Premier Business Leadership Series in Las Vegas Video Review

This semester I am working on a research project that looks at corporate sector use of social media and attempts to find best practices that can be implemented by government. I stumbled across this video tonight from the Business Leadership Series discussing many elements of social media in the corporate sector. The video gave me some great insights in the corporate sector and some new concepts that I will have take a look at to develop the potential use in government.

One of the panelist was David Brogan and he identified how important sentiment analysis and listening tools are. “If you don’t have the best tools available for listening then your still relying on survey data; survey data is one way to get information and analytics is another way – listening tools are the bedrock of all of this with analytics used to back it up.” (23:16) I think this is one area I will absolutely explore more, are sentiment analysis tools used by government agencies? If you have any insights, please share!

Around the 38 minute mark the question was posed what kind of metrics companies should be using. A lot of this was similar to government and I think throughout the semester this list will grow. I will be spending significant time linking corporate sector metrics back to government and being sure to identify the challenges. Here is the list, which is short, but a nice starting point for my research:

• Not number of followers
• Not number of fans
• Not number of views
• Looking for revenue increase
• Lead acquisition
• Subscribers to e-newsletters
• Improved open rates to existing content
• Sentiment analysis
• Percentage of conversation (What’s the percentage of conversations that form about my products to compared to my competitors)
• KPI’s (Key Performance Indictor) depends on goals
• Search engines and where your company appears in search results
• Time of sale cycle close
• Number of touches to customer
• Give back to an existing metric, tie the bridge between social media and organization goal is the key.

I really liked this quote from David Meerman, he was touching on the idea of identifying ROI for social media. I had a similiar discussion with my Dad about the value of social media, and this quote certaintly helped reinforce my beliefs of ROI and social media.

“So many things we do in business we do because its the right thing, its the right thing to have a beautiful corporate campus, its a nice thing to have painted walls, its a nice thing to give the sales people a blackberry that the company pays for so they can conviently return phone calls and emails when they are on the road, but I do not know anyone who calculates the ROI of the blackberry, or the corporate campus, the pretty trees that are there or the paint on the walls, so yeah- I know CEOs have to obsess about the ROI and the numbers to see whether this stuff is working working, but I do not see that it is always put X number of dollars in and always get X number of dollars out, clearly we have to measure things, but lets divorce your fear and ignorance away from truly wanting to measure something.”

I was also happy to see that social media use by government also got mentioned. No real surprises about the tools/case studies they selected. Here is the list:

• Whitehouse.gov
• Campaigns
• 311 Use by Twitter
• Manor, Texas
• UK Government Legislation

The panel ended by a quick A-Z review and key words from the discussion- it was a quick summation of the panel discussion. It was also nice for me, this quickly gave me some key points I can look to expanded upon for my research.

• A = Analytics
• B= Brogan
• C= Control, have to give it up
• D= Disaster recovery
• E = Earn it, got to earn credibility on the web
• F = Facebook and Future
• G = Grab Attention, have to think of ways to grab attention quickly
• H = Human, about being genuine, don’t be afraid!
• I = Innovate, identify influences, intelligent innovative ways to reach them
• J = Journalism
• K = KPI, how to track and how best to do that
• L = Listening to your audience and how social media can do that
• M = Measurements, how best measure impact we are having
• N = Need to respond in real-time
• 0 = Open leadership, ownership and who owns your social media program
• P = People and Paris Hilton
• Q = Questions, put out good questions to constituency and seek feedback
• R = ROI
• S = Sharing, all about sharing, be willing to share
• T = Twitter and trusted advisor, understand customer insights
• V = Viral
• W = Word of Mouth, want potential customers to be talking to one another
• X = X-Marks the Spot
• Y = You must be wondering when I will shut up!
• Z = Zero time left!