When it comes to data services, social networks, cloud computing, mobile and music, market concentration is constantly on the rise. Could this mean the burst of another bubble, once again requiring taxpayers to foot the bill?

Below, we discuss this from a Web 2.0 perspective. In the meantime, to keep up with our latest posts, why not just enter your email below to get the information first?

2010 will bring more players: Defend your turf!
Once upon a time, Nokia released a mobile phone that was basically re-sold by various operators in numerous countries and any subscriber revenue stayed with the operator. Apple’s iPhone revenue sharing deal has changed all that.

Google’s mobile operating system Android is also challenging Apple’s dominance. With this, Google is attempting to make sure that consumers continue to use its search function from their mobiles.

THE BATTLE IS ON: Who owns the customer?
The one that ‘owns’ the customer can provide mobile data transfer, services and devices as well as data storage, music files and so forth. The giants are moving into each others markets and the fight for survival is on.

For instance, mobile operators like Spain’s Telefonica need to protect their healthy revenue growth in the mobile internet use business (see image at right).

Given the above, mobile phone providers certainly did not appreciate the Apple revenue sharing deal they had to submit to.

Nor are retailers and booksellers smiling about Amazon and Wal-Mart stealing away market share by sometimes selling at deep discounts just to gain market share in countries they operate in.

2010 will bring more customer rights and choice: Really?
Google has leveraged computing in the cloud by offering ever more services for ‘free’. Amazon is riding the increasing demand for e-readers as bibliophiles around the globe turn to digital books.

But market dominance can result in consumer rights being violated. For instance, Amazon erased copies of a book title from its clients’ Kindle device in July 2009 (think YOU own the data – think again).

Take-aways: 4 ways to prepare for the inevitable data bust

1. Oligopolies are a bad idea – as the credit card market has demonstrated, having a few players only increases the costs for end-users. Therefore, a wider choice of online booksellers beyond Wal-Mart or Amazon is in the best interest of consumers.
2. Systemic risk increases as a small group of companies become too big to fail – remember the 2008/2009 financial crisis… the case of too big to fail seems to repeat itself in the Web 2.0 world, or can we afford to let Google shut off its servers?
3. Dependability and availability of data are threatened – what happens if a company goes bankrupt or your data have been erased? What impact will this have on a country or economy if the cloud computing infrastructure is out of order for a few hours or a day? Regulators need to get onto this act quickly, because companies and consumers cannot manage this risk alone.
4. Data protection and privacy laws – with cloud computing, nobody knows exactly where data are stored anymore and which national laws apply. Neither the EU nor the US have negotiated an agreement on this issue with such important outsourcing countries as India. If regulators continue to fail to see the writing on the wall in 2010 as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) did in 2006 regarding financial markets in the US, a real data disaster is just waiting to happen.

More resources about cloud computing, power shifts in mobile data usage, and more:

Miranda Mowbray: The fog over the grimpen mire: cloud computing and the law
ComMetrics: Citigroup, RBS and Google: Loads in common
Federal Computer Week: Cloud computing: Is it secure enough? New risks could cancel out potential benefits – are you compliant?
CommMetrics: No free lunch with Apple, Microsoft, Nokia and China Mobile!
Dion Hinchcliffe – ZDnet: Are the iPhone and social networks making the classic Web and intranet obsolete?

Bottom line
With only a few large players, the systemic risk of a crisis increases. Sometime, somewhere this data-bubble-in-a-cloud will bust, leaving us to pick the pieces. Accordingly, if we want to avoid having to turn off the power on server farms or paying for another government bailout involving digital data and cloud computing, we must take action in 2010.

This unraveling may not occur for some time, as easy money and excessive global liquidity will push the value or share prices of these corporations for a while. But the longer we wait to grab the bull by the horns and deal with it, the bigger the fall-out will be from possible digital data losses that will be huge and extremely costly.

Your turn. Are you ready and is your company compliant regarding cloud computing? Do you worry about your rights regarding your e-reader or your cloud-stored data? We look forward to your comments, insights AND opinions on this issue.

Short link blogging coming your way this week: our top stories include how 50 global brands use Twitter, why we should focus more on inbound than outbound marketing, and  how to make email marketing more conversational. Plus, check out some free tools, including recruiting secrets.

