I was recently asked to present on the topic of ‘Monetising Social Media’ at Magazine Week in Sydney.  The audience were experienced publishers who had moved into the digital world and looking to continue to evolve with the changing landscape.  I personally think the presentation title is a little misleading.  You cannot really monetise social media – but you can use it as a vehicle to drive traffic to your website to generate revenue.  This does work if done right as the Old Spice case study shows. In this case Old Spice was a dying brand but used new inbound marketing techniques (the audience opts into your network are via facebook, twitter blog subscriptions etc) with traditional outbound marketing (pushing a message out hoping the right audience finds it (print and TV advertising, radio, trade shows etc) to great success.

One of the biggest thing that impressed me was that the publishing companies in the audience had moved on a great deal in the last 18 months.  iPad apps, digitization were the norm and Michael Nielsen’s prediction in 2009 was being borne out:

Today, scientific publishers are production companies, specializing in services like editorial, copyediting, and, in some cases, sales and marketing. My claim is that in ten to twenty years, scientific publishers will be technology companies. By this, I don’t just mean that they’ll be heavy users of technology, or employ a large IT staff. I mean they’ll be technology-driven companies in a similar way to, say, Google or Apple. That is, their foundation will be technological innovation, and most key decision-makers will be people with deep technological expertise. Those publishers that don’t become technology driven will die off.

Michael Nielsen, Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted

Here is some of the presentation with evidence to show outbound marketing is becoming less effective whereas inbound marketing is cheaper and and has more impact (for traditional powerpoint format go to slideshare here

Thanks to @sandnsurf for the Peter Shankman quote and @iggypintado for the Old Spice case study

Daniel Kraft is a Stanford- and Harvard-trained physician-scientist, inventor and innovator. He chairs the FutureMed program at Singularity University, exploring the impact and potential of rapidly developing technologies as applied to health and medicine.

People I have shown Research.ly to are often shocked.  “What?! It has the data on every tweet?” Yes. Everything you have put out there. Over three years worth. And it can take that and slice and dice it anyway you want:  positive or negative sentiment, gender, location, top retweeters, who made the first tweet on a trending topic. It is one of the new platforms developed by the team at PeopleBrowsr.

When I showed it to one clinical researcher in the office the response was ‘I am never going on twitter, ever.’  ‘People presume they are having a private conversation, albeit in a social space – they don’t expect to be tracked, comments analyzed and remembered’.  Well, what goes online stays online and these are powerful platforms.

Research.ly

What does Research.ly do? It is a search engine and analytic tool for social media and it’s very good for those topics that get a lot of conversations happening. For example a new clothing store – Zara, has just opened in Sydney – and instantly you can find out who is talking about it, where, and top proponents of the store.

Viral Analytics Platform

Let’s take that a step further.  Research.ly translates that data as a Viral Analytics Platform. You can just as easily search for a peak in conversation over the last three years and find out what was being said using the datamine.  Take for example the case of the dating site eharmony.  They had a spike of online conversation over a year ago in January 2010.

Click on the spike and it takes Research.ly seconds to find the conversations about a discrimination lawsuit against eharmony (for excluding gays and lesbians).  Using the datamine, eharmony can see exactly what was said, who said it and the sentiment. Top right of the screen you can search other topics like this years South by South West.

The platform also slices and dices the conversations by community and builds a score card – so that you can see who the top 15 communities are that are positively mentioning a brand.  The communities are defined by looking at people’s twitter bios – in other words how people define themselves.

And then it takes the top three communities and finds those people within them who are the very top positive influencers for the brand.  What does that mean? That a company can find it’s top advocates – champions.  These people will create a good online conversation for them – and that worth a lot of bucks to some companies.

Customise Viral Analytics

Let’s take that a step further. The Viral Analytics platform can be customised – in this case CocaCola get realtime data of the conversations across twitter, facebook (pages), blogs… for any number of accounts and keywords and they can also export the data. They can do the same for the competition, in this case Pepsi, RedBull,  Dr Pepper. The team have also just added (this is very new) – a workspace tab -  you can look at who is tweeting within your company.  This is a very powerful tool indeed.

So, PeopleBrowsr platforms – real-time data, a social search engine.  That remembers, tracks and analyses.

An outstanding undertaking, beautifully captured on video MIT cognitive scientist Deb Roy shared a remarkable experiment, from the day his son was brought home from the hospital the family’s every movement and word was captured and tracked with a series of fisheye lenses in every room in their house. For Five Years!

The purpose was to understand how we learn language, in context, through the words we hear. For example, Roy was able to track the length of every sentence spoken to the child in which a particular word–like “water”–was included. Right around the time the child started to say the word, what Roy calls the “word birth,” something remarkable happened.

“Caregiver speech dipped to a minimum and slowly ascended back out in complexity.” In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences. Then as he gets the word, the sentences lengthen again. The infant shapes the caregivers’ behavior, the better to learn.

The clip below shows the evolution of the word ‘ball’.

Via Slashdot – worth reading the full article on Fast Company.  The images themselves are compelling, and from what this article says this will soon be seen on TED.com.

Google are on a roll and introducing the Priority Inbox (in beta) – an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail, identifying important email and separating it out from everything else:

“Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we’ve evolved Gmail’s filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this “bologna” from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.”

Here it is in action

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nt3gE9dGHQ&feature=player_embedded#!

According to their blog The Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread”, “Starred”, and “Everything else”. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you.

Simon Capel is Google’s Enterprise Sales Manager for Australia and New Zealand and is a man with a vision – for people to work in the cloud. What does that mean? Work anywhere, using any computer, securely access what you need and collaborate in real time. Why is this important? It changes the way we do business and, importantly, changes our expectations.

Simon Capel Presentation on Leveraging the Google Cloud

Working in the cloud for business uses Google Aps which delivers tools (like word processing, spreadsheets) through a web browser (think Internet Explorer, Firefox, and the new player, Google Chrome), tailored specifically to the user, and Google want companies to ‘get it’.  The business version is backed up with a service level agreement and support – Google are doing business.

Why is this different from what we have already?  It allows secure, easy collaboration and information sharing.  It’s not tied to fiddly accessing data through an intranet.  Data is stored on their servers – pointing to lower IT costs and lots of space (no more having to empty your inbox before another message can come in). Large government organisations (think city of Los Angeles), companies, as well as Universities have started using the cloud – my guess is they chose to do so because of ease of use, the collaborative tools offered and that it has the potential to save money.

Simon’s presentation is Google’s vision of the cloud changing the way we do business, and play.