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Negative comments. They cause legal departments fits and are often one of the biggest reason why companies don’t want blogs, forums or social networks.

As a communications professional, I’m not wild about negative comments either, but I am willing to accept them given the advantages that social media offers. Deploying social networks:

• help you track and manage what the public is currently saying online
• let you better address these comments
• can actually help you score points with customers

There are plenty of examples of users rallying behind companies that acknowledge mistakes and make good faith efforts to correct them.

To convince reluctant executives, there is a business case to be made that doesn’t involve value intangibles like engagement and authenticity. It’s about data mining. Social media can generate data – tons of it. The key is to tap its power to deliver customer insights.

But before anyone raises privacy concerns, let me say that I am not encouraging companies to monitor private conversations or sell personal data to third parties without a customer’s permission. I am also not talking about ways to serve up ads to customers. Analyzing social network dynamics yields insights that can improve products and processes, reduce costs and allocate resources based on customer behavior. In short, it helps us better understand our customers.

What form does this data take?

Social network analysis or social data mining focuses on the relationships and interactions of people, groups, or organizations and not individual users. It views user actions interdependently rather than independently. It follows the linkages between users and how they share information. It tries to identify patterns and understand their significance.

Joe Cothrel understands data. He works at Lithium Technologies. I have mentioned him before. His company builds forums for other companies.

From his perspective, not having a forum is far worse than negative comments. Forums can help clients hear about problems weeks before they begin hitting customer support centers and become expensive crises.

Harvesting insights goes beyond content (what is being said) and sentiment (how it is expressed). It’s about the patterns and connections - who is saying and how often. When do supporters engage, when do detractors chime in and why?

And it’s not just the social networks or forums themselves. It’s the space around them. What blogs and networks are connecting to yours? What are the key nodes, and is your social network one of them? Where are users coming from, where do they go when they are there and where do they go when they leave? If your social network is an ecosystem, how does it work and how does it work in relationship to the wider ecosystem outside of yours?

And for managers of social forums, when do you listen, when do you speak and what voice do you use? What does it mean to manage beyond the community?

Helping to answer these questions are tools like Google Analytics and customer relationship management (CRM).

Google Analytics is a free service that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and even digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.

CRM helps an enterprise manage customer relationships. CRM is a combination of policies, processes, and strategies implemented by a company that unify its customer interaction and provides a mechanism for tracking customer information.

Together they are powerful tools in distilling and making sense of valuable data about your customers from social networks. You can track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, generate sales leads and identify new product ideas. In turn, social networks can help with a company’s CRM efforts. As Denis Pombriant wrote,

We have all kinds of CRM systems today that systematize and organize our customer facing processes, but what we lack right now are effective ways of capturing customer feedback….Social networking is an important new contributor to front office business processes. It gives us a way to look at the world through the eyes of the customer, and makes good on some of the promises of CRM.

For example, a company can link a customer record to a social network or forum login and track activity and comments back to its CRM system. This enables a company have a more complete picture of the customer’s interaction with the company.

I realize that CRM and web analytics generally fall outside the purview of traditional media relations. Our role rests in the realm of what is being said, not shaping business processes. But in championing social networks to reluctant executives we need to think more creatively and expansively.

It is time to stop focusing on negative comments and stress social media’s strategic value. Understanding social data mining not only helps with our advocacy; it helps give us a seat at the table. It moves PR away from simply shaping perception to helping the enterprise better understand and serve customers.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Data Mining; CRM; Web Analytics; Social Networks; Lithium; Joe Cothrel; PR;

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Atlanta high tech industry pioneer Sig Mosley

His offices speak to his position as one of the deans of Atlanta’s high-tech community. The wood paneling in his lobby is a big contrast to the concrete digs of a typical start-up investment opportunity. And in the search for Atlanta’s most influential figures in technology, Sig Mosley of Imlay Investments would be on most everyone’s list.

Over that time, he has watched the emergence of an angel investment community. He has seen the glory days of the dot com bubble in 1998 and 1999 where he would see 40 business plans a week to its subsequent bust which sucked the air out Atlanta’s high tech industry.

As Sig told me, “No one anticipated how quickly and how hard the dot com collapse would affect the local angel community.”

For all its success, Atlanta is not without its challenges. He believes that Google might not have been funded if it had started here. Web 2.0 holds promise for Sig, but he doesn’t see as many opportunities for social media.

Sig Mosley has remained in Atlanta. But as a community, we continue to see departures — most recently Jeff Haynie’s — of our most talented, even for the best reasons.