In case you missed the last six weeks’ best links:

Very useful links: Microsoft vs. Facebook vs. SAP for week 35.
Very useful links: Data-theft to tweet-deaths via free tools for week 36.
Very useful links: NFL bans Twitter, now with adverts for week 37.
Very useful links: Real Madrid to GM via Twitter for week 38.
Very useful links: Audi to Ecofootprint via PlayStation for week 39.
Very useful links: Toyota to Razorfish via PRSA for week 40.

Social Media TOOLS and GUIDES that make a DIFFERENCE
VERY USEFUL Top 5 SEO secrets to WordPress

VERY USEFUL => The best WordPress plugins for bloggers

#tips2follow – A 10-Step Guide for Developing Social Media Strategy for Recruiting

Are you one of those presenters who has nightmares before going on stage? Things just got a heck of a lot worse: you now have to integrate social media into your presentation and monitor the backchannel on Twitter to gauge your audience – how it works 101.

Social Media FIRST to Move – TRENDWATCH
#trends2watch #first2move the Federal Trade Commission or FTC will charge bloggers up to $11,000 for not disclosing paid posts.

“The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that ‘material connections’ (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers–connections that consumers would not expect–must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other ‘word-of-mouth’ marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”

The FTC also has its eye on celebrities. ”Celebrities have a duty to disclose their relationships with advertisers when making endorsements outside the context of traditional ads, such as on talk shows or in social media,” the release explained.

@Genuine @jowyang Bloggers are now under scrutiny from the FTC. Which blogging disclosures do you think are the best?

But the question remains: Why must bloggers disclose receiving a product from a manufacturer that they write and publish a review about online while newspapers and magazines do not? Not only is it unfair, but why distinguish disclosure by what medium is used?? #badgovernance

For sure, the FTC fails the fashion test, but this latest regulation makes things more complex while leaving the core opaque as far as celebrity endorsements and paid blog posts are concerned #blogdisclosure

Social Media MARKETING BUZZ – Building or Damaging Brand
Recent study about Twitter use: Business tweets are an attempt to raise brand awareness, brand knowledge and improve relationship management. In contrast, the purpose of personal tweets is all over the map, including sharing knowledge and telling one’s friends about a recently seen movie – sometimes wasting time?

Nevertheless, this does not allow us to conclude that there is an increasing desire for brand engagement and customer service on more community-based media…. NO sir.

Job Opening
@WomenWhoTech @InfoSecJobsUK Students @naijand @lhawthorn - IT job openings, part-time – WordPress, software, PHP… spread the word!

Actionable Metrics: Standards, Testing and Trends
What are some techniques marketers can use to make their email marketing more conversational?  #tips2follow

Inbound versus outbound marketing – it’s changing but still a challenge for B2B folks

What did we miss this week? Please add what you found that was of interest in a comment below. Thank you.

Benchmarking requires setting objectives and measuring performance to see if one has surpassed it.

Here we propose five best practice steps to help you develop useful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will result in actionable metrics for your social media activities.

Not a subscriber yet? Want the scoop first? Just leave your email address in the field below.

1. Ensure management understands the difference between operating and financial metrics.

As Anthony (Tony) Tjan put it in one of his recent posts:

“The financial ‘numbers’ ultimately represent the scorecard we care about, but they do not help us understand how to score.“

It is critical to understand what the most important drivers or operating metrics are when it comes success or failure. Accordingly, what contribution for achieving the company’s operating metrics, such as higher customer retention, will come from social media efforts, must be addressed.

Tip 1: Define, write down and agree on the operating metrics you want to use and stick with them.

2. Know your customers and derive everything, including social media activities, from that knowledge.

Companies produce their corporate magazine or place brand advertising in a daily to reach and communicate with the targeted audience. Improving a magazine’s or corporate blog’s reading attractiveness works even better if it:

a) provides information that helps customers do their work smarter, and
b) empowers readers to get more out of services they purchase from the company.

Tip 2: Choose a social media tool that at least 20 percent of your current and potential clients already use themselves (e.g., would they read blog content delivered by email and/or RSS feed) AND provide content that is perceived as useful and adding value.

