the gr | | | | ng

September 15, 2010, 9 a.m. Pacific Time, 11 a.m. Central Time, 12 noon Eastern Time, 5 p.m. UK Time

Ekaterina Walter, Social Media Strategist at Intel
Angela LoSasso, Global Social Media Strategy and Programs at HP
Petra Neiger, Senior Manager, Global Social Media at Cisco
Holger Schulze, Director of Marketing at SafeNet

Ok, I’m back on it after a busy summer. On September 15, I will be chairing a round table discussion with these seriously knowledgeable industry experts to figure out how businesses can adapt emerging social media technologies to their existing marketing plan and how can they benefit from integrating social media into different functions of the business. Join me in grilling this panel on the impact and emerging issues of this fundamental shift in thinking, and the metrics involved to ensure a maximized ROI.

June 9, 2010, 1 p.m. Pacific Time, 3 p.m. Central Time, 4 p.m. Eastern Time, 9 p.m. UK Time

Isaac Garcia, Co-founder & CEO at Central Desktop
Ross Fubini, Chief Evangelist & Co-Founder at Cube Tree
Mike McGurkin, VP Services & Support at Newsgator

Join this influential panel, as we explore microblogging and social collaboration in the enterprise. As per usual, the panel will be grilled and either emerge frazzled, shining or both…topics include:

Landscape – Where have we come from and where are we now?
- Communications such as mobile or e-mail have become ubiquitous
- Consumer world has adopted microblogging and social media fully
- Professionals are starting to follow suit…or are they?

Grilling question: time suck? Is this creating noise which decreases workforce efficiency? (e.g. IM)
Grilling question: it’s great that collaboration is accelerated, but what effect does that have on data governance and security?
Live polling question: are you using microblogging or social collaboration in your organization? (yes, no, don’t know)

Where are companies successfully deploying microblogging and social collaboration? Internal vs. External Communications?
- Status updates improves task management (context on progress)
- Organizations are using microblogging as a way to escalate support issues in call centers
- Sales & marketing examples

Grilling question: how successfully have these apps been integrated into core platforms such as Helpdesk Support, CRM, ERP or Marketing Automation systems
Grilling question: how realistic is it that companies will create systems outside of the above core systems
Live polling question: Do you think microblogging and social collaboration… 1. increases workforce and operational efficiency or 2. decreases workforce and operational efficiency?

Adoption & The Future
- Are professionals deploying these tools on an ad hoc basis or do many organizations centrally purchase/roll out microblogging and social collaboration?
- What needs to happen for these tools and techniques to become as ubiquitous as e-mail or mobile (is that realistic)?

Grilling question: with these tools and techniques being so early stage, is it possible to make the business case without hard data demonstrating ROI?
Live polling question: Following this round table discussion, are you more likely to adopt enterprise microblogging and social collaboration within your team or company? (yes, no)

Register for upcoming webcasts by clicking on the ‘attend webcast’ button below.

I’m surprised I even made this grilling – I suffered from the worst bronchitis in living memory in the run-up to this session. Fortunately, I managed to recover just in time. So, do analysts still matter? The live broadcast was positively animated with a few tense moments during the grilling phases of the discussion. And it wasn’t just me grilling – the audience thoroughly enjoyed unpicking the panel. And so they should!

Speaking of the panel, Michelle Accardi runs the shared services group at CA, a leading IT Enterprise Management Software vendor, and in that capacity oversees their global marketing programs. She is both a client of various analysts such as Gartner and Frost & Sullivan as well as an ‘end user’ – a subscriber to reports and industry research which is relevant to her as a marketer. “Analysts matter as much as my customers care about them” she says. Her big thing is trust. She advises any marketer to canvas customers and find out which analyst firm THEY trust and to invest your marketing dollars accordingly. For Michelle the whole analyst thing is not just about the products, but also about understanding her customers’ needs so that CA can deliver the right solutions (read: ‘make sure that the messaging aligns with the customer need’). Now, since Michelle is big on the trust issue, I challenged the subject of objectivity as analysts often seem to get ‘won over’ – directly or indirectly – by vendors such as CA. Michelle agrees that there is a perception that vendors use (read: pay) analysts to push their own agenda, but insists that more often than not, analysts remain true to their role as ambassadors of reliable and trustworthy industry insights.

