Exciting News!
It was shortly after we signed on as a customer of Techrigy's SM2 last year that we heard about Alterian's acquisition of the social media tools company.
Now, our company, Intrepid, has just been acquired by Alterian as well. Obviously, I applaud Alterian’s vision. Together, we will be able to provide a very compelling solution around social media intelligence. The growth in the adoption of social media has been astounding, yet we’re still just in the early stages. Social data is growing exponentially, and buried within it are gold mines of insights. I believe getting at them properly requires both a robust platform as well as exceptional human effort.
Alterian offers a world-class integrated marketing platform. Intrepid offers services that provide insights around social data. Together, we extend each other’s reach and complement one another’s strengths. Alterian customers and partners now will have accessible support around how to use social data. Our analysts can do the digging of the data that yields the gold mine of actionable insights.
As part of our integrated launch plan, Alterian has prepared service packages that will immediately add value to customers deploying Alterian’s SM2. Once customers and partners understand what and how to ask compelling arketing and research questions around social data, the platform will become that much more valuable. I’m confident that our social media expertise will be a welcome augmentation to Alterian’s marketing platform for both customers and partners.
As for Intrepid, we now have a solid marketing platform behind us. This allows us to be a legitimate player in coming up with over-arching social intelligence solutions that are more efficient and germane. Alterian’s global reach truly offers a tremendous opportunity for all of us to push thought-leadership in social data solutions across different markets.
It’s still a brave new world in terms of social media intelligence. And I’m very excited to have joined forces with Alterian to make our impact. Please learn more at Alterian's site.
Creating Momentum at Lift9
Lift9's business concept is repeatedly validated as I speak with industry leaders and experts. Now, however, comes the real execution points where we ask customers for money and continuously prove our value. That takes a lot of focus, time and energy.
During this process, I've thought a lot about momentum. I'm convinced that Lift9 is in an exciting new space and offer a viable differentiating value with its low-cost access to actionable insights into social intelligence. We provide the heavy-lifting research that makes social monitoring tools' outputs more meaningful to their audience.
Most companies in our space want to be upstream from us and provide social media strategy & engagement services. Those are critical and important components of an overall social media solution. However, it is difficult to ideate a strategy without the data first making sense.
Lift9 really does provide the "so what" of social media reports so brands can strategize, sell, market, engage, create, service, educate, and so forth.
So now, how does Lift9 create the necessary momentum? How do we create the velocity around our services, because the "mass" (or interest) in social media solutions is already huge?
We will first make sure that there is a proper framework for all the data that we collect for a customer. The framework will be built around the marketing and business goals of the customer brand. We will prove our value on each and every output for our customers. We will focus on targeted listening so that the mountain of data doesn't intimidate us from finding the diamonds in the data. Lift9, with its research center, will listen across different data sets in today's multi-channel consumer environment. We will also work with strategic partners to make sure that the customer receives complete solutions for their needs.
Right now, our inertia will come from a few partner customers. This starts the momentum, which we don't take lightly. Momentum can go one of two ways -- positively or negatively. We must remain customer-centric and continuously prove our value. That is our commitment to our customers and to ourselves.
- John Song
Asking the ‘So What?’ of Social Media Monitoring Reports
Ever been at a party when a person recites some interesting stats?
"Did you know that Washington DC has the largest disproportional number of females to males of all major US cities?" "Did you know that 47% of all ventured-back American startup companies had a founder or co-founder who was born outside the US?"
Sure you have. Most react to such insights with genuine initial interest, but then quickly move onto other topics. The stats serve mainly as entertainment value.
Well, some of the social media monitoring reports come off the same way. Initially, they are interesting tidbits and fun to review, but the takeaways are at times very shallow. The reviewers of such information don't always have the time or the proper structure to dig deeper to find actionable results.
Pretty graphs and reports are only worth the paper that they are printed on unless that information provides actionable insights that lead to moving toward a desired goal. This could mean asking more penetrating questions that once answered lead to such compelling insights. This is a fluid circular process of gathering data, analysis, aligning with marketing goals, filtering out actionable insights, implementation, measurement. Standard reports, therefore, generally fall short as it only gathers data with cursory insights.
That is why when I really want to have a meaningful conversation, it is usually one-on-one or in small groups, and not at a party. For social media reports, ask the "so what?" and make the information come alive and actionable.