3. Establish how a particular social media channel can drive cost reductions and/or new product/service uptake.

Every office building has air conditioning and nobody asks for ROI on this. Plus, ROI (Return on Investment) or ROE (Return on Engagement) are the wrong measures for social media.

ROI is the outcome, but we need to understand how social media efforts contribute to operating metrics. Hence, we must establish how the input – social media or corporate blogging – drives the desirable output, such as lowering marketing costs or improving customer satisfaction.

Tip 3: Make sure your operators are clearly tied to your social media efforts.

4. Focus on the 3 to 5 KPIs that represent the most important drivers of value creation for your social media activities.

We suggest that a few clearly defined KPIs are more likely to assure people paying attention, without getting too distracted from the real job at hand.

Most important, KPIs must fit your company’s needs, like custom-made loafers or black heels. Otherwise, who would want to wear or make use of them?

Tip 4: Assure KPI buy-ins from your stakeholders, including your team, superior(s) and possibly key clients and/or investors.

5. Establish a baseline and timeline.

A baseline is a measurement used as a point of comparison. In turn, it can be used to asses progress against the budget or set of other objectives, including KPIs.

So it is advisable to first collect data whenever one begins social media monitoring to see where you stand.
Benchmarking against your own past performance is the only completely relevant measure. Therefore, improvement over the course of several months is what really matters.

For this reason, we developed the ComMetrics Footprint, ComMetrics Health Check, and ComMetrics Resonance, which are each made up of several measures. These allow tracking from the baseline onwards, as well as benchmarking against the ComMetrics Blog Impact index.

Tip 5: Establish the baseline numbers and compare such as Q1 2008 with Q1 2009 in order to improve.

For example, if you focus on backlinks, have they increased over the last quarter? And what about Quarter 3 2008 compared to Quarter 3 2009, what kind of improvements are seen there?

Bottom line
Surely nobody tries to quantify the ROI of air conditioning. Having it when outside temperatures reach 35 degrees Celsius helps office productivity, making it a mediating factor for, though NOT a cause of, ROI. Similar reasoning applies for social media measurement.

Above we outlined five tips that should help in developing KPIs that make sense to your company’s decision-makers and, most importantly, provide social media monitoring that helps your company improve.

More resources on KPI and benchmarking:

- Beth Kanter: Riffing on David Armano’s Listen, Learn, and Adapt: Need Your Organization’s Adaption Stories!
- Vijay Rayapati: Why social media ROI is the most over debated & misunderstood topic?
- Olivier Blanchard: Basics of social media ROI slide presentation.
- Mikey Ames The Hermit: Alumni Association Twitter Use – Baseline Comparisons.
- Beth Kanter: What’s Your Social Media Baseline?
- ComMetrics: Social media analytics and KPIs: From simple to refined.

Looking for telework as a techie? Join our virtual team NOW!

Now, it’s your turn.  What are some of your organization’s metrics, analytics and measurement stories for blogs?

Short link blogging coming your way this week: our top stories include the NFL – Monday Night Football – trying to control, if not outlaw, tweets by players – George Orwell calling, Facebook’s threat to personal friendships, Twitter finally seeing the writing on the wall – getting ready to generate badly needed revenue, how Google’s behavior-based advertising changes your search results and yet another Windows 7 vulnerability to worry about.

In case you missed the last six weeks’ best links:

Very useful links: Nikon to Wii via Yahoo! for week 31.
Very useful links: Friendfeed to Berlusconi for week 32.
Very useful links: Trabant to Obama via Copenhagen for week 33.
Very useful links: UBS to Levi’s via CBS for week 34.
Very useful links: Microsoft vs. Facebook vs. SAP for week 35.
Very useful links: Data-theft to tweet-deaths via free tools for week 36.

Not a subscriber yet? Want the scoop first? Just leave your email address in the field below.

