The World Economics Forum 2010 has just wrapped up in Davos, Switzerland. I was watching the session on Technology for Society, a panel discussion with some notable participants from the public and private sectors, including Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.
They spoke of advances, directions, barriers and issues. Interesting perspectives which occasionally outlined a future with no path to get there. There was something missing.
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It may just be me, but I’ve seen another spike in activity lately about measurement, and the value, of Social Media initiatives. While many are still saying you can’t really measure the ROi, that does nothing to inform and influence organizations looking to invest anything in Social Media.
And the debate is not whether Social Media can be of value, the question remains to be how much value? A hint of not being able to measure is enough to stop most organizations from pursuing Social Media immediately.
I think the answer is looking to trusted methods to understand new information.
I’ve been invited to speak with members of the San Diego Software Industry Council next month, where I’ll be presenting the latest addition to our OASIS Social Media Best Practices: The Social Media Scorecard.
Here’s a peek.
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New Marketing Labs posted an interesting interview on their blog with Miriam Kutcher, VP of Marketing at research firm IDC Insights about their new community launched last March. Miriam and a group of IDC analysts worked for most of 2009 establishing the community to address needs in their research verticals.
She generously shares their goals and details the “scorecard” approach she uses to track return on the community.
“Foundations of Listening” is the new book from The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), and it was recently covered in the influential Advertising Age. What the ARF found, is that despite the wealth of online opinion or “buzz”, and the growing basket of tools available to monitor such, neither is really that valuable.
So you can set up the fanciest tools available, but it doesn’t replace, or as the ARF found, even reflect what is actually in most peoples’ minds. Tools won’t give you “the answer”.
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Our OASIS methodology purposely puts target audience understanding up front in the thinking, since this knowledge is crucial to creating a successful social media strategy. And universally, we spend a lot of time explaining the detail behind the high proportion of our project time allocated to figuring out these online behaviours, capabilities, and presence of any assignment’s particular target audience.
OASIS, like Forrester’s POST methodology, is just an expression of a process to guide what you need to do when getting into social media. We licence OASIS under Creative Commons for free, because we suspect you will hire folks like Social Media 404 to help you with the how; how to use this type of method for organizational results.
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Are you?
We’ve been speaking with a number of organizations over the past several years, and doing some pretty cool work with some who “get” why being socially connected is good for business. But there are far more, who find an excuse to do nothing.
Entering 2010, we’ve rounded up the Top 7 Barriers we’ve found to social media adoption.
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