At the end of last year, I worked very hard alongside some colleagues at Factiva (Dow Jones) to coordinate a roundtable event to discuss Social Media with thought leaders in the Bay Area. The thought to have the roundtable came to me after speaking with Jeremiah Owyang and sharing my frustrations with the fact that every time i met up with people who were talking about Social Media, I always wanted my Factiva Insight product folks in the room- to listen and participate in those conversations. So what i managed to do was bring them West using a combination of social media itself (i blogged, reached out to other bloggers via comments etc) and good old fashion networking (i went from pub to pub in San Francisco- seriously i am not kidding) to engage members of the community that i knew would make great participants. We also reached out to a handful of local clients that we knew where dealing with these issues internally.

The location was a wonderful place called Zibibbo's in Palo Alto, CA where the food was incredible and the wine nicely poured...and what a great crowd we managed to get.


What were some of the questions we were/are trying to answer during this roundtable ?

- Do you believe Consumer Generated Media is important and should be measured?
- Who is creating Social Media? What are they creating? And is the who more important then the what?
- If you are producing Social Media as part of your PR/Marketing plan, how will you measure ROI?
- Do you think that Social Media needs a structured, mutually agreed upon measurement techniques and metrics (e.g. MSM's ad value equivalence and article impressions) to make monitoring a more serious practice?
- So what should be measured, and how do you want it delivered?


One of the agreed outcomes of the roundtable was that we would produce a white paper of the information that we gathered along with our co-author Jeremiah Owyang. Well for months and months i have been bugging (read harassing) Marketing about this white paper and when it would be finalized. Well as you know, Factiva has gone through a lot of corporate changes- we officially became Dow Jones in January and then five months later the news about the News Corp acquisition- well i guess they have all been busy. I am sure i have made more then one enemy being a pestering little bug- oh well i hope we can make up soon.

So the final outcome is this report authored by Matt Toll of our Marketing group and Jeremiah Owyang. You can Download the Report here: “Tracking the Influence” (PDF).

Since the event- many of the participants have continued to talk and address issues of social media measurement- some of the companies that participated have implemented strategies that they continue to refine. The white paper has some good thoughts and ideas by the participants and we hope that their voices are heard. As Jeremiah describes it, the white paper serves as a good primer for those that are new to the concept, or for those who need to start deploying a program but also provides a good insight into what was going through on minds on that day in December of 2006.

Additional information about the roundtable is available on the Factiva Roundtable wiki that was used to coordinate the event and provide a place for reflection afterwards. More pictures from the event here and shortly if i ever get to re-re-encode my video files i will post video clips of the participants.

and some final words?

At the Blogher conference two weeks ago i spoke on a panel on How To Measure Social Media ROI with Katie Paine and Lena West. One of the things that we discussed was the growing importance of monitoring Blog comments and using them as one of the aspects of measuring the success of your blogs. During the panel, i commented that you also have to understand your audience, will they leave comments, it is easy for them to do so (or do they need to sign-up like for example HP blogs), are they afraid to engage in public because they are afraid to speak on behalf of their company, etc. From my own experience, I still get a lot of e-mailed comments especially from clients on blog posts.

The Net-Savvy Executive has a recent post on Measuring blog comments that hits on that same subject and mentions some companies that allow you to search comments and others that allow tracking of comments that can then be incorporated into measurement techniques companies put together as part of their Social Media strategy. I agree with Nathan that vendors in this space are aware that tracking and measuring comments is important. This topic also came up back in December when Factiva hosted a Social Media Roundtable event in Palo Alto to gather feedback on what should be measured.

Another blogging Factivite (should we now be referenced as Dowjonesites?) blogs over at Guerilla HR and recently posted about Employee Blogs from an HR prespective. He gave Glenn Fannick and myself kudos for blogging and for the recent Social Media Roundtable event that we had and he also wrote about 'bad' employee bloggers and the need for a blogging policy.

I left a comment on his post and i wrote:
"What we did with the social media roundtable that you reference was awesome but it is also pretty scary. So we have engaged in this community of social media enthusiasts one that i had been involved in for a while- mostly 'personal' due to my interest in this 'new' media. Because i haven't really engaged with the Insight product suite since consulting services hasn't been involved that much, i started bringing the product folks into the conversation and they engaged fully and whole heartily- so the whole thing got rolling...now we have some great information that we gathered and we have started a buzz around where we are going and now how do we continue to be engaged above and beyond my blog or glenn's? It takes a lot of work and passionate individuals to maintain what we have started but I think it is very worth while. An interesting conversation is going on per this post once you jump in you need to continue so you don't just act like visitors."

