I’m speaking at and attending SocialCRM 2011 in NYC next Thursday (a week from today) and some things came up around the conference that led me to this post on SocialCRM.  Similar to the Occupy Wall Street posts I wrote recently (and still not done with) I came up with a triangulation of data that I want to share -as it shows the strengths of various platforms I am working with and evaluating.

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For one thing, I tried using various platforms to find Social CRM influencers in New York City or nearby (say, as far North as Boston and as far South as Washington DC), these people could be reasonably expected to travel to a conference in NYC easily (via Amtrak, car or bus), and still return home that night, if they wanted to.

TRAACKR

First up is TRAACKR, which has some very helpful new features (some of which I have been consulted on and asked about, beforehand).    I ran a Social CRM segmentation in TRAACKR yesterday to see what I’d come up with, and with the new enhancements for location/analytics, it’s usefulness is improved a bit.

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The Geo-location breakdown was very useful and isolated for me a few people that I could immediately look at the fit the criteria.  An quadrent diagram now ranks influencers for those who want to see a visual representation of what TRAACKR provides.
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This readout might become useful with a large list, not sure how much it plays into a smaller one but it’s certainly an advance in the platform’s capabilities. Sentiment Analysis is also provided, but you need to manually rate each mention first (which I haven’t done) so there’s nothing to show.  Like many other platforms in this Social space, the value proposition is both intimidate yet long term (if you put time to into looking at content).  The old saying – you get out of it what you put in to it, is very applicable here.

FOLLOWERWONK

I didn’t want to stop with TRAACKR since I only found a few Social CRM influencers close enough to NYC to take a closer look at, so I used FollowerWonk, which is a free platform and got more information that could be helpful.
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There’s a lot more about Followerwonk that I didn’t explore for this post but it’s all there, and for the most part, easy to access and mostly free (there is a credit system but most people can do what they need on this platform for free).

THE RECORDED FUTURE

The Recorded Future is an interesting platform in that it can do social media analytics, but what it really does best is Temporal Analysis and Predictions – it’s based more on what people think is going to happen in the future and showing you a map of that, as well as listing out influencers.
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As a forecaster, if Recorded Future has the data (not a certainty – but we’re working on that) you can make predictions based on what others think is going to happen.  Is that real forecasting – no, but it’s a lot easier to do this kind of work in RF than other platforms, any other platform, in fact, because none of the others is temporal based in the way Recorded Future is.

For example, Recorded Future was able to easily chart out that Social CRM is expected to be a 1 Billion dollar market by 2013 – that’s pretty interesting if your a forecaster (or financial analyst, or IT Analyst, or many other types of analytics where time is an important factor – what are the expectations of the Future).
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Also, Recorded Future does a good job finding Influencers (though it could improve the algorithm which is weighted mostly by volume of documents not so much the influencer’s own popularity (lets be honest and call it what it is) in a space.
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By clicking on the individual sources you can drill down and find who is influential – or whom others say are influential about a subject (which is what I did, and came up with a few names – based on what Paul Greenberg said about others).
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And when you add that all together – TRAACKR, FOLLOWERWONK and RECORDED FUTURE you can get some very interesting exploratory research.

WHAT WOULD MAKE THIS BETTER?

Well, the problem isn’t what the platforms or tools can or can’t do, in this case, as much as I don’t have a specific ask here – I’m just playing with all three platforms and trying out something to see what works.   Normally, that’s not going to be enough for a paid deliverable that moves people forward – but that’s not the point – had I wanted to offer something like that (I could) it would be for a very specific ask or task report, something I can’t really do here, but am very open to.

And if your around in NYC next week you can talk with me at SocialCRM 2011 in NYC next Thursday, November 3rd, or the  Social Media World Congress on November 1st and 2nd (see program for the specific time slots).

I’m at the Pluggedin Social Media Summit most of Tuesday but I wanted to quickly cover a few post I read in Gary Angel’s blog, SEMANGEL, about Social Media Measurement.

In the most recent post of the series, Sampling and Social Media, Gary points out that some of the uses of social listening that are typical for many reports are based on inaccurate samples (and it very may well be that it is impossible, in the current day, to get good enough samples do accurate reporting on Share of Voice, Share of Sentiment, possible trending charts as well).  At least, that is how I read the post.

On the other hand, social media measurement is great for things that don’t require representative samples, like Focus Groups, and I’m sure Gary Angel will go into more details and examples as his series on Social Media Measurement continues.

But my point really is something else.

I wrote Social Media Analytics to disambiguate the choices we need to make between disparate systems and processes (where it’s hard to look under the hood and see what’s really there – hence the Data Audit I posted yesterday, as one attempt to see “what’s really there”).  But the other question, that is even more significant, perhaps, is this.

Are social media analytics platforms being sold for the wrong reasons?

Are people buying these platforms expecting to do Share of Voice, Share of Sentiment, Trend Lines (pretty much all they do, besides a “river of news” verbatim, out of the box) when these are exactly the very things they can’t do well, based on what Gary put forward in last post?

I think so.

Anyway, here’s part of the latest SEMANGEL post

…. I’ll have more to say in future posts about the whole idea of sentiment analysis. I’m not convinced that social media measurement is the proper channel for measuring either brand awareness or brand sentiment. Much of the reason for my skepticism comes down to the fact that Social Media measurement isn’t based on a valid sample at any level. This doesn’t mean Social Media measurement isn’t interesting or important. It does mean that it can’t fulfill every function equally and of the functions that are most problematic, brand sentiment may be tops on the list!

Many thanks to Michael Healy and Christopher Berry for their thoughts at the panel (and Marshall Sponder as well since he and I talked on Friday). We had a great turnout – which was nice to see – and the discussion was lively and interesting.

 

By the way, it was great speaking to Gary as well, last week.

Looking forward to the rest of the Social Media Measurement series, where I’m sure Gary is going to tell us the great things these platforms can be used for.    My sense it that the best applications of Social Media Measurement will be those where a significant amount of work will be needed, it’s the very things that people, I bet, are trying to avoid doing (why they bought those damn social analytics systems in the first place -ha!).

But seriously, maybe there is something here – are people just trying to do the wrong things with these listening systems, are are the being sold to do things they really can’t do well?

Earlier this year I started worked with engineers at Integrasco on a questionnaire to ascertain current capabilities of Social Listening Platforms that will be the basis of a Data Capabilities White Paper late this year (depending on how many responses I get back).  I’m on Integrasco’s Advisory Board (based in Norway) and while the information is useful to have, it’s also something that should be made public.

The public URL of the Data Whitepaper Questionnaire is here.

The questionnaire has 51 questions (many that can only be answered by a technical resource or executive at a platform provider) and has to be filled out all at one time (half completed forms can’t be saved in Google Docs).

I hope to get enough responses (10 or more) to write the paper in December and publish it here, online.

The reason for this Questionnaire/White Paper was for planning purposes but it was clear from day one, the information would be shared once it’s collected and interpreted by me.

So, if your a platform provider involving social media and analytics, feel free to fill out the form by clicking on the link in this page.  Finally, I would have embedded the form in this post and or a blog page but the form is too wide for my current sidebar (in this blog) and overlaps it.