Last week I wrote about what I learned from talking to 25 companies on how social media was being used by them individually, as well as how they used it to enhance their business alliances and partnerships. Mostly I discussed the partnering aspects.

I thought that this week I would back up a little and discuss 5 points to consider when building out a social media program for your business.

• First, with any business initiative, start with a vision, plan, and mission. Sounds like a lot, but this could be a few paragraphs or one-pager. You already have a business plan (I assume), so this is just meant to complement it Not complicate it. Try to answer – “What is my prime purpose in using social media?” Influence customers to buy, provide better customer service and experience, build a new lead channel, etc. Then build your one-pager. Your prime purpose may change or expand in a year, so understand that this is dynamic.
• Second, if you’re not top management, then the above will not be very credible until the owners or senior management buy into it. Social media has the ability to touch and influence almost every area of your business operation, as sales, marketing, HR will all be affected by your strategy. You will need multiple layers of support to get this started – but not necessarily everyone.
• Third, think about how your vision will be turned into policy and action. You will need to establish some policies and guidelines about what’s inbounds and what’s out of bounds in your social media strategy. For instance, what guidelines do you need to establish around talking about new products or internal affairs or finances. These are important areas that can affect you legally, financially, and in your ability to compete.
• Fourth, can you track who’s saying or writing what? And what help or guidance are you providing them? What tools, training and programs might help them help your customers or clients better, or do their job better? There’s a lot of territory to cover on this fourth bullet and my next blog will talk about how to help you get connected to the right resources.
• Fifth, and this is the one I like least, but is necessary. What are the consequences for breaking policy? Even in LinkedIn, some groups have policies that do not allow links in their discussions. Most groups don’t, but those that do will or can expel you from the group. LinkedIn itself has certain policies that will be cause for your expulsion. If you plan to have consequences, then make sure they’re communicated well and backed up with adequate training. This topic alone is worthy of another blog and I would appreciate other thoughts on the subject.

As examples of how to get started or just start your thinking along these lines, take a look at IBM’s guidelines. Or check out Sun Microsystem’s guidelines – one of my former employers – where the CEO has (or had) a highly readable and followable blog. Since Sun is in the midst of being purchased by Oracle, I’m not sure where his future writings will go, but it might be worthy to check out his past material at http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/ as an example of an executive communication blog.

Look forward to your comments and thoughts.

And The Race Is On!

After developing and selling technology for the capital markets and financial services industry, I’ve learned some things about the value of real-time information. The same now seems to hold true for online social information sharing. Let me explain what I mean.

In the world of capital markets which includes brokerages and wirehouses, such as Morgan Stanley, and traditional banks such as Bank of America and Citi, real time information becomes an incredibly valuable commodity (or more precisely necessity). First, the aggregators and distributors of capital markets real time information include the likes of mega-info companies including Thomson-Reuters and Bloomberg. Second, some of the suppliers of this data include stock exchanges such as NYSE. And third, the users of this information include financial traders, mutual fund managers, wealth managers and financial advisors – to name a few. Those users or recipients of this real time information spend a lot of money on purchasing and employing this data to give them an edge about a company or fund that they might invest in (or not).

What is evolving analogously in the world of social media is quite similar. While instant messaging was the early leader in delivering real time interpersonal information, it’s the advent of Twitter that is really making this a potential business phenomenon and necessity. Twitter is the supplier of all this instant opinion information.

Just recently, Microsoft and Facebook announced initiatives to aggregate and promote Twitter information. They are the equivalent to Thomson-Reuters at this point. Of course Facebook, not to be outdone, would also like to be a competitive supplier in this market and is now allowing some real time views (aka status updates) of information posted by its 200 million users to be more publicly accessible. While Microsoft, through its new Bing search engine, is providing an index to the most followed Twitterer’s , bringing Twitter information to its search engine in less than a minute (near enough to real time).

So why is this trend important? It may provide businesses and marketers the ability to look at consumer interests, buying patterns and the effects of new product releases in near instantaneous fashion.

There is one issue that should be important to everyone. In the world of capital markets, real time information is about stocks and investments for the most part – relatively innocuous from a personal standpoint. However, in the world of Twitter and Facebook, the information is about us and our behavior. This type of real time market segmentation information has the potential to infringe on our privacy rights. Many of us have already seen our personal data being used for purposes that go beyond our consent. So while I look forward to the next wave of social media progress, we also need to be vigilant in how this affects our social communities and privacy.

Current Trends for Facebook and Twitter

As most of you probably know, Microsoft, up until a few days ago, had been using its Live Search engine with MSN. However, Live Search from Microsoft has been in a bit of classic web branding quandary as livesearch.com is owned by Tyler Tullock (not Microsoft) who is trying to retire on the ownership of that domain name by either selling it to Microsoft or getting compensated by driving traffic to Google (and to be fair, he did own the domain first).  On the enterprise search side, Microsoft leads with FAST, the engine they also purchased about 18 months ago – but FAST doesn’t appear to play a major role in their consumer oriented approach – at least at this time.

The big money and market share play is around consumer search and Live Search at least had little or no brand or market control compared to Google or Yahoo. So Microsoft, in its quest to gain a share of search player status, has been investing in their latest incarnation of search which we know is branded as Bing. Bing now has its own website, name and look and feel.

Accordingly Microsoft has been investing heavily in promoting Bing, I believe to the tune of nearly 9 figures – a hefty sum these days for advertising and promotion.  But what’s the alternative? According to their Q3, March 30, 2009 financials, overall revenue was down 6% and online advertising revenues took a double digit drop of 13%. So it makes sense that Microsoft needs to know if they can build a competitive market in search in the near future and the timing is hopefully propitious for them as they enter their new fiscal year.