Chris Ross, VP of Marketing at the Burton Group, arguably the most neutral IT research and advisory services firm, disagrees. He believes that there is no way for those ‘reliable and trustworthy insights’ not to be shaped by the tens of millions of dollars which vendors are pouring into these analyst firms. Chris believes that any analyst firm whose majority revenue is driven by vendors (e.g. Forrester, Gartner etc) will provide great insights to the vendor, but may have a penchant for more subjective recommendations to their buyer community.

The audience was getting animated, joining in the debate. One delegate was lamenting the difficulty of getting the analysts’ mindshare as a small medium enterprise vendor with limited budget, while another countered that analysts have a bias TOWARDS small medium enterprise who shake up the space and AGAINST the big incumbent players.

Naylor Gray, Frost & Sullivan’s Global Marketing Director turned the trust question on its head and put 2.0 on the hot seat. Frost and Sullivan are a well recognized analyst firm focused on accelerating growth for their clients. In his opinion, trust and the reliability of data gets established through questions such as 1. do they have a methodology, 2. is it transparent, 3. can the model be easily manipulated or is it ‘vendor proof’, 4. do they have the industry coverage and the capability? According to Naylor, social media cannot be trusted at a deep level. There is no methodology – there is no brand – social media is made up of individuals and individuals will never be trusted brands upon which professionals will make significant business decisions. He has a point – analyst brands play a role in empowering the buyers to make their business case. Going to your boss(es) for funding, validating your request with a leading analyst brand and related industry research/insights will go down better than ‘Someone on Twitter said’ or ‘this blog I read on a daily basis mentioned that’….

Still, Chris argues that analysts are under threat if they do no position themselves correctly in this new landscape. Interestingly, Naylor quoted Google as a key competitor due to the accessibility of industry insights and data which competes with the ‘off the shelf’ reports which analysts generate revenues from. “If the customer can get everything they need through search and Web 2.0 tools and platforms for free, they should.” says Chris. So, the ball is in the analyst’s court to stay relevant. “The analyst business model is strong, but our related services need to evolve. These days, we’re so much more than creating documents – we develop ‘Google proof’ non-commoditized insights, we sit in on staff meetings, develop highly custom research. The basic subscription model works, but the value proposition is shifting from content to advisory.”

So, the reason why analysts still matter is that information is not insight. And – according to the panel – analysts have a role to play in deciphering the many moving parts in their subject matter area to provide unparalleled depth and breadth which is indispensable when making important business decisions. Another consideration is that social commentary and/or communities are not necessarily prevalent in all B2B industry sectors.

So, the whole notion of empowering professionals with credible, reliable and free knowledge is a pipe dream? Naylor dryly interjected that business isn’t quite that altruistic, but could definitely see how more credible ‘vertical’ social networks could start making a difference (i.e. Sermo vs. LinkedIn). Michelle pointed at her work with ‘community of interest websites’ which CA developed with TechWeb TO empower the community. Which brings us back to trust – an industry professional will rarely believe a vendor-driven resource (even if that fact is well hidden). What would be really powerful, Michelle argues, is to ask the customers which brands they trust and to use that social consensus to develop trusted professional communities to empower professionals to rate products, exchange experiences and trade insights. The audience agreed: 73% would like to see these type of resources for their respective profession.

On November 17, 2009 I will be grilling a prestigious panel of three big name analyst firms, 1 CXO subscriber and 1 senior marketer on this question. Register by hitting the ‘attend’ button below. In a world of community empowerment, media is fighting for survival as its editorial voice struggles to compete with the web’s peer-to-peer conversations. Are analysts bound for a similar destiny?

