Let’s Talk Knowledge

I sit here at Louie Armstrong International airport, waiting for my flight back from SLA 2010. It was a great conference this year, and there seemed to be a lot of energy and enthusiasm, perhaps more so than last year. It’s possible this could have been a direct result of the Dow Jones Factini happy hours, but it is more likely from a sense of optimism the crowd had about what’s ahead.

From my perspective I did a few sessions this year on using Social Media for business research. I’d like to thank those in attendance (especially the brave souls who stood in the hall, or sat on the floor for my last session!). I had a lot of great conversations, and learned much from you all.

I wanted to quickly summarize the three key things that information professionals should be thinking about with respect to social media and social technologies in general.

1. Social as a research tool. A few key ways social can be used as a serious tool in your research toolbox:

• • There is a lot of great information in social media about companies, people, products, and industry topics.
  • Social is also a great way to find new sources, especially for niche topics, and private company info.

2. Social as a way to build your expert network. Social networks are about easily connecting people. Take advantage of the fact you have unprecedented access to expertise that previously you may not have even known existed, let alone had a way to connect with.

3. Social as a mechanism for customer communication. People are rapidly becoming accustomed to having content pushed to them, and curated for them by experts. Information professionals are uniquely positioned to help (and shine) in this model.

Remember that as a source of information, social media should be considered as just another source. Information that you find should be verified and validated, just as you would information from mainstream media. As far as social technologies go, don’t wait to long to embrace them.  Social is rapidly causing a fundamental shift in the way we communicate and share knowledge, and discover and navigate information. The sooner you begin to build your network, and communicate with your customers, the better off you will be positioned as adoption and usage of these technologies and networks continues to explode.

- Ken

A lot has been happening recently in the realm of Social. Major announcements from Twitter and Facebook over the past two weeks are sure to have implications beyond what we can conceive right now. The popularity of the two sites alone are growing in unheard of percentages with a combined user base of over 500 million.

One of the most interesting things that is happening as a result of this is how traffic is being directed on the web. More and more these social networking sights are actually driving traffic to major web properties. In the case of USA Today for example, social networking sites are in fact driving 6X more traffic than Google (full report from Gigya can be found here http://bit.ly/c8HLDA – free registration required).

I think this is actually a beginning of a fundamental shift in the way people discover and navigate information. Rather than relying on an empty search box to direct you, people are relying on their friends, colleagues, and other experts to guide them. This really shouldn’t be surprising. Before Google convinced us all that search was the best way to get to the information you need, we all relied on our networks much more heavily in order to gather and analyze information. If you were looking for competitive intelligence, the first thing you’d do is pick up the phone and talk to a sales rep, or a customer, or an industry analyst (not saying you CI professionals don’t still do this btw!).

But Search seemed so convenient. It was always there, and easy to use. People could be more self-reliant. In some ways, Search was an improvement. But the reality is that Search is also very inefficient. Depending on the research you look at, we see that people using web search engines fail to find what they are looking for anywhere from one-third to one-half of the time. But as the amount of information online became more and more vast, it seemed like Search was the only solution. The reality is we search because we have to, not because we want to.

Until the rise of the social networks. Easy to use and prolific, these sites are helping turn the web from a network of documents, to a platform that connects people. And a platform that not only connects people, but removes the friction involved with communication between people.

Now we are starting to see the beginning of how these social networks can be so much more than Search. Need to find something, as your network. Chances are someone you know has had the same or similar question and can guide you to their research or even analysis. Not sure what you are looking for, let your trusted network of experts tell you what is important around any given topic. This is why these sites are beginning to overtake Search when it comes to directing traffic online.

There is a lot more to discuss and understand about this topic. This post could get very lengthy if I tried to even scratch the surface. I’ll leave you with this thought though. Search will have a place for many years to come of course. However sooner rather than later, our ability to find the information we need will be more influenced by the power and reach of our networks, than our ability to craft elegant queries for the big white search box.

My advice to anyone today is to begin to understand these new tools and platforms. And to more importantly begin to build your networks on them. The investment you make today will be well rewarded in the near future. IMHO

- Ken

As I mentioned previously, Twitter is becoming a more relevant source for competitive intelligence. Not necessarily as a standalone source, but a nice complement to traditional sources. One of the great things about Twitter is the number of third party tools that have been developed to help you get the most out of the service. In this post, I wanted to share some thoughts on how I use TweetDeck, one of my personal favorites, for CI.

Just to be clear, I’m not trying to give an all encompassing tutorial of TweetDeck. If you’d like one of those, there are plenty of good ones out there. What I am trying to do is give some insight on how the tool can help you filter the huge amount of content flowing through the Twitter service to get information that is relevant for your competitive intelligence purposes.

There are a couple of basics when it comes to using TweetDeck. First is the concept of columns. Columns are a way to get different views of the the information streaming from Twitter. There are a lot of ways to filter a TweetDeck column. As in my last post, I’ll break it down by three different categories: People, Companies, Topics/Products.

I’ll start with people. Following people on Twitter recently got easier with the advent of Lists. You can create a list in Twitter of the people that you want to follow. These of course can include executives from a company you’re tracking, people who often comment on a company or topic your tracking, etc. Once your Twitter lists are created, TweetDeck can quickly create a column based on one of them. You can also create a column in TweetDeck based on a search. With respect to people, you can simply search for the @ mention of the user (for example @marcbenioff). This will allow you to see the things people are saying to a particular person on Twitter, and a great way to understand what topics a person is discussing or directed towards that person by the masses on Twitter.

For companies the process is much the same as people. You can create a list in Twitter that follows the people, products, and company feeds associated with a particular company. For example a Twitter list for SalesForce might include @marcbenioff, @salesforce, @joywang (social media analyst that often comments on salesforces adoption of social media). You may also want to create a column that is based on a search, again using Salesforce as an example you may want to create a column based on hashtags and or keywords (“#salesforce OR salesforce”). This will get you all the other mentions of a company name.

The same process used for companies can be followed for products or topics. Find the people that often talk about a particular product or topic, as well as create a search for mentions of the product name or topic.

Once you have your columns created in TweetDeck, you can now start using some of the powerful tools and analytics that that are part of the solution. At the bottom of each column in TweetDeck there is a row of buttons. One of my favorites is the “Cloud” button. By clicking this, you can quickly get a cloud tag of the most popular things being mentioned in that column. That includes keywords, links, twitter usernames, and hashtags. Great way to do some high level analytics and get a quick picture of what you need to know about what is happening right now.

Next is the “Filter” tag. This will allow you to filter a column by text, time, source, or name. For example, we could filter the SalesForce product column by the word “performance”, allowing you to see anything related salesforce.com performance.

There are also options to mark everything in the column as seen, thereby cleaning up the column entirely, or just cleaning up the entries you have actually seen.

These are just some of the ways TweetDeck can help Twitter become a more useful tool for competitive intelligence. Just to reiterate, I think Twitter is a great part of any CI monitoring strategy. Especially with respect to the conversation that is currently happening around the people, companies, and products or topics you are following.

If you have any other helpful hints with respect to TweetDeck, please do share!

- Ken