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  • mike manuel 2:29 pm on January 28, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: doug haslam, ,   

    We’ve Scooped Up Doug Haslam 

    The new year is off to a very good start, much of which I hope to share here shortly. That said, over on the Voce Nation, I just published one of our initial highlights, which is the news today that Doug Haslam is joining Voce and will be working along side myself and others on our social media marketing programs. My post has a little more detail, but for now, it should suffice to say we’re all looking forward to digging in with Doug and collectively kicking butt this year. More to come…

     

  • mike manuel 3:25 pm on December 18, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , articles, business intelligence   

    Data Analytics, The New Marketing Engine 

    So two interesting articles worth pointing to here, also an opportunity for all social media marketers to consider as we march toward a new year: First off, earlier this month, IBM’s Rob Ash posted this great piece on business analytics, and how various companies are trying to squeeze more value and insights from the growing piles of data that they sit on. And then there’s this second story from Spencer Ante at BusinessWeek, which coincidentally, is about IBM too, and how the company’s putting a lot more muscle and money behind the hiring of data analysts.

    While both stories are about Big Blue and big business, the big opportunity is front and center — company’s today have access to friggin mountains of data and intelligence, and those that can make the most sense of it, stand to gain considerably from it. Period. This is particularly true for social media marketing teams who are increasingly responsible for making sense of a messy, yet amazingly insightful social web. Those teams that can collect the right data AND wrap the right performance analytics around it, will be the champions of the standout programs we talk about this time next year. This is why I think stronger web analytics, tighter measurement models and better intelligence tools will be such an important part of this discipline’s maturity in 2010 (a topic for a separate post).

     

  • mike manuel 4:09 pm on December 16, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , ,   

    Three Types of Social Media Measurements 

    I’m continuing to post thoughts on social media measurement over on the Voce Nation. With this latest post today, I’m digging a little deeper into what I’m calling “spot measurements,” which are single values of program performance and health. Also, in my attempt to not be the guy that just says “you need to measure things like ‘discussion volume,’ m’kay?,” I’m providing three ways that you can take what would otherwise feel like unrelated data sources and start making sense of them thru some basic calculations. Take a look, let me know what you think.

     

  • mike manuel 1:55 pm on December 4, 2009 Permalink
    Tags:   

    “Shifting from Promises to Results” 

    Stephen Baker’s latest (and unfortunately, last) BW story seems timely in the context of my previous post on social media measurement, especially his comments toward the end:

    “The risk is that a backlash against the consultants’ easy promises could reduce social media investments just as the industry takes off…The best way to avoid a similar backlash today is for social media’s practitioners, including thousands of consultants, to shift the focus from promises to results.”

     

  • mike manuel 3:42 pm on December 3, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , brand monitoring, competitive benchmarking, ,   

    How to Measure a Social Media Program 

    So over on the Voce Nation I just published the first of several posts I’ve been cooking up on social media measurement. If you’ve got the time to give it a read, know that it comes from two places: 1) My own observations and experience working with our account teams and clients on measurement methodologies — we’ve been doing this for nearly a decade now, so we better have some insights and opinions at this point; and 2) My own growing frustration with expert-itis and the people who perpetuate the notion that “you can’t measure” this type of marketing or worse, those who insist you can, but would have you infinitely fidgeting and fussing with the pieces and parts of measurement instead of answering the big-ticket questions at the tip of most marketers’ tongues. So there you have it, let me know what you think.

     

  • mike manuel 4:26 pm on July 30, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , , social networking   

    Marketers Frustrations With SocNets Growing 

    I see a backlash brewing. I can’t tell you how many marketers I know are pissed off these days at A) the big social networks; and B) the community software providers. With the prior, it’s frustration over the big 3’s increasingly stringent terms of service and a general ambivalence toward brands unwilling to commit to big-budget deals and exorbitant media buys. And with the later, it’s frustration over the high costs and technical limitations of this software which I can only best describe as the “I-don’t-want-to-use-your-f*cking-’kudos’-system-for-feedback!” feeling. Yeah, everyone wants some sort of community strategy these days, but as marketing folks hit hard brick walls with the social networking cos and the big box software providers, the temptation to roll-your-own community creeps back into the mix. This is why projects like that which my colleague Nick shared today, may in fact be indicative of an early shift in thinking and spending. We’ll see….

     

    • Tom Foremski 6:44 pm on July 30, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Wow. This sounds serious. If marketeers can’t utilize the SocNets that’s going to be a huge problem.

      • mike manuel 9:17 pm on July 30, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        well, marketers not getting what they want isn’t always a bad thing, but yeah, lately it feels like there’s some grade-A resentment brewing, and that’s potentially a serious problem if current patterns continue.

