1. Social media listening
Past, Present and Future

2. Me
• I am Irish and live in Brussels
• I co-founded Attentio with Per
Siljubergsasen at the end of 2004
• Attentio is a social media listening platform
with clients across Europe
• Now I run Attentio and am a director of
young companies in new media
• Follow my updates @simonmc or
@attentio

3. The premise
The increase in social media listening
is directly tied to the growth of online
social media

4. Prehistoric social media (1980-2000)
First public dial-up Bulletin Board System by Ward Christensen
along with fellow hobbyist Randy Suess, began February 16, 1978
in Chicago.
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system.
Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, started in
1980.[1]
Google Groups is a service from Google Inc. that supports
discussion groups, including many Usenet newsgroups, based on
common interests. Users can find discussion groups related
interests, either through a web interface or by email. Google Groups
also includes an archive of Usenet newsgroup postings dating back
to 1981[2]
Early days

5. Early days

6. Microsoft’s first mention 1981
• The June issue of BYTE magazine has a fairly long article on XENIX by
Microsoft's XENIX product manager. Mostly, it's a standard "What's a
UNIX" paper, but it also describes some of the enhancements they are
adding to V7. The most important is support; additionally, they are
going to add a fair amount of hardware error recovery (bad block
handling, parity and power fail interrupts, etc.), as well as record
handling, shared data segments, synchronous writing, improved
interprocess communications, networking, and languages: Pascal, BASIC,
FORTRAN, and COBOL.
Early days

7. Google’s first mention 1998
• If you like Rankdex's laser pinpointing of just a page or
three, I recommend ...google.stanford.edu
which uses a similar but expanded quality algorithm and
a much larger index.
--
Chris Mitchell
The Searcher's Road Less Travelled
Early days

8. Blogs
• Bruce Ableson launched Open Diary in October 1998,
which soon grew to thousands of online diaries. Open
Diary innovated the reader comment, becoming the first
blog community where readers could add comments to
other writers' blog entries.
• Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal in March 1999.
• Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan (Pyra Labs)
launched blogger.com in August 1999 (purchased
by Google in February 2003)
• By 2008 there were over 100,000,000 blogs Early days

9. Attentio Slide from end 2004
Over 600 million Internet
users, converging to general
population, younger and
more likely to be influencers
(Source: Datamonitor)
More than 50% yearly
growth online consumer
shopping
(Source: AC Nielsen)
Growing importance of
search, e.g. Google is now
indexing 3.3 Billion web
pages
Usenet, the largest online
discussion group
community has more than
800 million posted articles
(Source: Datamonitor)
More than 7,000 active
online news publications,
FT.com has twice the
readership of Financial
Times
Blogging exponential
increase
1998 - 30,000
2002 – 500,000
Source: Economist
Early days

10. Blog sentiments for U.S. presidential
candidates
1.2
1.25
1.3
1.35
1.4
1.45
1.5
1.55
1.6
25/01/2004
27/01/2004
29/01/2004
30/01/2004
31/01/2004
02/02/2004
03/02/2004
04/02/2004
05/02/2004
07/02/2004
09/02/2004
10/02/2004
12/02/2004
17/02/2004
19/02/2004
22/02/2004
24/02/2004
25/02/2004
27/02/2004
28/02/2004
George Bush President 2004 election blog good
Howard Dean President 2004 election blog
good
John Edwards President 2004 election blog
good
John Kerry President 2004 election blog good
Average of Sentiment
Date2
Query 1
Early days

11. If there is stuff to listen to...
Companies emerge from 2000 onwards
Early days

12. More “buzz” = more applications
and more stories
• 2004
– US Elections
– CNN partner with listening company for buzz
measurement to predict outcomes
• 2004 onwards
– Superbowl
– Kryptonite
– Dell Hell Early days

13. First European clients
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
14000
29/02/2004-06/03/2004
07/03/2004-13/03/2004
14/03/2004-20/03/2004
21/03/2004-27/03/2004
28/03/2004-03/04/2004
04/04/2004-10/04/2004
11/04/2004-17/04/2004
18/04/2004-24/04/2004
25/04/2004-01/05/2004
02/05/2004-08/05/2004
09/05/2004-15/05/2004
16/05/2004-22/05/2004
23/05/2004-29/05/2004
30/05/2004-05/06/2004
06/06/2004-12/06/2004
13/06/2004-19/06/2004
20/06/2004-26/06/2004
27/06/2004-03/07/2004
04/07/2004-10/07/2004
11/07/2004-17/07/2004
18/07/2004-24/07/2004
25/07/2004-31/07/2004
01/08/2004-07/08/2004
08/08/2004-14/08/2004
15/08/2004-21/08/2004
22/08/2004-28/08/2004
29/08/2004-04/09/2004
05/09/2004-11/09/2004
12/09/2004-14/09/2004
Centrino - Bremen
Centrino - Nürnberg
Pentium-4 - Bremen
Pentium-4 - Nürnberg
Source Google Germany Web Feature (blank)
Average of Mentions
Day
Brand
Region
Early days

14. Early days
• It was a tiny niche companies that sold
services often had venture capital
• Ad hoc projects frequently out of
experimentative budget
• Critical mass wasn’t there i.e. Not enough
people are using social media
• But things were to change...
Early days

15. 2007 and onwards
• “Here comes everybody”
• The mega social network
• Advertisements come to
social media (in a meaningful way)
• Listening industry starts to mature
2007 - 2009

16. @SIMONMC
2007 - 2009

17. Business applications evolve
• Influencer spotting
– Who is talking about our brand and/or area
and is INFLUENTIAL
• Campaign impact
– If we do something does it create
conversations
• Reputation
– How is our reputation evolving?
2007 - 2009

18. Customers “suck it and see”
• More “free stuff”
– Blogpulse, Trendpedia, Technorati, Google
Blog Search, Addictomatic, etc.
• More agencies getting requests for trial
projects for listening, monitoring,
measurement
• Brands discussing and developing social
media campaigns
• The “Viral”
2007 - 2009

19. 2010 => today
• US market has grown “exponentially”
– More US players are now multi-million biz
• Market Research taking the industry
seriously i.e. “Netnography”
– They have to reduce cost of data collection
– Quicker and real time insight
• European market alive in UK, France,
Benelux and Scandinavia (slower in
Spain, Germany, Italy but emerging)
2010 ---

20. 2010 ---

21. Future
• Main drivers for listening
– Brand Monitoring
• Similar to press clipping and media evaluation
– Social Media Research
• Derives from market research i.e. Insight into
consumer behaviour
– Social CRM
• Traditional CRM with extras – connected with
community management
– Social Media Marketing platforms
• Integrating marketing spend, “noise”, impact etc.
2010 ---

22. Social Media Response Centre
2010 ---

23. 2010 ---

24. Future (cont.)
• The Community manager
• Chief Information Officer
– Integration into Business Intelligence
– Integration into CRM
• The Global Listening program
– Major brands want to coordinate efforts
• Save money, get information where it is needed
• May miss some local or cultural differences...
• Location based
– Depends on critical mass and privacy 2010 ---

25. Final thoughts
• Most major brands are now listening
– If they aren’t they will next year
• Ad hoc replaced by continual,
methodological listening and research
– Better analytics demanded
• Companies that sell services need to
explain how they get data
• There are case studies and that breeds
good practice
2010 ---

26. More information
• Follow me @simonmc or @attentio
• Email simon@attentio.com
• Ph. +32 (0) 473 670178