I’ve seen several linkedIn discussions and more than a few blog posts about using Google as a free reputation management system. Doing so could cost your business in a big way and result in failed engagement in social media engagement – the same goes for Yahoo! or Bing. Why?
1.) It’s A Search Engine: Google et al, are consumer search engines. They are NOT designed to search Social Networks, .alt networks, forums and 99% of newsgroups. That’s not what they do. Most issues regarding reputation and brand are in those semi-closed networks. Sadly 97% of the “online reputation management” services also only search Google and miss everything else.
2.) The Deep Web: Yes, it goes deeper than what Google, Yahoo! or Bing delivers. There are crackers and hackers and more in the subterranean depths of the Web. What they’re doing there can be critical to financial management firms, multi-nationals and more.
3.) Ecosystem Bias: Google owns “Blogger” the blogging platform, Microsoft owns “Live Spaces” their “blogging” platform. That means those platforms may be carrying their advertising – they inherently have a bias towards their own network of online properties. Therefore you may miss what’s critical.
4.) News Is Not All The News: Google News Alerts is very good. But. They only deliver news alerts for those news agencies with whom they have news distribution agreements. That means you again may miss what’s critical.
Only MediaBadger and 2 other companies go beyond Google, Yahoo! or Bing to explore the deep web and source the information that matters, one is in the U.S. and the other in France. If you’re truly concerned about online reputation management and seeing what’s happening online, relying on Google, Yahoo! or Bing may be the most costly mistake you make.
The biggest challenge on implementing Social Networking technologies in larger organizations is not the technology; it’s the people and the communications processes they use. We’ve found this in several instances now on consulting projects. Social Technologies are disruptive to current organizational communications. I’ve already posited about the potential decrease in the need for middle management earlier this year. read more
Thunking, Uncategorized•
on October 26th, 2009•
From the 80’s through to the 90’s, business found competitive advantages in deploying technology to either cut costs or speed up transactions. In the mid-90’s came the move to networking technologies exploded as the Web began to go mainstream. Business slowly embraced the Web by building websites that offered little interaction, were mostly one-way communications and offered purchasing ability.
But as human beings one of our fundamental drives is to connect and communicate. We always form groups; to either share ideas or to complete a task, big or small, short term or long term. The point is, humans always communicate and always form into groups. Always. The more effective a business is at communicating internally, the better it performs.
The newest technologies to improve internal and external communications is social technologies. Tools such as blogs, social networks, microblogging, video and photo sharing. Businesses that recognize these tools go beyond one-way broadcast messaging and can be used to gain competitive edges are ones who will succeed in the future.
More compelling is that spread of the Web. It doesn’t mean being wired into a desktop computer anymore. The Web today is so pervasive and ties into mobile devices.
The first adoption wave of IT in an organization was essentially to build databases with an illogical communication tool thrown over top – email. Companies who figure out how to use social technologies to communicate better, not just internally, but externally with all stakeholders (suppliers, government, customers, partners) are the ones who will gain the next competitive edge.
Some Social Media consultants will tell you “hey, just set up Google Alerts and do some occasional checking across search engines, it’s all you need!”. There’s two major flaws to this approach.
1. Regional Result Changes: Google, like other search engines, collects massive amounts of data constantly. To help manage this load, Google, among others, have data centres scattered around the world. If you try a search string in Atlantic Canada you will get different results from New England etc. This effect can be seen with Google Alerts for news and other data as well. The same impact is seen with Bing and Yahoo! While you may get some data, you’ll miss a lot more. Perhaps what is critical.
2. They Don’t Dig Deep: Yes, the search engines dig into a lot of content, but they miss a lot of newsgroups, Bulletin Boards, Usenet, .alt discussions and all of the Social Networks, such as Facebook Groups and Fan Pages. It’s these places where the deeper discussions about your brand, service or organization are often taking place. In fact 95% of the monitoring or “reputation management” solutions out there also miss this critical data.
3.The Context and Sentiment is Missed: Search engines just deliver results, they don’t care if it’s good or bad. That means a human resource needs to read, analyse and place into context all that information. Is that an effective use of time?
4. The Flow of the Conversation: It’s often to also understand the “flow”, “spread” and valleys of a conversation to gain perspective. Search engines don’t provide this. Neither do most reputation management solutions.