How will Microsoft know if Bing is successful? That question was posed last week to Scott Howe, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group, during Federated Media’s Conversational Marketing (CM) Summit in NY. His company, aQuantive Inc., was bought in 2007 for something like $6B, so it was no surprise that he had his own Mercedes limo driver parked out in front of the Hudson Theater in NY waiting for him (on 44th Street in the theater district, that is usually reserved for real entertainers).

In any case, he was asked how much he thought it was worth to Microsoft for a percentage point gain in market share (paraphrasing of course). Obviously, and as he replied, Microsoft is not looking for incremental gains, but something that elevates them into the high teens and beyond. Anything else in the big picture is probably a failure (my comment – not his).

So if Bing booms, then Microsoft scores big time. It will likely eat into Yahoo and Google’s market share, causing at least for Yahoo a further decline in value –something that they can ill afford. And what a great way for Microsoft to start the New Year. On the other hand if Bing bombs, then Yahoo’s stock possibly increases making it both more expensive and probably more imperative to get back into negotiations with Yahoo. In either scenario, Microsoft should know by the end of their Q1 which direction the market wind is blowing.

Bing already seems to be picking up some early momentum (several percentage point increase in market share) and the search engine and its interface have some pretty nice features. The question is whether it’s enough to get people to migrate and stay migrated.

In this blog, I’d like to explore a few thoughts on internet search, enterprise search and content management, since last week I attended, for the second time, the Enterprise Search Summit conference in New York City.

Since I also attended the Search Engine Strategies Conference (SES) in March, it’s difficult not comparing the two conferences. The attendance and sheer size of SES is an order of magnitude greater than the Enterprise Search conference (2000 attendees vs. 200) and the mega-companies such as Google and Microsoft have a much larger showing at the SES conference.

It is commonly presumed that enterprise search is meant to manage the search for content inside the business firewall, while internet and web search is geared to find content for the general public. In general that is true, although companies such as Microsoft and their FAST and Sharepoint offerings as well as Google and their business search division have blurred some of these distinctions. Since I don’t want to spend an entire blog on differentiating how enterprise search differs from internet search, a decent summary of some of the distinctions can be found from New Idea Engineering (an enterprise search company).

Since I’ve spent time in all 3 areas, in some of my ensuing blogs I will attempt to look more closely at each area separately. But to begin with, and without trying to sound like a Gartner or Forrester analyst, I’d like to offer my 10 predictions and observations:

·  Google and Microsoft will largely control search both from an internet search, as well as to a large degree enterprise search as well.

·  Google will have to purchase or invest in a larger business-side search organization to further penetrate the enterprise area. Its skills, as evident from the Enterprise Search Conference, are clearly quite thin on the business end.

·  Google and Microsoft will buy, invest in or invest organically in more social networking companies and capabilities (Twitter, Facebook, etc) to broaden their offerings and public reach.

·  Microsoft, to maintain a player status, will buy Yahoo to replace MSN and its Live Search search engine which have too little market share. Google still commands 65% +/- marketshare. Microsoft will then have to determine whether they can embed some of the capabilities of FAST into Yahoo.

·  Enterprise search and content management will be constructed on a Microsoft model including Sharepoint and FAST, further marginalizing companies such as IBM, EMC and Open Text

·  Microsoft, through its Sharepoint offering, may eventually own the entire new content management space. Google Apps potentially have a play in this space, but for the present at least is not ready for enterprise prime time at a major corporate level quite yet. I don’t see anything dramatically new from EMC or IBM and I hope Open Text can keep pace to keep everyone honest so to speak. But today’s software industry is based on revenue and market share, and this industry is moving so quickly, only those with the deepest resolve and pockets can keep with it.

·  Business intelligence and analytical ability will become further embedded in the internet search engines (not just enterprise search). As evidence, FAST, originally a focused internet search engine that morphed into an enterprise search platform, has some significant capabilities in the business analytics area (guided navigation for example).

·  Companies such as SAP and SAS who are attempting to move into the search side with their analytical engine will have to form alliances, build API’s or license their technologies via an OEM agreement, or they will be wasting their time.

·  Other enterprise search vendors such as Autonomy, Endeca, Vivisimo and Exalead may to have to focus on certain vertical industries to be a viable play (eDiscovery is an example), or be bought.

·  Finally, search (internet and enterprise) and content management will further converge technologies and provide capabilities to the end user that can locate content – whether structured or unstructured – either in a dimensional way (folders and files) or in a more search friendly way.

In the blogs coming up, I plan on discussing more on these relevant topics as well as share some related work I’m doing in the healthcare and medical area around search, marketing and social networking.

I attended the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York City and there was usually something interesting to hear or learn about from many of the panelists and presenters.

After so many years in the business and after working with companies like Endeca and Open Text who have search engines, social media and content programs for the enterprise, it was well worth the time to hear so many good presenters on timely and relevant topics of interest.

But enough said. If you have an interest and time, try attending one of these Search Engine Strategies events in one of your local cities. There are a number of them scheduled in the upcoming months.

Just go to http://www.searchenginestrategies.com for further information.

For those more enterprise (business side) focused around search and Web 2.0, there is another conference in NY, also at the Hilton, upcoming in May. This is also reasonably worthwhile to attend, although not nearly as comprehensive as the one put on by Search Engine Strategies.

For more information on this conference, go to
http://www.enterprisesearchsummit.com

Lastly, there is quite a lot going on around social media and the enterprise this week at the AIIM Expo this week (March 31 – April 2) in Philadelphia.

As a marketing and sales person, as well as technologist, it’s a pleasure to see so much effort being put into incorporating new ways of communicating and how to deliver this as a business.

Mind this though…there are a lot of simultaneous moving parts in this field, so keeping on top of everything is no easy task. More to come on this.