Social media – still a two-edged weapon
Jinfo Blog

6th December 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Presentation after presentation at Online Information 2009 indicated that businesses were starting to pay serious attention to social media. Managing risk was the predominant theme – but have we thought of everything that could go wrong? ‘Wiki-fixing the world’ was the vision of David Cushman of the consultancy 90:10 Ltd at one of the event’s numerous free seminars on the subject. To benefit from it, organisations had to relinquish control, recognising that it wasn’t social media if it didn’t change your business – and that the people who made the biggest difference to your organisation didn’t work for it. On the same tack, Rob Howard of Telligent suggested that customers might know more about, for example, Dell Computers than Dell did. A key part of monitoring what was said about your brand was to identify the most influential bloggers and Tweeters, analyse what they were talking about and the sentiments behind it, and present it back to the community. Laura Vosper of LexisNexis also stressed the need to identify and engage with influencers, in a presentation based on the vendor’s recent white paper Finding Influence (LiveWire comment at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e25260). Acknowledging that techniques like sentiment analysis couldn’t be fully automated, she encouraged organisations to experiment with their monitoring, correlating comment online with their own customer relationship management data and integrating this with traditional media coverage as well. Taking the issue of sentiment detection further, Tom Vesey of Carma Europe saw social media as a good predictor; much risk to reputation had its origins there, he said, and engaging with it could defuse a crisis before it happened. But there was a dilemma: it was often the very young in the organisation who were really good at engaging with social media – but would they have the marketing and public relations experience to deal effectively with the outcomes? There were more warnings. The consensus in a conference panel discussion on where the enterprise content management market was going was that ECM hadn’t yet got to grips with social media; vendors currently equated ‘management’ with ‘control’, ECM couldn’t match the intuitive nature and flexibility of social media, 2.0 was bringing fundamental changes and it remained to be seen whether ECM vendors would be able to adapt. Social networking activity happens in the cloud, and expert panel participants in the final session of the whole conference were apprehensive about the general dangers of cloud computing. Professor Charles Oppenheim mused that enthusiasm for the cloud needed to be tempered by worries that confidential data could be put at risk by pressure from a foreign jurisdiction – or even simply by a service provider going bust. PowerPoint presentations from the free seminars will be available in due course at http://digbig.com/5basmw

« Blog