Re: will this put the tension between tools and strategy to rest? Doubtful. Organizations have a natural propensity to favor tools over strategy work, because it’s easier to have something to “show for it”. There’s also the fascination with shiny new objects. As you pointed out the “elbow grease” is hard and unsexy – love the ALU concept BTW. To further augment ALU, I think it should include internal as well as external collaboration processes (within enterprise and enterprise with customers).

Finally, somewhere between the analytics layer and the ALU sits a process automation layer. I bring this up, as I’m thinking through this a lot lately (see latest blogpost on Attensity blog), and we are making that part of the product. Automation is not necessary for everyone, and its importance varies with the relative scale of social media information. But the idea is that you set up processes in ALU, then set up some business rules after you pass social media data through the semantic analytics layer – to facilitate the data flowing through the processes that you establish in ALU. So it’s a kind of a bi-directional relationship of: actionable insights > semantic extraction > automation of process < business rules < process establishment. If that makes sense..

- Maria
@themaria
.-= Maria Ogneva´s last blog ..Webcast Interview with Ted Rubin: A Case Study of How to Succeed in Social Media =-.

First, sorry — for some reason i missed your comment on first pass.

Second, thanks for reading and commenting, much appreciated.

Thanks for the kind words, and I totally agree with you — the last two components deserve much more focus than the first two (and they are the ones that are overlooked by vendors, for the most part, today — yet, they are going to be the defining elements of being able to do Social CRM — or just become Social.

I am sensing many different versions of what the ALU may have, so I am going to spend most of the time there (then again, each time I make such a commitment turns into a nightmare where I don’t realize how weak the other areas are — but I totally agree that the ALU is where things will happen and make a difference… I am already working on some better definitions and expansion on the cocept).

Thanks for the great comment!

I think you and I spoke before when I was at Gartner, and I agreed with you back then. If not, we should talk soon —i like your approach.

In either way, I agree that the contact center will play a significant role in this model, most of the B2C world relies on contact centers for up to 90% of interactions with customers. As I told Lauren above, there are several vendors (mentioned above) that can do that today and do a decent job. Of course, not yet at the level of scale that would make sense, but we will continue to grow this so we can get there.

I think that the contact center is one of the components, as you say, that will be present in the ALU — but would like to see more than that, more enterprise collaboration outside of the contact center, more business units other than customer service involved, more collaborative enterprise (you know the term, you guys are involved in it ).

I am looking forward to chatting more with you on this, I think there is a lot of value in what you are working on collaboration and contact center to the model I am working on.

Looking forward to it…

thanks for stopping by. I know Market Research very well, been exposed to it for a very long time (my numbers are different, it used to be around 15-18B when i tracked it not that long ago — regardless, a humongous number — right?)

There are two main differences with traditional market research that make this a more viable, feasible alternative: time and cost. Market research is not as used as necessary (even when it is, it has to be done in a group form, to justify the complexity of the model) due to the time it takes to create, collect data, analyze, create report, etc. Of course, that involves certain costs (I don’t think that anyone going into MR does it for charity or their love of a good insight — they do it for money, lots of it).

If you have to spend $50,000-100,000 and wait two months to get an insight, from a group, which you then need to adapt to a specific user or community – how much would you use that?

The new tools and models allow any organization to obtain in minutes (yes, minutes) what used to take months and for a small portion of the costs. Not only that, but the results are going to be in electronic form, positioned in a community made out of business users or business users and end-users, where it can be used as input into creating better processes, better experiences, etc.

Market Research has some life left, of course. But I have spoken with several users of very large brands that are learning more and more about how to leverage the social tools and the insights, and spending less and less in MR — with far better results. There is a change afoot.

As for the willingness, the people in the organization, as well as the customers, are changing — 10 years ago we could not have even attempted something of this magnitude, virtually all users and customers were not interested in the “new social” model. Five years ago, we would have been at the forefront — as more and more Generation C people come into the workforce and the marketplace, we will see a wide shift from the traditional model (and its associated problems) to a better, more social model.

Time will tell, but my money is in change driven by people, leveraging tools, to improve processes.

Thanks for the read!