On Reading Finally delivering the Social Media playbook at BrandBuilder, today,  I feel (felt) somewhat skeptical, but upon listening to Oliver’s video about RedChair (which I liked), I’m interested in seeing what he and his partners will actually deliver.

To be fair, no one really owns this space, today, but many people would like to (own it, or parts of it) and are staking a claim on it now, even a friend of mine, Gary Angel in his post on How do you Measure Social Media ROI? – whose webinar  I’ll try to attend, and Jim Sterne is now writing his next book on Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment which will be out next May (I wrote a short blurb for it).

I have a lot of respect for Jim Sterne’s work and his first book on Web Metrics was largely responsible for getting me involved in Web Analytics – and he has good track record – I know him well – so I believe his book will be an excellent resource for Social Media when it’s published.

Last June, Steve Rubel spoke at Mediabistro Circus about Brand All Stars (I wrote about it and was in the audience – Using Social Media to promote your brand- Steve Rubel (Brand All Stars) on what I think, most of what Olivier Blanchard is aspiring to promote with his  RedChair, though Oliver’s vision is larger and involves the underpinning and surrounding parts that Steve Rubel didn’t specifically address.  Still, at the end of the day, I’m not sure about what is actually being delivered.

I think one of the main sticking points for me with Oliver’s premise, for me, – there’s only a few people in the world who can execute on a social media program and all it’s parts – and then suggests, his group is one of them -  ….. I have an open mind – or will try to.

I mean, he has an excellent team – and Jacob Morgan, seems to have a lot of good things he writes about – and just the other day came up with the real cost of implementing a social media program (see his presentation on Social Media ROI – see slide 18), which I read about while I was in London last week – and he gave prices and timelines in slide 18 – and I was very impressed- that he was willing to come out and publicly admit what the real time line is, and what the real prices for a social media program would be (200K+ and over a year to get results – measure them – not for the faint of heart).

The reason I’m thinking back to Steve Rubel – at the time he talked about PR 2.0 and Brand All Stars – I thought about how nice it would be to go into companies and teach them how to do Social Media by identifying their “stars” or teach them how to create their own “luminaries” and then, inject them into relevant conversations and monitor the results – but it’s yet my thing to go around and actually train companies to do that – maybe I’d like to but just don’t know how.

Still – I’m seeing how much of what I’ve done, from a measurement, and, also, strategy part, become one of the next areas that is being “staked out” with a lot of people now wanting to “own” social media – who want a piece of the pie, along with the web analytics community, the PR community – well … just about everyone.

My only advice is to look at track record – see what people who want to teach social media have actually done ….. and judge them from there.

I know Gary Angel pretty well from the Analytics field – I’d trust whatever he comes up with on a measurement perspective – same thing with Eric T. Peterson; I’ve seen their work and know what they’re capable of – they have good track records, as far as I’m concerned. I know K. D. Paine pretty well – I trust what she says.      Oliver .. I just don’t know enough – I havent’ seen anything really, yet, besides the presentations – and I was underwhelmed by the delivery, outside the fluff – but that’s just me – maybe with a little more time …. I’d see more and could express my own opinion based on what I’ve actually touched.

The main “hook” with Red Chair – is that few people can deploy Enterprise programs from within large organizations – but (and I have worked in many of these “large organizations” myself, so I have an idea of what Oliver is talking about) is not so much they are frustrated – is that they are largely  SILOED – and could not execute a Successful, Authentic Social Media program, even if they wanted to!

Weather RedChair can go in and suddenly teach some enterprises to do it now – will depend largely on the corporate culture and will that current organizations have towards Social Media – when he goes in there – and that’s hard to predict.

I don’t blame anyone from wanting to “stake out” a piece of the pie of Social Media – that’s what’s business is all about – I just think results ought to stand on their own - and the best endorsement of your brand is other people praising your brand for you.

Anyway, last week I noted a post from Marketing Pilgrim Cup of Joe: How Not To Go Viral and Look Like an Idiot thought it was good as it pointed out that good social media for a large brand (if it’s not original – needs to be really, really, really GOOD) – and when RedChair goes into large organizations and teaches them Social Media – I wonder if he is going to deal with that Pink Elephant – the one that says – you better be really good if your not going to be authentic – but if you are authentic – you don’t have to worry overmuch on your presentation as your content will carry the rest of your message for you.