Becoming a Top 5 Five Technology Community

His vision is for Atlanta to become one of the top 5 high tech communities in the country. To do this, he believes Atlanta needs to see more venture money and more angels investing in technology. And successful entrepreneurs need to get back into the fray after they achieve success. He supports the passage of proposed legislation that would allow the state of Georgia to allocate a portion of the State’s pension fund dollars for alternative investments. This legislation would go a long way to helping spawn high tech investment and demonstrate the state’s commitment to technology.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: John Imlay; Sig Mosley; Atlanta; Imlay Investments; Atlanta Technology; New South Media Buzz; Bernaise Source Buzz;

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This month marks the second anniversary of CNN iReport. This initiative reflects the Cable News Network’s commitment to crowdsourcing and citizen journalism.

After the initial success of iReports, CNN launched an iReport.com beta version in February of this year. (And just last week, iReports announced it was no longer in beta.) The site allows users to submit photos, videos and comments and have them appear on the site. The submissions are sometimes very serious and sometimes just entertaining or novel. CNN producers review these submissions and select reports for possible airing on the CNN television networks, CNN.com and other CNN platforms. The site also allows iReporters to contact each other.

• At launch they had 13 iReports; right before they launched iReport.com, they were receiving around 10,000 a month.

The Atlanta Connection

For those who regularly follow my blog, I have a strong interest in social media as well as Atlanta based companies that are showcasing social media. CNN iReport meets both criteria. In fact, Lila King, senior producer for user participation at CNN.com strongly believes that iReport has become so successful because its CNN headquarters are in Atlanta. The proximity adds credibility and allows for more collaboration.

Viewers have posted about their own experiences, while some commented specifically on CNN’s coverage. CNN doesn’t censor contributions and believes the advantages of an open discussion outweigh any negative comments. There are however community guidelines that address inappropriate (hateful and obscene) material.

For CNN, iReport is clearly a business strategy to create and extend content and engage viewers. But to King it is much more. She points to citizen journalists who literally risked their lives posting videos about protests in Myanmar. “I believe tools like iReport helps the grassroots spirit of the Internet.”

The success of iReport has not gone unnoticed. Writing about alternative forms of journalism, Project for Excellence in Journalism reported that “CNN’s iReport is the most conspicuous example of this trend.” Other networks have similar initiaitves, including ABC’s i-Caught, Fox’s uReport, and MSNBC’s FirstPerson.

While iRerport’s criteria is pretty broad, it is still much harder to make the leap to other CNN properties. On average, 10 percent of 800 – 1200 iReports are vetted each day and make it to another CNN platform. In addition to the community guidelines, here are some other things to consider:

• Making the cut to another CNN platform requires a full vetting of its authencity.
  

• Submissions need to be in context of stories that CNN is running at the time.

• The most successful submissions contain a compelling human interest angle.

• The most recent submissions often have a better chance of getting aired.
  

With more citizen journalist-produced content making its way to news websites, it makes me wonder how crowdsourcing will impact the PR profession. Will it give us more opportunities to gain exposure or make it harder to stand out in the crowd? Will we have to rethink how we “pitch” a story? Will our expertise be as valued when user generated content is gaining more currency? Can or should PR “orchestrate” the contributions of citizen journalists?

Crowdsourcing and citizen journalism are still in their early stages of adoption. It is still unclear if ithey will increase interest in broadcast and print journalism. What is clear to me, however, they are not only changing the face of journalism; they are also impacting the way PR professionals do their job.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: iReport; CNN; Atlanta; Crowdsourcing; Citizen Journalism; New South Media Buzz; Bernaise Source Buzz;

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As reported by The Atlanta Business Chronicle, (subscription required) Atlanta based Appcelerator and its CEO Jeff Haynie (blog) are heading to Silicon Valley as part of a $4 million deal led by Storm Ventures. Rumors had been swirling for a few weeks and shame on me for not chiming in earlier.

I have been following companies like Appcelerator in my quest to promote social media awareness and adoption. Appcelerator allows developers to incorporate interactive features into their web sites without the need for JavaScript or plug-ins.

Haynie himself has been a leader in Atlanta’s tech community. Previously, he was co-founder and CTO of Vocalocity and has been regularly involved in such technology events as SoCon08, Barcamp, and Atlanta Startup Weekend.

Entrepreneur Scott Burkett says we are at a crossroads;

The Atlanta community has a choice to make. We can continue to play second fiddle to communities with half of the innovation present here. Or we can treat Atlanta as a greenfield opportunity and evolve. There are plenty of problems to tackle, and lots of work to be done - but it can, and will happen. But certain views, approaches, cultural hangups, and models will either need to evolve, or be pushed out of the way (this is already beginning to happen).

Now I know he wasn’t referring to me when he said “a greenfield opportunity.”

The online discussions may be messy. We may later regret the emotions that pour out, but we have at our disposal a forum to address real needs and present solutions. Through the collective wisdom of the community we can offer advice and help enterpreneurs create more fundable business models. Through social media, we can foster a creative environment where ideas matter. Yes we may vent, yes we may rant, but along the way we are taking advantage of these new channels that will hopefully spur investment in Atlanta.

