Jennifer Zeszut is the Chief Social Strategist at Lithium Technologies.  Jennifer is the founder and former CEO of Scout Labs, a SAAS platform for real-time social media visibility and customer analytics which was acquired by Lithium in May 2010.    On Lithosphere she is JenniferZ.  She blogs at jenniferland.wordpress.com and you can find her on Twitter at @jenniferland.   The battle between Google and Facebook heats up this week, as Google makes major enhancements to its Social Search feature.  Now, your friends' content and recommendations will show up in search results while you are searching. Facebook refuses to give Google its social graph information, so Google must rely on the graph data of every other social network it can get its hands on (twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, etc.).  Watch Google's little promo video here:          What's the big deal? Why is this so significant and what's the battle all about? Google's PageRank algorithms revolutionalized search many years ago because by using linking behavior and stability of content, it offered us a way to see "relevant" stuff on top.  It became the authoritative source for what's most relevant for me in the sea of content that exists out there.  But relevance is not a THING.  There are infinite ways to define relevance.  News content is most relevant when its RECENT, which may be not true for websites, say.  Today, given the rise of social networks, relationships and the opinions of people I know are influencing us more and more.  There is a new potential paradigm for relevance now, and that's "what my friends like".  It seems obvious, but shockingly, no one has really done social search very well yet.  Even Google has only put their toe in the water with this release by returning their regular search results, sorted by their traditional relevance algorithm, and just appending social graph information to the result so that you know "your friend kelly liked this one".   What Google hasn't done, but what would be very interesting, is to have two results sets: one set of traditonally relevant (PageRanked) results, and then a second set of results filtered and ranked by "friend recommendations", forgeting PageRank all together.  For example, I am heading to Monaco and I need a hotel there.  When I do a search now, I get tens of thousands of results, with the most Google-algorithm-deemed "relevant" ones on top (the most links, the most traffic, the most enduring content, etc.) and I explore from there.  But what if I ONLY saw results that came from the friends and family in my social graph?  In this example, I would very likely get a BLANK PAGE, as my friends and family simply don't go to Monaco.  They don't know hotels there.  So, while purely social search (results from my immediate social graph) is interesting to contemplate, I feel like VERY little would come back for most searches, leaving the user dissatisfied and feeling like they must be missing quite a lot.  And they'd be right.   And this is exactly why I don't think that Facebook will ultimately win the search battle. If I search on my Facebook page right now for "hotels in Monaco" nothing comes back. Now, more might come back if they opened up my tight-knit Facebook network to friends-of-friends and friends-of-friend-of-friends.  But then that's not Facebook - not for me, at least.  I want my Facebook to be selective and hand-picked and focused. It's the reason I read 80+% of my Facebook feed but only 5% of my Twitter feed.    The reality is that there are two DIFFERENT "communities" and I, consumer, want access to both.  There is my immediate community of friends and family, and they carry significant weight in certain categories -- especially where aesthetic matters (kimmie knows my taste in food and if she likes a restaurant, then I probably will too).  But there is another community - a virtual community of experts and influencers on a specific topic - people that travel to Monaco all the time, people who collect high-end watches....  I may not know ANY of those folks personally (yet), but I want to know what they recommend, much more so than my mom.   So I see Google as my virtual community summoner -- a virtual community I access via the search box, and influence is ALWAYS topic specific.  In this case, I would prefer my search results ranked by the Influence of of the author with respect to the TOPIC IN AM SEARCHING ON.  I want results ranked by people who go to Monaco all the time and whose opinions are trusted.  I simply don't care what my mom likes.    Similarly, I wish Facebook would stay Facebook.  Resist the temptation to open up the social graph more and more.  Instead, be there when I want to know what my friends and family think and be great at it.    It's probably too much to ask the Internet giants to stay in their respective corners, but I believe strongly in knowing who you are, what role you play in the ecosystem and in consumers' hearts and minds.  Then do THAT amazingly well.  Push THAT envelope.  Doing too much dilutes focus both internally and in the mind of the consumer, which is the biggest risk of all. Exhbit A: Yahoo.    Love to hear your thoughts. ... View more

