Earlier this week I wrote about the Online Community Unconferece East that Forum One is running here in NYC on  February 10th, 2010; there is a discount code of marshall25

In fact, Community Management might be one of the most “in”, most “up in coming” jobs in Social Media – the position that going to be strategic in many companies and industries in the future – a future that is rapidly emerging.   Take  this post about Tweet Your Way to a Community Manager Position which tells you what you have to do to get into Social Media community management .

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mage credit: geek & poke

The subject of Community Managers got more important today when Jeremiah Owyang posted about the List of Corporate Social Media Strategists, Corporate Community Managers in 2010 with the people on that list that he’s keeping are similar Social Media Community Managers though Jeremiah calls them Strategists.

From what I can tell by comparing the Online Community Unconference East attendee list with the Jeremiah Owyang list there are individuals from organizations on his list attending the Forum One conference on the 10th of February.

Here’s some of the organizations that are common to both lists.

1. Thomson Reuters
2. IBM
3. Microsoft

As Jeremiah Owyang points out, Altimeter Group is in the process of defining the skillsets needed to be a strategist, and by extension, a Community Manager – which often overlap:

The Altimeter Group is developing a free research report, on “Skillsets of Social Media Strategists” and will identify the attributes, backgrounds, experience of this emerging role,if you’re interested in receiving a copy, please register on this form.

But, even more importantly, if you want to find out what it takes to be a community manager/strategist, or meet people who are successfully doing it  – you should attend the Feb 10th Online Community Unconferece East and use the conference code marshall25 to get a discount.

A couple of things were apparent to me when my post on Google and Social Media Monitoring was published yesterday at MyCustomer.com first, then on my blog immediately after.

…. (and didn’t appear in Social Media Today, btw, while I asked them to publish it,  given up trying to figure out what their criteria or selection process is ).

I noticed when I looked at the commentary in BackType around my post on Big Brother & Google’s Entrance into Social Media Monitoring and I saw the phrase “I’ve been saying this is coming” echoed by the community of readers and re-tweeted – having a life of it’s own.

I am also thinking of “WhatTheTrend” website and Twitter Hashtags being Trended realtime (wish the had a historical dictionary of all hasttags and how they trended – but I guess this is as good as we can get for now on an explanation of what the hashtags appearing now mean and who started them).

With Social Media Monitoring tools you can pull out the entire history around any set of keywords or topics and pull out the hashtags – while that is not the customary use – it is valuable – especially for research into what people are saying and what they want around a topic.

I’m using Sysomos Map – one of my favorite platforms to use for analysis, to look at the conversation or “meme” around “I’ve been saying this is coming”

…. in this case – the literal phrase brings hardly any results – so I went with “I’ve been saying” AND “this is coming” when they are within 5 words of each other, over the last 6 months

And this is the Word Map I get from Sysomos Text Analytics

And I’m wondering that if I wrote my post – or amended it, after the fact to say …. “I’ve been saying this is coming” or “I have been saying this is coming” – my post world more forcefully become part of the meme it’s already “in” – not because I said so, but some of my followers – DID.       I just have to reinforce that idea – since I happen to agree with it – and this on way to do it.  So I’ll change the title of the post – just did.

So, when someone says “I’ve been saying this is coming” … what are they talking about?   Here’s a quick way to find out using Sysomos Key Conversations.  Looking at blogs first -

Below is a list of top sentences that appear in content relevant to the search query. Click on a sentence below to refine the query.

for years i have been saying to look towards the uk to see what is coming our way in regards to islam, and the similarities of the sharia movement can be seen in this video.

i think that many of these scientists are believers of the global warming cult, and because they believe so fanatically, will do anything to make the data fit into their theory.

all i know, is that i have been saying for months now how democrats or republicans — it really doesn’t matter which group you support these days because they’re both sides to the same coin.

At least as far as blog monitoring goes – when someone says “I’ve been saying this is coming” it often means comparing some situation to something other situation – as implying there is a link.  The first example compares Islam to Sharia (whatever that is), the second example compares Global Warming Scientists to fanatics and the last example compares democrats to republicans and says they’re both two sides of the same thing.

I planned to go further with this analysis but decided not to – mainly as much of the content being surfaced was significant in it’s own right but was not clearly about “I’ve been saying” and “this is coming”.

This post is an enhanced adaption of an article that just appeared at MyCustomer.com that I wrote with an associate, Cecilia Pineda Feret.   While the text is identical, I added images in my post that do not appear at MyCustomer.com as I was concerned this article was already very long (but I’m not as worried about it here at Webmetricsguru.com).   I asked for permission from Neil Davey who publishes MyCustomer.com, a SiftMedia Property based in Bristol UK,  a to publish my article here.

But first …

This week, with Google Rolling Out Social Search and possibly with a tie in to Facebook and moving Social Search into Beta highlights widespread concerns for online privacy and identity management around Google.  Yet more news aboutGoogle Toolbar Spying on Whitehouse.gov (and others) came out shortly after I wrote this article with Cecilia Feret, and I’m sure more instances of online monitoring and privacy will come up in the future.

