I was recently presenting strategies for social networking to an executive team at a software company and someone asked this question. "Couldn't we just do a couple of these things...won't that be enough?" Now I should qualify that up to this point in my presentation I had only covered very elementary steps to implementing a corporate social strategy so I was concerned that he was feeling overwhelmed so early on the process or perhaps apathetic (I couldn't really tell which). My greater concern was several others in the meeting where nodding in agreement and I could see that the growing consensus was "lets make a list of a couple action items and get the hell out of here"

I remembered that a good friend of mine (Bob E) had recently mentioned that most companies he had encountered were in social networking for a penny not a pound. Many enterprises just want to be able to report back to the board that they are active in the space or that they are testing channels or that they have a Twitter presense. This lack of commitment reminded me of the story of Cortez who went into battle back in 1519 and once on the beach instructed his men to Burn the Boats! because if we are to survive we will use our opponents boats to return home. 

Now that's motivation!!! that's commitment!!! and that's what companies need to do to be successful when they make a change of this magnitude Burn the damm boats!!! For every company those boats are different things, culture, naysayers, antiquated thinking, fear, lack of information or strategy. Whatever it is just find it, and burn it and when your done reach down in your pocket skip over the pennies and find that pound because that's what it takes to change how your company does business.

Just to be sure my rant about commitment isn't taken out of context I do believe in a methodical and consistent approach to social networking. You don't have to be on every platform and chase every trend but in the end the commitment to the culture and direction has to be there.

 Interesting speech on commitment and the Cortez story

This past week analysts at the Altimeter Group released their study titled "Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management" The study outlines 18 use cases for putting the customer first and the technologies that you need to get that job done. Authors R “Ray” Wang and Jeremiah Owyang did a great job creating what will become the play book for social media integration in the enterprise. In the report they discuss the 5M's of Social CRM as a framework to guide your processes and strategy as you integrate Social CRM into the seven key categories (Customer Insights, Social Marketing, Social Sales, Social Service and Support, Social innovation, Collaboration and Customer Experience) that connect you to your customers.

Enterprise business intelligence tools play a key role in successfully integrating and measuring the unstructured and semi-structured data that drives the social space. SAS, SAP Oracle, Purisma, IBM, DataFlux, Information Builders and others are already addressing the challenges that Social CRM delivers. Its still very early in the adoption process but BI vendors are starting to see the growing opportunity. The interesting thing will be to see who puts a clear end to end offering together first. Monitoring is the popular technology for now but as companies gain better access to the social landscape they will demand integration and measurement. The Social CRM market is moving so fast I can't help but think that the larger slower moving "big stack guys" may be at a disadvantage and susceptible to an innovative upstart. 

Jesse Thomas does an excellent job of rolling the numbers of social media in to a fast paced video. Its crazy how fast these numbers keep growing!

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

One of the great things about the TDWI World Conference series is that you get to see your friends every 90 days and for the last year or two Vickie Farrell, Strategic Marketing Manager for HP’s BI Solutions business and I have had a chance to visit and discuss the trends in BI. Vickie and her team do an excellent job surveying business intelligence end users to compile the annual whitepaper titled HP’s Top 10 Trends in Business Intelligence a comprehensive look at the industry.

I'll list a couple here but you should follow the link to get the full document.

Trend #10: Growing interest in cloud computing for business intelligence.
Trend #9: Social computing and the next frontier for business intelligence.
Trend #8: Growing importance of integrating and analyzing unstructured/semi-structured data.
Trend #7: Growing impact and opportunity of Complex Event Processing.
Trend #6: Data warehousing and business intelligence: A new generation drives new priorities.

To get the rest follow the link!

Thats not an easy question. There are a lot of interesting solutions out in the market that do a good job counting things like number of posts or number of twitter followers but do these simple metrics actually tell us who is the top influencer on a topic within a market? I don't think they tell the whole story.

I recently tackled this challenge using some existing technology coupled with external data to create the Topic Influencer Report you see below. It takes into account not just the easy to count items but additional information to analyze the facts and metrics that include calculating a proprietary Engagement Power Ranking along with an proprietary Authority Ranking. Often times we make assumptions about how important one author may be to our brand based on volume but in the end making noise doesn't matter if the community doesn't respect or see the author as authoritative. And its especially interesting when you take into account weather they have a loyal and engaged audience. Adding Authority, Engagement Power Ranking and the other data points create a clear picture of the best conversations to follow and participate in.

The Influencer Report below is based on 2 large, publicly held business intelligence and data warehousing companies, their brands and their products. These firms are direct competitors. We monitored over a 6 month period during which 7,200 references and comments were made on 675 website, 105+ twitter accounts, 100 blogspot domains, 400+ Facebook posts and another 5000 various web based social references. 

In this example we identified 40 powerful voices for this community and for demonstration purposes have plotted the top influencer's here. (don't panic if you don't see your name, this report is topic based on two brands so if you don't write about these two companies much or their technology you won't make this list)

We produce three separate views of the report to help our clients each is based on the same methodology.

1. Topic Influencer Report - Example above

2. Competitive Influencer Report - Identify who leads the communities that take about your competition

3. Sentiment Influencer Report - Identify your brand Mavins as well as the authors who are broadcasting negative content so you can engage and educate

Give me a call if your interested in seeing who the true top influencer's on your brand, topic or technology are.