  Jennifer Zeszut is the Chief Social Strategist at Lithium Technologies.  Jennifer is the founder and former CEO of Scout Labs, a SAAS platform for real-time social media visibility and customer analytics which was acquired by Lithium in May 2010.    On Lithosphere she is JenniferZ.  She blogs at jenniferland.wordpress.com and you can find her on Twitter at @jenniferland. _____________________________   In Obama’s first State of the Union Address last week, the President laid out his plan to increase economic and job growth by “out-innovating, out-educating, and out-building the rest of the world.”  He emphasized the important role that entrepreneurs play in economic growth and reminded us that this country is founded on and forged by great entrepreneurs.    I was inspired by the President’s words and, for a moment, it got me wondering how I might be able to help advance entrepreneurship in this country.  And then I got back to work.    But I was shocked out of complacency and into action when, on Saturday afternoon, I received a call from the White House.    On Monday, Jan 31st, the President would be launching “Startup America”, a national campaign focused on encouraging investment in job-creating startups, accelerating research, and breaking down barriers to success for entrepreneurs and small businesses.  They wanted entrepreneurs in attendance for the kickoff event with the media and afterward for a closed-door brainstorming/planning session with staff from the Executive Office of the President.  Why me?  How me?  The amazing Astia organization had given them my name, having recently won their Technology Innovator Award for Entrepreneurship.     “Could you get on a plane tomorrow? And are you willing to speak at the event?”  In a daze, I packed a bag…   Today’s event at the White House was truly inspiring. In attendance were Small Business Administration Administrator Karen Mills, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling, Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, chairman of the Case Foundation and now Chairman of the Startup America Partnership initiative, and Carl Schramm, president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation.  The President was NOT able to attend after all -- something about Egypt….;-)   Public and Private Sector commitments were made on multiple fronts, including education, mentorship, funding, incubators, tax incentives and more.  Facebook, HP, Intel, Microsoft and others made financial and resource commitments to further the cause.     There were some very inspiring statistics today:   More than half of the companies in the Fortune 500 started in a recession or bear market. (Kauffman foundation). Takeaway: It is in times of economic downturn when people come together and take a chance. 40% of our GDP comes from firms that did not exist in 1980. (Kauffman Foundation).  Takeaway: We can’t have huge companies without first nurturing small ones.    Several great entrepreneurs spoke as well, including the inspiring Zoe Damacela an 18-year old college Freshman and entrepreneur who has pulled herself out of poverty, even homelessness, with her successful clothing company.   When it was my turn to address the room (my speech is in the 54th minute), I decided to speak on behalf of entrepreneurs everywhere to help the government officials and industry people in the room understand what amazing passion and talent they unleash if they can support us, fund us and make it easier for us to do what we do. I likened us entrepreneurs to sled dogs – born to run with new ideas.  Startups are job creators, to be sure – Lithium employs more and more people every year.   But just as important as the number of jobs we create, is the KIND OF WORK we create. We do work that we LOVE.   It is passionate work.  Fun work.  Work with purpose.  It is productive work.  You want to increase Americas’ productivity?  Come walk the halls of any of our companies, and you will see people wearing 10 hats, doing whatever it takes to see our ideas thrive. It is astounding what we accomplish in a day. And it is deeply connected work. Starting a company is forming a new family.  We are connected to the idea and to each other in profound ways.  It is a bond and a sense of community that is often life-long.   This is the kind of work this country needs.    My country has called me, both literally and figuratively.  I have some thinking to do on exactly how I will stay involved in this movement, but there is no turning back.  What i DO know is that the President should create a place for this passionate, entrepreneurial community to connect online (a Lithium powered community???) and should be very carefully listening to and learning from the wisdom of the crowd (Lithium SMM????) 🙂   You can follow Startup America efforts at #startupamerica and #startupamericapartnership ... View more