I’m enjoying London and not as focused on blogging while visiting, but when I read Kevin Hillstrom’s post on Sharing Information with Executives, today – I immediately had some thoughts about it, which have been in my mind all day and decided to write about it now.  I like Kevin’s post and he’s  spot on, but his post and viewpoints therein are also somewhat disturbing; here’s what I mean:

…..The responsibility for ferreting out information is on you, dear analyst, because executives are not going to ever volunteer enough information to inform your work … in fact, in some cases, they simply cannot tell you the real reason for an analysis (i.e. they need numbers to determine if 5% or 10% of the workforce will be let go next month).

I think this is true, and feels all too familiar, but it also suggests the very nature and setup of many organizations, that employ analysts, are the real problem – Hillstrom’s suggestion to ask a bunch of subtle questions to ferret out of Executives, the real information they  don’t want to share (because they can’t or won’t tell us) reduces  delivery of analytics insights to some form of Machiavellian game, a game no one teaches you how to play.

I don’t think this is where we really should encourage people to go - even if, at the end of the day, what Kevin Hillstrom says, is right, for now. At the end of the year, this strategy of tricking an executive into giving information they are trying to avoid giving, so the analyst can do the job they’re hired to do – just compounds the problem of lousy communications.

….. An executive wants a loyal employee. But sometimes, loyal employees (I’ve done this) develop an “agenda”. And if the agenda is not congruent with the executive, look out. Maybe you want to do multivariate testing on the home page, but the executive you work for is having a battle with another executive in another department, and wants to “be right”. In this case, even though you are doing the right thing (by wanting to execute a multivariate test), you might appear to have an agenda (i.e. prioritizing testing over the executive). And once you appear to have an agenda, you are banished to the island of misfit toys. You’ll see this happen all of the time when a new executive takes a job — the new executive has a vision for what she wants to accomplish, and if your agenda is not aligned with the new executive, it doesn’t matter how good of a job you do, you’re going to be banished to the island of misfit toys.

Sounds like the only agenda that is allowable to follow is the one your boss has – implying you have to come into a job subverting any agenda you may have, to whatever the boss has as their agenda.   I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do, even, if, on the face of it, what Kevin Hillstrom wrote is actually true, and effective.

I believe it was Stephen Fry, who said on Tuesday, at the 140 Conference, that took place in London (I attended the morning sessions, once of which, Fry spoke at), that when he spoke to the people who run corporations, they aren’t asking the typical questions (like how will this product or service help me and my company, etc), rather, they’re asking to get guidance on how to accomplish what they want to achieve.

My take away is to  find the right person (the guy at the very top) to present information and receive guidance from, rather than the people under them – which, unfortunately, is what usually happens.

So ….. your a bright web analyst – but you have to spend all your energy proving your total loyalty to superiors (who also happen to be extremely insecure in their own positions), according to Hillstrom, leaving you next to nothing or no room to actually be creative, innovative – all that has to be subverted to the personal loyalty of the group and organization your in – even if that organization is largely dysfunctional.

I don’t happen to agree this is the way we should approach our jobs in order to succeed.  Maybe the organizations that do the best are the ones who aren’t structured this way – maybe all this work you have to do in order to get the boss to trust you by following their agenda, is what you would have used to come up with the creative solutions they needed (but don’t want to consider) in the first place.  If we are reduced to playing Machiavellian games just to get anything done, no wonder the results are pretty diluted.

Maybe, just maybe, the reason leaders of organizations are at the top, the most creative minds, is because, according to Stephen Fry, they don’t play those games; too bad, so many under them, do.   Maybe, that’s the problem we need to solve.

In a future post I’ll explore what to do about this situation.

KeenKong – is what I call a “conversation analytics” platform that is just about to launch (English and French) in Beta; I’ve known of KeenKong since early this year, when a friend, Frederic Guarino showed me what he was working on.   Occasionally, I’d hear references to KeenKong, and I saw a short demo of it this summer.