The post i referenced was Jeremiah's recent post on Do companies Cultivate, Harness, Build, Engage, Lead, Visit, Watch, or Join Communities? - before boarding the plane on saturday i opened a couple of browser windows (an offline trick i have been forced to do) including the post that he linked to about Shel Israel's lunch with the Citizen Agency folks. As i read through all their thoughts and comments it was addressing some of the things i have been thinking about post the social media roundtable event. I completely agree with Tara Hunt that if you are going to step into a community you must not play visitor- I of course wanted the out-put of the event to come out immediately- things change so much in a week let along a month. There are some great follow-up posts from the attendees but aside from Glenn's and my quick roundup posts (both of us have been on the road since the event) factiva has a lot of information that we need to share back but it will take some time because the video and audio is being put together back in corporate-the white paper is getting started and the DJ final announcement last week meant that everyone was 'on deck' for integration stuff.

So i won't fret because i know when i get back from vacation things will start to be produced and shared back but figured i would share this as an example of a company (factiva) using social media and how we are continuing with the monitoring social media community and are very conscious that we need to continue what we started. More to follow- of course!

It is a great feeling when something that you put a lot of effort and love into goes well. i can honestly say that i am extremely pleased with how the social media roundtable event that we hosted last night turned out. i have a lot of people to thank like my factiva colleagues Glenn Fannick, Matt Toll, Sally Hammond and Saurabh Goorha but the biggest shout out goes to Jeremiah Owyang who:

1.) inspired me to take this on and to use the social media tools and connections i have made to involve key members of the community

2.) volunteered with passion to be our master facilitator and came up with a great exercise to gather the attributes that are the most important to the attendees.

Glenn Fannick who is part of our product development group posted some of his initial thoughts on his blog and i agree that my head is also spinning from all the things we discussed. Today the factiva team spent some time debriefing from the event. Before leaving to go back to the east coast, i managed to convince Glenn to sit in front of the camera and share his thoughts on the outcome of the event and what we intend on doing as next steps. The great thing is that the conversation is already started (see links below).

We are committed to taking what we learned and incorporating these needs into our product strategy in order to meet the needs of our customers. Take a listen to the video- and please feel free to post a video response if you attended with your thoughts!




One of the things that i find to be the most fascinating is that we will have the opportunity to apply some of the metrics that we discussed during our session as to the affect of the social media being produced by this event- our internal PR group will hold us to that. The entire event- about social media-was driven by social media

• it basically started with a conversation on a blog
• we used linking to various blog posts to engage people
• we used a wiki to share event details

So far the output has been the production of social media and attendees are posting on blogs, photo sites and video sites- so how will factiva measure the outcome of this event? We plan on sharing that information back into the community so watch this space.

Current Event Resources:

• Jeremiah's very detailed post from the event including many links to additional resources and the outcome of the important attributes exercise- Factiva Social Media Roundtable helps to answer “What should we measure”
• Jeremy Pepper's -master scriber and insights post Factiva Roundtable and Social Media.
• Chris Kenton's engaging thoughts on Social Media Metrics
• Flickr stream tagged to factivaroundtable
• We will continue to update links and resources from the roundtable wiki, and we have some video and audio that we will be making available as well as a white paper with the findings and the questions raised.

I am skipping town for the next few days heading south for some R&R- i have a lot to think about and chew on and i certainly look forward to reading even more thoughts and engaging questions and conversation on this topic when i get back!

I have been busy over that last few weeks putting the final touches on the Social Media Roundtable that Factiva will be hosting on December 5th in Palo Alto. Although i still have some final confirmations that i am waiting on the list of attendees has shaped up to be excellent. i am super excited that the folks in my product group that are coming out for the roundtable from New Jersey are going to get a chance to get some real life use cases of how producers, consumers and enablers of Social Media are thinking about measurement in the enterprise space.

I created a wiki for the event that can be accessed here: http://factivaroundtable.pbwiki.com/

Jeremiah Owyang, who will be moderating the event recently had a great blog post about 'Companies that Measure Social Media, Influence, and Brand' - although comprehensive in itself- the beauty of the list is that others have contributed to the list- if you know of other companies and tools please add them to his post!