And now to the article – which has been enhanced with examples of what was referred to in the article – the text is identical and to view the original go to MyCustomer.com and sign up.

Big brother and Google’s entrance into social media monitoring

As a web and social media analyst I am predisposed toward any service that merges customer data with site analytics information and online conversations – which leads me to the following bold, as some say, prediction. At the Monitoring Social Media 09 conference last November, my presentation included the statement: “Google will enter the Social Media Monitoring space within the next 2 years.” (For more information see Slide 15 of my presentation on the Future of Social Media Monitoring).

Google, the largely Orwellian company that claims to “Do No Evil,” takes web site traffic data and correlate it to news, search trends, purchasing activity, search activity and browsing activity throughout the entire web. As I will be discussing Social Media Monitoring as part of my one-day conference in London on March 31st, 2010 at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp, I have further developed my thoughts from last November.

Based on my own assessment by looking at the available platforms today, there are no Social Media Analytics vendors or Online Reputation Management Services capable of matching Google yet. I think Google’s entrance into this area would be mostly helpful to some of the current entrants, many of them  could end up going out of business or being swallowed up by others. For a recently updated list of Social Media Monitoring Vendors see  StephenDebruyn.com.

Data that could be used for Social Media Monitoring is collected from our search history, websites and web presence. Google collects 18 months of Web History (down from 24 months of a few years ago) and can view and search from the full text of the pages you, or anyone else who has ever logged into Google. Once it acquired DoubleClick, Google integrated DoubleClick’s browsing pattern tracking with Google’s web history tracking to have a full spectrum of access to our web experience at its fingertips, including what sites we ultimately visited after leaving Google’s site, and what products we purchased subsequently.

Note: Google added Twitter updates on some queries in early December 09 as shown in the above screenshot (blue box appearing on the right).

A natural fit?

By logging into my own Google Dashboard, I can see all the information Google collects about me including the number of Google Analytics accounts I have access to, my Google Calendar data (so they know where I have been and where I’m going), my purchasing history via Google Checkout, if I use that for online purchases, all the people I know via my Google Contacts/Address Book plus the information in my Google Documents, the textual analytics around my Gmail correspondences, my Google Reader habits and what I liked and shared on it, whom I’m following on Google Reader and who follows me. In addition to information it collects about us via our Google Accounts and websites, Google Search now displays real time data from Twitter and Facebook highlighting relevant search results.

Above: logging into my Google Dashboard offers a vast array of Information Google has on me or anyone else with an Google Account, yet they are still not showing everything they have.

Google also knows my age, zipcode and activity (ClickStream) giving them a 360-degree visualization of me and anyone else like me who spends a lot time interacting with the world via the web. Magnify the data Google collects on me by the number of Google Accounts (unknown at this time) and you end up with an unparalleled collection of information – what John Battelle calls The Database of Intentions as he describes in his book, “The Search.”

In addition, Google’s real time information about us has been improving exponentially, especially for business activity. Google knows our location in physical space via Google Mobile (and our movements, where we were, are and where we went next), our advertising activity and our profit or costs on Google AdWords.

According to an analysis of 4 million websites done late last year by Factual, 28% of all websites are being monitored by Google Analytics. As of 2007, 108,810,358 websites existed — the way things are going, the number has probably more than doubled by 2010. Using 2007 numbers, Google Analytics was likely to track about 29 million websites then, and tracks probably closer to 60 million sites by now assuming the rate of growth has at least remained consistent. In all likelihood, it is much more than my conservative estimate.

Keeping in mind all the information Google collects on us, why shouldn’t it enter the Social Media Monitoring space with their own suite of solutions? After all, they already have entered many other areas where they are considered one of the top or THE top application for that area: Advertising, content, health, commerce, mobile phone, power monitoring, news, and web analytics tracking. It would be a natural fit for Google to enter Social Media Monitoring.

A vision of the future?

While Google has yet to formally compete with Comscore, Quantcast, and Nielsen in audience monitoring on web platforms, they can easily draw upon the categorization of services, create their own categorizations, and, to some extent, already have within Google Analytics Benchmarking and with Google AdWords. Any website owner can compare their own traffic with other websites in the same category – the data is anonymous, but highly indicative and useful.

Note: Google’s Benchmarking is available when you share your data autonomously within Google Analytics.

What might a Google Social Media Monitoring platform look like and what features might it have?

Free, easy to use, and accessible to anyone who has a Google Account.

Any website monitored by Google Analytics would also be monitored for mentions against specific pages of the site, much as WebTrends reports referral logs to Radian6, but, in this case, it will be Google Search feeding Google Analytics seamlessly much as Yahoo! Search feeds Yahoo! Pipes.

Google Alerts, which have already been built into Google Analytics, via its Intelligence features, could list any mention or event that surpasses a preset threshold. Google Analytics already does this for site events such as more page views, visits or time spent on a page than normal based on trending algorithms that Google has employed and maintains for each Google Analytics account.

