“Joaquin, I’m sorry you couldn’t be here tonight”

I was watching tonight’s Letterman interview with Joaquin Phoenix, bizarre at the very least – check it out. Three or four minutes into the interview, we’re trying to work out if this is just weird or if it was W-I-E-R-D. First place we go was Search Twitter, where pretty much up to the minute postings confirmed it…Yep, this is indeed W-I-E-R-D (check out yesterday’s Twitter postings on this subject here). Once we saw all of this, we went of to check out Juaquin’s interview history on IMDB and it seems that he’s done that type of thing before.

A couple of lessons for you SocialMediaMarketerati here, this is how things work today,  consumer wants up to date information, goes to Twitter and gets it on the button, then can run over to YouTube to confirm, because after all, seeing it on YouTube is believing (lonelygirl15 excepted).

When I went off to Advanced Search Twitter, I did notice that there was a Sentiment Check-Box where you could filter all positive or negative messages or those that asked a question. I first checked the positive filter (for Feb 12th) and got one response. Then the negative and got a couple more. I finally checked the question filter and there were the pages. I suspect that Twitter are now using some simple text processing in a further effort to try and add some value to the analysis, afterall they are about to change their business model to try and add value for paying business users. Facebook are also sitting on a goldmine of text that demands some pretty sophisticated text analytics – I wonder how accurate their Engagement Model actually is.

There are also a number of other Text Analytics products on the market, however, I know that Overtone’s OpenMic product has a dashboard that includes a very accurate Feedback Sentiment Index (FSI) that is worth checking out.

Just getting back to Joaquin and Letterman, it didn’t take long for the Gawker’s blog post on the interview make it to #2 position with Google search terms <joaquin>, <phoenix>, <letterman>.

Time for bed (because the interview only finished 30 minutes ago).

Selecting a Community Platform – 10 tips from Jeremiah

Forrester analyst, Jeremiah Owyang’s freshly published report, The Leaders In Community Platforms for Marketers provides valuable insight into 9 vendors. Here is a summary in 10 bullets:

1.       Social network and online community adoption is on the rise and are being seen as cost effective channels for product and brand marketing and a  growing tech segment is for community platforms providing community infrastructure and features, reporting and integration with business applications – these 10 bullets are dedicated to helping evaluate a vendor.

2.       This Forrester Study assessed 9 vendors: Awareness, Jive, KickApps, Leverage, Lithium, LiveWorld, Mzinga, Pluck, and Telligent - selected from a field over over 90, these focused on large organizations, interactive marketers  and have a strong services component.

3.       Applicability and reputation: vendors specialize in markets and vertical and therefore their feature set is tuned to certain segments (e.g. KickApps for media) – make sure your vendor has experience with your market needs.

4.       Speed and ease of deployment: How quickly you can launch a community and then extend and expand will be determined by the amount of configuration and the ease of use of the tools, componentized or widget based platforms make this easy

5.       Features to look for: Basics will include threaded discussions, comment, live chat, document and image upload, blogging forums and more advanced features are Wikis, Multimedia (audio, video) support, polling and surveys, social networking features, premium content support and of course system security to prevent hacking, web analytics to report basic usage .

6.       Advanced features you will need: Widget creation and customization, full service reporting and analytics and performance dashboards, ability to add custom code, the ability to setup automated import of content, analytics to identify influencers and understand community conversations and to make recommendations on action.

7.       Completeness of offering: Full functionality is complemented by the ability to integrate with other applications (e.g. CRM or BI) will be required as will the ability to exchange (I/O) data via APIs, how much control do you need over the layout, navigation and graphics and a strong and easy to use administration layer.

8.       Services to keep you on track: Implementation consulting to ensure that you are trying to achieve the right goals, installation services to ensure correct deployment, essential support and maintenance to make sure data is backed up, recoverable, the service can be restored with minimal downtime and no data loss,

9.       Of the 9 vendors (who all seem to claim market leadership), Jive Software and Telligent came out on top across all categories – of particular mention, Jive’s intuitive UI , Telligent’s strong analytics, Lithium’s forum and blogging solution, Awareness’ quality of site design (pixel perfect graphics),  KickApps widget technology and Pluck’s content management.

10.       The Elephantear’s take on this is that there is a broad enough range of vendors out there to suggest that this is a maturing market, as with any technology vendor selection, viability and reputation are always a concern, but make sure that you rank importance of what you need to achieve with your community and the application features and support you will need to do this – this will help you select a vendor that will provide the right solution for your needs.

top 10 tips for customer listening

1.    Whatever your business, your customers are voicing their opinions, find out where and harvest it from each and every place, use this to augment surveys and focus groups

2.    Make sure it’s obvious and easy for them to leave feedback in their own words, especially in each place that they deal with you (customer touchpoint), encourage them with hard and soft incentives

3.    Social Media is big and growing, get on the bandwagon (not just communities and blogs), participate and actively listen – you will need technology to maintain coverage and to monitor this dynamic environment focusing your attention on where the conversation is most relevant

4.    Capture both structured and unstructured feedback then organize it into categories that are meaningful to your business – how you want customers to perceive and ones that you can take action on

5.    The action starts as soon as you take the feedback – immediate acknowledgement, timely and intelligent responses and then deliver the insights to the right people inside your organization who can act upon them, then ensure those actions are taken

6.    Make sure the cycle time to capture, categorize, analyze and  act matches the purchase cycle for your product -  in many cases this is real time, so accuracy and precision are also key – if your feedback volume is large, then this will have to be automated – text analytics is the obvious technology

7.    The departments who take their cues from the feedback need to have a quantifiable structure to evaluate the feedback and give them the mandate to act – use BI tools to deliver those insights

8.    There are strategic actions, tactical actions and just plain listening that will improve your customer perceptions and experiences – some of these actions can be automated with the right technology in place

9.    If you are participating in Social Media, then do so genuinely and add tangible value, anything else will be noticed and punished – identify, listen to and use the influencers to carry your messages

10.    Your customer listening program can be a useful barometer as to the performance of your organization, it will allow you to quickly spot underperforming business processes and areas of market opportunity – investment in the program, the technology and your organization’s commitment can yield a positive ROI.