  • mike manuel 3:40 pm on June 30, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , ,   

    Soundbite 2.0 

    Often it’s the small twists and tweaks to ‘established practices’ that can really take things in a new direction — case in point, I was recently reading your run-of-the-mill-mega-company-internal announcement, however, this one was followed by several supporting points pre-packaged in 140 character tweets with all the shortened links and hashtags served right on top. It was one of those moments where your natural reaction is to just gag on the silver spoon working its way down your throat, but after a closer look at things, it really wasn’t over-the-top-type-stuff that this company had pre-defined, it was actually all fairly basic. It was the type of stuff I might, if I was an employee, just retweet for lack of a stronger opinion on the matter. My takeway was this: framing the company news in snack size chunks was helpful for A) holding attention; B) summarizing the news; and C) enabling people to actually do something with it — quickly, at the point of comprehension. I can’t see this working well for every company, but it’s interesting nonetheless…

     

  • mike manuel 10:42 am on June 23, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , , social media strategies   

    On Domain vs Off Domain Strategies 

    So I’ve noticed a strange sort of tug-o-war taking shape among those managing social media programs and without going into all the details here, I’ll just say the tugging typically gets down to this question: where should you put your time, energy and money? Should it be with” on-domain” strategies (e.g., brand communities, business blogs, corporate video, etc., basically any sort of effort that folds into a company’s existing website)? Or should it be with “off-domain” strategies (e.g., microblogs, social networks, monitoring projects, etc., basically any sort of third-party platform or service that could be ‘officially’ adopted to help the company participate with the larger web outside its walls). I guess the ’strange’ part is that this split, this tug, really shouldn’t exist at all, because it’s not an either-or situation. The best programs will inevitably be those that strike a balance between how social media is used on-domain to communicate and connect with people, and how it’s used off-domain to accomplish this exact same thing. I think finding the perfect blend between those two experiences is where every marketer ought to be focusing their time, energy and money right now.

     

  • mike manuel 11:23 am on June 16, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: cnp_studio, , , , , ,   

    Voce Adds Web Dev Team, Forms “Voce Connect” 

    So I just ‘broke’ this news over on the Voce Nation, thought I’d share it here too, the short of it is this: 1) Voce has scooped up the entire cnp_studio team, a group of web developers that specialize in social media design and development work; 2) We’ve formed a combined (social media marketing + web development) service team within Voce that’s now called “Voce Connect;” and 3) We’ve been quietly working together for months now, winning a mix of social media marketing and web development projects with some of the biggest consumer and business brands in the world, much of which we’ll be showcasing and sharing on our new company site which we rolled out today too. Our press page has all the details, and I’ll be posting more on this shortly, but suffice to say, it’s a big day for our company and a good measure of how our firm’s thinking about the changing landscape for marketing and communications. There’s much, much more to come.

     

  • mike manuel 8:40 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: sentiment analysis,   

    Machine-Based Sentiment Analysis is Flawed 

    So, it’s sad, but kind’a comical too to see how quickly the everyday use of the web for communication is eroding everyone’s grammar and syntax (cough, Twitter). What’s truly tragic, however, is the frigg’n pandemic spread of companies promising machine based linguistic and sentiment analysis services, all of them knowing oh too well that the web has damn-near its own dialect now, be it acronyms (FTW!), abbreviations (RT) or any number of adhoc classifications (#[hashtag]), and maybe more importantly, a growing appetite for unspoken gestures of expression and opinion (be it thumbs, stars, likes, or otherwise), yet, for whatever reason, these companies continue to over-promise mountains of insight and perspective into “how your customers think and feel,” based only on what a bot and an algorithm spits back!? I don’t know, it’s just, uh, flawed. Update: check out Microsyntax.org, this entire organization is diving into the ‘new’ unconventions of communication on the web.

     

    • Hayden 8:46 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I know…. but its the best we currently have without getting a human to analyse it.

      • mike manuel 8:49 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        what’s wrong with using silly humans?

    • Hayden 8:54 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Nothing, they are the best form of artificial artificial intelligence there is;
      http://press20.blogspot.com/2008/09/artifical-artificial-intelligence.html

      • mike manuel 8:57 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        yeah, mechanical turk is interesting, flawed in it’s own ways, but interesting. at very least, it’s addressing the ‘human analysis can’t scale’ challenge that’s often voiced.

        • Hayden 9:02 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

          I’ve yet to see anyone that has automatically linked the Turk to a sentiment engine…. now that would be useful!
          Although you’d have a variable cost from the Turk, you could set a maximum budget (like a Google PPC campaign).

    • Dave C. 8:57 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I’m still going with John Henry over the jankety steam engine in this case.

      • mike manuel 9:02 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        haha, nice. me too.

    • Tac Anderson 9:04 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      It’s the classic tech biz problem of trying to provide customization at scale. The analytics will get better to incorporate these shifts in Web comm but they will always be behind and will always require a certain amount of human filtering/qualifying.