Social Media TOOLS and GUIDES that make a DIFFERENCE
VERY USEFUL #trends2watch => USA => 45 percent of employers use social media 4 screening job applicants | 35 percent have rejected candidate based on SM background

Economic CRISIS AND POLICY Research
#metrics2watch => Education is important – according to OECD - BUT measuring its effects according to money spent on education and people attending university is a bit hard to follow – see WEF World Competitiveness Report 2009-2010 ==> youth unemployment rates would be a better KPI to benchmark nations success regarding educational spending and policy – get the inside scoop including WEF report, OECD Excel spreadsheet and youth unemployment trend #bettergovernance

Social Media BEST PRACTICE
#trends2watch => Why Facebook ruins real friendships…  #trends2watch #tips2follow

VERY USEFUL freemium: deciding what is free and what costs – easy to add features – difficult to remove #tips2follow

Social Media MARKETING BUZZ
Why Social Media Marketing is Essential

VERY USEFUL => Popular on commetrics.com via Twitter => re-tweets happen more often, nice #metrics2watch #trends2watch

Social Media FIRST to Move – TRENDWATCH
#first2move – Google personalises AdWords = interest-based behavioral targeted advertising for search results #trends2watch

#SMfailure USA => NFL wants to ban tweeting before during after games – honest => Orwell’s Big Brother returns or just plain stupid?

#trends2watch Twitter, the two-year-old venture capital-backed company that lets people send 140-character messages, is ramping up efforts to monetize its success in the quest for revenue.

2009-09-10 Thursday, it revised its Terms of Service to specify that it may run advertising, thereby keeping its options open.

“The services may include advertisements, which may be targeted to the content or information on the services, queries made through the services, or other information,” the terms read.

“The types and extent of advertising by Twitter on the services are subject to change.”

“In consideration for Twitter granting you access to and use of the services, you agree that Twitter and its third-party providers and partners may place such advertising on the services….”

InfoSec
#threats2watch advisory for a zero-day vulnerability in the SMB2 (Server Message Block 2) service that ships with newer versions of Windows; specifically, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Server 2008. Advisory contains a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploit for the flaw.

Actionable Metrics: Standards, Testing and Trends
Best business model: Free to use, pay to play – when will venture capitalists pull the plug on Twitter?

2009 Social Media Calendar – Upcoming Conferences of Interest

• September 14 – 17 ==> Chicago, USA – Social Media For Government: How to engage your employees and citizens by using the latest Web 2.0 technologies to drive communication results.
• September 29 – October 2 ==> Ottawa, CANADA – Social Media For Government: How to engage your employees and citizens by using the latest Web 2.0 technologies to drive communication results.
• September 29 – October 2 ==> Washington, USA – Social Media for Healthcare: How to use the latest web 2.0 technologies to engage your community, improve quality of service and build your reputation.
• September 30 – October 1 ==> Washington, USA – Rethinking Corporate Communications 2009 Conference.
• October 28 – 29 ==> Atlanta, USA – The eMarketing Association (eMA) – eM9-ATLANTA eMarketing Conference: Forum for the very latest trends, best practices, processes and ideas that are transforming the future of marketing.
• November 7 – 10 ==> San Diego, USA – Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) 2009 International Conference: Delivering Value.

What is happening in your neck of the woods? Please share your conference dates by leaving a comment below or sending us an email.

That’s the way we saw things this week; now it’s your turn. Did we miss anything important? Please add it below as a comment, along with a link. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Short link blogging coming your way this week – our top stories include Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud or EC2 vulnerability to hacking, 34 free social media tools, Microsoft and Bing’s imminent release of a new, joint feature and how the media shift shows why BBC, AOL and the Guardian are becoming increasingly dependent on social networks like Facebook, Xing and Bebo to get traffic (view chart) and how Twitter may be named in a lawsuit after a driver’s tweeting caused freeway carnage.

In case you missed the last six weeks’ best links:

Very useful links: White House to Adobe for week 30.
Very useful links: Nikon to Wii via Yahoo! for week 31.
Very useful links: Friendfeed to Berlusconi for week 32.
Very useful links: Trabant to Obama via Copenhagen for week 33.
Very useful links: UBS to Levi’s via CBS for week 34.
Very useful links: Microsoft vs. Facebook vs. SAP for week 35.

Not a subscriber yet? Want the scoop first? Just leave your email address in the field below.

Social Media TOOLS and GUIDES that make a DIFFERENCE
VERY USEFUL #tools2watch – Social media monitoring wiki – lists 34 free and 60 commercial tools for social media analytics – great help for monitoring your brand.

