I’m thinking about the webinar I’ll be giving with Compete.com on September 28th (formal announcement will be forthcoming soon) and “ultralight” data not normally collected in your typical analytics implementations.   Tried to visualize what that would look like and this is what I came up with

I’ll have specific instructions in the webinar and possibly a case study – my main point is to ask the question … “Am I setup to capture activity around my business goals in every way/sense it needs to be tracked”?

I’m guessing the answer will be no.

How much of the activity around my business am I actually capturing (that’s what the chart above measures)?   In the case of this business data is in silos and is often difficult to combine.

I know there’s probably a better way to represent this – but right now between all the data sources I have listed in the chart at the beginning of this post and all the campaigns running I count 180 cells – and of those 82% are not enabled (data isn’t being captured) – a lot of that is normal as the data is in silos, after all (for example you would not expect to see Restaurant.com data/transactions  showing up in Google Analytics or SeamlessWeb – one could attempt to connect the data – but it would be a lot of extra work and custom programming to do it at this time – or if you had a data warehouse – maybe this could be done).

Of all the data there is “out there” to be capture on the business that I based this chart off of, only 9% of it is actually being captured – and most of it is in a silo.

On the other hand, can Social Media ROI be represented when so much of the data you’d need to measure it – is essentially “ultraviolet” – hidden from normal site?  I don’t think so.

The webinar I’m giving with Compete.com will address how one deals with having so much data that still needs to be tracked and how it might be organized.

Another way to look at data is comparing data sources to each other

Think of it this way – say your business has a community manager – where is the activity of that community management in Social Media going to show up in this scenario above?

- Facebook (Fan Page)

- Twitter account

You probably won’t see activity around community management reflected in your Email Campaign data, probably not even in FourSquare data – since most check ins are happening on their own, by people who want to share their loaction.  I suppose a business can run a campaign giving away stuff to the first people who show up and check in (The Gap did something like this last weekend).  Overall, your not going to find a lot of the data you need to prove community management works from the data normally available – that is why it’s so frustrating to come up with realistic ROI numbers.

We can compare data sources and see how much of the data being collected is reflected in another source of data.

I know my viewpoint is biased by working in Web Analytics – the more I look at these charts, the more the best place to get the most data we need is Site Analytics, as incomplete as it is for this business, for example.

When looking at datasources such as GrubHub, for example, it’s almost impossible to see how you could tie Social Media activity to such a data set – it almost presupposes a data warehouse and a Social CRM system.

Where’s the “common key” that can be used to tie data together?  A lot of work would need to be given to finding useful ways to combine data.

Having said that – the excellent session I attended yesterday on Pimp My Reports from Stratigent covered basic dashboard creation and it occurred to me that dashboards don’t solve the data collection problem this post uncovers and details.

Just because you can combine data from disparate sources such as email and twitter, and sometimes create additional metrics around them, you can’t create data you simply don’t have or never collected.

When Dominique Lahaix reached out to me a few weeks ago about his new platform, ECairn Conversation I wasn’t too sure what his platform was till I saw it and now I’m playing around with it in a Demo account that was created for me.

With a thick French accent – Dominique hailed from San Francisco and told me what ECairn could do (I had a little problem at first understanding parts of what he was saying) – but once he showed me the platform it began to make a lot of sense – and got me thinking how much Public Relations, in particular, needs platforms like his.

You can see the main points of ECairn Conversation in the YouTube video below:

I have had pretty good results using Sysomos Map to datamine for Influentials and am pretty happy with it’s Geo-location capabilities- I’ve found it better than other platforms for this – but getting a list of bloggers for any topic is just part of the work.

The list still needs to be vetted – contact information needs to be added to each record – a social profile of how each influencer can be reached on each social network they are on needs to be compiled. A contact manager is needed to track outreach to the blogger or influencer and a way of tagging and categorizing the contact needs to exist – plus a way of sharing a list or series of lists and having parts of your team work on it – is needed.

I have found most Social Monitoring platforms don’t have those capabilities – but eCairn does. It’s also true that Radian6‘s new Engagement Console will offer some of those capabilities – and so there is an overlap and a good play by Radian6 to stay on top of Social CRM – but eCairn is really for list building and it appears to be better in that, than anything else I’ve seen.

What’s more, eCairn is much less expensive than other options I’ve seen for building lists – and the lists you build are reusable and can be shared across your organization. In fact, this method of building a list makes a lot of sense over what I heard last summer from Chris Abraham and the blogger lists his PR firm built which I describe in detail – here. While Radian6 at the time would not have been suitable (but may now be, using the Engagement Console).