Yesterday, I was able to see a working version and get questions  answered  by Fredric Guarino and Oliver Berger.  KeenKong is based in Montreal, but Fredric is a frequent visitor to New York, so I have seen him often here, and I may go up to Montreal at some point in the near future.

KeenKong is designed to handle and add structure to a large number of personalized conversations with Brands and/or Individuals, where it is also desirable to reply personally.

KeenKong captures, parses and groups conversations into several buckets that are defined, partly by the conversation, and partly by the beliefs of it’s creators (I believe, based on Neurolinguistics) that conversations will always fall into 24 (or so) brackets or buckets, if you will – and this is a built in feature of human communications.

KeenKong is built to first take whatever conversation your having online, and structure it into those buckets – so you can better sort on the conversations and respond, in kind.  For example – if you have several thousand people trying to converse with you (say your a famous celebrity), or a with a well known Brand, through a blog or website (KeenKong will soon be available for Facebook, MySpace, Identi.ca and will have iPhone and Blackberry applications available in the near future), KeenKong will greatly simplify how you can respond and build trust by providing personalized answers, and back and forth communications.   As more and more people converse with each other – it becomes neccessary to invent platforms like this one – to facilitate much more optimal conversations.

You start by viewing your conversations on a “TalkBoard” (see above) that groups the conversations into the buckets or categories, on the left, then finds common objects in the conversations (ie: shirt, belt, shoes, etc) – Demographic information is provided, when it is available.

when you select one of the power words or objects, you get all the conversations they’re part of and you have the option of responding to those conversations in the same way by tagging individuals as a group you want to identify.

Once you have the conversations, you can look at the effect of your work using KeenKong over time for Sentiment and Effectiveness.

When I saw the demo for the first time this summer, @whitneyhess was testing it with twitter conversations she was taking part in and it was amazing what she was able to accomplish with KeenKong.

After looking at the Demo yesterday I was tempted to think KeenKong would work out really well for Customer Service, but Fredrick and Oliver were quick to point out that KeenKong was designed for a much wider variety of uses.   We also talked about what the definition of a conversation is, and of “active conversations” (back and forth between one individual and one respondent) and “interactions”, which are more like what most Social Media tools count today (all Tweets, Blog Posts, comments/posts on Facebook and MySpace, when they can be read, photos and videos) as conversations when they are often really one way “interactions”.

Since there is no “standards” that are in place for each vendor of a Social Media package to define what a conversation is, each vendor ends up deciding this for themselves – often making information between platforms totally incompatible – a much worse situation than what Web Analytics had/has with different platforms reading raw data logs in their own way – but at least, most Web Analytics platforms agree with the definitions of what a unique visitor, visit, pageview, bounce rate, etc, are – whereas most Social Media platforms, have no such agreement (see my presentation on the Future of Social Media Monitoring, above for a fuller rundown on this issue).

By the way, I’m excited to give the presentation to a large audience in London next week – and what I’m sensing is KeenKong is a platform that falls in the category of “applied social media monitoring” – it’s more of a next generation application that’s used to make life much easier for individuals that need to understand the conversations and respond to them, in kind.  KeenKong is not a monitoring platform that tries to find out what people are saying about a topic or Brand – it’s purpose is to enable and supercharge conversations between “You” and your customers.

What do I think of KeenKong?

I don’t know about the subdivisions/bucketing of conversations – but as long as it works, whatever way KeenKong wants to classify information is OK.  Furthermore, by classifying conversations at the GetGo, KeenKong is “segmenting” information much in the way some websites are able to segment visitors by offering a simple homepage, but pointing visitors to options (do you want to “learn”, “shop”, “buy”, “get support”, etc) – much as sites like IBM.com, have done – and customers self select/segment themselves by what links they click on and what pages they land on.

This kind of “self selecting” / “navigational” segmentation works very well for Web Analytics – but hasn’t really been applied to “conversations” till now.

What KeenKong has done is look at conversations as if it’s a website, and given us navigation – while adding unique tags to the conversations so you can respond to them in a highly personalized way – but in volume.

There’s a lot of promise in KeenKong – since it’s just launching now – I’m sure there will be an open beta soon, and I suggest signing up for it, ASAP – I know I will.