VERY USEFUL Look who follows NoFollow links - test finds that both Yahoo & Google follow the NoFollow links #metrics2watch

#tools2watch – Bing will soon release the new feature “Bing and Ping”, a means to share your search results with friends – you can preview by becoming a fan of Bing on Facebook – that nets you an invite to the pre-party.

Sentiment analysis for online content: Honest? What the benchmarks show: failure. #trends2watch

Sentiment analysis – human scaling #tools2watch

Economic CRISIS AND POLICY Research

Best quality tea prices rose by 36 percent since January, almost twice the 2005 price (see graphic at left) #trends2watch

Discussing Doha – Europe provides $2 a day per cow in farming subsidies – in India 70 percent of population live on less than $2 a day #bettergovernance

VERY USEFUL #things2read OECD’s new report on the well-being of children worldwide

Social Media BEST PRACTICE
Best business model: Free to use, pay to play – when will venture capitalists pull the plug on Twitter? #bettergovernance #trends2watch

VERY USEFUL – Why following the product development diagram could result in failure for your start-up #things2read

Study raises DOUBTS: opt-in Internet surveys’ validity may not hold up against paper-and-pencil and telephone surveys – find the summary and the full paper here.

Social Media MARKETING BUZZ
VERY USEFUL => Popular on commetrics.com via Twitter => re-tweets happen more often, nice #metrics2watch #trends2watch

Social Media FIRST to Move – TRENDWATCH
#first2move – North Carolina Department of Transportation providing traffic reports via Twitter: what about risk management - micro-blogging causing accidents by drivers reading tweets while driving?. Traffic reports for motorists and ferry passengers by region or interstate highway. #trends2watch

InfoSec
#threats2watch  RISK MGMT: Stealing data from Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2). Research reports way to attack the cloud using side-channel. (300.5 KiB, pdf)
Amazon not ready to talk about this threat this week, but this is a systemic risk that cannot be ignored by Google, Microsoft or Amazon, since all three offer these cloud services, nor by clients depending on these providers – what if your application is hacked this way? #trends2watch

Actionable Metrics: Standards, Testing and Trends
Best business model: Free to use, pay to play – when will venture capitalists pull the plug on Twitter?

VERY USEFUL social media ROI 67 slides #things2read http://bit.ly/8VDWI BUT operating metrics are more important than ROI….

#trends2watch social network sites bringing much  traffic to media sites such as BBC, the Guardian, AOL News (see graphic below).

2009 Social Media Calendar – Upcoming Conferences of Interest

• September 14 – 17 ==> Chicago, USA - Social Media For Government: How to engage your employees and citizens by using the latest Web 2.0 technologies to drive communication results.

• September 29 – October 2 ==> Ottawa, CANADA - Social Media For Government: How to engage your employees and citizens by using the latest Web 2.0 technologies to drive communication results.
• September 29 – October 2 ==> Washington, USA – Social Media for Healthcare: How to use the latest web 2.0 technologies to engage your community, improve quality of service and build your reputation.
• September 30 – October 1 ==> Washington, USA - Rethinking Corporate Communications 2009 Conference.
• October 28 – 29 ==> Atlanta, USA – The eMarketing Association (eMA) – eM9-ATLANTA eMarketing Conference: Forum for the very latest trends, best practices, processes and ideas that are transforming the future of marketing.
• November 7 – 10 ==> San Diego, USA - Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) 2009 International Conference: Delivering Value.

What is happening in your neck of the woods? Please share your conference dates by leaving a comment below or sending us an email.

That’s the way we saw things this week; now it’s your turn. Did we miss anything important? Please add it below as a comment, along with a link. Looking forward to hearing from you!

2010-06-01 – Update – new tools – heated discussion – see bottom of this post.

Recently a customer asked why we have not yet included sentiment analysis in My.ComMetrics.com. Yes, the customer was fully aware that sentiment analysis (also called opinion mining and sometimes semantic analysis) involves classifying text using natural language processing, computational linguistics and text analysis to reveal the sentiment (e.g., positive, neutral or negative) of a particular text.