Jennifer Zeszut is the Chief Social Strategist at Lithium Technologies.  Jennifer is the founder and former CEO of Scout Labs, a SAAS platform for real-time social media visibility and customer analytics which was acquired by Lithium in May 2010.    On Lithosphere she is JenniferZ or you can find her on Twitter at @jenniferland.     Lithium works with a lot of brands.  Savvy, customer-obsessed brands, on the cutting edge of social media.  We have been their social media partners for years, and over those years we have seen lots of trial and lots of success.  Lots of confusion and lots of revelation.  Brands have been feeling their way through social media and each year has had its themes.  Let’s review.   If you were in the biz then, 2007 was the era of the blog.  How to find influential bloggers?  How to keep up with the “insane volume” (ah, how quaint a notion!)  In 2008 and 2009, we saw consumer-generated media (CGM) platform proliferation.  There were LOTS of CGM sources and networks for brands to stay on top of  (MySpace, Ning and Digg-related data requests into us were numerous), with new ones popping up all the time (what’s this ‘Twitter’ thing?).  But in 2010, consumers started to converge on Twitter and Facebook and brands scooped up their social media chips and went “all in” on those numbers.  (Although to this day, one of my favorite parts of my job is demoing the Lithium SMM app, which indexes most all social media channels, and watching the shocked face of a prospective customer as they discover tons of meaty brand conversations in corners of the social web that they never knew existed!)  But even so, there have not been many requests for MySpace data this year (although I hope my friend @mjones pulls it out and resuscitates that brand!).   2010 was the year of Twitter and Facebook.   But brands are on the verge of another revelation and change is coming, I think. The brands who doubled down on Facebook and Twitter early in 2010 are starting to bump up into four pretty major limitations of those platforms.  Dare we call them the “Four Fatal Flaws of Twitter and Facebook?”  I heard these complaints from a few brands early in 2010, and am hearing them regularly from many brands now.  They are:   1)   Content Decay A brand sets up a Twitter account and a Facebook page (or pages) and staffs them with smart, connected employees.  The customers come.  They engage with the brand and with each other.  They have great conversations – recommending products to each other or dialoging about a promotion they are really excited about, say.  Then the next random comment is posted…and the next and the next and the next.  And pretty soon those great conversations are lost – pushed down from the “top of the fold” in the time-ordered Twitter Feed and/or Facebook Wall.  So now, maybe the next day, a new customer comes to the Facebook page and wonders what product customers are recommending and they DON’T see the meaty thread that raged yesterday.  They ask the same question again. Hopefully an advocate answers again.  But it’s like “Groundhog Day”… all over again.  We will never scale by answering the same questions over and over. (See “1:1 Doesn’t Scale”, next.)      What’s more, those conversations are NOT hosted on your own site, but Twitter’s and Facebook’s.  So those conversations are not showing up in a prospective customers’ search results the way those conversations would be if they were hosted on your own site.  For one of our Lithium clients, a full 40% of inbound traffic comes from search engine links into community content.  Do you have 40% of lead traffic to ignore?  I know we don’t.  So we must solve for Content Decay.  We must keep conversations alive for customers and we need to host that content ourselves, somehow, so that we can reap the SEO (and data and relationship and scale and other…) benefits.   2)   1:1 Doesn’t Scale Brands are realizing that they can’t staff their teams to be able to respond to EVERY brand / category / competitive mention.  They just can’t.  In 2010, many brands (wisely) migrated from departmental ownership of social media to a hub-and-spoke system – managing inbound social media mentions centrally and routing them quickly to the right people or departments within organizations – enabled with tools like Lithium SMM and Co-Tweet.  But there is a curious and wonderful phenomena that (usually) happens with brands participating in social media – the more a brand engages, the more the customers come.  If you extend yourself, you will need to keep extending yourself more and more to meet conversation demand.  (And must I remind you – this is a good thing!)  Brands try to keep up for a little while (sometimes with summer interns, sadly) but many are starting to realize that 1:1 can’t scale.   Teams should be investing in tools (like Lithium SMM) that prioritize their queues and tell them what’s most important to be paying attention to.  We don’t need a fatter firehose, but more perspective.    