Interesting article from BCG: http://bit.ly/4Uj9Iv.

In terms of social media marketing, this encourages companies to:

• Focus on the right information
• Extract the right signals
• Process them and
• Modulate organisation behaviour

I think most of the social media tools out there help companies extract signal. I’m not sure they even help identify the right information, since that would imply a detailed understanding of the company and its business and the tools out there are very general.

So many thoughts come to mind:

1) Perhaps we need social media tools that are specific to verticals or to functions? Like helping identify the (social) sources of authority in the medical field (i.e. which blogs are of the most worth, have the most influence on potential consumers etc) and then helping identify what kinds of information is “traded” via these blogs.

2) BCG doesn’t have an easy “share this” link for their articles! (It should be at the bottom of each page of the PDF file)

3) Extraction: Weak at best. Limited manual intervention.

4) Process: This is where contemporary tools are the weakest. Conventional tools just don’t let you manage the information you get. There’s a big wodge of info (i.e. these blogs mentioned you, these twitter threads mentioned you, blah) but there’s not much process management. I guess this space is being explored though… I think CoTweet has got the right idea for example. I’d found another great tool though I can’t remember the name or URL right now. Basically it let you mark pages / comments / articles as you surfed and then created an inbox for you with a list of all marked pages. You could then reply to these comments/articles/posts or let others in your department do so. Perhaps this is a little like the stuff Best Buy is doing.

5) Modulate: This is probably the hardest. Who modulates? Getting information to the right people will help them make the changes needed. So who are the right people within the company? Should there be a general “notice board” that people can subscribe too? Should there be mailing lists for each topic? Chat/ forums? Not sure… a lot of companies just use the old spam everyone technique which seems to work a bit.