Social listening is not eavesdropping like it would seem. The technology has been around for awhile and the buy-in is reaching significant points. So what is social listening? Social listening is the ability to capture consumer comments about products, brands, campaigns, corporations, etc. This knowledge of trends and opinions is valuable, very valuable.
Twitter continues to grow in usage and in data, personal data. More than 400 million tweets take place each day, which is up from 340 million just one month ago. Interestingly, the majority of Twitter users are mobile.
Oracle is buying social media monitoring platform Collective Intellect, which means those services will soon be available in the Oracle cloud-based social CRM platform.
As technology advances and social media becomes even more prevalent in our day-to-day lives, where does that leave email? There are many people I know who say they don’t use stand alone email for anything. They rely completely on Facebook to communicate with friends, family and business associates. Personally, I do find myself having more conversations on the social media guru’s site than using my personal email account. The relationships are different and therefore the communication is different. So in the battle of social vs. email, who will win? And what will be the results of that win?
The latest player in the social media arena, Google + has had a dismal start and experienced non-existent growth. There seems to be some pseudo-taxonomy of social media that labels various sites for various purposes, i.e. Facebook is for pictures of kids, Twitter is for news, and LinkedIn for recruitment. I don’t think I agree with that totally and to be completely honest, I’ve not given Google+ a try. However, the ability to segment your followers and therefore, your conversations is a feature that seems like it would have a following.
In this day and age of social media infiltrating every area of our lives, for good or bad, there is one area that has resisted this trend (at least up until now) – books. Perhaps the last refuge from social media, many go to find shelter from the friending and tweeting in their comforting pages and worn binding. Unfortunately, this once solitary refuge is looking to join the social realm as companies like Copia and BookGlutton look to jump on board.
When someone mentions social networks, Facebook has to pop in your mind. Jonathan LeBlanc’s book, “Programming Social Applications”, would lead one to assume (yes, I know the dangers lurking there) that this would include Facebook. One would be wrong.
Whether you are merely an individual wondering what your friends and colleagues are saying about you or a major retailer about to launch a new customer retention program, knowing what the word on the street is and more importantly, how to manipulate it is very important.
New Zealand’s government will be focusing on social media and on the government’s role for identity management and network security in the coming year.