SD Forum - Real Time Social Media Monitoring and Marketing

The SD Forum Semantic Web SIG held a forum on Real Time Social Media Monitoring and Marketing. It was a mixed bag of two companies that do social media monitoring (Techrigy/Alterian & Scout Labs) and one that's using blogs and other online social media to do marketing (BuzzLogic).

Most of the folks in the room were techies, although there also seemed to be a bunch of marketing folks there as well.

The presentation by Connie Bensen of Techrigy was disappointing. Her presentation seemed more pedestrian than it should have been for the audience in the room. She also seemed a bit nervous, which may be her natural presentation style. One of her most interesting slides (and not in a good way) was a set of two slides trying to show where the community manager fits into the cycle. The slides made absolutely no sense.

The second company to present was Scout Labs. They do social media monitoring. Top clients include Netflix and others. Margaret Francis and Jochen Frey were the two presenters. Francis is on the marketing side of things and Frey is the CTO. Margaret Francis did a fantastic job describing the social media platform and why especially an enterprise sized company should be using a platform like Scout Labs for monitoring. Her take on why folks like @comcastcares are doing customer service on platforms like Twitter was definitely interesting. They expect to monitor 100M in 2009. That's compared to 10M in 2008. They don't expect that same level of growth in 2010. The currently only monitor English language results.

The final presenter was Keith Kilpatrick of BuzzLogic who talked about how they are using online social media, and blogs specifically, for digital media and advertising for their clients. He shared information on how they are using Comscore and other ratings to determine where and how to advertise.

One topic that was covered by all three was the importance of listening before leaping. There are a ton of free tools out there to listen even before you have to pay. Alterian/Techrigy is a freemium model and Scout Labs allows you to do a 30-day trial.