Recently I attended a roundtable event lead by Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester where 28 industry leading companies discussed our predictions on the future of social media. It was an incredible day where leaders from companies like Wells Fargo, Cisco, IBM, Google, Nokia, SAP, Oracle, Intel, and others all shared our best ideas about how social media will change our personal and professional future. We came up with several insightful predictions that will be published in an upcoming Forrester Report.

 The event spurred my thinking around a couple of ideas how social media can help companies facing shrinking budgets during this tough economic climate.  

 1)       Eliminate Guesswork –

a.       Then…..It used to be that one of the best ways to find out what consumers thought was to pay small groups of random citizens to sit down in a non-descript room with 1 way mirror windows to answer prescribed questions about their shopping habits (or whatever issue we wanted to probe them about). We would conduct hundreds of these focus groups in small and large cities across the country trying to be sure our methodology was defensible – since we were expecting that these few hundred specimens would absolutely represent the sentiment of the 300 million people in our country. We would supplement this with random calling households by telephone precisely at dinner time to ask them a series of questions with very specific words designed to predict what the person would do in the real world.

b.      Now….On the internet today there are tens of millions of active communities talking about every topic you can possibly imagine. People are telling you what they think without the interpretation bias of a survey question. Technological advances in text mining and Natural Language Processing allow us to understand what millions of consumers think about virtually any topic you can imagine. The most innovative companies have already figured out ways to bring social communities into their board rooms to help make critical business decisions. More and more companies see social media as a way to mitigate the budget cuts that are forcing them to cut spending on traditional market research studies. You no longer need to guess what people think about a specific topic – millions are already talking about it every day in online discussions.  Reduce your traditional market research budgets and supplement those projects with technology based social media research.

2)       Don’t be afraid to jump in –

a.       Then…there were so many miss-steps early in social media that most companies were happy to stay on the side lines to avoid making a mistake that could impact the brand and get someone fired. We can all think of our favorite social media gaff whether it was a PR agency pretending to be enthusiastic employees of a major retailer or images of laptop batteries catching on fire spreading across the global web, or even the Turner Network devices that were scattered around several cities to hopefully generate online discussion of a new TV show that instead lead to a bomb squad scare.

b.      Now… the most innovative companies have found ways to join the discussion in a transparent way and that doing so can be really good for business by changing the dynamics of the discussion, solving problems faster than traditional means and generating scores of great ideas. Rather than making customers go through the incredibly annoying voice activated telephone directories trying to find any live person in customer service, the best companies are deploying customer service reps directly into online community discussions to see if they can help resolve common problems. These companies are finding that you can answer common problems that hundreds or thousands of customers might be having with their products by simply joining the conversation. The result is a lower cost of service as well as an increase in client retention. These companies are also benefitting from an increase in advocacy as most social media citizens applaud the more open and honest discussion with companies that was all but eliminated with the advent of scripted call centers or automated telephone systems. You can do this a number of ways but the most common include creating an area on your corporate web site where customers can chat with your customer service reps (swimming in the shallow water) or you can empower your best customer advocates to engage discussions in the online communities that are having the biggest impact on your brand or your products (diving in the deep end). We always recommend full disclosure of who they are and what they are looking to do – solve customers’ problems.

 There are many ways you can use social media as marketing and operations budgets are being scrutinized.  These are a sample of some of the ways our clients are using social media to swim upstream during this challenging economy.

You may have read recently that media analysis firm Cymfony was acquired by TNS Media Intelligence. On the heels of Nielsen’s acquisition of BuzzMetrics/Intelliseek last year and Forrester analyst Peter Kim’s recent report on the brand monitoring space, I believe this is further validation of our business and the growing need of companies to understand what their customers are saying about them, their competitors, their products and key trends driving the market. This event underscores the value that technology can bring to the rapidly changing environment of media analysis.

I agree with Peter Kim that the brand monitoring space is just starting to heat up. We are continuing to see the integration of traditional & social media analysis services with core marketing activities. Our partners, like LexisNexis, are also seeing an increase in the rate of adoption.

Biz360 will continue developing powerful metrics that help our clients accurately measure both traditional and social media as well as the relative weights of the various influencers. Our recently announced MediaSignal for blogs extends our weighted-reach metric for traditional media to a collection to over 32 million blogs. Combined with our tone analysis offering, Point-of-View Sentiment, which combines the best of human intelligence and automated technology, we’re able to provide clients with positive, neutral and negative impressions of their brands, spokespeople, messages, market issues, trends, etc. across print, online and broadcast news and social media.

As more companies adopt these services, I believe it is essential to be able to provide them with standardized metrics that can be applied across a variety of media types. Accurate and broad measurement of media coverage and tone analysis across traditional and social media formats is essential to the rapid adoption of brand analysis and monitoring services. It is also important that the metrics be easily comparable to other marketing metrics.

Recently, we brought on a new CMO, Tony Priore, to pave the way for more exciting product announcements this year. What kind of announcements? You’ll have to wait and see, but you can be sure we’ll make good use of our existing assets and continue to stay focused on increasing the efficiency of market intelligence.

Our experience shows that the line between what is traditional and what is social media will only become more confusing in the future. We are here to assist our clients in decoding this ever changing world of media.

As I get ready to begin my role as CEO of Biz360 tomorrow, I reflect back on my decision to leave a leadership role with a very successful business enterprise and move my wife and two young daughters more than halfway across the country away from our friends and family. Really, it was an easy decision for us to make.

I am fortunate to have spent time working with many different world-class organizations. My career consists of more than 15 years of building successful sales and marketing organizations for both small and large companies. Much of my career has been spent with technology-based organizations. As a Partner in the Management Consulting Division of The Gallup Organization, I helped executives use scientific research to develop business strategies for engaging their employees and customers.

As I learned more and more about Biz360, I realized the tremendous market opportunity facing the company. With the increasing levels of media coverage and explosion of social media on the Internet, even the most advanced companies are struggling to measure and manage the fast pace of changing perceptions in today’s digital society. Biz360 has been and will continue to be a leader in developing innovative technology to measure and interpret market perception.

The company has the talent and the technology to deliver the full service offerings our most demanding clients require. From real-time insight to analyst services, Biz360 has the foundation to lead the way for years to come.

On a personal note, my wife and our two young daughters will be joining me in the Bay Area in November. After meeting the people at Biz360 and studying the business opportunity, we knew this was the right move for us. Personally, we love the outdoors and welcome the chance to live in a great place like the Bay Area. It’s an easy decision to make this level of commitment when you feel so confident about the opportunity.

You can expect great things to come from Biz360. And I look forward to your thoughts along the way.