I took a romp around ECairn tonight and liked what I saw so far – since I’m using the demo account I can’t add anyone else, but I could add a list of urls that I pulled on NY Food Bloggers using Sysomos Map – and in that way I see the use of multiple tools neccessary for me as eCairn doesn’t have geo-location capabilities yet.

Adding the list was easy enough – I also saw how to put in contact information for each blog

You add this information but when you do so – you have it forever – it’s part of your Social CRM.

There’s also trending lists and I think a whole lot more.

You can find new conversations from within eCairn – and you can build your list directly there – no need to import anything if you don’t want to.

I saw more features than the demo allows me to look at – eCairn already has categorized many blogs into segments – you can build your own segments from lists you create or use theirs – and I find that very useful.

Also, once you build segments – you can analyze the conversations from within those segments – and the more comprehensive your lists are- the better. In fact, a system like eCairn would be a perfect acquisition, believe it or not, for Comscore.

Why do it say that – and maybe I’m wrong on this – but Comscore has built this big dictionary of websites that it categorizes – the list would be perfect to import into eCairn as a starter or seed list – but what if you could also build the contact information as well – what if Comscore did that? and then offered it as an add on product?

Just a thought. At any rate – if your needing to build a blogger or influence list – this is probably what I’d use to actually create the list. Sure – would still use Sysomos to find the influencers – but eCairn is where you want to store the data.

Saw John Lovett’s post at Web Analytics Demystified about Altimeter Group‘s report on Social CRM = Business Transformation which took a closer look at tonight.

Social CRM is becoming one of the big success stories of 2010,  Ray Wang and Jeremiah Owyang are echoing what we already know when they released their  free report: Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management.

This is a good first start in

1. Identifying what your needs are for Social CRM (what category)
2. Figure how mature that category of Social CRM is relative to all the categories
3. Mapping vendors to each category

Pretty nice – using a methodology they created a map of Social CRM for us.

When they can, I hope Altimeter Group takes this study  further (or perhaps this is someone else’s job – perhaps Nathan Gilliatt who writes at theThe Net-Savvy Executive blog) by looking at  each category and each vendors’ implementation (Vendors to watch) – which is where the information would be most useful in my opinion.

Altimeter Group‘s  job is to provide a strategy document – a map of the terrain of Social CRM but that leaves a big question in my mind – what lies between what Altimeter’s Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management and figuring out what to use ?

I see a big hole – (damn, maybe I should fill it …. now that’s a thought)!

Companies are dipping their toes into Social CRM (with Altimeter Group‘s blessing, no less, ) but there is little to help them figure out which vendor really is the best one for them – all the vendors for each category of Social CRM will claim they can do the job and are the best solution – but I doubt most of them are.

Meaning, there doesn’t seem to be many good partners that will actually help you identify which solution (of those mentioned) is the best for you (that is left for the customer to figure out for themselves – even though often, they may not be equipped to understand the complexities of what they are getting into).

The 18 Use cases ……..

Jacob Morgan said it in his own way … Report on 18 Use Cases for Social CRM

….. keep in mind that what they created is just a starting point. I just finished re-reading the report again and I think what they have put together is a great doc but I do have some ideas, thoughts, and notes on what they put together.

….. would have liked to see is a separation between what can be automated and what needs to be handled by a human.

…. in order to fully take advantage of SCRM a company would need to work with at least: Biz 360, Facebook Profiles, Sugar CRM, Informatica, and IBM Cognos.  I just don’t think that is realistic and then there’s the issue of integration and of course budget and resources (yes I know, a completely separate issue).

Reminds me of something a friend expressed to me … she was dismayed (being a idealistic, I suppose) that someone charges 22K to show up, give some general advice, then leaves (and never comes back).

BTW, this is not related to Altimeter Group, just to be clear (@jowyang asked me if that’s what I meant).

In fact, the only reason I brought it up was that there’s a large gap between giving advice, and implementing it.

Reminds me of anther client who contacted me recently and asked me for reputation monitoring for someone – I replied with my answer and put down – but with an extra “0″ in the right by mistake (blame in on the iPhone and a too quick response)… ha, ha.

I was tempted to think …would happen if someone came back and said… OK – we’ll pay you that extra “0″  per hour…

Hmm, interesting thought – I quickly saw my mistake and wrote my client back – that if I could charge that much, I should quit what I’m doing and just do that.    Ok, i digress, enough.

Implementation?