Finally, I can take heart in knowing we can create successful high-tech companies. The challenge is keeping the homegrown talent here.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Jeff Haynie; Scott Burkett; Atlanta; Appcelerator; Sig Mosley; John Yates; Social Media; New South Media Buzz; Bernaise Source Buzz;

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Reading Chris Anderson’s recent Wired Magazine cover story about the End of Theory prompted me to do something I had been meaning to do for sometime: buy Michael Lewis’s Moneyball.

Chris’s piece examines how computers, the Internet and the era of massive data are changing our assumptions about science and scientific method. Moneyball looks at how the use of data enabled the Oakland Athletics to amass one of the best overall records in baseball with one of the lowest team payrolls.

And it is the power of data that is transforming the way we in marketing and PR do business. Through data, we can identify trends that we never knew existed, find previously ignored market segments and gain an advantage in a very competitive marketplace.

So beginning at the All Star break, I started reading and finished the book at 2:30 one recent morning. Now I am no baseball expert and can’t prove or disprove Lewis’s theory, but I was struck by one thing in particular: The story of how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane used Ivy League number crunchers parallels the work we are doing with social media.

It is a story about questioning assumptions, challenging orthodoxy, tapping new ways to engage fans and measuring performance. It’s about a new kind of expertise that is creating a whole new approach to doing business.

For the longest time, stats like batting averages, stolen bases, and RBIs have governed baseball. Leading the majors in any one of these categories is worth millions of dollars. What Beane did was unconventional. He looked at the statistics that others overlooked, ignored, or rejected to sign ballplayers that other scouts had overlooked, ignored, or rejected.

His conclusion: on base percentages and slugging percentages are a far more accurate way to assess talent and predict success. They were the best indicators of which players would produce the most runs for the team as a whole. More runs, more wins. And today, while these stats are more widely used, that has not always been the case.

The story really begins in the late 1970s with an eccentric visionary, Bill James. Back then, there was no such thing as a blog, so he self-published a book that challenged the orthodoxy governing the measure of baseball success. Without search engines, he placed a single ad in the Sporting News. He grew a small but loyal following and responded individually to reader mail.

At the time, management and traditional sports journalists were very skeptical. In much the same way bloggers were initially dismissed, sportswriter Thomas Boswell wrote, “What we really need is for the amateurs to clear the floor.”

There was also no place for companies to share information with their customers. Data was not transparent; stats were held by major league teams and only one company – the Elias Sports Bureau – was authorized to sell that data. Major League Baseball wasn’t interested in new metrics and wasn’t interested in giving fans the data they asked for.

Quoting James, Michael Lewis writes: “The entire basis of professional sports is the public’s interest in what is going on. To deny the public access to information that it cares about is the logical equivalent of locking the stadiums and playing the games in private so that no one will find out what is happening.”

James advocated that the accumulation of baseball statistics should be taken out of the hands of baseball insiders and put instead in the hands of volunteer scorekeepers. The huge success of Rotisserie Baseball in the mid 1980s demonstrated that fans were hungry to engage with each other.

These developments along with the growing power of computers and the drive for new kinds of expertise (like the use of derivatives in financial markets) all contributed to a new way to think about stats, baseball and managing teams.

Does the story of self-publishers, companies unwilling to engage their customers, skeptical journalists, empowered fans and the lack of transparency sound familiar? These are the elements that social media advocates experienced in the beginning and, to a lesser extent, experience today.

While most of us are not involved in managing sports teams and picking players, the lessons learned from Moneyball are transferable. Most importantly, data is king.

Moneyball Marketing

In making their selections, the A’s crunched millions of bits of data, analyzing the outcomes of thousands of plays in a given game and in a given season. It’s the same approach we should be taking: looking at the connections among and interactions between individuals to understand innovation, collective decision making, and problem solving, and how the structure of organizations and social networks impacts these processes.

Blogger Steve Rubel refers to it as Moneyball marketing.

We need ask ourselves: Are we looking at the data that social networks yield? How and where does data factor into PR decisions? Can we use data to target the right audience - especially in the age of the long tail where we can go after niche markets?

Identify the right data and you can help improve products, increase sales, engage customers and build brand.

Once more, as the Oakland A’s demonstrated, data collection can save dollars. The challenge of course is to identify the right data. And that data must directly relate to your company’s business objectives. In the case of the A’s, the goal was to maximize limited dollars.

Number crunching and computers may seem incongruous with the traditions that govern our nation’s past time. And after all baseball is just a game. But Moneyball demonstrates once again that how you play the game often dictates whether you win or lose.

Let me get back to you.

Technorati Tags: Moneyball; Michael Lewis; Oakland As; Baseball; Billy Beane; Social Media;

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