    • Rich Reader (WOM-buzz) 9:33 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      for the moment, people are still necessary (best qualified) for the scoring and classification components of sentiment analysis. If this moment should pass, then judgment day will have arrived (Terminator-style), wherein sentiment analysis will cease to be a service that is sought-after, and there will be no bail-outs.

    • Mike Driehorst 9:46 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Of course it’s flawed — both the attempt and the way companies promote that service.

      However, having a machine do it is a good starting point for us people to then dig into the results to determine their validity (how close or if the machines are accurate).

      To do it in large scale by people is very time-consuming when having the machines take the first step followed by people power is a step in the right direction.

      • mike manuel 9:52 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        agreed, i think the ‘hybrid’ approach (to tac’s point above) is our best bet, but for you, me and so many others to know this and still see so many companies hucking sentiment analytics as a ’solved problem’ is both the disturbing and flawed part of it all…

      • Rich Reader (WOM-buzz) 10:00 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        If you have a large and persistent data stream, do you then obtain stable classification error rates (type A and B)? If so, how high a pair of error rates leaves you better off than human-based coring and classification? If not, how do you place a value on the output?

    • Kevin Murphy 9:49 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Some analyis and listening is better than none. Automated sentiment scoring is a great flagging tool for spotting key issues. But as a measurment tool, it sstill needs to eveolve.

      • mike manuel 9:56 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        yeah, i wasn’t implying it’s an all or nothing thing, kevin, just that if you’re investing solely in machine based analytic systems and services, just understand they’re over-promising and under-delivering right now.

    • paullyoung (Paull Young) 10:23 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Twitter Comment


      I agree wholeheartedly with @mmanuel “machine based sentiment analysis is flawed” [link to post]

    • larry levy 11:47 am on May 21, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Mike – Most people well versed in the space recognize this as a tough problem to solve but still worth trying.

      We’ve actually found that the results based on traditional vs non traditional don’t vary as much as you’d expect. This space is being somewhat tainted with companies/programmers just slapping a dictionary onto entity extraction and thinking they’ve nailed the problem.

      As we improve our algorithms, we’re achieving results in the high 80%’s in terms of accuracy on negative and positive. It’s the neutrals that cause the most grief – even human inter annotator agreement on these is very low – somewhere between 55%-60%.

    • marlinex (Marilyn Clark) 8:55 pm on June 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Twitter Comment


      Machine-Based Sentiment Analysis is Flawed [link to post] [Not convinced yet that humans can be replaced in this case]

      – Posted using Chat Catcher

  • mike manuel 9:50 am on May 18, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: corporate, , , staffing   

    Corporate Social Media Teams Are Growing 

    So not that it’s terribly surprising, but the headcount for in-house (corporate) social media teams seems to be growing — very quickly — despite the economy. Two years ago, even in the biggest companies, you had, at best, a collection of quarter-timers, loosely coming together around launches and campaigns. Thereafter, part-time social media/community/online strategists started to take foot, now, shit, most companies have *at least* one dedicated person, with many, many companies having far more. The other observation worth noting here are the organizational models, (err, model), which seems to in a lot of companies boil down to a very lean, very skilled cross-functional strategic team that establishes standards, protocols and practices that are then pushed out to a much larger set of business unit practitioners and regional teams for local implementation. It’s just interesting to see familiar patterns of corporate organization and structure finally taking hold around a new discipline, a sign of the industry’s maturation?

     

    • theMetz (Adam Metz) 6:00 pm on May 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Twitter Comment


      Corporate Social Media Teams Are Growing: Shared by Adam Where’s the table? J/K MM.
      So not that it’s terribly su.. [link to post]

    • mark bjornsgaard 1:21 am on May 19, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      any chance you can post the data / link to the research?

      • mike manuel 6:42 am on May 19, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        nope. this is based on my own observations working with a variety of companies here in the bay area — it’s also what im hearing from my peers and friends who work in-house.

    • dtuells (dave tuells) 11:26 am on July 7, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Twitter Comment


      More on social media trends in industry (and I really like this one): [link to post]

      – Posted using Chat Catcher

  • mike manuel 5:32 pm on May 13, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , ,   

    Defining Social Media ‘Expertise’ 

    Social Media Marketing Experience

    I joked (mostly) about social media expert-itis in a previous post, but if you really had to try and dig into what makes someone a “social media expert,” it’s really not that difficult of a thing to deconstruct, I mean, if you just focus on direct experiences. So…uh…that’s what I did. Well, it’s a start at least. Keep in mind, I’m approaching this from a communications consultant’s point of view, in-house folks have some unique skill requirements that I’m skipping here. Also, it bears mentioning, while it’s helpful to try and draw some simple distinctions between what it means to have an understanding of this industry verses real-world know-how and knowledge, let’s be honest, in the end, “expertise” will always be relative to need, so yeah, your mileage will vary, but hopefully this is a start. [cross-posted to Voce Nation]

     

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