Archive for July, 2011

Talks about the future of social media monitoring picked up momentum when Salesforce entered the market. They acquired Radian6, industry’s leading social media monitoring platform. Radian6 is used by 50% of Fortune 100 companies and hence this acquisition is crucial, not only for Salesforce but also for entire social web market.

When we go little back in times we would see that this market got flooded with hundreds of players of all sizes in a very small time frame.They offered almost similar solutions with different price tags. The purpose was to capture the larger share of the market and lead this new business. Few companies like Radian6, Alterian and Visible Technologies were lucky to catch the early bus. But, as the market got flooded, everybody started asking the very obvious question – where are we heading? And, none of them had the correct answer. The one point agenda to exploit the social media wave seems to have come to an end.

• Does that mean an end of social media monitoring business?
• Is there any scope for re-defining this business model?
• Is there any scope for smaller players?

It’s not so dark as of yet. We do have scope for re-defining this business model and YES, there’s a scope for small players as well. But, to do all this, we’ll have to re-think. We’ll have to re-visit to this business model. Instead of catching the social wave we’ll have to think in terms providing real business value. We’ll have to think in terms of investment and return.

Alright. So the next question would be – How to go about this? What is the way forward for all these companies and also to the concept of social media monitoring?

The way forward is to show results, not in terms of data but in terms of value. There are multiple ways which could provide a proper value, a proper ROI. Getting more marketing insights, social search optimization, social PR and Social CRM are few of them. In next post we’ll talk about one of these concepts and we’ll see how they can help the concept of social media monitoring to flourish further.

• Tom Anderson, co-founder and ex-president of MySpace has suggested that Google+ looks good enough to beat Facebook and other social networking websites.
• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg joins Google+ and one of his early connections is current Facebook CTO Bret Taylor.
• The networking model of Google+ is more real. Circles help you distinguish between family, close friends and acquaintances, claims Google.

These are the popular stories of web world today. These stories are making noise because the wonder ball is now open. Google has launched Google+ [to few limited users]. And, it has started creating buzz in the industry. People were guessing about a similar product for long. Few leaked stories also talked about names like loop, circles, etc; but now we know it’s Google Plus. It’s not just another product from Google; they promote it as the future of Google. It’s not buzz or wave. This time they are much more serious and much more prepared.

But, as most of us ask in our circle – the real question is, why Google needed a product like this? The answer is simple. They want to dominate internet market. They are leaders in search, video sharing, emailing and they want to spread their wings to other spaces like photo sharing, group discussion, and social networking. They had products like orkut, buzz, wave but people at Google were not serious about this business, at least till the time Facebook storm took the internet to a new level. Facebook not only emerged as the leader in social networking space but it also become a threat for the core business of Google, emailing [Facebook’s social inbox] and search [Social Search]. Google had to response. And, they responded with a bang this time.

The challenges for others like Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster are different. They have to build everything from scratch. But, Google doesn’t face this problem. It has YouTube for video, Picasa for photo sharing, Google docs for document management, Gmail for email service, Android for mobile services and many more utility products. What they needed was a product which can integrate all these utilities and give users a platform to plug and play at a single dashboard. They seem to be winning this race by launching Google+ . Yes, it does provide a single dashboard, a simple look, filled with some powerful features.

But, it doesn’t mean they don’t have challenges. They do have challenges. The challenge for Google+ is not to attract users but to maintain the simplicity it has right now. People have started liking this product because it is simple. It is not clustered and it is not noisy. But, that could be because there are not much people. And, there are not much applications. Going forward when there would be a crowd of users, developers and applications – the real test of Google+ will begin.