First off this isn't an easy task, the amount of unstructured data available in client driven communities is huge not to mention the standard enterprise data we already have that needs to be integrated with this highly valuable source of insight. Attensity Group's suite of applications focus on leveraging actionable data from emails, web forums, surveys, CRM systems, online communities and other sources. Attensity just launched Analyze for VoC Community Advantage. Attensity's VoC solutions convert the text of conversations and feedback into intelligence with dash boarding capabilities that reveal sentiments and trends of your customer or prospect communities.

The Analyze for VOC Community Advantage product is a SaaS hosted solution offering quick setup and fixed monthly costs for the service. Providing insight into customer sentiment, loyalty and satisfaction. The combination of a semantic engine and text analytics allow Attensity to find valuable data where others just see unstructured chatter. Companies in this sector are getting the attention of the front end business intelligence companies as many of them see the addition of this type of market intelligence as critical to their business intelligence offering.

The addition of this type of data to enterprise intelligence can be invaluable and allow companies the insight needed to become less reactive and more right-time in their approach to trends within client communities.

I don't see this type of analysis being adopted by every company that gets value from their BI infrastructure.....just the smart ones.

I just spent a great couple days in Las Vegas at the TDWI World Conference. I'm happy to report that the industry seems to be bouncing back in a positive direction, the floor was full of vendors and the attendee numbers were up 40%+ over last years event according Rich Zbylut of TDWI. I had lots of briefings and saw a bunch of great technology over the 3 days so I'll be writing about a few of my favorites over the next few days. 

Dave Menninger Vice President of Marketing and I met up to talk about Vertica 4.0 The news from Vertica continues to be positive. They have grown to 120+ customers and are now adding 10 -15 each quarter. Each time Dave and meet the news and improvements are substantial and continues to show that Vertica is executing on its road map and long term strategy.

The latest version of Vertica includes important upgrades like workload management that allows users to manage complex mixed queries and align them to business priorities. They have also made the system Unicode compliant enabling them to handle international locations and data. Armed with enhanced international capabilities I would look for Vertica to start aggressive growth initiatives in Europe in 2010. They have also made patent-pending changes to the Optimizer and Execution Engine within the appliance to keep them very competitive in regards to speed. To stay current with more sophisticated demands from users, Vertica is now SQL 99 Complaint adding a variety of new and more powerful query types to their arsenal.

Vertica continues to focus on its partner ecosystem and has added an Informatica Powercenter 8.6 plug-in to the line up along with continuing its relationships with partners Cloudera, IBM/Cognos, JasperSoft, MicroStrategy, SyncSort, SAP/Business Objects, Streambase, Tableau, Talend and others.

I'm pretty critical of most business intelligence solutions that claim to be collaborative or socially driven. While the industry is taking small steps to enter the space most attempts to date have fallen short. More often than not companies struggle in 3 main areas:

1. Full integrated into workflow and processs - Users don't want to leave the BI environment where they make decisions then be forced to jump into a separate application just to be collaborative. Also adoption fails when you have to use multiple platforms. And its difficult to create the proper climate to grow the meritocracy culture that drives social networking and engagement.

2. Strong collaborative tools - Hanging a "thumbs up" or "star icons" on your report repositiory is not social business intelligence...its window dressing and generally an indication that you don't really get the culture of social networking in business intelligence. Successful applications need to allow for ratings, commenting, instant messaging, live interactive dashboards, decision and data traceability, blogs, easily added images and video, security as well as access to outside sources and commentary. The ability to bookmark and create your own work space are also important features that should not be missed.

3. Easy enterprise data integration - all to often I see so called social business intelligence platforms that can't reach beyond data from CSV files or Excel or worse yet they only allow an image file of the report. They are seldom tied back to the enterprise data source and are not dynamically updated. Collaborating doesn't make up for bad data it just produced highly collaborative bad decisions. You should run away from a system that doesn't make data access easy.

I was quoted today in a press release as saying "Lyzasoft has taken the next step beyond accessorizing business intelligence solutions with social networking tools to fully integrating those features into the new version of Lyza, creating the culture, tools and the work process necessary for an effective solution," added Shawn Rogers, president of Analytic Response, which focuses on the analytics, social media, business intelligence and Enterprise 2.0 markets. "With Lyza, users no longer have to exit out of their BI processes to leverage the social media aspects of the solution, creating and facilitating a culture of sharing and collaboration into the standard BI workflow." 

I happily stand behind the quote and my review of Lyzasoft. It hit the nail on the head, executing on all 3 of the pitfalls I mentioned above and by moving well beyond them in scope and features. The lauch of Lyza Commons sets a new standard for the big stack business intelligence companies to catch up to. Plus Lyzasoft CEO Scott Davis didn't miss the importance of pricing and has set the bar exactly where companies can adopt the technology without heavy risk. 

The new version of Lyza is available immediately for Windows, Mac and Linux. It is priced at $400 for a single machine, one-year subscription with unlimited online support and complimentary product updates, or $2000 per user for a perpetual license and one year of support. 

Lyza Commons runs on Microsoft Windows and is priced at $4,000 per workgroup for an annual license including maintenance and $20,000 per workgroup for a perpetual license and one year of support. There are no per-user fees for Lyza Commons, and there are no limits on the number of users in the workgroup.

Bottom line, Lyza and Lyza Commons have set a new standard for bringing collaborative business context to enterprise data. 

iDashboards is tracking the Vancouver Olympics with its interactive dashboard software. Its updated daily with the days results and the ability to click into details ranging from country medal counts to comparative information from the Torino games in 2006. The dashboard highlights information using speedometers, gauges, interactive country flags, world map overlays, bar charts etc. It free so check it out if your looking to add more details to your Olympic experience.