapter 10, that is, when you read chapter 10).

Like anything else, you can have the colors on a palette, but it’s the artist who paints a picture by taking the colors and making it do something, convey some idea or feeling.

The last thing I want to talk about is Engagement – again, I am thinking this through.

- someone sitting in the backseat of a car may be driven past past a route several times but generally won’t remember how to get there, though the route will seem familar.

- someone who has to drive a route will generally learn to remember it, once they drive it.

What’s different?  Same route – different levels of involvement – what I decided to call “engagement”.

I think engagement, for the purposes of analytics measurement, is the tangible application of effort to make a decision (where there is something to make a decision on).  It may be difficult to measure “engagement”, but not impossible though “time spent on page” alone will not get you anywhere, nor will “specific link clicked on” or “specific PDF file downloaded” – clearly, as in Social Media Analytics, interesting data and insight comes with Synthesis, the ability to combine several points of data and embody them in a model, as Gary Angel did when he modeled traffic to a website.

The very same modeling could have been done with “likes”, “votes”, “shares”, “tweets”, “retweets” – the data set is different but the concept is very similar and I hope Gary ends up doing something like that chart on modeling, but with Social Data instead of or in addition to Web Analytics data.

And to end this post it should be obvious by now why this kind of analytics is literally impossible to imagine in just about any marketing/PR/MarCom firm even though what it delivers is actually what clients want and need in the first place - true insight … it takes a bit more time to do than firms are willing to commit to, or let the analysts devote,  and the vocabulary of PR (based on Spin) is antagonistic to analytics which essential nature is a search for the  truth of a situation, often by triangulation.

Time for bed, at least I got these ideas out … hope they made some sense.  If not, at least it  helped me to understand my own ideas a little better – but I’d be happy to hear some feedback from readers on this post.

I will shortly be testing Radian6 and Google Analytics integrations on WebMetricGuru.com (I’m happy to say my Radian6 Influencer Account was restored and I’m grateful to  Community Manager Cory Hartlen at Radian6 for getting me up and running).

As I understand it, Web Analytics integrations are in place for WebTrends On Demand (only), Adobe Omniture Site Catalyst and Google Analytics.    The instructions for Google Analytics are fairly straightforward and involved creating an  account linked to the Google Analytics Profile for a specific Radian6 email account.  Where an account has many profiles this procedure allows only one Google Analytics profile to be tied to a specific topic profile.

In my case, I simply created a Radian6 Topic Profile named “WebMetricsGuru” and gave that information to Cory over at Radian6.   In a few days, after communications are set up between Google Analytics and Radian6 (my account) I will start seeing data from my Google Analytics profile flowing into my Radian6 WebMetricsGuru Topic Profile – that should be very interesting – especially as my book is progressing and all the work I do with analytics informs my thinking.

In other words, I get my ideas and insights by the problems I tackle and solve along with the struggles that I don’t solve, but encounter and grapple with.   As my favorite painter Paul Cezanne once said (more or less, can’t find the exact quote) what little bit once learns for oneself, authentically, is worth more than a thousand of someone else’s formulas.  My knowledge comes from my curiosity and willingness to push the edges to find knowledge on my own terms.  Even when we fail, we succeed, at least our failures are “authentic”.

Getting back to the Radian6 Google Analytics Integration, my understanding based on what I heard today is that it can be free for accounts past a certain size (spend) but I don’t want to put any numbers out there as I am not sure I have all the information.

You can see the Google Analytics data in lower part of each black box on the right, above.   I took this from a screen shot Cory showed me today but in a few days I’ll be able to replicate it myself on my own account.

The analytics integration makes sense when your a brand or business and your monitoring not only what people are saying about you, but what of that “buzz” actually lands on your website.  If your “listening” is not site specific, any of the analytics integrations probably don’t make sense (for example, if your listening to allergy conversations about a few brands, but you don’t really own any of them, then there is no point to having analytics integrated).  But if you do have a landing page, something that you want to know about – this analytics integration makes sense.

I mentioned to Cory Hartlen it would be nice if, instead of, or in addition to the analytics integrations herein we also had Comscore Media Metrix data (or Nielsen) mixed in – sorta an extension of Compete.com that is already in R6, but blown out all the way to have demographics, time spent, visits  and so on, based on panel data, for the top 50,000 – 100,000 sites each month.

A very worthy idea to look at, I think.

I was going to write more – there is certainly a lot more to say both about Radian6, but also a few other products and services I found out about recently – but I’m too tired (it’s all that book writing).  I’ll catch up with those topics in my next posts.