Social Media and a Search Postscript
December 2, 2008
A happy quack to my one Canadian reader who sent me a link to “Most Businesses Don’t Have a Handle on Social Media Marketing”. You can find this story by Nestor Arellano here. The article appeared in ITBusiness, a Canadian Web site. Mr. Arellano summarizes the results of a survey by the Marketing Executives Networking Group in the US. The study revealed that executives realize social media is important, but at the time of the survey about 60 percent those surveyed in the sample allocate significant money to the this type of marketing. For me the most interesting comment in the article was:
For instance, 33.1 per cent of them said they were never able to determine ROI, while an additional 25.6 per cent said they “hardly ever” knew if their social media efforts were worthwhile. In addition, only 26.3 per cent thought social media marketing was more effective than using other online media tools for marketing, such as search advertising or display ads.
Mr. Arellano also notes that more than half of the IT staff and senior executives are not too keen about the use of social media for marketing. The concern is that employees will waste time fiddling with the applications. Social tools are likely to enter organizations the way personal computers did in the early 19080s; that is, some employees will just use these systems under the radar of management. One of the applications that may have applicability is a social wiki. Employees and possibly customers can contribute information.
After reading Mr. Arellano’s write up, I remain balanced on the fence with regard to social media in organizations. Employees are often spurred by their advisors and blue chip consultants to use social tools to improve operations, reduce costs, or whatever other benefit attributed to these systems. The issues that disconcert me are:
- Liability. Most consultants and employees are not the targets of legal action. As a result, their desires are not tempered by the liabilities certain information systems create the moment the systems become available. Consultants will weasel word their way around responsibility, and the employees often change roles or even jobs, leaving the “problem” to their successors.
- Finding what’s in these systems. Most employees and consultants deal with the surface or one aspect of a system. However, when someone asks, “Who gave the customer this information about this product?” someone has to hunt for the answer. My team has had this thankless task, and it is neither easy nor cheap to pull together the information from and within a social media system. We love this type of job, but it is expensive and time consuming. Furthermore, what’s “in” these systems can be quite interesting.
- Controlling costs. It is easy to fire up a wiki. It can be expensive to put in place a reliable mechanism to manage the wiki, keep the content fresh, and expand the system so it does not die on the vine. Like newsgroups, participation is often sporadic and brief. Social systems have to be marketed and managed. If ignored, these systems become a cost sinkhole when a problem surfaces. There is neither staff nor time to figure out what happened and then to fix the problem.
There are legitimate uses of messaging systems within organizations and for customers. The approach with which I am most comfortable is one that includes planning, budgeting, controlled testing, focused deployment, assessment, and then next steps, if any. Creating a customer-employee wiki and stepping back to see what happens is too risky for my taste. Companies have learned the importance of managing user groups. Now most organizations with active customer involvement try to schedule “summits” or some other type of organized activity over which the company exercises control. A user group can turn into a snake pit left to its own devices. An unmanaged wiki may have the same characteristics.
The problem of capturing the information, indexing it, and making it searchable is not intractable. Exalead has a social search capability, for example. But some effort is required before the system is deployed. Otherwise, the cost of playing catch up may erode the financial payoff of the system itself.
We have investigated a number of start ups in the last year. We’ve found that when the organization bakes in social media, the problems of shoe horning a social media system into an established organization are minimized. Consultants and some bureaucrats assume that the new functions can be layered on to the existing infrastructures and business methods. In our experience, the assumption may be incorrect. Furthermore, organizations engineered to use Internet centric applications as part of their basic business methods have a cost advantage. There is not much information about this aspect of social media available to us at this time. We also have a working hypothesis that start ups with social media baked in may have a competitive advantage over established operations that are taking the add on approach to social media.
Stephen Arnold, December 2, 2008
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3 Responses to “Social Media and a Search Postscript”
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Hi Stephen,
Thanks for your continued blogs – I enjoy reading them. I don’t think social media (and microblogging) is an area the enterprise can ignore simply because their customers are leaving feedback there. This feedback is often way more direct than they would offer via a formal survey and is a great leading indicator of customer sentiment. There’s an immediacy in social media that, I think, will make the formal MR channels redundant in years to come.
At Leximancer we’re focused on actionable social media and getting great traction right now.
Where are you based? It would e good to catch up in person one day soon. I have a view on Autonomy having worked there that you might find useful too!
Leximancer..I recently asked for a trial copy for their 3.5 version.
After exchanging 10 emails with 2 of their company representatives, they declined to provide me with a free trial.
Instead they said, “…that we can negotiate for a paid desktop trial.”
Although they advertise a free trial at their site, they actually trying to make people pay for a tial version.
How crappy and scummy is that?
Stay away from them. The software costs 1500$ AUD, and they expect you to pay without testing it.
Unless of course you pay for a trial version first.
Most probably their software is full of bugs..
They con people into buying their crappy software!
Stay away from them!