5. It’s Getting Too Local for Search Engines: With smart phone usage growing and increased free public Web access, the Web is becoming very local. As this trend continues, consumer search engines will face a challenge in keeping up. Alternative local search engines may help. But reputation management and online brand monitoring solutions have yet to catch up to small and local as well.
6. The Commercial Ecosystem Bias: That’s a fancy way of saying “search engines are more likely to deliver results in Social Media services from applications that they own.” For example, Microsoft owns Bing, and LiveJournal; if the content is “relevant enough” Bing will be biased towards LiveJournal to increase the chances of advertising click through on their ad network. In our analysis of Google, Bing and Yahoo! we found a 46% bias on the same search strings to deliver search providers ecosystem relevant content. We’re just sayin’.
In the end, we’re saying that doing the odd Google or Yahoo! search and not finding anything about yourself or your business is a dangerous way to approach understanding your reputation or leveraging a reputation management service. Food for thought. What do you think?
(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Director)
Thunking•
on August 14th, 2009•
Seriously. Present day management structure is heirarchical, borrowing this process from military organization. All an employee needs to get their job done is connection to a boss. Senior management (CEO, COO etc.) direct corporate strategy. Executive management, VP’s then take the strategy and begin to break it down…it moves down the chain to middle management (directors, managers) and line managers (supervisors, branch managers etc.) to the line employees who do the tasks or tactical work.
Running a business takes resources. Management responsibilities are essentially to maintain structure so that decisions get made and tasks completed. The more people you add, the greater the complexity of coordination – and primary to coordination is communication. When a business gets to a certain size it’s primary role becomes self-preservation to keep the machine going – hence middle management and HR, PR and like departments. Middle management has often (and is today) a gatekeeper, a communications hub. I refer here to Ronald Coase and his paper “The Nature of the Firm.” in which he describes the challenges of organizational communication via transaction costs.
A firm is successful when the costs of managing its employees are lower than the potential gain from managing – profitability. When management costs are too high, the market will outperform the company. Part of the reason in a recession that we see middle management go so fast in cuts.
Social Media tools (i.e. Social Networking) enable groups and teams to quickly organize and can eliminate the need for middle managers who previously did that organizing. A well developed Social Network designed for a business can, through the use of roles definitions, personal resumes in a profile, tagging and such, enable faster, more cost efficient project and team organizing.
Collaboration tools such as “Wiki’s” and other knowledge and information management services reduce the cost of productivity for these groups.No longer do middle managers need to do the coordinating and assignment of tasks. A primary example of a tool that will change this is Google Wave. Microsoft’s answer is SharePoint and IBM is re-inventing Lotus Notes.
My bold prediction is that we’ll see less “middle management” over the next 10-15 years as these tools become common place. Skills will become ever more valuable and the ability to collaborate with fellow workers vital.
Failures in a new product launch, new process or software implementation can cost both small and large businesses a fortune. Hence there is a lot of analysis before heading into such initiatives. It’s called risk mitigation and that’s sensible. Today, Social Media can have a measurable impact on reducing those costs of failure and provide more opportunity. Such approaches could be very useful in a down economy.
So how then? Social Media can reduce the cost of failure in the areas of marketing, sales, software implementations and product development best. By employing the right tools, a company can “float” ideas for a marketing campaign internally (i.e. via a Wiki) or externally via Twitter or a blog or newsgroup discussion. It’s key to remember that in these cases it’s not about a large volume of participants; it’s about the right size group that makes it viable to gather feedback.
If a company is looking to launch a new product feature and has cultivated a core group of loyal customers through a blog, Wiki, Twitter or newsgroup, then it has a ready source of fast feedback participants. A few questions can be floated and feedback monitored. The result may be realizing the new feature is not necessary or recommendations may result in reducing manufacturing or development costs. This is a measurable and impactful way to using Social Media tools and groups to reduce the costs of failure.
Internally, a company might use similar tools to float general questions and queries. Responses can be gauged. In terms of a sales initiative, production can have input to an upcoming planned sales initiative. This way, the production team is aware that a ramp-up might be necessary, or they can suggest additional features that may make a product sell better. Either way, the cost of failure is reduced, and there is greater cross-team functionality put in place.
In this current economic climate, the costs of failure will be weighed even more before decisions are made on expenditures. Social Media tools and practices can help avert those failures much earlier, likely leading to improved products and productivity and best of all, better bottom-line impact.