Google’s entry in Reputation Management could also take the form of a coordinated response to online mentions using a version of Gmail, with preset templates already set up for the site owner to respond to negative or positive buzz.

Specific solutions might be offered using an advertising campaign with AdWords, including on YouTube where links would be provided in response to a specific action or mention, so that the site owner or business could take immediate follow-up action and have the information appear in Google’s properties counterbalancing or supporting mentions as the case may warrant. Google could or would charge the User for running advertising against the responses, but the User, for the most part, could or would use Google’s Reputation Monitoring service for free. Google could create and maintain a PR/Management Dashboard for individuals and entities.

Reputation Management could also be added to Google via Google Webmaster Tools. Now a site owner can monitor how often their websites are crawled by Google, any problem encountered, and is able to use a response form to communicate directly with Google when there is a problem with their site. Google can find information on the web relating to each page of the site and place it in Webmaster tools for response by the owner while still passing the data to Google Analytics for analysis, trending and alerts.

Note: Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard could be enhanced to handle Reputation Management on a page and site level.

Paid Advertising via Google AdWords (or AdSense, if you’re a publisher) could be integrated with brand mentions in Social Media that appear in Google Search and tied to landing pages monitored by Google Analytics. ROI could be calculated, perhaps for the first time, for Social Media efforts across most or all of your marketing channels.

As Google has almost all the pieces in place to do a better job of social media monitoring than anyone else, why hasn’t it formally entered this space yet?

Note: With Google’s Chrome OS – all the data on your hard drive, not just the Google applications you run now, will be in Google’s possession, as this video above shows (also note the reputation and security focus).

Simply put, until now, the Social Media Monitoring space wasn’t big or important enough for Google to get involved, it was still a niche market in its infancy, according to Forrester.

So far, much of the online marketing budget for Businesses has been focused on Search (Paid and Organic) and not Social Media. In addition, Google may be hesitating until the market grew big enough. Meanwhile it has been increasingly viewed as Big Brother; where Google’s entrance into monitoring is  likely to amplify fears that Google knows everything about us and will use that information for its own best interests at own expense.

But, in 2009 the tide began to turn in favor of Google dipping its foot into Social Media Monitoring as conversations began to be viewed as markets with a whole class of technologies emerging to help companies keep track of the online conversations. Last October two key events happened which helps Google justify enter the Social Media Monitoring space.

• First, In-Q-Tell, the investment arm of the U.S. government that also serves the C.I.A  bought a stake in Visible Technologies, one of the largest Social Media Monitoring vendors. This action sent a signal to Google and the business investment community that Social Media Monitoring was on the verge of becoming a big business (one that Google may want to be part of).

• Second, the FTC released its Blogger rules defining the scope and penalties around monitoring blogger payola and Social Media endorsements.  As more and more businesses and individuals seek to monitor online reputation the market for Social Media Monitoring is becoming much more crowded with bigger profits for the main players such as Visible Technologies, Radian6, Buzzmetrics, et al.

I suspect Google has considered entering Social Media Monitoring for some time now and has been quietly working on its own offerings, poised to enter the market at any  moment and dominate it, as Google has proven over and over. Often Google acquires companies to enter a space such as the recent purchase of AdMob to enter the Mobile Advertising space.  The Google acquisition I am most familiar with is Google  acquiring Urchin in 2005 and making  it a free product to anyone who opened a Google Account. However, I do not believe Google needs to acquire a Social Media Monitoring Platform as their own products are at least as good as anything they could acquire and they have everything they need to launch their own solution and tie it to their existing products.

How would Google’s entry in the Social Media Monitoring be good for the existing players in this space?

• Google’s entry into any business area raises the visibility of that sector and further legitimizes the business model of that sector.

• Google’s entrance into Social Media Monitoring will force monitoring vendors to cooperate with each other and improve their offerings, just as Google’s entrance into Web Analytics encouraged vendors to differentiate themselves from Google Analytics,  focusing on features such as event correlation, segmentation and rich media tracking, features Google Analytics did not initially offer, but does now.

• Development of standards for Social Media Measurement. As I mentioned in slide 11 of my presentation on the Future of Social Media Monitoring Social Media does not have a standard set of definitions for measurement of conversations, sentiment, or share of voice to guide vendors in implementation, which hampers interoperability of social monitoring platforms with each other, even though they are monitoring the same conversations online. Furthermore, implementing standards leads to more profit for vendors. One example is the IAB’s VAST Video Advertising Standard which further monetized third party Video Ad Platforms such as BrightRoll.

• Most vendors prefer not to share information with each other, however, with Google’s presence in this space, they will have more reason to do so.

These are just some of the reasons for Google to formally enter the Social Media Monitoring space. Of course, the usual suspicions regarding Google’s intentions as they enter any business are likely to surface again. Accusations of being BIG BROTHER hasn’t stopped Google before, and it probably won’t stop them now.