Moderated by Mike Butcher of mbites.com and vecosys.com
Simon McDermott – CEO Attentio
Heather Hopkins – Head of Research, Hitwise
Kris Hoet – Marketing Manager, EMEA Consumer Marketing, Microsoft Online Services Group
Scott Thomson – Analytics Director, Starcom

SMc: Monitoring conversations to evaluate for example campaign impact, identifying what influencers are saying about your products, monitoring reputation and understanding consumer behaviour. So the big questions are “Are we discussed?”, if so then “What are the issues that are being raised” and “What do they think?” We do some benchmarking and look at trends as well as understanding who the influencers are and how you can communicate wth them. for example we worked with a consumer eletronics player that had a lower momentum than other products.

MB: what’s the technology that you use?

SMc: we use a proprietary time-based search technology looking at buzz together with staff who look at what it all means. We’ve been doing it for 3 years.

MB: is Hitwise going to cede the market to these guys or are you doing something else?

HH: well I’m really here to talk about monitoring blogs and we don’t compete with Attentio.
So comparing Sony Rootkit with Diet Coke & Mentos – the Sony story resonated wildly with the tech community but it wasn’t such a big story elsewhere. At Hitwise we have some people who like data and a lot of data. We’re blogging and it makes our life a lot easier dealing with journalists, but also our engagement with our customers has gone up.

MB: so if you monitor your own brand using free tools why would anyone pay for a service
HH: well we can’t justify it given how small we are – it’s for larger brands really

MB: why not just give people laptops and let them get on with it?
KH: Well we did that but we also do a lot going out to the community and meeting people face to face, building a relationship with bloggers. For all that we need to track who’s using what so we can focus on the right people. We use Attentio, but we also use lots of free tools too. We use comment tracking and we get good results out of that. The best way of tracking is of course to be reading everything 🙂

This week we launched an update on maps but there’s no big launch around it, but because we’ve been engaging and tracking some of the people in the cities covered and we can then talk to them and then that gets picked up by mainstream media – also is good for getting feedback.

MB: interesting that comments are very important.

KH: everybody changes their opinion because of comments. Also comments are the easiest way for people to connect with each other – you don’t have to have a blog yourself. “Everybody is a customer” It’s a kind of early warning system. And people are still often quite thrilled to get a reply.

MB: what feedback do you get?
ST: there’s a difference between just listening and then trying to change people or affect their behaviour. So we use a number of services to provide contextual information about online conversations.

MB: so trying to influence the conversation can be dangerous? (ref Cillit Bang vs Tom Coates)
ST: yes it’s about finding the influencers and then treading very very carefully.

MB: So a replacement for focus groups?
ST: Yes, but I think that research industry is eager for revolution. We’re all interested in understanding online behaviour better and although you can do it yourself it helps to get help.

MB: how can you iron out differences in the results from different blog tracking methods?
SMc: we offer companies granular insights into the brand eg French blogosphere reaction vs German – we don’t have much demand for standardisation with other markets – what people want is a quick read of what’s going on but yeah, you have to tread carefully.

Q: Any research into the social profile of bloggers and whether they are representative.
A: HH: we can do this with blog audiences – slightly male skew, all social grades represented, but tends to be urban people under 35.
SMc: younger people are more involved in social networks and don’t blog as much but there are studies that show that people move into blogging more in their twenties.
ST: our focus is less on who is saying it and more on what is being said as the former is too much to ask at the moment.
HH: also demographics are very dependent on the types of blogs visited and the type of conversation going on

Q: After my Dell guarantee lapsed it went wrong. I blogged about it. 2 months later I got a comment from Dell apologising and putting someone in touch the next day, collected laptop and repaired it free of charge. So tracking does work.

SMc: if they’d been monitoring a while ago they’d have got a better response from Jeff Jarvis 🙂

Q: international tracking – how mature are the offerings? How close are we to saying “These are the 3 most influential” in this geography.
SMc: Quite a long way on the breakdown. We’re focusing on Europe and we’re getting there.
KH: we tried this for the launch of Windows Live. I think it’s a very human thing – the tools don’t really work, but getting in touch with people and talking to them is much better at pulling out who the most influential are. It’s not just about links, it can be just as much about community activities in real life as much as online.

Q: So once you know them, how do you start a conversation without them getting suspicious.
A: people have lots of ways of getting in touch. Be humble. Explain what you’re doing. Ask for help. Invite people to events. It doesn’t always work but we keep trying.