Are these very communities the future of research, market intelligence and vendor reviews? Picture sophisticated social networks of highly targeted professionals – connected by powerful Web 2.0 tools and platforms – who not only generate content but also share the insights and conduct the research which analysts have become synonymous with. Will analysts be able to compete with the immediacy and fluency of these peer-to-peer conversations? This round table webcast will aim to answer these questions and look at the future role of analysts in this new landscape.

Mingling around at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco (a welcome newcomer in the top 10 of the healthcare event calendar according to industry insiders), one can’t help but feel inspired by this new movement that is emerging in the healthcare sector. ‘User generated healthcare’ promises to bring together content and transactions in a user-friendly way. Increased availability of data and today’s 2.0 tools (mobile devices, social networks, widgets, online events etc) provide a significant opportunity to create unprecedented engagement and conversation between patients, clinicians and (the much demonized) insurers and biopharma companies. With patients increasingly demanding to be heard and empowered (rightly so, since we pay for it all!!), 2.0 is precipitating a momentous power shift in the healthcare sector. Not only will patients be better educated on diseases and have a say in their own treatments or doctors, but they will be able to take charge of their own ‘preventative medicine’ journey and diagnose themselves using mobile and web applications and technologies. This will change the patient/healthcare provider/insurer/supplier landscape and one can only hope that ‘the system’ will put its weight behind this momentum and not stifle it as it has so often done in the past.

Speaking of which, the FDA is holding public hearings on social-media use – they’re being as open-minded as they’re heavy-handed when it comes to enforcing regulations under the new administration. The question on everyone’s mind is how you create the traditional delineations in this new (uncontrollable) conversational landscape. What are the liability considerations and what is fair play, what isn’t…my question is how this Health 2.0 movement will change the marketing landscape in pharma. I’m having some very interesting conversations with leading marketers in the world’s largest biopharmas, insurers as well as doctors and patients and will definitely be putting together a round table grilling on the subject. Stay tuned.

Looks like the microblogging posse is getting $100 million in new funding from an investment consortium that includes mutual fund company T. Rowe Price Group, equity company Venture Partners and existing backers Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.

Twitter is now valued at around $1 billion which is 4x its Jan 09 evaluation and it now has 54 million visitors a month, which is a 10x increase on the beginning of the year. Conventional thought justifies the investment in such staggering growth. But hang on…I nearly forgot – what do the revenues look like? Oh, they haven’t figured out a business model yet? Ah well, I’m sure they’ll get there eventually…

ARE WE SERIOUS ABOUT THIS?? This isn’t 1998!!! As much as I love Twitter, professionals and consumers the world over are ‘joining the conversation’ and Twitter STILL hasn’t figured out how to make money (Wikipedia shows projected revenues of $400k and this is their 4th year in business). Just to put this in perspective: LinkedIn – with 43 million registered users, is generating in the region of $75-$100m per year. Last October, one of their VCs projected solid revenue models for the first quarter of this year – that didn’t happen (the closest to a business model we got was a hypothetical e-commerce model in the New York Times in June of this year).

The latest idea is to introduce paid business services which include an “analytics dashboard” to help companies monitor Tweets about their business, or verified corporate Twitter accounts.  From a marketing perspective, this makes sense – especially if Twitter can offer integration with CRM and marketing automation systems and make its ‘touches’ part of the marketing scoring process. Still, it’s hardly big leap stuff – clearly Twitter is struggling to find answers, so why not turn to its users? The professional twitterati would be all too willing to share some thoughts on what they would pay for…personally, I struggle to understand why contextual content and advertising services remain unavailable to the marketing community. Twitter has a huge opportunity to generate revenues by facilitating more measurable connections between businesses and individuals in meaningful and relevant ways – let’s hope it figures out how.