Spain, spam, hash and analytics

We just finished our Premier Business Leadership Series event in Berlin, and it was very successful. But before I bring you up to date on that, I’m still thinking about our experiences at our recent analyst conference.

Every year we hold an analyst conference in the US and one in Europe. I recently returned from our European event, held in Marbella, Spain. Our stateside event at Steamboat Springs showed there was a lot of interest in our Social Media Analytics product. The European audience was just as excited.

Social Media is hot and companies want to know what it means to their brand and their ability to operate in dynamic markets. So where are most companies when it comes to harnessing social media? To be honest, I think most are at the measurement stage. They simply want to understand what is being said about them and whether the sentiment is good or bad. This measurement phase we’re in today will be short lived. Fairly soon folks will realize that measurement is not enough. It will be time to move from measurement to action. That’s where analytics come into play. Once you’ve measured the sentiment around your operation, it’s time to put programs in place to move the needle.

Analytics can help you figure out not just how many hits you’re getting, but what social media channels are most effective for you. They can help you figure out who the influencers are in your market, and what those influencers are saying about you.

Armed with that information, you can make decisions on a campaign level: what do I need to say to who, and where, in order to get to my desired result, whether it’s improving public perception of your product or company, driving traffic to a website or converting clicks into leads into sales.

It really is exciting to watch how social media and analytics are coming together. If you’re still on the sidelines, it’s time to get in the game.

We had another interesting Twitter experience around this analyst event. At our last event, the Twitter traffic on the #sassb hashtag far exceeded our expectations. We created a hashtag for this event as well, #sasmar. We didn’t see quite the same volume of tweeting that we did at the Steamboat Springs event, but once again we had strong, positive interactions with the people in the room, and extended the reach of the event to people who weren’t in the room.

And we also got spammed. Another vendor sent several tweets on the #sasmar hashtag linking to promotional information for their product. To be honest, it seemed like an unfair intrusion. I’ve thought about it since and I still don’t know what we should have done about it. Maybe there’s nothing we could have done.

Is that the way Twitter is heading? I sure hope not. Spam is inevitable. It’s in email, snail mail, even the phone. I guess we should expect that. What do we do about it?