Recently I came across this statement by Nathan Gilliatt:

“This NY Times article doesn’t include “brand monitoring,” “listening,” or “social media analysis” as it focuses on “sentiment analysis,” but they’re all more or less the same thing.“

Gilliatt puts the finger on a sore issue that indicates how critical it is that we DEFINE sentiment analysis (see above) and then test not only the reliability, but the validity of the results.

Is it reliable?
Reliability means getting the same results for the same text analysis regardless of how often the test is run. According to this criteria, the Financial Times’ Newssift service is strong. It lists the two articles in the Financial Times mentioning ComMetrics (see image below). Repeating the string of keywords with other terms such as social media measurement or social media tracking resulted in the same articles appearing on a larger list.

Sentiment analysis is it reliable – probably is … but being reliable while measuring the wrong stuff cannot be the answer as we explain below.

Is it valid?
That all depends how you define the term validity and which sentiment analysis software one uses.

Using the keyword ‘ComMetrics’, the data served by the Newssift tool revealed:

- one neutral article
- one positive article, and
- one article that has nothing to do with ComMetrics, but is still positive.

But can these findings be interpreted as valid? The article classified as neutral raised some important questions and explained how certain blogging challenges could be successfully resolved. How this sentiment would suggest neutrality while brand monitoring is a bit difficult to understand. Further, the last article listed in the image above has absolutely no relationship with ComMetrics. Accordingly, its appearance in the user’s results list is an error.

In conclusion, 33 percent of search results were correctly identified and classified, regardless of what keywords were used.

What about Twitter?
Various sentiment analysis software is available for Twitter. For instance, the image to the right is from Twendz, which provides new visitors with a hyped-up description of itself. Unfortunately, its analysis is neither well-described nor are the findings coherent.

A similar software called Tweetfeel fails to work for small brands and does not even bring up all tweets for the biggest brands out there. Hence, we could not really test it.

Twitrratr is another one of these tools, but it stopped tracking some of our brands in late 2008. Maybe the system was put into hibernation?

Worse, it is nearly impossible to figure out what criteria are used by any of the applications to decide whether a tweet is positive, neutral or negative.

How such tools and their findings should “…take the pulse of Twitter users about particular topics…”, as the NY Times article claims, suggests that the journalists did not take the time to take these tools for a test-drive. This kind of ’investigative’ reporting will not help reestablish the value of content.

In short, the sentiment analysis tools we were able to quickly test and review for Twitter seem reliable, but they do not pass the validity hurdle (i.e. they do not measure what they are supposed to measure).

More posts about Twitter from this blog

Bottom line
Sentiment analysis is an important, but very hard to master, science and it is still in its infancy. While it can be quite accurate (reliability => maybe high => 80 percent or higher), it does not necessarily make the data valid or useful for making strategic decisions grounded in effective brand monitoring.

Finally, when it comes to languages, things get way more complex than simple tweet or text analysis, making success an ever more elusive concept for sentiment analysis, as illustrated below:

- cultural differences:
When Americans say ‘quite’, they mean ‘very’, and ‘interesting’ implies they want to hear more. In England, ‘quite’ means ‘not at all’ ‘interesting’ equals ‘I can’t think of anything nice to say’, and calling something ‘quite interesting’ indicates the speaker is desperately searching for the nearest exit.
-  positive versus negative meaning: sinful isn’t always sinfully good chocolate

The above is nicely illustrated by a comment I recently emailed regarding a story about buskers working in the London Underground.

The ’busker’ emailed back saying something like: “… you make some interesting and very true observations…” Depending on where the busker makes her home (e.g., United States versus Great Britain), this sentiment can be interpreted in many different ways.

Takeaway: All of the sentiment analysis programs I have tested – not all were mentioned in this blog post – are seriously challenged when it comes to coping with the intricacies of language. Reliability is an important factor but if a tool does not meet validity requirements, I don’t want to use it for brand monitoring or social media tracking.

Your turn: Did we miss something? If you know of any tool that works better magic than those we looked at, please give us a shout. What is your experience with, and opinion of, sentiment analysis?

More resources about social media marketing and the c-suite:

2010-06-01 – Update – discussions about new tools and validity concerns on Xing SM Monitoring group