Q: There are very good metrics in academic circles for measuring influence – SNA is probably the way we should go.
HH: I think this is absolutely the way to go for larger brands.

Lee Bryant – Headshift
David Fitch – Simmons & Simmons
Olivier Creiche – six apart
Adam Tinworth – reed

Lee’s telling us about some of the cases and then looking real world perspectives of what is being done.

We’ve got mature well-developed products now and we have some good external services for getting people started without involving IT and then you can build your own mashups and services using things like Ning.

But it ain’t what you do…

So just putting in blogs isn’t enough, you need concrete business use cases, engagement and people support and (at least a degree of ) a connected infrastructure.

We’re just about to release a library of use-cases that might be useful for people to look at info & knowledge sharing, innovation & R&D, internal comms as well as Marketing & PR.

So here’s some cases.

OC: We just deliver bricks, the important stuff gets done by these guys who build interesting and useful houses. Last year we were still just explaining what blogs are and how we thought they might be used. Bob Lutz: “No better opportunity exists to engage”.

Web publishing is way ahead in this country (Adam’s going to talk about Reed’s experience) Most of the creative stuff starts with smaller businesses and that then gets picked up by bigger players EG Serious Eats, Huffington Post vs Washington Post.

Internal Communications eg Citrix were very fast growing and had new employees not staying very long so they wanted to hold on to a bit of that knowledge while they were there, across dozens of projects and going very fast. AEP is a much bigger company but with the same story – trying to stop e-mail becoming the central repository for knowledge. They start small, they experiment, nobody *knows* how it will work but one of the success factors is having a champion someone who has a better idea than anyone else which shows the way for others.

Marketing and Community types of blogs eg Arcelor and Mittal merger raises a lot of anxiety among various stakeholders. Launched a blog/2.0 site because they wanted to be very open about what they were doing and how they were going about it and they let people go out with cameras and interview people around the world about what they felt about it. still being evaluated, but they are very happy and the press coverage has been excellent.

David Fitch:

What’s key to us is providing an infrastructure for lawyers to share knowledge and expertise across practice areas but also offices, knowing what’s going on inside the firm and outside.
We’ve been experimenting for about 3 years pushing a group of conservative people towards using new ways of operating. Blogs RSS Wikis are words that frighten lawyers so we’ve been giving them new tools and our experience is that people are able to use the lighter tools very easily – especially like bringing the time to publish down.

Our business case – the investment was zero – we used open source and tested it internally, but once we started, other people followed very quickly. so we didn’t have to justify an investment decision but we now have good evidence for new investment.

AT: we got into social media entirely by accident. We set up a small team and started out blogging and suddenly got requests to provide it internally. Publishing firms tend to be quite balkanised but as we started moving into a new business of interacting with our readers, we had a lot to learn and this raised a hunger for people to share what they’re learning and keep conversations going.

We have a number of problems – education – we’re not dictating any solution and we bring people together who (aaaagh contact lens emergency…)

Q: Does it actually work?
A: LB: it devolves things down to the level of the basic unit of work which is the person. What has happened with enterprise knowledge sharing is that people get the pain without any payback, but the lightweight tools give you power to organise your stuff and your contacts with other people and work with it all better. What’s also interesting is putting it on top

Q: do you see this as the end of employee communications as we know it?
A: LB: I don’t think so – every generation sees itself as Luke Skywalker, but it’s silly really because it actually just gets layered over the next one so now that we’re at the human scale where things really do work – people can publish and develop some sort of collective intelligence.
AT: No as it’s a way of taking away the more mundane bits of internal comms work and lets people focus on face to face

Q: MB: Lots of companies have huge intranets – should we just wipe them away?
DF: very familiar with this – there’s a huge wealth of material that’s useful but just couldn’t be found – so we did some work about improving search and findability but also looking at using lighter infrastructure to start again, which will involve some pain, people will have to go back and look at relevance for example, but that change is going to deliver the benefit that we’re moving towards creating communities and connecting people rather than just producing static content.

Q: GC: How do you deal with info that becomes out of date?
A:LB: different approaches – the most interesting is that in a mature implementation anything acquires its own context, tags etc so out of date stuff falls down as sediment in these systems. So then you need some sort of review system, but it’s more about letting more timely stuff come to the fore.
DF: it’s also so much easier to keep your stuff up to date, even for lawyers 🙂 so just using lighter tools helps a lot.