Finally, brands are starting to realize that nirvana is not their employees responding to 100% of mentions (an oh so 2010 metric).  Nirvana is really having YOUR CUSTOMERS jump in to conversations, positively, on your behalf.  For example, some Lithium communities have crazy super-fan advocates responding to thousands of customer inquiries per month.  In fact, GiffGaff is the fastest growing Telco in Europe which outsources 100% of its customer support to its own customers via its Lithium-powered community.  Now that’s leverage. New metrics for 2011: % of mentions coming from customers vs. coming your own employees.  Get customer engagement up!  Brands must find ways to focus their own efforts and to enable customers for the rest of it.  2011 will be the year of leverage.  Tools and metrics and solutions for unleashing your best customers as advocates and letting them help you scale.  (They’ll do it better than summer interns ever could.)   3)   Customer Data Scarcity Facebook and Twitter are all too happy to host your most intimate conversations with your best customers.  But when it comes time to leverage those influencers, there is next to nothing in terms of data coming back from those platforms.  Most of us can’t call up Twitter and say “Can you send me my top Influencers who live in Paris who have expressed interest in Digital SLRs and who are women, as we have a product launch in Paris and I want to involve our key Influencers.”  Yeah – not going to happen.  The latest data I’ve seen coming out of Facebook is the “time of day” analysis that gives brands a graph of what time of day your Friends tend to be logged in to Facebook. So while the sushi boat of conversation is flying by at a million miles per hour, they tell us the best time to lob our post into the wind so that friends might see it. ARE YOU KIDDING???  That’s the best we can do?  Now, Facebook makes available a few more metrics than Twitter, but all would agree that both are sub par.  And better metrics for brands is clearly not a priority for either Twitter or Facebook. Brands are getting increasingly frustrated by this lack of visibility and lack of metrics because it hampers their efforts to take relationships to the next level and put advocates to use for business objectives, which brings me to…     4)   Friends and Followers – So What? We have seen hundreds of RFPs this year stating that “the Strategic Business Objective for the effort is to attract <pick your number> Followers.” Web pages are littered with these kinds of “we’ll find you Followers!” vendors:     If 2010 was the year of gathering Friends and Followers (just ‘cuz), 2011 will be about business results – about holding social media efforts up to the same scrutiny as other business efforts.  Social Media is working its way up the corporate consciousness.  It’s there already at many companies whose CEOs have social or community-oriented initiatives as one of their top 3 strategic priorities for the year.  But it doesn’t earn that level of championship via Friends and Followers.  It gets there with words like “reduced costs by X” or “increased revenue by Y”.  We are thrilled to see big companies get serious about social media and we are happy to help each of them with the cold, hard business case.  It’s there.   _____   So that’s my recap of what brands are bumping up into right now as they manage their brand presence and customers online via social media – and what’s next.  Now I’m not predicting the death of Twitter or Facebook in 2011, by any means.  If customers are there, brands must be too.  But there are smarter ways to do this.  Ways that solve for the above issues and give brands more bang for their social media buck.  Twitter and Facebook will evolve…a little…maybe.  They will give us a few more metrics and a few more ways to engage our customers on their platforms.  But the real innovation will continue to come from product companies like ours that build on customer trends to help brands derive real business value. ... 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Jennifer Zeszut is the Chief Social Strategist at Lithium Technologies.  Jennifer is the founder and former CEO of Scout Labs, a SAAS platform for real-time social media visibility and customer analytics which was acquired by Lithium Technologies in May 2010. On Lithosphere she is JenniferZ or you can find her on Twitter at @jenniferland.     As we close out the year and gear up for an exciting 2011, we continue the transition to being one company with a single Twitter account.  Beginning in January, we’ll all be on the @LithiumTech handle so please re-follow us there. We’ll keep an eye on the @Scoutlabs account (old habits die hard) but we won’t be posting from that account next year.   For the best and fastest response, ping us @LithiumTech or use the hashtag #LithiumSMM in your tweet. As always, you can jump right into our community (Lithosphere) at: http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/Social-Media-Monitoring/bd-p/Li-SL   Happy Holidays to all! ... View more